Tuesday is the bicentenary of the birth, in Portsmouth, England, of Charles Dickens, literature’s greatest humanist. We can rejoice that so many of the evils he assailed with his beautiful, ferocious quill — dismal debtors’ prisons, barefoot urchin labor, an indifferent nobility — have happily been reformed into oblivion. But one form of wickedness he decried haunts us still, proud and unrepentant: the lawyer.
Four years after Toronto real-estate developer John Jocobes Kaptyn died of cancer, his $75-million estate remains enmeshed in a Dickensian struggle that has devoured millions of dollars in legal fees.
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The latest in a series of court rulings was written last week by an irate judge who compared the Kaptyns to Charles Dickens’s feuding Jarndyce clan, from the novel Bleak House.
The House ethics panel weighing Charles B. Rangel’s fate left little doubt Tuesday about whether Mr. Rangel took part in unethical conduct. But one crucial sidebar remains unresolved: Was Mr. Rangel’s situation with his former lawyers really like something out of the Dickens novel “Bleak House”?
“Do you sell all your friends?”
Rigaud took his cigarette from his mouth, and eyed him with a momentary revelation of surprise. But he put it between his lips again, as he answered with coolness:
“I sell anything that commands a price. How do your lawyers live, your politicians, your intriguers, your men of the Exchange? How do you live? How do you come here? Have you sold no friend? Lady of mine! I rather think yes!”
Clennam turned away from him towards the window, and sat looking out at the wall.
“Effectively, sir,” said Rigaud, “Society sells itself and sells me; and I sell Society.”
