Jonty Claypole

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 Charndyce and Charndyce without knowing how or why.

Whole families have inherited legendary hatred with the suit.

The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking horse when Charndyce and Charndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed themselves 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.

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.

And so, Brett, I mean, is Dickens exaggerating?

Were there really cases like Jarndyce and Jarndyce that had been going for decades and decades and decades?

And you started your career in equity.

And Brett, when you were starting your career, had all the necessary reforms come through?

Were cases like this settled in a couple of years at most?

Or was there still a jarndyce and jarndyce element in the law?

And do you think a book like Bleak House has any impact on the reforms that eventually happened?

I was saying earlier in the episode, you know, Dickens again and again in his books turns his moral outrage on particular subjects.

And there does seem to be a trend that within a few years of him writing these hugely successful bestsellers, that some change to the law is made.

But it's very hard to prove that.

that influence or that cause and effect.