The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick | Page 2

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. Dickens'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 (God 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 institution 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 Dickens a bright, clever-looking youth in the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, attorney-at-law in Gray's Inn, earning at first 13s. 6d. a week, afterwards advanced to 15s. 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