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children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon
as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his
net - to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled
somehow'.
'I follow you, sir'.
'Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out
of the heap, who could be saved; whom the father believed dead,and
dared make no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal
adviser had this power; "I know what you did, and how you did it.
You came so and so, this was your manner of attack and this the
manner of resistance, you went so and so, you did such and such
things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and I
tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be necessary to
produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced. Give the child
into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If you are
saved*. Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was
cleared'.
'I understand you perfectly'.
'But that I make no admissions?'
'That you make no admissions'. And Wemmick repeated, 'No
admissions'.
One ends up feeling almost as much sympathy for the lawyer as for poor Pip himself.
We can only speculate on why Dickens's presentation of lawyers should have become so
much so much more sympathetic after Bleak House. It may have had something to do with
the increased public respect accorded to lawyers in the second half of the 19th century,
something which lasted well into our own century though it has pretty much vanished
now in England, I think. It may have had something to do with his son Henry's taking
up a legal career. We do not know. What is certain, however, is that the Dickens lawyers
who are remembered today are either such comic villains as Dodson and Fogg or Uriah
Heep or else the more alarming lawyers in Bleak House, rather than the more sympathetic
figures of the later fiction, with the exception of Jaggers perhaps (few people think of
Sydney Carton as a lawyer).
Given this, it is certainly a pleasing irony that the only one of Dickens's eight
sons to become successful in the world should have been a lawyer, Henry Fielding Dickens
who became Sir Henry and a judge. I should like to end with an anecdote about Sir Henry
which would surely have appealed to his "inimitable" father. Once, after passing sentence
on a criminal, Sir Henry asked the man the customary question, whether he had anything
to say? The man promptly responded, "Yes, you ain't half the man your father was!"
