The meaning of Chancery in Bleak House

Everyone knows that Bleak House is "about" the horrors of the bureaucratic mess of the chancery court in England that kept cases tied up in procedures for years and sometimes at the time of settlement there was no money for anyone but the lawyers, whose fees came off the top. Why should we care about the ineptitude and corruption of 19th-century England? And it's not as if our government is anything like that today, no matter how long you have to stand on line to register your car at the DMV. Yet we do get caught up in the plight and recognize the feeling that drives or crushes the characters, frustrated by the legal stalemate of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The only answer is that the court of Chancery and the legendary J and J case are metaphors for the way in which we imagine or picture ourselves in relation to the world at large, the cosmos. There are some who, like Miss Flite or Richard Carstone, pass through their entire life waiting for some great benevolence to happen - and it never will. You will not win the lottery. Your troubles will not magically disappear. There will be no final judgment, not on this earth anyway. Others can maintain a cool indifference to the workings of fate, to the ways of the world that are beyond our control; these characters are content and elevated and, at least within the world of fiction, or Dickens's fiction anyway, they become incorporated into society and find happiness and a proper mission in life - not a perverse mission like Mrs. Jellyby's African charity but they help others through charity and kindness. Today we know there are many vast systems far beyond the comprehension and scope of any individual - thinking of the vast web of social media and digital information - and I think part of the meaning of Bleak House is that we should not look to abstract and remote systems of knowledge and information to find meaning in our life, or salvation if you will, but we should look to one another - only connect.