A remark 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 1 The terminology can be confusing, but I believe that the word lawyer, as used in Bleak House, is Dickens’s collective term for both a solicitor and an attorney, which is how the word lawyer is defined in the OED and how most people did, and still do, use lawyer. Prior to the Judicature Acts of 1873, attorneys and solicitors maintained some separation in their professions (Robson 5) in that the term solicitor was “restricted to persons who conducted suits in the Court of Chancery”(Encyclopedia of the Laws of England 489). That is, solicitors practiced in the equity courts, and attorneys practiced in the law courts. Dr. Johnson may or may not have used attorney in a generic sense just as lawyer is often used; he may have been referring to an actual law-court attorney. For my purposes, I will use solicitor to refer to Bleak House’s Tulkinghorn who is actually described as practicing before the equity courts and lawyer or legalist elsewhere, excepting, of course, those instances where attorney or attorneys appears in quoted material. Barrister refers to an entirely different profession that is not addressed in this essay. 2 The quotation is a little confusing with the “all male [sic]” reference. However, the word male is obviously a wrong word, so I believe that the proper reading of this phrase is “all mal and unfair practice,” that is,“all malpractice and unfair practice.” From