ABSTRACT
Dickens has often been censured for his inadequate knowledge of the codes and practices of professional life. George Orwell, for instance, makes the general comment that “Dickens knows very little about the professions his characters are supposed to follow.”1 Others have made particularly pointed claims about the imperfections of his engagement with legal matters. Most strident of all, perhaps, is James Fitzjames Stephen’s claim in an Edinburgh Review article of 1857 entitled “The License of Modern Novelists” that Dickens’s “notions of law . . . are precisely those of an attorney’s clerk.”2 He
knows the physiognomy of courts of justice, and he has heard that Chancery suits sometimes last forty years, though he seems not to have the remotest notion that there is any difference between suits for the administration of estates and suits for the settlement of disputed rights.3
