Tulkinghorn and Professional Responsibility in Bleak House

Aremark of Dr. Johnson's recorded by Boswell in his Life of Samuel Johnson aptly conveys the low esteem with which attorneys were held at the time and which prevailed until Dickens's day¹ "Much enquiry having been made concerning a gentleman," Boswell wrote, "and no information being obtained; at last [Dr.] Johnson observed, that 'he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentlemen was an attorney'" (Life 1: 420). Other critics of the profession were less circumspect and voiced grievances more openly. In 1728, for example, justices from the West Riding of Yorkshire petitioned the House of Commons to complain about how unqualified persons continued to practice as attorneys. The abuse, in fact, was so prevalent that it prompted an investigation by Sir William Strickland, which resulted in the regulatory act of 1729 (2 Geo. II, c. 23). But with enforcement left primarily to the judges, little improvement followed, leading to members of the Society of Gentlemen Practisers to declare in 1739 their "utmost abhorrence of all male [sic] and unfair practice,"² and that they would do their utmost to detect and discountenance the same'" as a self-policing body.³ The Society was a London society; elsewhere, members of the profession relied on various "provincial law societies," but a general agreement evolved so that in addition to self-policing efforts, no one should be allowed to practice without proper admittance to the Roll and that admittance should be predicated on a proper education according to the apprenticeship system: "This was accepted by most men for perhaps the greater part of the eighteenth century (Robson 9–12; 20; 35–51; 52–53).

Yet even with this sort of governance and structure, the profession was fraught with danger. The legislation was punitive rather than directive–the 1729 Act "like its predecessors, and most social legislation of the period, laid down the penalties of misbehavior, rather than tried to prevent it" (Robson 12)–and the apprencticeship system was itself flawed:

Some of these stipulations, notably that concerning the examination by the judges, were difficult to impose, and were probably carried out in a perfunctory manner. And without this examination, the obvious fault inherent in the apprenticeship system–that it was too personal in character, varying from master to master–was allowed full scope for development. The attorneys were drawn from a wide variety of social positions, and their practices varied enormously from that of the great London attorney, to that of the small attorney in a country town. In consequence there was little hope that all attorneys' clerks would acquire even a certain minimum of legal education.

(Robson 54)

So, rather than just the criticism of the legal system (specifically the procedural deficiencies of the Chancery Court, which were a great concern roughly a generation before Bleak House and a well-recognized criticism by Dickens), another, though related, reformist message seems to have been precisely what Bleak House's Gridley says it is, that is, the legal professionals themselves:

"The system! I am told on all hands, it's the system. I mustn't look to individuals. It's the system. [ . . . ] My Lord knows nothing of it. He sits there to administer the system. I mustn't go to Mr. Tulkinghorn [ . . . ]. He is not responsible. It's the system. [ . . . ] I will accuse the individual workers of that system [ . . . ]!"

(232; ch. 15)

As S. Garrett remarks, "Most of the solicitors depicted in [Dickens's] novels would in these days have found themselves before the Discipline Committee of the Law Society" (48). But we do not need to judge the legalists of Bleak House by our own standards to determine the strength of Dickens's argument. Eighteenth and early nineteenth century standards were more than adequate for his audience to gauge the novel's reformist message about "the individual workers of that system [ . . . ]!", and I believe indeed that one of the Dickens's primary reforming messages was to accuse the Tulkinghorns of the legal world of malfeasance and incompetency.⁴

Questions of competency and honesty were...