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The real-life character of the "richest commoner in England" Jennens the Miser was incredibly Dickensesque. When he died unmarried and intestate with a fortune estimated at £2 million, a series of endless legal wrangles began that appeared to be unresolvable by the iniquitous common law. For fifty-five years, the contents of his unsigned had been disputed in the Court of Chancery, that Byzantine construct of the English legal system with which Dickens was well familiar. Not only had he worked there as a clerk, he visited as a patron due to his own copyright disputes. The understandable desire to bemoan the inefficiencies of the Court of Chancery proved to be an inspiration, and out of Dickens' imagination sprang Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a fictional case much like the Miser of Acton's where the value of the deceased's contested estate had long since been spent on legal fees (due to the clerk's low stipends, they imposed exorbitant ad-hoc charges on the litigants).
So, Dickens had to set his fictional events back in 1827 when the infamous Six Clerks were still in post. Unfortunately this plot device aged the context, placing it "out of time" and also introducing confusion with other contemporaneous themes that he wanted to explore as part of a serialization. And so the novel, and others of its like in which perhaps Dickens sought to become the keeper of the nation's conscience, were never written. Shortly after Dickens passed away, a new unified High Court of Justice, with the Chancery Division - one of three divisions of the High Court - succeeded the Court of Chancery as an equitable body. The moment in time for a chance to write a classic piece of finger-poking had been lost forever.
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