For those of us unsettled by the accelerating speed of change (and who out of their teens isn’t?) it’s worth considering the alternative. One of the legal disputes that Charles Dickens satirized in Bleak House began in 1798, when an old man left the huge sum of 1.5 million pounds, and was still working its way through the courts in 1852 when the book was published. Daniel Pool reports in “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew” that, when last heard of, the case had still not been settled in 1915.
