Gridley’s monologue

The setting: a room in a building in Bell Yard, a London alley. The room is home to three newly orphaned children. Mr Gridley, another resident of the building, is present. He has found his life consumed by a lawsuit in the High Court of Chancery, where he is known as “the man from Shropshire.” His suit has dragged on for years, with costs amounting to at least three times the sum in question. The suit, Gridley says, “has fallen into rack, and ruin, and despair, with everything else.”

Kind, generous John Jarndyce, who has assiduously avoided all contact with the Chancery suit that bears his family’s name, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, commiserates with Gridley, seeing him as yet another person “unjustly treated by this monstrous system.” Esther Summerson, an orphan who has become a housekeeper of sorts for Jarndyce and his two wards, narrates:

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853).

As the father to two ex-speech-team kids, I can’t help hearing Gridley’s monologue as perfect for Prose Reading. The change in tone as this passage closes would make for a knockout ending. Free to any taker.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”