The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick Part 1

The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick.

by Frank Lockwood.

PREFATORY.

At the request of my friend Lord Russell of Killowen, then Attorney-General, I delivered this lecture at the Morley Hall, Hackney, on December 13th, 1893. I had previously delivered it in the city of York at the request of some of my const.i.tuents. I feel that some apology is required for its reproduction in a more permanent form, which apology I most respectfully tender to all who may read this little book.

F. L.

THE LAW AND LAWYERS OF "PICKWICK."

Sir CHARLES RUSSELL: I stand but for a single instant between you and our friend, Mr. Lockwood. He needs no introduction here; but I am sure I may in your name bid him a hearty welcome.

Mr. FRANK LOCKWOOD: Mr. Attorney-General, Ladies and Gentlemen--It is some little time ago that I was first asked whether I was prepared to deliver a lecture. Now I am bound at the outset to confess to you that lecturing has been and is very little in my way. I spent some three years of my life at the University in avoiding lectures. But it came about that in the const.i.tuency which I have the honour to represent, it was suggested to me that it was necessary for me to give a lecture, and it was further explained to me that it did not really very much matter as to what I lectured about. I am bound to say there was a very great charm to me in the idea of lecturing my const.i.tuents. I know it does sometimes occur that const.i.tuents lecture their representatives, especially in Scotland, and I was anxious, if I might, to have an opportunity of lecturing those who had so many opportunities of reading, no doubt very useful lectures to me. But the difficulty was to find a subject. My own profession suggested itself to me as a fit topic for a lecture, but unfortunately my profession is not a popular one. I do not know how it is, but you never find a lawyer introduced either into a play or into a three-volume novel except for the purpose of exposing him as a scoundrel in the one, and having him kicked in the third act in the other. I do not know how it is, but so it is. All the heroes of fiction either in the drama or in the novel are found in the ranks--no, not in the ranks of the army, but in the officers of the army, or in the clergy. It is so in novels, it is so in dramas; Mr. Attorney-General, I believe it is so in real life.

And so, looking about for a subject, being reminded, as I was, that the subject of the law was unpopular, I turned--as I have often done in the hour of trouble--I turned to my d.i.c.kens, and there I found that at any rate in d.i.c.kens we have a great literary man who has been impartial in his treatment of lawyers. He has seen both the good and the bad in them, and it occurred to me that my lecture might take the form of dealing with the lawyers of d.i.c.kens. I soon found that was too great a subject to be dealt with within the short s.p.a.ce which could be accorded to any reasonable lecturer by any reasonable audience. I found that the novels of d.i.c.kens abounded with lawyers, to use a perhaps apt expression. Having regard to my profession, they fairly bristled with them, and so I determined to take the lawyers of one of his books; and I chose as that book "Pickwick"; and I chose as my t.i.tle "The Law and the Lawyers of 'Pickwick.'"

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an extraordinary thing when we look at this book, when we reflect that it contains within its pages no less than three hundred and sixty characters, all drawn vividly and sharply, all expressing different phases of human thought, and of human life, and every one of them original; when we reflect that that book was written by a young man of twenty-three years of age. In that book I found that he portrayed with life-like fidelity constables, sheriffs' officers, beadles, ushers, clerks, solicitors, barristers, and last, but by no means least, a judge. Every incident of the early life of this great author bore fruit in his writings. No portion of his struggles and experiences seemed to have made a deeper impress on him than did those early days, as he said himself in the character of David Copperfield:--

If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics.

His first introduction to the terrors of the law was an unspeakably sad one--sad, indeed, to his affectionate and imaginative nature. "I know,"

he writes, "that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was arrested." He never forgot--how could he, knowing what we know the lad to have been?--often carrying messages to the dismal Marshalsea. "I really believed," he wrote, "that they had broken my heart." His first visit to his father he thus describes:--

My father was waiting for me in the lodge, and we went up to his room (on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that a shilling spent the other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before now, with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him, who came in by-and-by; and as the dinner was a joint stock repast I was sent up to "Captain Porter" in the room overhead, with Mr. d.i.c.kens's compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a knife and fork?

Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return. There was a very dirty lady in his room, and two wan girls, his daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The Captain himself was in the last extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had on a shelf; and I knew (G.o.d knows how!) that the two girls with the shock heads were Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I daresay; but I came down to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the knife and fork were in my hand.

When the stern necessities of the situation required the detention of Mr.

Pickwick in the old Fleet Prison, we have produced a lifelike representation of the debtors' gaol; and I believe that the reforms which have made such an inst.i.tution a thing of the past are in a great part owing to the vivid recollection which enabled him to point to the horrors and injustice which were practised in the sacred name of law.

At the age of fifteen we find d.i.c.kens a bright, clever-looking youth in the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, attorney-at-law in Gray's Inn, earning at first 13_s_. 6_d_. a week, afterwards advanced to 15_s_.

Eighteen months' experience of this sort enabled him in the pages of Pickwick thus to describe lawyers' clerks:--

There are several grades of lawyers' clerks. There is the articled clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who goes out of town every Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks.

