CHAPTER I

In Chancery

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting

in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in

the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of

the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus,

forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn

Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black

drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown

snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of

the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;

splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one

another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing

their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other

foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke

(if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust

of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and

accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and

meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers

of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping

into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and

hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales

of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient

Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog

in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper,

down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of

his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the

bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog

all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the

misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as

the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman

and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their

time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling

look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the

muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,

appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old

corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn

Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in

his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire

too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which

this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds

this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be

sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head,

softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a

large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an

interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the

lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an

afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar

ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten

thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on

slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running

their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and

making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On

such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or

three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a

fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a

long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom

of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with

bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits,

issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly

nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting

candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it

would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their

colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the

uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in

the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the

drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the

Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it

and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the

Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted

lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every

madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined

suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and

begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to

monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so

exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain

and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its

practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the

warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come

here!”

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon

besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three

counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before

mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown;

and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or

whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning,

for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the

cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The

short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of

the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when

Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on

a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained

sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is

always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting

some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say

she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for

certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a

reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of

paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in

custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to

purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving

executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts

of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is

not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life

are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from

Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at

the close of the day’s business and who can by no means be made to

understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence

after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself

in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My

Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising.

A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger

on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal

weather a little.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in

course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it

means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been

observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five

minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the

premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause;

innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people

have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found

themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how

or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the

suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new

rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown

up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the

other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and

grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone

out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere

bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth

perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a

coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags

its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good

that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke

in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out

of it. Every Chancellor was “in it,” for somebody or other, when he

was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by

blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-wine committee

after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of

fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it

neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the eminent silk gown who said

that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he

observed, “or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr.

Blowers”—a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and

purses.

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched

forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide

question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty

warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many

shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office who has

copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that

eternal heading, no man’s nature has been made better by it. In

trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under

false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never

come to good. The very solicitors’ boys who have kept the wretched

suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle,

Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments

until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into

themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause

has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a

distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle,

Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising

themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter

and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when

Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and

sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the

ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history

from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted

into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad

course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some

off-hand manner never meant to go right.

Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the

Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

“Mr. Tangle,” says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something

restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.

“Mlud,” says Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and

Jarndyce than anybody. He is famous for it—supposed never to have

read anything else since he left school.

“Have you nearly concluded your argument?”

“Mlud, no—variety of points—feel it my duty tsubmit—ludship,” is

the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.

“Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?” says

the Chancellor with a slight smile.

Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little

summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a

pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places

of obscurity.

“We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight,” says the

Chancellor. For the question at issue is only a question of costs, a

mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will come

to a settlement one of these days.

The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought forward

in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, “My lord!” Maces, bags,

and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at the man from

Shropshire.

“In reference,” proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and

Jarndyce, “to the young girl—”

“Begludship’s pardon—boy,” says Mr. Tangle prematurely. “In

reference,” proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, “to the

young girl and boy, the two young people”—Mr. Tangle crushed—“whom

I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my private

room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the expediency of

making the order for their residing with their uncle.”

Mr. Tangle on his legs again. “Begludship’s pardon—dead.”

“With their”—Chancellor looking through his double eye-glass at the

papers on his desk—“grandfather.”

“Begludship’s pardon—victim of rash action—brains.”

Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises,

fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, “Will

your lordship allow me? I appear for him. He is a cousin, several

times removed. I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court in

what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin.”

Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in

the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog

knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him.

“I will speak with both the young people,” says the Chancellor anew,

“and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their

cousin. I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I take my

seat.”

The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is

presented. Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner’s conglomeration

but his being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from

Shropshire ventures another remonstrative “My lord!” but the

Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously vanished. Everybody

else quickly vanishes too. A battery of blue bags is loaded with

heavy charges of papers and carried off by clerks; the little mad old

woman marches off with her documents; the empty court is locked up.

If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has

caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a

great funeral pyre—why so much the better for other parties than the

parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!