Charles Dickens excoriated pettifogging bureaucracy and exposed the plight of victims in a nineteenth century English society that struggled to reform its legal system. In Bleak House, published in 1852, several members of one family exhaust themselves, and their inheritance, as the fictional case Jarndyce v Jarndyce, is brought time and again to the Chancery court. Dickens saw this court as an archaic failure causing socio-economic decay and even the death of the litigants as lawyers gobbled up fees.
However, Amanda Capern argues that the court of Chancery was an essential institutional arm of English state governance before 1750. It was deeply involved in family and community affairs, offering arbitration in disputes over money and property, managing some estates and issuing commissioners and orders to settle the debts of litigants. Procedures in Chancery were relatively simple, if not cheap, and everything was in English. Many cases were resolved very quickly. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century there were protracted cases of family litigation, long before Charles Dickens dreamed up his corrosive model of Chancery for his great novel Bleak House. In this paper, then, Amanda Capern asks if Charles Dickens was right about what an awful law court Chancery was. She takes the story back to an earlier period when almost every family in England had something going on in Chancery and explains why society was unable to do without its lawyers … no matter what they cost!
Amanda Capern’s latest book is The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe (2020), which was nominated for a prize for international research collaboration by the Early Modern Women Society (USA). She is also author/co-editor of Women and the Land, 1500-1900 (2019) and several articles on gender, property, and the law. She is a Leverhulme Trust Fellow on a project called Going to Chancery. She is General Editor of the textbook series Gender and History (Macmillan/Bloomsbury).
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