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As demonstrated in Part I, the question of Chancery reform before 1827 was much debated in party terms and focused largely on Lord Eldon's shortcomings as a decision-maker. After Eldon's departure, it largely ceased to be a party-political issue, although by 1830 law reform in general was firmly on the political agenda. With Eldon gone, there was much common ground on the outlines of Chancery reform. This can be seen from the plan proposed in the Commons by the conservative Sir Edward Sugden in December 1830. Sugden suggested creating a court of appeal for equity, on which the Lord Chancellor, Master of the Rolls, Chief Baron, and Vice Chancellor would sit. He proposed reforms in the masters' offices, under which they would be paid salaries rather than fees, and he wanted masters to sit in open court, with limited judicial functions. He also advocated retrenchment of sinecures and the removal of payment by fees. These ideas were all echoed in the new reformist Chancellor Brougham's proposals for the court, which he elaborated in the spring of 1831.

In 1850, William Carpenter, a reform-minded journalist, called the court of Chancery ?an instrument of oppression? and noted that ?[t]he madhouses, the workhouses, and the gaols, in all parts of the kingdom, have within their walls the melancholy and heart-broken victims of the evil it does.? The image of the nineteenth-century Chancery as a ruinously expensive and slow court is familiar and was given its most famous expression in Charles Dickens's Bleak House. Yet the court was also a prime focus of attention for law reformers throughout the nineteenth century, until its incorporation into the Supreme Court of Judicature in the reforms of 1873?75. The process of reform was slow and complex, driven at different times by different parties, who had often divergent notions of the problems to be addressed.

Lindsay Farmer's argument that, in seeking to replace the common law with legislation, and in striving for a novel systematization of the relationship between civil and penal law, the criminal law commissioners of 1833-45 transformed the understanding of criminal law in relation to government is a powerful one. It is to some degree an inferential argument, positing that a reading of Bentham's theory of legislation allows us to understand the commissioners' work better, since Bentham ?makes explicit many of the broader political assumptions that guided the commissioners and allows us to understand the precise nature of their codification project.? It is worth asking therefore how far the commissioners were informed by Benthamic ideas and what they understood their task to be.

As both James Oldham and Joshua Getzler show in their perceptive and helpful comments, much work remains to be done on the history of both the nineteenth-century Chancery and the wider law reform movement. My discussion of the inconclusive nature of the political debate about Eldon's arrears leads Oldham to ask whether the Chancellor was really overburdened and whether the appointment of the Vice Chancellor was as counterproductive as many contemporaries claimed. On the first of these issues, the data show that while Eldon was in general able to deal with the caseload before him, it was in the 1810s?when ?by a series of most important decisions, [he] systematized the law of bankruptcy??that a dramatic arrear in appeals developed (see Figure 5), which contributed to the political pressure on him in the following decade. Oldham shows from a survey of his notebooks that Eldon heard roughly fifty cases a year from 1801?13; while according to official returns, in the 1820s, he heard more than forty appeals each year. But between 1813 and 1819, the number fell to about twelve cases a year. On the second issue, the data show that the creation of a Vice Chancellor did have an impact, but a relatively modest one. Lacking the distractions of the Great Seal, he could hear more original business; and cases set down and heard in Chancery increased by about 40 percent in the decade and a half after his appointment. While the number of appeals also increased, both numerically and proportionally, they remained at manageable levels.