The Charles Dickens Page

James Thellusson: Maybe my father’s Dickens tale wasn’t fiction after all

What was the inspiration for the infamous "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" lawsuit in Dickens’s "Bleak House"?

This article originally appeared in the Washington Post on June 8, 2025

Used with permission from the author

James Thellusson is the author of "School’s Out: Truants, Troublemakers and Teachers' Pets."

Charles Dickens despised the Victorian legal system. In "Bleak House," he invented the epic, decades-spanning Jarndyce v. Jarndyce legal battle over a family inheritance to expose the system’s cruelty, cost and complexity. "The one great principle of the English law," he wrote in the novel, "is to make business for itself."

My father agreed. He was scarred by generations of intra-family legal disputes, and sometimes, halfway down a bottle of Johnnie Walker, he would tell my brother and me that in the 19th century, our Thellusson forebears were Dickens's inspiration for the Jarndyce case, as well as for Tellson's Bank in "A Tale of Two Cities." We didn’t care. It was ancient history, and our mother encouraged us to ignore the wasteland of our family’s legal history.

After my mother died, following my father by 15 years, I began to wonder: Might there have been some truth to what my father said? Was there a connection between my family's history of legal feuding and Dickens? With time on my hands, I turned detective.

I started at the National Archives in Kew, southwest London, where the last will and testament of Peter Thellusson, an ancestor, was kept. My father had always said Peter's will was the key to the Jarndyce link. Reading the will and then delving into related documents in the archives and at the British Library, I found that Peter, an 18th-century banker, turned out to be a Georgian Gordon Gekko. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper described him as "a creature with a lust for gold burning in his heart and dead to all beside." He made a fortune in banking, insurance, sugar, war loans and, shamefully, the slave trade. He also financed French aristocrats fleeing revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre.

In 1797, when he died in his 60s, Peter left over 600,000 pounds, when the average annual London salary was 80 pounds. The Bank of England's inflation calculator suggests 1 pound then is worth 107 pounds now, so his estate would be worth more than 60 million pounds ($80 million) today. Instead of leaving it to his family, Peter locked away the fortune in a trust where they could not gain access, and he instructed the trustees to let its income accumulate — compounding to an astronomical sum — for the sole benefit of his eldest male great-grandchildren. He bypassed his living family for the unborn.

When the lawyers finished reading Peter’s will, legend says, his enraged eldest son took out a pistol and shot his father’s portrait. Peter’s widow, three daughters and three sons immediately went to court to overturn the will. Even though they hired a squad of London’s top lawyers, the will was declared valid in 1799, and an appeal in the House of Lords in 1805 failed. Not that the lord chancellor approved of the generations-skipping bequest: He called it "unkind and illiberal," and in 1800, a law known as the Thellusson Act was passed to prevent anyone doing anything similar again.

But, like the Jarndyce family in "Bleak House," the Thellussons never gave up hope. They petitioned the Court of Chancery and Parliament so often that over the course of six decades they generated more than 950 orders and 780 Chancery reports. In 2002, legal scholar Patrick Polden wrote in "Peter Thellusson’s Will of 1797 and Its Consequences on Chancery Law" that the Thellusson will was "part of Chancery lore and few leading lawyers did not at some stage of their careers make an appearance in it." He also noted that the series of Thellusson cases were judged in the House of Lords four times, and between 1798 and 1863, writing, "Besides Lord Chancellors, every Master of the Rolls from Arden to Romilly ... and most of the vice chancellors were engaged with it."

Polden’s remarks reminded me of "Bleak House," where Dickens wrote of the Jarndyce case: "Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was ‘in it,’ for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar." Perhaps my father was right?

Dickens was keen to be authentic. In the novel's preface, he wrote, "If I wanted other authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages." He noted, "There is a well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs."

Well, the Thellusson cases started in 1798, were unfinished when "Bleak House" was serialized in 1852, and had incurred 176,000 pounds in costs, or "more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds." Perhaps Dickens knew the Thellusson suits?

In 1833, Lord Lyndhurst backed the Thellusson Estate Act, giving the family access to income from the trust for the first time. Legal spats continued, though. When the trust was finally dissolved in 1859, the estate was said to be worth about 500,000 pounds. Though this was not an insignificant sum, it was hardly the staggering fortune Peter had dreamed of letting accumulate.

