★★★★★ | Literature | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Key Themes
- Corruption in the British court system.
- Miseries of children — orphans, child labor, mistreatment.
- The mystery of Lady Dedlock.
Highlights
It is the long vacation in the regions of Chancery Lane. The good ships Law and Equity, those teak-built, copper-bottomed, iron- fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means fast-sailing clippers are laid up in ordinary. The Flying Dutchman, with a crew of ghostly clients imploring all whom they may encounter to peruse their papers, has drifted, for the time being, heaven knows where.
Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy’s office of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary.
I lay ill through several weeks, and the usual tenor of my life became like an old remembrance. … Before I had been confined to it many days, everything else seemed to have retired into a remote distance where there was little or no separation between the various stages of my life which had been really divided by years. In falling ill, I seemed to have crossed a dark lake and to have left all my experiences, mingled together by the great distance, on the healthy shore. … I had never known before how short life really was and into how small a space the mind could put it.
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.
Some men rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial affection into their mother’s name.