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December 07, 2009
George Eliot on "Going to Law"
The notion of the honest lawyer seems to have been a stranger to the 19th-century English novel. Here is how George Eliot describes the prospects of a law suit in The Mill on the Floss:
Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and
proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice
could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a
weaker. Law was a sort of cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured
honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.
. . .
"I hope and pray he won't go to law," said Mrs. Moss, "for there's never any knowing where that'll end. And the right doesn't allays win. This Mr. Pivart's a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich mostly get things their own way."
[Jeremy Telman]
December 7, 2009 in Books, Quotes | Permalink
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Comments
No, the 19th century did not have a particular fondness for lawyers. One need only think of a few representations of lawyers -- Dickens (Oliver Twist, Bleak House, David Copperfield) -- the law is filled with unfairness, loudness, a failure to pursue truth, and at the end of the day justice goes to the iniquitous; similarly, Leo Tolstoy wrote with loathing of lawyers in his works: they are often characterized as something more akin to low-levels of society, grimy, and perpetually taking people's money for no good end. And while Shakespeare may have employed a lawyer to save Shylock's unwitting contractual partner from a gruesome end, he also famously wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry IV).
-Michael Lopez
University of North Dakota
Posted by: Michael Lopez | Dec 8, 2009 12:27:19 PM
