Dickens’s law makers and law breakers: Barnard's Inn and beyond Transcript Date: Tuesday, 7 November 2006 - 12:00AM DICKENS'S LAW MAKERS AND LAW BREAKERS – BARNARD'S INN AND BEYOND Professor Andrew Sanders London. Michaelmas term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters were but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Thus Dickens famously opened the first chapter in the first monthly part of Bleak House in March 1852. Readers are reminded that it is not March they are reading about. It is an 'implacable', foggy, damp November and London is bogged down in mud. The mud is so pervasive that at that notoriously inconvenient section of Holborn, Holborn Hill, where one of the only old east-west axes of central London dipped down into the valley of the Fleet and then climbed up again as it approached the boundaries of the City, Dickens fantasizes that it would not be a surprise to encounter one of the beasts of the primeval morass, a megalosaurus, the 'great lizard' so named some twenty-five years earlier by the naturalist William Buckland. Dickens's images are of Noah's flood newly retreated and of a prehistoric monster. The first image might imply hope and a new beginning, but the second threatens a return to an earlier phase of creation when, as Tennyson had recently phrased it in In Memoriam,'dragons of the prime / … tare each other in their slime' (Section LVI). What Dickens seems to be implying in the opening paragraph of Bleak House is that human civilisation as a whole is threatened with regression. The London of the present is clogged with mud underfoot and its air is polluted with fog, smoke and a disease-bearing miasma. Without change and without reform, its future seems bleak. The 'bleak' house of the title is as yet unidentified, but those readers who purchased a title-page and a frontispiece to the completed novel with its last serial part in September 1853 would have been confronted with two contrasted images The frontispiece shows Chesney Wold bleakly exposed to the elements while the title-page bears a vignette showing the conspicuously house-less Jo. It is not simply the implacable weather and the bleakness of the urban and social prospects before us that Dickens seeks to emphasize in the opening to Bleak House. He also wants to suggest a relationship between the physical fog and mud and the metaphorical chaos inspired by a complex, befuddled and befuddling legal system, exemplified in the novel by the workings of the Court of Chancery ('at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery'). In the novel the court is sitting in the old hall of Lincoln's Inn where it sat out of session rather than in Westminster Hall. What Dickens is doing is setting what we still call 'legal London', the central swathe of the city stretching from Gray's Inn in the north to the Temple in the south, as the topographical core of his story. It is a sclerosis that clogs central London, just as the Law itself seems to impede any reforming process in the nation as a whole. It is significant that both here and in A Tale of Two Cities that Temple Bar, the historic barrier in the Strand between the City and Westminster, is specifically mentioned. In Bleak House, on that raw November afternoon 'the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near the leaden-headed old obstruction: Temple Bar' while at the opening of Book Two of A Tale of Two Cities (set some eighty years earlier) we are told that Tellson's Bank has its windows both 'always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street' and heavily overshadowed by the gateway from which the surviving severed heads of traitors seem to 'ogle' clients 'with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia or Ashantee.' The rotten, severed heads were long gone by Dickens's day but Temple Bar itself was only removed from its historic site in 1878 in order to facilitate the construction of the new Law Courts but it had long been disparaged as an inconvenience and a severe impediment to the circulation of traffic in central London. Like the descent to and from Holborn Hill it formed blockage in one of the only great east-west axes in Dickens's London. Contemporary maps of London reveal quite how important were Holborn and the Strand/Fleet Street as the main arteries linking the residential and administrative West End with the commercial and industrial City and beyond it the all-important docks. 'Legal London' straddling Holborn and the Strand and stretching as far as the river, coupled with certain of its attendant geographical and architectural features which figure in Bleak House, can thus be seen as clogging those already muddy arteries in a way that can properly be called sclerotic. Significantly too, Lincoln's Inn and its surroundings form the central site of the novel much as, as again contemporary maps reveal, it stood at the geographical heart of the metropolis. Even today, if we were to draw a Union Jack on a map of modern London, Lincoln's Inn Fields represents a largely unacknowledged core, a central axis at a mid- point between the City and Westminster and between the northernmost and southernmost tips of the capital. This seems to me exactly why Dickens determined to set so much of the action of Bleak House where he did. Holborn and the Strand/Fleet Street transect London from west to east, but, in Dickens's time no major thoroughfare crossed this central area from north to south. Crossing Waterloo Bridge from the south side of the Thames, and passing the offices of All the Year Round in Wellington Street, a visitor to London would find that Bow Street reached a dead end at its junction with Long Acre. To the east of Wellington Street 'Legal London' sat in the way of a north-south artery. The only historic street of any significance, Chancery Lane, which is iself so important a site in Bleak House, could scarcely be called a major thoroughfare, either then or now. London had to until the very end of the nineteenth century for the wholesale demolitions and dynamic reconstructions of the Aldwych and Kingsway to give the city that major route. Though long planned, work began only in 1900 and the still unfinished scheme was opened in 1905 by King Edward VII (in whose honour the new street was named). Kingsway replaced a tangle of lanes, alleys and streets which linked Covent Garden to Lincoln's Inn Fields. Their disappearance was not much mourned at the time, though antiquarians and admirers of the very variety of London's historic townscape did regret the demolition between 1890 and 1903 of the old houses in Drury Lane and Wych Street. Their last days were beautifully, and memorably, recorded by the photographer, Henry Dixon, for the Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. The demolition of the old wooden houses in Wych Street deprived readers of Dickens of a topographical context. Ironically perhaps, the only surviving wooden house between Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Strand is the so-called 'Old Curiosity Shop', but the links between this and Dickens are tenuous at best. Readers of The Old Curiosity Shop might feel satisfied by this odd survival, but readers of Bleak House have the more satisfying sensation of considering the last relic of what might have been in Dickens's mind when he created Tom-all-Alone's. The shift in social pretension remains remarkable. By stepping out of Lincoln's Inn Fields, with its public institutions and its substantial seventeenth- and eighteenth-century brick houses, we move immediately into what was once a far less salubrious area of narrow streets and overhanging wooden buildings. Ths may or may not be the site of Tom-all-Alone's. Dickens not only invented his slum he also did not precisely locate it. This might strike some readers as anomalous. He carefully places other sites in and near Lincoln's Inn (Kenge and Carboy's in the Inn itself; Tulkinghorn's house, 'formerly a house of state', in the Fields: Snagsby's shop in Cook's [Took's] Court, Cursitor Street; Mrs Jellyby's house in Thavies Inn, and the 'narrow back street, part of some courts and lanes immediately outside the wall of the Inn' where Krook's warehouse is situated off Chancery Lane), but he leaves the location of his slum imprecise. This is, of course, deliberate. We know that Tom-all-Alone's is near enough to Lincoln's Inn (Hawdon, who lodges at Krook's off Chancery Lane, frequents it and Tulkinghorn walks to it from his house in the Fields) but it is essentially a composite fiction of a London slum, one made up of elements of Seven Dials, St Giles's and, possibly, the lanes off the lower part of Drury Lane as it neared the Strand. It is described in Chapter 16 as a 'black, delapidated street, avoided by all decent people; where the crazy houses were seized upon, when their decay was far advanced by some bold vagrants, who, after establishing their own possession, took to letting them out in lodgings.' Certainly, Phiz's exaggerated illustration which accompanied Chapter 46 makes it look very much like Wych Street (though the Gothic church tower that Phiz included resembles neither the baroque spire of St Mary-le-Strand nor that of St Giles-in-the-Fields).