In this video, Professor Jon Mee talks to Professor Gary Watt, School of Law about Dickens' relationship with the Law.

In most of Charles Dickens novels he paints a picture of the legal profession as one of greed and inaction. It is a subject that Dickens had personanlly experienced. As a young boy his father was imprisoned for debt and after moving on from working in a blacking factory Charles got a job as an office boy at a solicitors firm in London.

A few years later Charles became a journalist and spent four years reporting on one of the country’s most complicated courts. Clearly this grounding in the legal profession had a big impact on his future storytelling, especially in the novel Bleak House. The novel revolves around a long-running litigation in the Court of Chancery, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. The lengthy court proceedings has far-reaching consequences for all of the characters involved.

Dickens had firsthand experience of just how draining a legal case could be, as Professor Gary Watt, from the School of Law, found: “After the success of A Christmas Carol he found people were pirating that work and he was encouraged to pursue an action to try and stop the pirates but he found the whole experience ruinous. A couple of years later he was invited by the lawyers to have another go and he said ‘I will not easily forget the expense, anxiety or horrible injustice of the Carol case and I would much rather not’.”