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as a gullible, soft-headed magistrate at the end of Copperfield). It seemed generally only
too clear that the Artful Dodger's verdict on the magistrate's court was the true one:
"This ain't the shop for justice!"
Dickens continues after Pickwick to give us rascally lawyers like Sampson Brass
as well as professionals like Perker who are not rascals but respectable men, yet who love
and admire legal complexities for their own sake irrespective of any considerations about
human happiness. Mr Snitchey of Snitchey and Craggs in the Fourth Christmas Book, The
Battle of Life (1846) is an example. Here he muses on the pleasant countryside which is
the setting for the story:
"Here's smiling country once overrun by soldiers - trespassers
every man of 'em - and laid waste by fire and sword. But take this
smiling country as it stands. Think of the laws appertaining to real
property; to the bequest and devise of real property; to the mortgage
and redemption of real property; to leasehold, freehold, and copyhold
estate; think," said Mr Snitchey, with such great emotion that he
actually smacked his lips, "of the complicated laws relating to title
and proof of title, with all the contradictory precedents and numerous
acts of parliament connected with them; think of the infinite number
of ingenious and interminable chancery suits, to which this pleasant
prospect may give rise".
Snitchey was "evidently a real property lawyer", observes Holdsworth, "for he looks
at a landscape with the eye of a conveyancer".
There are no more major legal elements in Dickens's fiction, however, until we get to
David Copperfield where we find his most memorable rascally-lawyer creation, Uriah Heep
(balanced, however, by the honest and good lawyer, Tommy Traddles) and a marvellous
exposé of one of the most notoriously obsolete of English law courts, Doctors' Commons.
The exposé is put into Steerforth's mouth in answer to David's query as to what
a "proctor is:
"Why, he is a sort of monkish attorney", replied Steerforth.
"He is, to some faded courts held in Doctors' Commons - a lazy old
nook near St. Paul's Churchyard - what solicitors are to the courts
of law and equity. He is a functionary whose existence, in the natural
course of things, would have terminated about two hundred years
ago. I can tell you best what he is, by telling you what Doctors'
Commons is. It's a little out-of-the-way place, where they administer
what is called ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with
obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of
the world know nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have
been dug up, in a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. It's a
place that has an ancient monopoly in suits about people's wills and
people's marrages, and disputes among ships and boats".
"Nonsense, Steerforth!" I exclaimed. "You don't mean to say
that there is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical
matters?"
"I don't, indeed, my dear boy", he returned; "but I mean to
say that they are managed and decided by the same set of people,
down in that same Doctors' Commons. You shall go there one day,
and find them blundering through half the nautical terms in Young's
Dictionary, apropos of the 'Nancy' having run down the 'Sarah Jane',
