Bret Walker SC
speaker
138 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Bret Walker SC’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
By a coincidence, which is only a coincidence in one sense, 1852, Bleak House's publication was also when there was a very important statute, Chancery Procedure Reforms, which was up to that point the largest of the steps taken towards what I'll call sanity in the system.
But there was still a fair bit of madness and vestiges of self-interest.
And it wasn't really for another 10, 15 years that in particular the separate courts were united into one High Court with different divisions.
So no longer a separate Chancery Court, but a Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice.
It suffices to say that there was
a spirit of reform and of disdain or distaste for the past, for the quite recent past, which I have no doubt that Dickens was very largely responsible for making so firm, so imposing a body of public opinion that finally the politicians were able to overcome the conservatism of
some judges, some Lord Chancellor and many of the court staff.
So yes, I think he was a very important player in the change, the swerving of public opinion, no longer to take for granted what the judges complacently said about how marvellous their system was and instead stepping in
through reforms instigated and seen through by lawyers, I should say.
It was the lawyers who took the lead, not Malone, as parliamentarians and ministers in seeing these reforms through.
But without Dickens...
I wonder whether it would have been complete by the end of the 19th century as it plainly was.
Well, they are very impressive.
I think I read Bleak House twice.
one hot summer when I was 15 or so.
It was not really beach reading, but there you go.
And maybe because it was the beach or the beach house, that chapter with its fog and was what I later learned was the ghastly doctrinal and procedural labyrinth of the Chancery side.
That has stuck with me probably more than any other part of any of the Dickens novels.
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