There is the salaried clerk--out of door, or in door, as the case may be--who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his personal pleasure and adornment, repairs half-price to the Adelphi Theatre at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion which expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk, with a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are the office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day-schools; club as they go home at night for saveloys and porter: and think there's nothing like "life."

I fancy d.i.c.kens never rose above the status of office boy, and probably as such wore his first surtout. We hear of him reporting later in the Lord Chancellor's Court, probably for some daily paper; but beyond the exception which I shall mention presently, we have no record of his taking an active and direct part in any of those mysterious rites that go to make up our legal procedure.

Upon this question of the opportunities he had for knowing in what way a lawyer is trained, I must here acknowledge the debt of grat.i.tude that I am under to my very good friend Mr. Henry Fielding d.i.c.kens, one of her Majesty's Counsel; and how rejoiced, Mr. Attorney-General, would that father have been had he been able to see the position which his son has won for himself. He wrote to me a long and kind letter, in which he gave me further information as to his father's opportunity for observing lawyers and their mode of living, and he told me that which I did not know before, and which I think but few people knew before, namely, that his father had kept a term or two at one of the Inns of Court. He had eaten the five or six dinners which is part of the necessary legal education for a barrister; and he had suffered in consequence the usual pangs of indigestion. But it is not to that that I wish to allude to- night. d.i.c.kens did that which I venture to think but few have done; for, giving up all idea of pursuing a legal education, and finding that the dinners did not agree with him, he got back from the Inns of Court some of the money which he had deposited at that Inn. You are all familiar with the process which is known as getting b.u.t.ter out of a dog's mouth; I venture to think that that is an easy thing compared with getting money back from an Inn of Court.

But that is not all that Mr. d.i.c.kens told me. He wrote down for me an experience his father once had with the family solicitor, which, I think, is worth your hearing. "My father's solicitor, Mr. Ouvry," he says, "was a very well-known man, a thorough man of the world, and one in whose breast reposed many of the secrets of the princ.i.p.al families of England.

On one occasion my father was in treaty for a piece of land at the back of Gad's Hill, and it was proposed that there should be an interview with the owner, a farmer, a very acute man of business, and a very hard nut to crack. It was arranged that the interview with him should be at Gad's Hill, and the solicitor came down for the purpose. My father and Ouvry were sitting over their wine when the old man was announced. 'We had better go in to him,' said my father. 'No, no,' said the astute lawyer.

'John,' said he, turning to the butler, 'show him into the study, and take him a bottle of the old port.' Then turning to my father, 'A gla.s.s of port will do him good; it will soften him.' After waiting about twenty minutes they went into the study; the farmer was sitting bolt upright in an arm-chair, stern and uncompromising; the bottle of port had not been touched. Negotiations then proceeded very much in favour of the farmer, and a bargain was struck. The old man then proceeded to turn his attention to the port, and in a very few minutes he had finished the bottle."

Mr. d.i.c.kens also told me of his father's knowledge of the legal profession, and of the distinguished members of it. Though not himself, he writes, of the legal profession, my father was very fond of lawyers.

He numbered among his intimate friends Lord Denman, Lord Campbell, Mr.

Justice Talfourd, Chief Justice Crockford; in fact, it is difficult to name any eminent lawyer who could not claim acquaintance, at any rate, with our great author. And he tells me, too, an anecdote relating to a distinguished lawyer of the present day--Sir Henry Hawkins. We nearly lost that great man, I think about the year 1851, on the occasion of some theatricals at Knebworth. The play was _Every Man in his Humour_, and Frank Stone, the artist, father of Mr. Marcus Stone, R.A., was allowed to play a part with a sword. (Those of you who have had any experience of theatrical matters know how dangerous it is to trust a sword to an amateur.) He came up flourishing the sword, and if Mr. Hawkins had not ducked we should have lost that eminent man; but he did it just in time.

Before I introduce you to the types of the judge, the counsel, the solicitors, let me say something to you of the district in which lawyers live, or rather in d.i.c.kens's time lived, and still do congregate. From Gray's Inn in the north to the Temple in the south, from New Inn and Clement's Inn in the west to Barnard's Inn in the east. I once lived myself in Clement's Inn, and heard the chimes go, too; and I remember one day I sat in my little room very near the sky (I do not know why it is that poverty always gets as near the sky as possible; but I should think it is because the general idea is that there is more sympathy in heaven than elsewhere), and as I sat there a knock came at the door, and the head of the porter of Clement's Inn presented itself to me. It was the first of January, and he gravely gave me an orange and a lemon. He had a basketful on his arm. I asked for some explanation. The only information forthcoming was that from time immemorial every tenant on New Year's Day was presented with an orange and a lemon, and that I was expected, and that every tenant was expected, to give half-a-crown to the porter. Further inquiries from the steward gave me this explanation, that in old days when the river was not used merely as a sewer, the fruit was brought up in barges and boats to the steps from below the bridge and carried by porters through the Inn to Clare Market. Toll was at first charged, and this toll was divided among the tenants whose convenience was interfered with; hence the old lines beginning "Oranges and lemons said the bells of St. Clement's." I have often wondered whether the rest of the old catch had reason as well as rhyme.

