For several years, I practiced a form of passive resistance while my dad’s so-called estate was settled. If a riding lawn mower was mentioned, I’d say, “Just give away the lawn mower!” Ditto for the shed. “Give away the shed!”
What a tangled web Dad wove! Like the suit of Jarndyce & Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, there was cunctation and confusion; there were mysterious lost deeds and a shed with a rusting lawn mower. At one point, if I weren’t hallucinating, and I sincerely hope I was, there was talk of turning a “meadow” into an Amish farm. The meadow was hardly bigger than a back yard, but perhaps the Amish could harvest the dandelions.
“Just give away the meadow!”
Despite suspicions that the executors were not entirely honest, that they might have visited Vegas in their leisure hours, I wanted the whole thing settled, period, the end. My favorite mathematical conundrum was: How long does it take to give away a shed? At one point I contemplated giving everything to a party who was suing, but friends pointed out that generosity might spur more lawsuits.
Wills, unsettled estates, and endless lawsuits are a central theme in 19th-century literature. In Dickens’s Bleak House, the eccentric Mr. Jarndyce refuses involvement in a tangled lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has troubled his wretched family for generations. Many of the characters in Bleak House are peripherally involved in the suit. Some have grown old waiting for the settlement. Mr. Jarndyce warns his gullible ward, Richard Carstone, to avoid the perils of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has led many to financial and spiritual ruin. Alas, Richard ignores Mr. Jarndyce’s advice, with grim results.
In the beginning of the novel, Dickens describes the fog overhanging Chancery, the glum courts where judges preside over murky cases.
Dickens explains Jarndyce and Jarndyc eloquently.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.
In 19th-century literature, the wills of wealthy men have a major impact. In Middlemarch, Fred Vincy squanders money on horses and frivolous pursuits, in the confidence that he will inherit the estate of his dying uncle, Mr. Featherstone.
But Mr. Featherstone is shrewd. “So, Sir, you’ve been paying ten percent. for money which you’ve promised to pay off for mortgaging my land when I’m dead and gone, eh? You put my life at a twelvemonth, say. But I can alter my will yet.”
Mr. Featherstone alters his will in favor of a distant relation, but repents on his deathbed. He asks Mary Garth, his attendant, to burn it in order to reinstate the will that leaves everything to Fred. But Mary has a strict moral philosophy, and refuses to touch the will while Mr. Featherstone is ill, possibly not in his right mind. It is the morally correct thing to do, but it does affect Fred, Mary’s boyfriend. Eventually the right thing turns out to be right for Fred and for Mary, too, but the reader must think hard about it. Obviously, principles are laxer in the twenty-first century. What does one make of Mary Garth? Are there Mary Garths in the twenty-first century?
In War and Peace, there is more fiddling with wills. Countess Drubetskaya is ambitious for her son, Boris. She realizes that Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of the dying Count Bezukhov, may inherit his father’s estate. And so she does a very odd thing, on the chance that it may help her son someday. She hustles Pierre out of a party and into a carriage, and accompanies him to his father’s house. While the Count is on his deathbed, she wrestles with the eldest princess for a copy of the will that leaves everything to Pierre. How she manages to win this wrestling match is beyond my powers of explication, but it changes Pierre’s life, not necessarily for the better. People pretend to like him, but cheat him and take advantage of him. But, yes, he can and does help Boris. Eventually he finds his way to contentment, but riches have deprived him of joy.
Nineteenth-century writers often wrote about the perils and the power of money. The title of one of Zola’s novels is Money. We might all be better off if we regularly read the 19th-century literature of inheritance, wills, and money. I’m not saying we would be smarter, but we might think more about moral philosophy.