08-06-2025
Maybe my father's Dickens tale wasn't fiction after all
James Thellusson is the author of 'School's Out: Truants, Troublemakers and Teachers' Pets.'
Charles Dickens despised the Victorian legal system. In 'Bleak House,' he invented the epic, decades-spanning Jarndyce v. Jarndyce legal battle over a family inheritance to expose the system's cruelty, cost and complexity. 'The one great principle of the English law,' he wrote in the novel, 'is to make business for itself.'
