The following article by Professor Gary Watt is taken from his book Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law (pp. 557-59, footnotes omitted)

‘In Chancery’ is the title of the first chapter of Bleak House. Dickens could not have chosen more appropriate opening words. To begin with, it is an acknowledgment of the external formality of legal documentation. ‘In Chancery’ are the first words one would have read on virtually every legal document issued out of, and connected to, that court in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dickens is historically accurate when he writes that ‘the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks’ Office has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading’. Beyond the form, there is something more substantial and more sinister. We know that the word ‘chancery’ derives from ‘chancellor’. It can now be revealed that the word chancellor is derived from cancellarius, the Roman scribe and official who sat just within the lattice-work barrier (cancellus) that separated the judges from the people in the Roman tribunal court. To be ‘in Chancery’ is therefore to be behind bars – indeed the phrase ‘in Chancery’ is the etymological twin of the word ‘incarcerate’; the former from the Latin root ‘cancer’, the latter from the variant Latin root ‘carcer’ – both meaning bars or crossed bars. This original etymological sense of chancery is employed by William Lambarde in his Archeion (1591) where he says that the etymology indicates that the chancellor metaphorically contains matters ‘within certain barres and limits’ (original emphasis). He adds that the Chancellor ‘doth (when the case requireth) so cancell and shut up the rigour of the generall Law, that it shall not breake forth to the hurt of some one singular Case and person’ (my emphasis). The etymological identity of ‘in chancery’ and ‘incarceration’ has apparently been overlooked until now, and even for Dickens it might have remained subconscious, but the novel clangs with echoes of the prison door. Consider, for example, the final paragraph of the first chapter, ‘In Chancery’:

 

The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is presented. Nothing can

possibly come of the prisoner’s conglomeration but his being sent back to prison…

(emphasis added)

 

The prisoner in question is the so-called ‘man from Shropshire’, but the scene is intended to foreshadow the incarceration of Richard Carstone who along with his cousin (and lover) Ada Clare is a ‘ward in chancery’. (There were ‘wards’ – corridors of cells – in Victorian prisons too.) Richard and Ada share the forlorn hope of becoming rich through their interest in the chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce which all stems from the disputed will of a ‘certain’ Mr Jarndyce. Dickens is never accidental in his choice of names and here he is very precise. Richard means ‘rich ward’ – literally the ‘protector of wealth’ – and Carstone compounds ‘in – carcer – ation’ with comfortless ‘stone’. (Shakespeare uses the same metaphor to describe another victim of ‘judicial process’ when in The Winter’s Tale, he sets Hermione ‘Standing like stone’ (5.3.48) as a statue before her husband, who had been her judge.) It is Richard’s fate to be imprisoned within, and to die behind, the bars of the chancery case. Dickens parallels Richard’s plight with the image of a caged bird. The parallel commences when old Miss Flite takes Richard and his companions to her garret room. We are told that there are ‘a number of bird-cages hanging there, some containing several birds’. The picture is hauntingly reminiscent of the Grimms’ fairy tale in which the boy

Jorindel seeks to rescue his lover Jorinda from a witch who has turned her into a bird and imprisoned her in a cage. Having overcome the witch’s magic, which had fixed him ‘as a stone’; at last ‘he came to the chamber’ where there were ‘seven hundred birds singing in the seven hundred cages’. ‘Jarndyce’ is obviously a pun on the sickness and attitude of jaundice, but why did Dickens choose Jarndyce instead of ‘Billus’ or ‘Tummris’ or ‘Sumpson’ or any number of alternative allusions to disease? In the search for the origins of the name Jarndyce and Jarndyce I suggest that we need look no further than the title of the fairy tale Jorinda and Jorindel. Dickens even talks of witchcraft at work in Jarndyce and Jarndyce. He tells us that the fortune of the will has been spent on ‘an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch’s Sabbath’ and it all originates in the ‘evil hour’ (a ‘witching’ hour or ‘devil’s dancing hour’ is implied) in which the disputed will was made. Jorinda and Jorindel was first published in England in an 1823 edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales illustrated by George Cruickshank, who went on to illustrate Dickens’ works. If Dickens was consciously or subconsciously inspired by the memory of the fairy tale we should not be surprised. This is, after all, the man who declared ‘if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss’.

At the end of Bleak House, as at the end of the fairy tale Jorinda and Jorindel, the birds are released from their cages. The difference, of course, is that in Bleak House it is the young man who is incarcerated and ultimately his only freedom is in death. There was no fairy-tale ending for Richard and Ada. Dickens gives us express warning of Richard’s fate when, in the first half of the novel, Esther’s narrative observes the ‘riveting’ of ‘a fatal link…between…his free hopes and [Miss Flite’s] caged birds’. Towards the end of the book – by which time Richard is utterly enthralled and in ill health (there are ‘wards’ in hospitals too) – we are told that Miss Flite has added two new birds to her cages, which she calls ‘the Wards in Jarndyce’.

Even Richard’s room in Bleak House is closely paralleled with a bird cage. It is said to be ‘a comfortable compound of many rooms’, and in the same passage of text, the ‘native Hindu chair’ outside his room is said to be a compound of ‘a sofa, a box, and a bedstead, and looked in every form something between a bamboo skeleton and a great bird-cage’. It is significant also that Esther Summerson starts her journey – and Bleak House is above all the story of her journey – with ‘no companion left but my bird, and him I carried with me in his cage’. The care she shows for the caged bird foretells the care she will bestow on Richard and on the other ward in chancery, Miss Ada Clare. Esther even calls Ada her ‘pet’, the first occasion falling in chapter three in the Lord Chancellor’s private chamber, at the very heart of the chancery cage. Dickens’ personal identification with Esther, which is suggested by his gift to her of the first person narrative, is further evidenced in the fact that Dickens doted on a canary which had been given to his daughters around the time that Bleak House was forming in his mind. When the canary died fifteen years later, Dickens had this epitaph carved: ‘This is the grave of Dick, the best of birds, born at Broadstairs, midsummer, 1851, died at Gad’s Hill Place, 4th October 1866’. Dickens’ canary was allowed to fly around the room and perch on heads just like Lawrence Boythorn’s does in Bleak House. Compared with Sir Leicester Dedlock, who keeps his wife like a caged pet (and who would probably prefer all of nature to be ‘enclosed with a park-fence’), Laurence Boythorn is a child of nature – a Laurel Boy-thorn. Contrasting with Sir Leicester in a different way, there is Skimpole, who is no child of nature, but a dependent child and the pet of John Jarndyce. He is a bird, as he says of himself, living in a cage: ‘[t]hey pluck his feathers now and then and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!’.

Richard Carstone personifies the caged bird, but there is one who matches him in this and parallels his fate – Lady Dedlock. He is incarcerated; she is locked. The first time we see Lady Dedlock, she is looking through the window at ‘the light of a fire…on latticed panes’. (How efficiently evocative this is of the fire and ‘pain’ and the latticed bars of chancery which enclose the world of the novel.) The last time we see Lady Dedlock, she is lying ‘with one arm creeping round a bar of the iron gate, and seeming to embrace it’. She tried to fly from her cage (in chapters fifty-five and fifty-six, entitled ‘Flight’ and ‘Pursuit’ respectively) but she could not escape it. The flight and death of Lady Dedlock was foretold when

Krook predicted that Miss Flite’s birds would die if ever they were released…