Legal Brief for August, 2013

Charles Dickens and Lawyers

Before he developed a career as one of the English speaking world's finest novelists Charles Dickens' first line of work as an adult was in a law firm.  Dickens served as a junior clerk in a law firm in London for about 18 months in the 1820's.  He left that position to become a freelance court reporter, working at that trade for about four years.  From that perspective he was able to see up close a great variety of trials and court proceeding.  It is not surprising therefore that Dickens frequently involves lawyers or legal issues in his novels.  In fact, lawyers appear in a11 of his 15 novels.  As readers of Dickens will know however, he did not hold the law and lawyers in high regard.

In one of his most celebrated books, Bleak House, one of the central plot lines is the long running estate case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce.  The force of Dickens' illustration of the foibles of the legal system in Bleak House prompted the English government to undertake a significant and long overdue reform of the English legal system.

Here a few memorable quotes from some of Dickens' works regarding lawyers and the law:

• "It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world.  There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers."
  (The Old Curiosity Shop)

• "We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner."
  (Little Dorrit)

• "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."
  (The Old Curiosity Shop)

• "Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises."
  (Bleak House)

• "If the law supposes that", said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, "the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience - by experience."
  (Oliver Twist)

• "These sequestered nooks are the public offices of the legal profession, where writs are issued, judgments signed, declarations filed, and numerous other ingenious machines put in motion for the torture and torment of His Majesty's liege subjects, and the comfort and emolument of the practitioners of the law."
  (The Pickwick Papers)

The literary world celebrated the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth in 2012.  If Dickens were alive today hopefully he might have a somewhat more favourable view of the legal profession and the court system!