Read about another entry on the list.Tulkinghorn in Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Back to the law as we know and do not love it. Bleak House gave us the case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a byword for legal prolixity: “Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means.” Dickens’s fictional dispute over an estate “drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless” until there is nothing of the estate left. The novel’s scheming lawyer, Tulkinghorn, stops at nothing in service of his client, Sir Leicester Dedlock. Bribery, blackmail, even abduction – all are par for the course, because he is irreducibly evil. No doubt Dickens enjoyed killing him off.
Bleak House is one of Elizabeth Day's ten favorite books about cities, Daisy Hildyard's ten best poems, books and plays about our human inheritance, George Packer's six favorite books, Oliver Ford Davies's six best books, Ian Rankin's 5 favorite literary crime novels, Tim Pigott-Smith's six best books, James McCreet's top ten Victorian detective stories and one of Rebecca Ford's favorite five fiction books. It is on John Mortimer's list of the five best books about law and literature and John Mullan's lists of ten of the best thunderstorms in literature and ten of the best men writing as women, and is among the top ten works of literature according to Stephen King.
--Marshal Zeringue
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