d.i.c.kens loved the old Inns and squares. Traddles lived in Gray's Inn: Traddles who was in love with "the dearest girl in the world"; Tom Pinch and his sister used to meet near the fountain in the Middle Temple; Sir John Chester had rooms in Paper Buildings; Pip lived in Garden Court at the time of the collapse of Great Expectations; Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn had their queer domestic partnership in the Temple. The scene of the murderous plot in "Hunted Down" is also laid in the Temple, "at the top of a lonely corner house overlooking the river," probably the end house of King's Bench Walk. Mr. Grewgious, Herbert Pocket, and Joe Gargery are a.s.sociated with Staple Inn and Barnard's Inn.

Lincoln's Inn has not been forgotten; for though Mr. Tulkinghorn lived in the Fields, yet Serjeant Snubbin was to be found in Lincoln's Inn Old Square.

I never could understand why d.i.c.kens located the Serjeant in the realms of Equity; but what should interest us more to-night is the fact that the greater part of "Pickwick" was written in Furnival's Inn, which, as d.i.c.kens describes it, was "a shady, quiet place echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on summer evenings."

But to know the Inns as d.i.c.kens knew them, let us accompany Mr. Pickwick to the Magpie and Stump in search of Mr. Lowten, Mr. Perker's clerk.

"Is Mr. Lowten here, ma'am?" inquired Mr. Pickwick.

"Yes, he is, sir," replied the landlady. "Here, Charley, show the gentleman in to Mr. Lowten."

"The gen'lm'n can't go in just now," said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head, "'cos Mr. Lowten's singin' a comic song, and he'll put him out. He'll be done d'rectly, sir."

Well, you know, respectable solicitors (clerks) don't sing comic songs at public houses nowadays, but that is how Mr. Pickwick found Mr. Lowten.

"Would you like to join us?" said Mr. Lowten, when at length he had finished his comic song and been introduced to Mr. Pickwick. And I am very glad that Mr. Pickwick did join them, as he heard something of the old Inns from old Jack Bamber.

"I have been to-night, gentlemen," said Mr. Pickwick, hoping to start a subject which all the company could take a part in discussing--"I have been to-night in a place which you all know very well, doubtless, but which I have not been in for some years, and know very little of; I mean Gray's Inn, gentlemen. Curious little nooks in a great place, like London, these old Inns are."

"By Jove!" said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr.

Pickwick, "you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would talk upon for ever. You'll draw old Jack Bamber out; he was never heard to talk about anything else but the Inns, and he has lived alone in them till he's half crazy."

"Aha!" said the old man, a brief description of whose manner and appearance concluded the last chapter, "aha! who was talking about the Inns?"

"I was, sir," replied Mr. Pickwick; "I was observing what singular old places they are."

"_You_!" said the old man, contemptuously. "What do _you_ know of the time when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read and read, hour after hour, and night after night, till their reason wandered beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were exhausted: till morning's light brought no freshness or health to them; and they sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies to their dry old books? Coming down to a later time, and a very different day, what do _you_ know of the gradual sinking beneath consumption, or the quick wasting of fever--the grand results of 'life' and dissipation--which men have undergone in these same rooms?

How many vain pleaders for mercy, do you think, have turned away heart- sick from the lawyer's office, to find a resting-place in the Thames, or a refuge in the gaol? They are no ordinary houses, those. There is not a panel in the old wainscoting but what, if it were endowed with the powers of speech and memory, could start from the wall and tell its tale of horror--the romance of life, sir, the romance of life! Commonplace as they may seem now, I tell you they are strange old places, and I would rather hear many a legend with a terrific-sounding name than the true history of one old set of chambers."

There was something so odd in the old man's sudden energy, and the subject which had called it forth, that Mr. Pickwick was prepared with no observation in reply; and the old man checking his impetuosity, and resuming the leer, which had disappeared during his previous excitement, said,--

"Look at them in another light; their most common-place and least romantic. What fine places of slow torture they are! Think of the needy man who has spent his all, beggared himself and pinched his friends to enter the profession, which will never yield him a morsel of bread. The waiting--the hope--the disappointment--the fear--the misery--the poverty--the blight on his hopes and end to his career--the suicide, perhaps, or the shabby, slipshod drunkard. Am I not right about them?" And the old man rubbed his hands, and leered as if in delight at having found another point of view in which to place his favourite subject.

Mr. Pickwick eyed the old man with great curiosity, and the remainder of the company smiled, and looked on in silence.

"Talk of your German universities," said the little old man. "Pooh!

pooh! there's romance enough at home without going half a mile for it; only people never think of it.'"

"I never thought of the romance of this particular subject before, certainly," said Mr. Pickwick, laughing.

"To be sure you didn't," said the little old man, "of course not. As a friend of mine used to say to me, 'What is there in chambers in particular?' 'Queer old places,' said I. 'Not at all,' said he.