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.