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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My Lord!”

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do.
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#BleakHouse

DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to purge himself of his contempt,”

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender.

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank.

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits.

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 20h

Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned?

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank!
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it)

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief,

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DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

DickensYouSay @dickensyousay.bsky.social · 1d

And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
#CharlesDickens
#BleakHouse

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