London's Legal System in 1900: Solicitors' Offices

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As part of his survey of the legal system in London, Arthur H. Beavan had the following to say about solicitors' offices in Imperial London, first published in 1901:

In what kind of offices do these various types of solicitors transact their work from one year's end to another?

No modern writer has described more realistically the lawyers' offices of the past than Dickens.

What can excel his forcible portraiture of Mr. Grewgious ensconced in Staple Inn; of Tulkinghorn in Lincoln's Inn Fields; of Mr. Vholes established in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane?

Take up Pickwick, and you have Dodson and Fogg, "two of His Majesty's Attorneys for the Court of King's Bench and Common Pleas at Westminster," whose den was at Freeman's Court, Cornhill.

In Great Expectations you read of Mr. Wemmick, admirer of "portable property," whose chief was exclusively engaged at the Old Bailey; while Lawyer Brass and his sister Sally slaving away in their dingy office, are marked features in the Old Curiosity Shop.

There still linger in and about Bedford Row, etc, a few of the the highly respectable Dickensonian type of office; they usually include the basement, tenanted by the housekeeper and her family, and the ground floor, which stretches away to the rear in an apparently interminable set of offices, the private rooms shut out from every external sound by double baize-covered doors, and invariably containing framed engravings of dead-and-gone Lord Chancellors, Lord Thurlow for choice, or Lord Chief justices - of whom the most popular appears to be Lord Mansfield - their place of honour being over the carved projecting chimney-piece.

Japanned tin boxes bearing names of importance share the space round the four walls with dingy calf­bound law books and reports.

There are always comfortable leather chairs, and the substantial tables are so littered with dusty bundles of deeds and other documents that there appears to be no room for ordinary correspondence, while pens, ink, etc, are exasperating in their inefficiency.

Gas has never been introduced into these offices; candles, up-to-date in that they require no snuffing, set in broad-based japanned holders, illuminate the rooms.

No typewriter, telephone, or other new-fangled invention penetrates the clerks' department; copying of deeds is done in the old fashion, but a copying-press is just tolerated for letters.

Even the clerical staff seems slightly antiquated, of the Lowten, Guppy, and Smallweed type, while the seniors, like their principals, are staid-looking elderly men with an air about them of having once been connected with the Church.

Sometimes the principal and his family live on the floors above the offices.

I recollect an instance of this in the "Fields," where in wonderfully comfortable rooms commanding a surprisingly open view of London, the cosiest of old-fashioned dinners used to be given and rare vintages of port sparkled and glowed with the advent of the walnuts and filberts.

At the opposite pole is the fashionable criminal lawyer making a huge income, with a town mansion, and a country seat not too far away.

His professional life is passed in spacious premises rather out of the legal districts, but conveniently near the Central Criminal Court.

There are innumerable rooms, or sets of rooms, each presided over by a departmental head, whose movements in or out of the building are punctiliously recorded in the hall below for the guidance of visitors.

In the sanctum sanctorum there is little suggestive of law, a few reference books, voila tout; for the rest the furniture and appointments are those of a West End bachelor's snuggery, a servant in livery bringing up afternoon tea, the rumour of such an innovation being enough to agitate the shades of an Erskine, Mansfield, or Eldon, even in the Elysian Fields.

West End solicitors have, as a rule, rather cheerful offices, situated in any direction you like, taking Regent Street as a centre; and it is no secret that the firm once entrusted with the private legal business of the late highest lady in the land (Queen Victoria) is located not a mile from Great Marlboro' Street.

The few attorneys, nominally such, whose transactions lie chiefly in money-lending, seem to delight in unassuming quarters, some quiet street off the Strand, and there they perfect a complex system of secret entrance and exit, so arranged that even their clerks can never be quite sure if the principal be really at home or not.

In the City there are many small solicitors who struggle with destiny - and somehow contrive to make a living - often in one room, sharing with a neighbour the services of a boy-clerk, their habitat up two or three pairs of rickety stairs in one of the few crazy old tenements that still linger in Laurence Pountney Lane, Old Jewry.

The thoroughly up-to-date Company solicitor has the range of several floors in one or other of the palatial buildings, say in Throgmorton Avenue, that are a feature of the modern city.

Everybody about the establishment is alert; all mechanical and scientific aids to rapid communication with the ends of the earth are employed; the rooms are numbered and labelled like Government departments; and the porter below can tell you in a moment if Mr So-and-So be in, or when he may be expected.

Breathing-time there is none; and if by appointment you secure ten minutes' conversation with the great man himself or his lieutenant, your remarks must be brief and to the point, or he quickly lapses into an appearance of not listening to what you are saying, not entirely assumption on his part, for his time means money.

If you happen to be five minutes late in your appointment, you have to bewail for hours the fatality that made you linger at Pymm's or led you to be buttonholed in Cheapside to discuss the latest city scandal.

If any solicitor's office can be pleasant, it is when the firm is established in some ancient red-brick house, perchance the private residence of some city magnate a century ago.

Such an one I will try to describe.

It is up a cul-de-sac, not far from the Bank of England; its big frontage occupies almost one side of the court.

Saving the lofty basement where generations of housekeepers and their families have lived and died, the premises are given up to the law.

In the centre, still retaining its wrought-iron work and torch-extinguisher, is the entrance-door leading into a spacious flagged hall, once guarded by stately liveried servants.

Right and left are the quiet consultation-rooms of the principals, with modern legal furniture, and with the usual accumulation of documents tied up with tape, and sheaves of letters covering the tables.

Here a quiet consultation is always obtainable, and one feels that for once in a way, one's legal adviser has grasped the salient points of one's case.

On the first landing of the broad stone stairs stands a grandfather's clock that has ticked away whilst clients have passed up and down, and members of the fine house have gone in and out, for a century past.

On the first floor, the old drawing-rooms and boudoirs en suite have been cut up into offices for various departments, but their ceilings and heavy wainscots betray their original uses.

Above - where children long ago played, and grew up to become in due time pillars of the Exchange, and at last retired for good to some forgotten City churchyard - are many clerks' offices, where the heavy business of the house, engrossing, copying, etc., goes on all day.

With such a firm as this, families entrust their private affairs, and mercantile houses place the highest confidence.

There is quietude, with rapidity of action when needed; the best legal methods are adopted, and the charges are based upon the sensible principle that the cheaper the rate at which legal advice can be had the more often will the merchant have recourse to it before embarking in an undertaking not only full of financial risk, but often involving responsibilities of any other sort, unforeseen by him.

Next: Legal London in 1900: The Inns of Court