ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the courtroom performance and reputation of barrister Charles Phillips prior to his famous and controversial conduct in the 1840 Courvoisier trial. Phillips’s early career, now overshadowed by its end, was marked by notoriety of a different sort, one rooted in his emotional style of advocacy. Phillips attracted censure within a few years of his call to the Irish bar in 1812, and by the time he joined the English bar in 1821, his rhetoric had been subjected to an extensive critique. That critique was firmly rooted in his ethnicity: despite having an English father, the Sligo-born Phillips would be identified throughout his career as an ‘Irish barrister’, and ‘Irish eloquence’ was deemed by the English and the Scots as privileging emotion over reason. Emotional performativity is generally acknowledged as culturally specific, and the criticism intensified when Phillips moved to England and the English courts. After failing in Westminster Hall, he retreated to the Old Bailey where, until the Prisoners’ Counsel Act of 1836 allowed defence counsel to address the jury, ‘Counsellor O’Garnish’s’ overly expressive tongue and performative abilities were curbed. Once the ban on speeches was lifted, Phillips’s emotional, voluble, sentimental rhetoric led to his professional ruin.
