That the troubled finances of Charles Dickens’s father were the subject of scrutiny in a London court of law is well known.1 That he appeared before the Court of the King’s Bench at Westminster in 1831 and 1832 on a quite different matter is not.2 The testimonies that John Dickens gave on these occasions were, in themselves, of little significance. Nevertheless, they contributed to a series of events that, together, threatened for a while the reputations of leading legal figures, challenged the competence of a long-established part of the legal system, and prompted discussion of the respective responsibilities of press and Parliament in the matter of parliamentary privilege. The whole affair began, innocuously enough, with the death of an old man in Wales.3 Evan Evans died “at a very advanced age” at Llandaff in Glamorgan on 13 December 1821. His will was contested by his god-daughter’s husband, an excise officer from Frome in Somerset called William Peddle, who employed a well-established Bristol solicitor, Charles Houlden Walker. Peddle’s case was to be heard in Doctors’ Commons, the ancient London college of civil law advocates and proctors, which, through its Prerogative Court of Canterbury, had an exclusive right to exercise jurisdiction over

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证人席上的约翰狄更斯：议会之镜和诽谤案

众所周知，查尔斯·狄更斯的父亲陷入困境的财务状况是伦敦法院审查的对象。1 他于 1831 年和 1832 年在威斯敏斯特国王长椅法庭上出庭，处理完全不同的问题2 并非如此。约翰·狄更斯在这些场合所作的证词，其本身意义不大。尽管如此，他们还是促成了一系列事件，这些事件在一段时间内共同威胁了主要法律人物的声誉，挑战了法律体系中历史悠久的部分的能力，并引发了对新闻界和议会各自职责的讨论。议会特权问题。整个事件开始于威尔士一位老人的去世，这很无伤大雅。 3 埃文·埃文斯于 1821 年 12 月 13 日在格拉摩根的兰达夫去世，“年事已高”。他的遗嘱遭到了他教女的丈夫的反对，他是来自萨默塞特郡弗罗姆的一位名叫威廉·佩德尔的消费税官员，他聘请了一位著名的布里斯托尔律师查尔斯·霍尔登·沃克 (Charles Houlden Walker)。Peddle 的案件将在 Doctors' Commons 审理，这是一个古老的伦敦民法倡导者和监督者学院，通过其坎特伯雷特权法院，该学院拥有对以下案件行使管辖权的专属权利