The horrors of the prisons which Howard and Elizabeth Fry, for all their gallant efforts, were powerless to remove, gave rise to a wave of public sentiment which carried their administration to an opposite extreme. Dickens saw this and exposed the folly of the movement in “David Copperfield.” You will doubtless remember that David’s old schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle, of Salem House, suddenly developed from a brutal pedagogue into an ardent philanthropist, after having become a Middlesex magistrate, and devoted himself to the well-being of criminals. Copperfield, as the rising author of the day (Dickens himself), is invited to see a new model prison and takes his old friend Traddles with him.
“It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spend one half the money on the erection of an industrial school for the young or a house of refuge for the deserving old. In the kitchen repasts were being prepared for the prisoners, so delicate that none of our soldiers, sailors, labourers, or workmen could hope ever to dine half so well.”
There, in a most comfortable cell, our friends find Uriah Heep reading a hymn book, canting and complaining of the toughness of the beef; and Mr. Littimer, Steerforth’s infamous valet, gently hinting that the milk supplied might have been adulterated. To illustrate this I turned to the old numbers of Punch of the day, a study of which, comic paper though it be, is one of the best illustrations of the current life and thought of every period since it appeared in 1839. There one finds innumerable jokes and pictures of convicts enjoying every sort of luxury, obsequiously waited on by the warders. Prison reform had to be irrational before it could become sane; for, as David Copperfield says, “Perhaps it is a good thing to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.”
Next we come to an abuse, on which I must speak with much diffidence, for no one but a trained lawyer could properly discuss it—the Court of Chancery. It is the theme of much of Dickens’ best work and is the whole motive of “Bleak House” and the famous Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. The mixture of humour and pathos in the treatment of this subject tempts me to digress a little before explaining as best I may the actual state of the law at the time. We are introduced to those who were interested in the vast machinery of the Court of Chancery, as the great Jarndyce case drags its slow length along from the Lord Chancellor down to the starving law writer. We see suitors of every description like the “man from Shropshire” and “Miss Flyte.” We seem to smell the musty law papers as we read the book. I confess to feeling almost maddened by the callous slowness with which Mr. Vholes the solicitor, who “maintained an aged father in the Vale of Taunton,” played with the hopes and fears of the anxious suitors. The eminent respectability of such a practitioner, adds Dickens, was always quoted whenever a commission sat to see whether the business of the Court could be expedited. We laugh, but the tears are not far off, at the humour of such people as Miss Flyte, Mr. Gruppy, Conversation Kenge; yet we feel the pathos of all the woe and disappointment caused by the delays of the monstrous machine of the Law.
To Dickens the Court of Chancery represented two things: first it stood for oppression. It appeared to him a vast system backed by vested interests, which sucked unhappy suitors into litigation against their will, fettered and crippled them for the rest of their lives, and, in many cases, ultimately consigned them to the despairing misery of a debtor’s prison.
It drove men and women to madness, like poor Miss Flyte, or made them misanthropes, like Mr. Grindley, “the man from Shropshire.” It made wretched, half-ruined people hang about the courts day after day expecting a judgment, it caused houses to fall into ruin, and whole streets to become deserted because Chancery could not decide to whom they belonged. Listen to “the man from Shropshire’s” description of his own case:
“Mr. Jarndyce, consider my case. As there is a heaven above us, this is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father (a farmer) made a will and left his farm and stock to my mother for her life. After my mother’s death, all was to come to me, except a legacy of £300 that I was to pay to my brother.”
The brother claimed the legacy, Grindley said he had had some of it, and the brother filed a bill in Chancery.
“Seventeen persons were made defendants in this simple suit.” Two years elapsed and the Master in Chancery then found there ought to be another defendant, and all the proceedings were quashed. “The costs at that time—before the suit had begun, were three times the legacy.”
The brother tried to back out, but the court would not let him. The whole property was sucked away in a suit which common-sense could have decided in a day.