Stranger Than Fiction? The Jennens Inheritance in Fact and Fiction Part 1: The Jennens Fortune in the Courts

Jarndyce v Jarndyce, the great lawsuit created by Charles Dickens in Bleak House, published in serial form in 1852–3, as a microcosm of all the manifold evils of the Court of Chancery, so permeated the popular consciousness that it seems rather to belong among the Leading Cases so fruitfully explored by Brian Simpson than in the pages of A.P. Herbert's fictional Misleading Cases.¹ Since it has often been said to have been based upon one or two real cases, particularly the ‘Jennens Case’, this article began as an attempt to compare the real with the fictional case—to see how far Jennens was indeed ‘the real Jarndyce v Jarndyce’.²

What emerged from that examination, however, was not only a much more complicated story, and a cautionary tale about too ready an acceptance of real models for fictional events, but one which throws light on a seldom explored species of legal proceeding, which had an international dimension, and the ways it was promoted and financed.

It also highlights the acute difficulties experienced by claimants and their adversaries in furnishing legally admissible and conclusive evidence of identities and relationships before the implementation of the Marriage Act 1836 and the Registration Act 1837. Gaps and defects in the older sources encouraged the pursuit of optimistic claims and ensured that, in those cases which reached the courts, their resolution would be lengthy, costly and not always satisfactory. And when the law deployed the blunt instrument of limitation periods to curtail proceedings, that in turn led the more determined claimants to muddy the waters with allegations of fraud.