Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In Pendennis (1848–50), Thackeray, who had himself spent a brief and miserable time reading for the bar, reminds us that Victorian novelists and Victorian lawyers could not always be easily distinguished from one another. In this semi-autobiographical novel he muses that, despite their unhygienic dilapidation, the Inns of Court were necessarily imbued with romantic associations for the mid-nineteenth-century novelist: [B]ut the man of letters can't but love the place which has been inhabited by so many of his brethren, or peopled by their creations as real to us at this day as the authors whose children they were – and Sir Roger de Coverley walking in the Temple Garden, and discoursing with Mr. Spectator about the beauties in hoops and patches who are sauntering over the grass, is just as lively a figure to me as old Samuel Johnson rolling through the fog with the Scotch gentleman at his heels on their way to Dr. Goldsmith's chambers in Brick Court; or Harry Fielding, with inked ruffles and a wet towel round his head, dashing off articles at midnight for the Covent Garden Journal, while the printer's boy is asleep in the passage ( Pendennis , ch. 29: 367). The eighteenth-century English novel had a peculiarly intimate relation with the Inner Temple. The migration from law to letters, and the literary moonlighting of lawyers such as Fielding, suggest that, in the eighteenth and ... log in or subscribe to read full text