The one great priciple of English Law according to Dickens is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Only when viewed by this light does the legal system become a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze we are apt to think it. Let the public clearly perceive that its grand principle (Dickens says), "is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble." Obtaining a decision in Court was likely to be frustratingly slow and expensive as Dickens discovered in 1844 when he launched suits against five piratical publishers for breach of copyright. As he complained in a letter, "I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed." Although Dickens won the suit, it cost him more than any damages he was able to collect and he resolved never again to become involved in dealing with Chancery, remarking bitterly in 1846 that "it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law." Ultimately, he got his revenge, as writers often do, by publishing in 1852, Bleak House, his novel, about, among other things, the law's delay, and the human consequences thereof. The story evolves around the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a law suit which in the course of time became so complicated that no man alive knew what it meant. The parties to it understood it least and the only way it could end, it did end: consumed in costs. Along the way to this pitiable end, the reader gets to know some wonderful characters who do amazing and interesting things, in an authentically described landscape of a polluted nineteenth century London. If you haven't experienced this great classic yet, I advise you to do so. You are in for a great treat.