Uh dear. When we asked for readers’ favourite legal characters and quotes from Dickens we really weren’t trying to add to the heap of obloquy piled upon the profession. But is hard to escape the theme.
Peter McLoughlin of McLoughlin & Company Solicitors finds ‘a tad harsh’ Dickens’ description of barristers dining together: a ‘bad dinner in a party of four, whereof each individual mistrusts the other three’.
From the Pickwick Papers, James Woodhouse of Charles Lucas and Marshall, Newbury, quotes Mr Pickwick’s characterisation of lawyers as a body - ‘suspicious, distrustful and over-cautious’. Woodhouse also points to The Old Curiosity Shop’s Mr Brass, and the ‘notable absence of modesty’ with which he describes a familiar principle: ‘… as an honourable member of the legal profession - the first profession in this country, sir, or in any other country, or in any of the planets that shine above us at night and are supposed to be inhabited - it’s my duty, sir, as an honourable member of that profession, not to put to you a leading question.’
Dorset solicitor John Pownall finds a contemporary theme: ‘Sampson and Sally Brass, the brother and sister law firm from The Old Curiosity Shop take some matching for the focus which Dickens puts on the job of a solicitor (as opposed to an advocate) in the days of the fused profession. From an equality perspective, Sally’s inability to get on the roll was the source of much unhappiness for her father, so we are told, and so she is left to be her brother’s clerk, whilst effectively running the shop herself.’
Adrian Brodkin of Adrian & Co, London also nominates from Curiosity: ‘If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.’
And, from the same book, James Brazier of Bristol finds some homespun wisdom: ‘… as doctors seldom take their own prescriptions and divines do not always practise what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the law on their own account, knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person’.
From Obiter’s favourite Bleak House, there is the memorable scene introducing Mr Tulkinghorn. ‘The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Garden, into Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and in these shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in nuts.’ Thanks to John Martyn of QualitySolicitors Knight Polson.
Tulkinghorn, of course, gets a pistol bullet through his heart. Happily not all of Dickens’ solicitors meet sticky ends. Peter Wignall, solicitor, of Shepway district council says: ‘I have always liked the descriptions of Fips in Martin Chuzzlewit, especially towards the end of the book where the dry as dust lawyer shows an unexpected side: "And there was Fips, old Fips of Austin Friars, present at the dinner, and turning out to be the jolliest old dog that ever did violence to his convivial sentiments by shutting himself up in a dark office."
Many of us play the dry as dust lawyer sometimes against our natures,’ Wignall observes. Obiter is relieved to hear it. A token remuneration will presently be perambulating its way - in short, you have won the prize.
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