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M. Slater
DICKENS AND THE LAW
Law and lawyers form a very prominent feature in Dickens's work. Two of his novels,
Pickwick Papers and Bleak House, revolve around law cases and have many characters
who are legal functionaries of one kind or another, or who depend on the law for their
living. But throughout nearly all the novels we find such characters, from Sampson Brass
and his formidable sister Sally ("a kind of Amazon at Common Law") in The Old Curiosity
Shop, through such different figures as Uriah Heep, Sydney Carton and Jaggers, to the
"angular* Mr Grewgious in Edwin Drood. Indeed, if a census were to be taken of Dickens's
characters by trades, it might well turn out that his legal characters were outnumbered
only by servants of one sort or another. And it is certainly the case that he has more
legal characters in his books than do any of his contemporary fellow-novelists, with the
possible exception of Trollope.
Not all of Dickens's readers have appreciated this aspect of his work. "His notions
of the law are precisely those of an attorney's clerk", commented one irate professional.
But the great historian of English Law, Sir William Holdsworth, celebrated Dickens as a
wonderful repository of exact and detailed information about the legal system in his day,
in a series of lectures at the University of Yale in 1929 (published under the title Charles
Dickens as a Legal Historian in 1930).
There are fairly obvious biographical reasons for the law featuring so prominently
in Dickens's novels. His father's falling foul of the laws regarding debtors led directly to
his "hard experiences in boyhood" as Forster calls them, and later he was launched into
the world as an office boy at a firm of solicitors. Later still, he invoked the law against
the shameless piracy of his Christmas Carol by unscrupulous publishers (1844), but ended
up out of pocket, even though he got the verdict he wanted. The offending publishers
simply went bankrupt and Dickens was left having to pay heavy legal costs. He had good
reason to remember Mr Bumble's angry words, "The law is an ass" and later remarked
that the law in England was more remarkable for its property of shaving close than of
shaving the right person. Among his close friends he had one notable lawyer, Sergeant
Thomas Talfourd, M.P., to whom he dedicated Pickwick Papers as a mark of gratitude for
Talfourd's efforts in Parliament to secure some kind of copyright law. (Talfourd is also
traditionally identified as the original of Tommy Traddles in Copperfield, one of the few
morally admirable members of the legal profession - the only one perhaps? - in Dickens's
earlier novels.)
After Bleak House, which can be seen as the culmination of all Dickens's attacks
on the state of the English legal system, his presentation of lawyers seems to have become
decidedly more sympathetic (with the minor exception of the suavely urbane "Bar" in Little
Dorrit). I want to return to this point later and to suggest some possible reasons for this
development which, I should say, had never really struck me, until my attention was drawn
