Geoffrey Bindman QC celebrates Anthony Trollope’s depiction of the legal profession
Biographies of lawyers are notoriously dull. Sometimes their lives are dull. More often professional discretion requires suppression of the juiciest tales. If we want to understand the lives of lawyers in past generations we can learn more from fiction. Anthony Trollope is a wonderful guide to the legal profession in the Victorian era.
Unlike his near contemporary Charles Dickens, who was a solicitor’s clerk in his youth, Trollope never worked in the law, but he saw it at close quarters from childhood. His father was a barrister, a sad failure whose practice in the Temple collapsed, driving him into bankruptcy and the family into abject poverty. The son’s portrayals of lawyers and the law are many and various, full of worldly wisdom and untainted by any cynicism or hostility his father’s experience might have inspired in him.
Trollope’s output was enormous—including 47 novels many of which are very long. I have read only about a dozen. But I have read accounts of Trollope’s lawyers by much more dedicated Trollopians such as the
