![]() ![]() ![]() The corruption of Chancery finds its analogue and result in Tom-all-Alone’s, aptly named after the first suitor in the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Whilst Esther’s past tense narrative seems to establish a comfortable distance between the reader and the suffering within the novel, the shift to present tense in the third person narrative reminds us that street urchins like Jo remain unacknowledged, yet “dying thus around us every day” (734). Leavis observed, Dickens is concerned not only with a stagnating legal process, but with how “the laws of human nature”, distort human relationships. Chancery becomes a microcosm for the iniquities being propagated at an institutional level and repeated by individuals. The metaphor of Chancery having its “decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire” (15) demonstrates how the corruption and inefficiency working at an institutional level is propagated at every other level of society. Dickens destabilises the Victorian dichotomy between the public and private through the double narrative, as moral corruption transcends class divisions in the novel and spreads from the lowest to the highest levels of society. The Court of Chancery acts as a centripetal force, drawing characters inexorably into its interminable legal process. ![]()
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