The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick | Page 3

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 Dickens 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 gratitude that I am under to my very good friend Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens, 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. Dickens 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 butter 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. Dickens 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 principal 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 glass 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. Dickens 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