COMM 317: Tangent on Charles Dickens. Tangent? No. It's our assignment for Friday

Charles Dickens, whose novels many of us suffered through in school, is surprisingly good if we read him on our own time later. He was an amazing descriptive writer whose cadences match the rhythm of the spoken language, and his characters come alive and step up off the page 150 years later. He was also a very good reporter before he started writing novels.

Read the page on Dickens' biography "From Law Clerk to Journalist" in a very good fan's website called Gad's Hill Place. My theory: Dickens was so good at recording spoken English because he was first trained as a court stenographer. He covered courts and he covered the houses of Commons and Lords for a magazine called The Mirror of Parliament. Here's what he had a character in "David Copperfield" (1849-50) say about covering British politics, in terms that obviously spoke for Dickens himself:

I ... am joined with eleven others in reporting the debates in Parliament for a Morning Newspaper. Night after night, I record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify. I wallow in words. Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know the worth of political life. I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted.

Anything there remind you of Congress? Or, for that matter, the Illinois General Assembly?

Dickens also covered the British high court of Chancery, first as a stenographer and later writing sketches for magazines. In later years he made the court almost a character in the novel "Bleak House." Its first chapter begins with a famous description of the fog in London that turns into a description of the (mental) fog in Chancery court. Here are the first few grafs:

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 had 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. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits [islands] and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. 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.

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. ... [Parentheses in the original. Brackets are mine. -- pe]

And so on. I was first told about this passage when I was a courthouse reporter in Tennessee, which still has a separate Chancery Court system, and I think everyone ought to read it.

We don't have separate chancery courts in Illinois, but we have chancery cases in Circuit Court. When perennial U.S. Senate candidate Andy Martin sued the Illinois Republican Party earlier this month asking for a court order making them let him speak at GOP rally during the State Fair, he was filing a chancery case against the party leadership. Any time a plaintiff seeks a court order making a defendant do something, i.e. a "writ of specific performance," technically he's filing the case it "in equity" or "in chancery" and not "at law." If you ever cover the courts, these legal technicalities can be important.

So when Sangamon County Circuit Judge Patrick Kelley got mad and said "I feel as though I am overseeing a trailer park" during the hearing on Martin's lawsuit, he was expressing a sentiment Charles Dickens would have fully understood and sympathized with.