Trust and Conscience in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend (Critical Essay‪)‬

Most readers presume that the case of "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" revolves around a will, but as John Jarndyce tells Esther Summerson in chapter eight of Bleak House, the question which Chancery cannot resolve is that of "'how the trusts under [a] Will are to be administered'" [my emphasis] (118; ch. 8). The only reason that the case has come before the court responsible for administering Equity, rather than the common law courts, is that it involves not simply a will or testamentary devise, but a bequest "in trust," over which "the Court of Chancery has exclusive jurisdiction, as that court alone can enforce the trust" (Spence 19). Instead of conferring legal title to his property directly on the heirs, the testator Jarndyce appoints trustees to hold the legal title and manage the trust property on behalf of the equitable title-holders (beneficiaries). However, the trustees of the Jarndyce fortune never appear in the text, and in their absence, Chancery has stepped in to act as a trustee by default in keeping with its own maxim that "Equity will not allow a trust to fail for want of a trustee." Bleak House is as much a novel about trust as it is a novel about law. "Trust" is essentially a term of morality, and like "conscience," it is "a vague but powerful concept of justice and natural law" which found a place in the lexicon of Equity (Petch 1997a, 123), the branch of law that expanded legal discourse into the broader arena of morality and casuistry. In Equity doctrine, trust refers to both an interest in property (legal or equitable) and a relationship between two persons, the trustee and the beneficiary. While at common law the beneficiary has limited remedies to ensure that the trustee holds property on behalf of the former, the principle of Equity is that it would be unconscionable for the trustee, who has undertaken to hold property for another's benefit to hold it for his personal benefit. As Lord Hardwicke stated in Ayliffe v. Murray (1740), the trust was "a burden upon the honour and conscience of the person intrusted, and [was] not [to be] undertaken upon mercenary views." (1) By focusing on the notions of honor and conscience, Lord Hardwicke related breach of trust not to illegal conduct, but to the breaking of a kind of gentleman's agreement, a contract with no binding legal force, but which Equity nevertheless recognized as binding on the conscience of the trustee.