The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick A Lecture

Excerpt

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 constituency 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 constituents.  I know it does sometimes occur that constituents 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 Dickens, and there I found that at any rate in Dickens 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 Dickens.  I soon found that was too great a subject to be dealt with within the short space which could be accorded to any reasonable lecturer by any reasonable audience.  I found that the novels of Dickens 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 title “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....