In Hansard, Parliament’s record, there are striking similarities between the description of the Thellusson cases and the fictional Jarndyce one. For example, one member of Parliament, Daniel Harvey, said the Thellusson cases "came on as regularly, term after term, as if the case were part and parcel of the Court of the Chancery." Dickens described the Jarndyce case as a tedious part of the court’s schedule, one that "drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless."

Harvey said, "The mere mention" of the Thellusson name "was sure to produce the bobbing up of twenty learned wigs" — lawyers — "who were engaged, pro or con in this endless case." In "Bleak House," Dickens wrote that, at the mention of Jarndyce, "Eighteen ... learned friends ... bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte." Harvey said, "The law might be said to cling to [the Thellusson estate], as the hungry sloth clings to a luxuriant tree." Dickens wrote that the Jarndyce case "is now only a question of costs, a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit."

Dickens was a shorthand reporter in the Court of Chancery in 1829 and a parliamentary reporter in 1833. The newspapers he worked for reported on the Thellusson lawsuits and the Thellusson Estate Act. Could Dickens have written those reports? Unfortunately, articles were not bylined back then, his notes are lost, and his diaries don’t mention specific debates. Even so, it seems implausible that he did not know of the cases. After all, Dickens worked as a legal clerk starting in 1827, flirted with becoming a barrister and socialized near the Inns of Court, where the British legal profession lived and worked. Did the celebrated cases never come up in conversation?

The Thellusson cases are mentioned more than 1,500 times in British newspapers between 1829 and 1852, and two of Dickens’s journalist friends, Albany Fonblanque and George Augustus Sala, knew the Thellusson family. (Fonblanque’s Huguenot grandfather owned a bank operated by Peter Thellusson, and Sala mentioned the Thellussons in his writing.) Again, it is difficult to imagine that Dickens never spoke with them about the cases or the family, and never encountered it in the press.

Circumstantial evidence for a Thellusson "Bleak House" connection had steadily grown. But what of my father’s comments about "A Tale of Two Cities"?

In Dickens’s 1859 novel about the French Revolution, employees of Tellson’s Bank play a vital role. Beyond the echoing Tellson and Thellusson names, are there other signs of possible inspiration? Yes — many, as I discovered. Dickens wrote that Tellson’s Bank was "a French house, as well as an English one." In real life, the Thellussons ran eponymous banks in Paris and London. They were well-known Huguenot bankers who are mentioned in Thomas Carlyle's "The French Revolution: A History," which Dickens used as a source and jokingly claimed he had read 500 times. Did he miss the Thellusson name every time?

In "A Tale of Two Cities," Dickens wrote that Tellson’s Bank "extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate." In real life, Peter Thellusson gave Madame du Barry, a mistress of Louis XV, generous credit, which she used to finance French royalist plots. He also financed the escape of a marquis. Peter’s London house became what was described at the time as "a rallying point" for émigrés, and his eldest son, Peter Isaac, sat on a committee to raise funds for French refugees.

The Thellussons were also known to be major lenders to French aristocrats and secured loans to them against deposits kept in their London bank’s vault. Dickens wrote of Tellson's "strong-rooms" and their “secrets,” and that "Tellson’s was ... as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange."

Just as these loans gave the Thellussons leverage, Dickens recognized that "the affairs" of many "French gentlemen and French families" were "entirely in Tellson’s hands." In my detective work, I found this from the legal scholar G.W. Keeton, writing in 1970 for the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly: "Dickens so exactly describes the business of Thelluson’s [sic] during the Revolution that, coupled with the obvious similarity of name, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the author was thinking of Thellusson's when writing A Tale of Two Cities."

The Thellusson bank, I am confident, was almost certainly Dickens’s inspiration for the firm in "A Tale of Two Cities," and I suspect that Peter Thellusson's unusual bequest, famously so troublesome at the time, figured prominently into Dickens’s imagining of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. But other drawn-out family inheritance battles have been proposed as his model in "Bleak House." William Jennens, nicknamed the "Miser of Acton," died in 1798 and left a large fortune intestate. His heirs' infighting began in "the last century" and ended in 1915, so it also fits the criteria mentioned by Dickens in the "Bleak House" preface. The Jennens saga was also widely reported in the press. Another case involved the estate of Charles Day, which Dickens mentions in correspondence. It, too, might be one of the "authorities" Dickens said he could "rain" on us to validate his depiction of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.