In Dickens's Bleak House, the Jarndyce will case runs for generations until the legal costs have swallowed the estate

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853. Its centre is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a Chancery suit over a fortune left under conflicting wills. "Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on," Dickens writes. "Innumerable children have been born into the cause." One claimant, old Tom Jarndyce, "in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane." The young ward Richard Carstone gives his life to the case. Near the end Mr Smallweed produces a will found among the dead Krook's papers. The lawyer Mr Kenge says it advances Richard's and Ada's interests "very materially." The case then ends at once, because the estate has been absorbed in costs. Richard dies soon after. In his preface of August 1853 Dickens cited a real "friendly suit" begun nearly twenty years earlier that had already cost seventy thousand pounds and was "no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun." Scholars identify it as the case over the will of Charles Day, who died in 1836; it ran from 1837 to at least 1854. The novel helped support a judicial reform movement that ended in legal reform in the 1870s.