The Lawyers of Dickens-Land dislike for the law itself — for its de lays, its interminable red tape and its senseless jargon and forms as it was ad ministered in England in his day. He had been an attorney's clerk for eigh teen months and had seen when a young man many instances of individual hard ship which certain particular applica tions of the law had worked. At best he seems to have considered the science of jurisprudence as a vast mesh of art ful contrivance — a labyrinthine spiderweb — and lawyers themselves as a species of arachnidan accomplices, whose function it is to further entangle those who are unfortunate enough to get caught by the great Spider, Authority. When once they are imbrangled, The more they stir, the more they're tangled.
Lawyers themselves will resent the imputation that Dickens' types of their profession stand for the profession itself. Just as Dickens has been criticised, and justly too, for going too far in his ridi cule of the pompousness of the proceed ings of a court trial in "The Tale of Two Cities," and for his attacks upon the English High Court of Chancery, in "Bleak House," so may he be justly censured in somewhat too broadly cari caturing a profession which, of all others, is most admirable in its personnel. In the legal profession, there are lawyers and lawyers; there are bad men as well as good. The cloak of a learned pro fession does not change the character of the individual within, and to para phrase the words of Bobby Burns, "a lawyer's a man for a' that." Mankind has been the same since civilization commenced, and the same types are to be met with today that Dickens satirized — aye, even that Terence exposed and Juvenal vilipended over two thousand years ago. They are present in any other walk of life as well as in the law.
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Although Dickens' lawyer-characters are far from admirable, they do not, there fore, necessarily stand for the profession itself; they are simply types of men who may be encountered in every walk of life since civilization first made crookedness and hypocrisy possible among mankind. With an eye always open to the gro tesque and humorous side of life, Dickens was little impressed with the solemnity of the shammer or the ceremonial of the charlatan. His keen powers of obser vation easily detected the ass beneath the lion's skin. It was rather the abuses of the law — its protracted delays or the injustice and inconsistency of some of its institutions — as for instance, the debtors' prison — and the pretensions of its pettifogging practitioners — that the author attacked and aimed to correct or eliminate. That he was justified in much of his criticism is obvious fromthe fact that the publicity he gave through his novels subsequently brought about the needed remedy in the things he criticised. After all is said, and remembering that Dickens always wrote for a pur pose, is it not possible that his satirical condemnation of the useless intricacies of law and the mysterious chicanery of lawyers, has been effective in weeding out the jargon of forms and the shysters of men who could make the law itself possible of condemnation? And in short ening much of the delay for which the English law stood arraigned in his day since Shakspere's time, must it not be admitted that his attacks on the system at least called attention to the evils to be remedied? It has been the policy both of American and English juris prudence of latter years to get down to simpler forms, to prune away the am bages loquendi in the formal pleadings, to expedite litigation and to raise the general standard of the profession to a loftier and nobler plane. And if by
