Chapter 1
CHAPTER I. IN CHANCELLORY. London. Micklemas 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, wadding like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke luring 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, indistinguishable 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 foothold 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 the crust of mud, sticking at all those points tenaciously to the pavement and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green apes 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, charned 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 diverse places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongy 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 become 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 could see nothing
but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery Bar ought to be, as they here are, mystically engaged in one of the 10,000 stages of an endless course, tripping one another up on slippery precedents,
groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretense of equity with the serious faces, as players might.
On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the course, 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 Chancer looks into a 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 its slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to moneyed might the means abundantly of wearing 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 to you rather than come here. Who happened 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 a 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 shorthand 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 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 ever had 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 may to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century. He 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 the instance of his rising. 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. Jandice and Jandice drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in the 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 coals. 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 Jandice and Jandice 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 coffeehouse 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 had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was in it, for somebody or other, when he was a counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benches
in select port wine committees after dinner in hall. Article clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handed 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 mace's bags and purses.
How many people out of the suit of jarndyce and jarndyce had 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 Jandice and Jandice 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, spoilation, botheration, under false pretenses of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitous boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr Chuzzle, 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 this course 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. Chisel, 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 Jandice and Jandice 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 kind of offhand manner never meant to go right thus in the midst of the mud at the heart of the fog sits the lord high chancellor in his court of Chancery.
Mr. Tangle, says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman. Well, I'd say Mr. Tangle. Mr. Tangle knows more of Jandice and Jandice than anybody. He is famous for it,
and I suppose never to have read anything else since he left school. You nearly concluded your argument. Well, I'd know. Variety points. Think it my duty to submit, Lord Chip,
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 piano forty, make eighteen bounds, 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 cost, 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! Macy's 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, beg your lordship'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 today 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. Beg your lordship's pardon. Dead. With their Chancellor looking through his double eyeglass at the papers on his desk. Grandfather. Beg your lordship'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 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 and you, and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with their cousin.
I will mention the matter tomorrow 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 is being sent back to prison, which is soon done. The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative monord, 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. End of chapter 1
