I knew very little of this. I know about the Inns of Court, but I didn't know this was such an Inn; I know what a chancery court is (Delaware has them!) but similarly not that it applied in this case. I've no idea what Michaelmas is, but like Christmas, I assume it's an event and/or season which occurs periodically.
I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.
I just wanted to get across that there's more detail to be wrung out of even the first line. You don't need to get all nuances on first read, but they're there. Dickens was known for his observational detail, and also he'd spent a lot of time in London courts on account of his father so knew all these terms well.
Everyone has their own comfort level with reading, and we do just skim things we think unimportant... I often do that until suddenly the book stops making sense, and I have to go back some pages and re-read things which I'd skipped that were clearly important. Different authors have different densities of load-bearing words.
I think it's forgivable if you gloss over this first line and think it might be set in a hotel during a holiday, with some random high-ranking person, because the next 800 pages will make it pretty clear it's about a court. But I am worried that these students, hoping to get an degree in English, would rather guess what's being said, when they had the opportunity to look things up. An afternoon on Wikipedia would do them a world of good.
I could still read the text! And it's useful to read texts and understand 95%, or 80%, or even 50%! IMO "fully understand what you're reading" versus "can't understand what you're reading" is a harmfully discouraging dichotomy. You can often gloss over such things rather than struggle with them.