Past as Prologue: "Dickens v . Dickens" in Chancery

Abstract: In 1934, the widow of Sir Henry Fielding Dickens filed a complaint with the Court of Chancery to defend her right to keep some 40,000 pounds (roughly 2,400.000 today) from the sale of The Life of Our Lord , an unpublished Dickens manuscript inherited by her late husband. Her niece, Ethel Dickens, disputed Lady Dickens's claim. Ethel contended that because Dickens's Will consigned copyright benefits to the Charles Dickens Family Trust, the proceeds from the sale belonged not only to Lady Dickens but to all the author's heirs. The case, which took up a full year of the court calendar, was marked by acrimony on both sides of the dispute, only to conclude, as a close examination of the primary documents supports (and the author of Bleak House seems to have foreseen), with neither side having won.