- 13 -
which proved fatal to the inquiry for ten years --'Mr Vholes is
considered, in the profession, a most respectable man'.
So in familiar converstation, private authorities no less
disinterested will remark that they don't know what this age is coming
to; that we are plunging down precipices; that now here is something
else gone; that these changes are death to people like Vholes: a man
of undoubted respectability, with a father in the Vale of Taunton, and
three daughters at home. Take a few steps more in this direction,
say they, and what is to become of Vholes's father? Is he to perish?
And of Vholes's daughters? Are they to be shirtmakers, or governesses?
As though, Mr Vholes and his relations being minor cannibal chiefs,
and it being proposed to abolish cannibalism, indignant champions
were to put the case thus: Make man-eating unlawful, and you starve
the Vholeses!
The end of the Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit with the whole estate having been
swallowed up in costs and lawyers' fees so that the suit "lapses and melts away" is the
final proof offered by the book that in England the whole business of the law is simply
to make business for itself, a bleak conclusion indeed!
In the novels that follow Bleak House, however, Dickens's presentation of lawyers
seems to change. The law itself may still be seen by him as something more obstructive and
alarming than helpful or beneficient in its operations but the men who work the system
are no longer either comic villains or sinister creatures like Vholes. Sydney Carton is a
tragic hero, indeed, and Mr Lorry an entirely benign figure in the plot of A Tale of Two
Cities as is Mr Grewgious later in Edwin Drood (indeed, it looks as though Grewgious
will turn out to be the chief champion of the good against Jasper). Mortimer Lightwood
and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend are very sympathetically presented despite
their profession and, indeed, the only satirical portrait of a lawyer I can think of in these
later novels is the suavely urban "Bar in Little Dorrit and he is rather a minor exception.
Even Jaggers who at first appears to be a somewhat sinister and threatening figure
turns out to be a man with a heart and a conscience which no amount of washing his hands
with scented soap will rid him of. We see him, finally, as a good man who has had his
"poor dreams' as much as Pip and who at least once in his life attempted to beat the
dreadful system he had to serve. The scene in which he brings himself to confess this to
Pip in front of Wemmick is masterly. Jaggers can only make such a communication in a
legal form, using a kind of forensic rhetoric that is part of his stock in trade as a lawyer.
Even in such a moment of truth he cannot wholly shake off his professional self (we might
recall the Shakespeare quotation Dickens makes use of, propos lawyers, in his preface
to Bleak House: "My nature is subdued to what it works in. Pity me, then, and wish I
were renewed"). Here is Jaggers "confessing" in the third person to Pip:
'Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that
all he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers
for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children
solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen;
put the case that he habitually knew their being imprisoned, whipped,
transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman,
and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the
