Lawyers on Trial : attitudes toward the lawyer's use and abuse of rhetoric in nineteenth-century England

The notion of the lawyer as an amoral rhetorician had grown out of the long association between oral courtroom pleading, or "advocacy," and the ancient art of "rhetoric," or persuasion. After a brief introduction tracing mistrust of the lawyer to the beginning of advocacy in ancient Greece, "Lawyers on Trial" explores a variety of attitudes toward the lawyer's use and abuse of rhetoric in nineteenth-century England, beginning in Chapter I with public and professional reactions to three highly publicized defenses: Lord Brougham's defense of Queen Caroline (1820), Charles Phillips' defense of Courvoisier (1840), and Sir Fitzroy Kelly's defense of John Tawell (1845). Although these cases took place early in the century. Brougham's controversial statement on the duties of an advocate, along with the rhetorical tactics of the other two lawyers, so strongly affected public opinion that the legal profession spent much of the rest of the century trying to improve both its public image and its shattered self-esteem.

Chapter II examines the attitudes of the legal profession in more detail, focusing on four handbooks designed specifically for the courtroom pleader: Edward O'Brien's The Lawyer (1842); Edward Cox's The Advocate (1847-59); Cox's The Arts of Writing, Reading, and Speaking, in Letters to a Law Student (1860-63); and Richard Harris' Hints on Advocacy (1879), Differing widely in scope and format, these handbooks shared two common goals: helping students and young barristers acquire the professional and rhetorical skills they would need throughout their careers, and addressing for barristers of all ages a dilemma that many felt acutely, how to apply rhetorical skills both effectively and morally in professional practice.

Finally, Chapter III explores representations of the barrister, or pleader, in nineteenth-century poems and novels, including John Anstey's Pleader's Guide (1796-1802); Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers (1836-37) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848); Samuel Warren's Ten Thousand a Year (1839); and Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm (1862). On the one hand, these works reflect popular attitudes toward the lawyer's abuse of rhetoric, but at the same time they also helped to shape such attitudes.