From this perspective, Dickens could represent the disease emanating from the slum of Tom-all-Alone’s as “work[ing] its retribution, through every order of society, up to the proudest of the proud, and to the highest of the high” (p. 590). Equally, he could represent the abuses of Chancery, the highest court in Britain, as leaving deadly “ ’impressions ... all over England’ ” (p. 106). And, where this court could, and did, hold property interminably in its bureaucratic grasp, he could, and did, link the institution that was supposed to be dedicated to equity with the slum that gave ample evidence of inequity.

When Dickens began writing Bleak House, the injustices perpetrated and perpetuated by the court were not just topical; they were already proverbial. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the phrase “in Chancery” referred, among other things, to “the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything, and the certainty of cost and loss to property” and dates this usage from the 1830s. Twenty years later, when the abuses of Chancery were being widely publicized in the press, Dickens’s indictment of the court extended to the equally dilatory procedures of Parliament, as well as to the reactionary upper classes, figured in the novel by the Dedlocks and their milieu. Both the world of Chancery and that of Fashion are “things of precedent and usage” (p. 23) in Bleak House, where Dickens further links the two in the cohesive symbolic pattern that encompasses all of Britain: “Fog everywhere.” “And ... at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor, in his High Court of Chancery,” where dozens of bewigged lawyers are “mistily engaged” (p. 18) in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a “slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing” (p. 28). Based in part on an actual case that had been dragging on for fifty-three years by 1851, the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House epitomizes the “trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration” (p. 21) of the court. “Conglomeration” is one of Chancery’s effects ; “ ‘Wiglomeration’ ” (p. 107) is the portmanteau summation John Jarndyce gives of the ’deplorable cause’ ” (p. 105). “ ‘The Lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits ... have long disappeared from the face of the earth’ ” (p. 104), he explains. Nonetheless, “ ’through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends’ ” (p. 105).

Something like this can be said3 of the structure of the novel that begins “In Chancery” (chapter 1), “hanging” (p. 17) in a state of suspended animation; goes on to the world of “Fashion” (chapter 2), which is “wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool” (p. 23); and then, departing for yet another scene, concludes an account of “A Progress” (chapter 3), on “streets ... so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen” (p. 42), back “in Chancery” once more. “ ‘Beginning over’ ” and over “ ’again,‘” Bleak House also closes without closure. Leaving off with an ambiguous unfinished sentence, Dickens leaves behind the formulaic fulfillment of wishes that characterizes so many nineteenth-century novels’ endings.

And yet, Bleak House not only has a plot—that mechanism of cause and effect that propels a narrative from beginning to end. It has a compelling one, too, centering on mysteries of identity, driven by the desire to uncover guilty secrets, urged on by the first professional detective in English fiction.