Harold Skimpole was identified with Leigh Hunt. Dickens
himself admitted the resemblance; but only in so far as none
of Skimpole's vices could be attributed to his prototype. The
original of Bleak House was a country mansion in
Hertfordshire, near St. Albans, though it is usually said to
be a summer residence of the novelist at Broadstairs.


_I.--In Chancery_


London. Implacable November weather. The Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln's Inn Hall. Fog everywhere, and at the very heart of the fog
sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. The case of
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. No man alive knows what it means. It
has passed into a joke. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in
the profession.

Mr. Kenge (of Kenge and Carboy, solicitors, Lincoln's Inn) first
mentioned Jarndyce and Jarndyce to me, and told me that the costs
already amounted to from sixty to seventy thousand pounds.

My godmother, who brought me up, was just dead, and Mr. Kenge came to
tell me that Mr. Jarndyce proposed, knowing my desolate position, that I
should go to a first-rate school, where my education should be completed
and my comfort secured. What did I say to this? What could I say but
accept the proposal thankfully?

I passed at this school six happy, quiet years, and then one day came a
note from Kenge and Carboy, mentioning that their client, Mr. Jarndyce,