Bleak House and the Demise of Chancery: A Case Study in the Relationship between Fictional Literature and Legal Reform

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between fictional literature and law reform through the treatment of the Court of Chancery in Charles Dickens’s 1852-183 novel Bleak House. It offers a reading of the novel as a law reform narrative which presents a coherent picture of the state of the law as it is and an imaginative alternative for its future. The Chancery represented in the novel is mythologised and symbolic rather than strictly historically accurate, and this enables Dickens to reveal its problematic essence as a morally bankrupt and bankrupting institution. The solution the novel puts forward is two-fold: calling for its readers to participate personally in an ethic of equity and for lawmakers to reconfigure the court in a way which encourages such an ethic in its participants. Although the novel did not have a noticeable effect on the historical process of Chancery reform, it did contribute a new and counter-cultural normative vision of reform, and impacted on its readership at an individual level.