
                                

                                Charles Dickens

                                  Bleak House

                                    Preface

A Chancery Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some
hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy,
that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice
(at which point I thought the Judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was
almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial blemish or so in its
rate of progress, but this was exaggerated, and had been entirely owing to the
parsimony of the public; which guilty public, it appeared, had been until lately
bent in the most determined manner on by no means enlarging the number of
Chancery Judges appointed - I believe by Richard the Second, but any other King
will do as well.
    This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this
book, or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with
one or other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might
have coupled it with an apt quotation from one of SHAKSPEARE'S Sonnets:
 
My nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd!
 
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what has been
doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here that everything set
forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and
within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of
actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the
present moment1 there is a suit before the Court which was commenced nearly
twenty years ago; in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to
appear at one time; in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy
thousand pounds; which is a friendly suit; and which is (I am assured) no nearer
to its termination now than when it was begun. There is another well-known suit
in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last
century, and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has
been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other authorities for JARNDYCE AND
JARNDYCE, I could rain them on these pages, to the shame of - a parsimonious
public.
    There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The
possibility of what
