In 1857, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, jurist and literary reviewer, was moved to ask this question:

Who is this man? Charles Dickens of course. Stephen was not the only literary critic to attack Dickens, but few held him in more contempt. Why does Stephen resent Dickens' social criticism so much? Is this simply a case of an individual's dislike? Dickens responded in kind to Stephen, hauling him over the coals for pages in Household Words. Their feud illustrates the shifting boundaries between the press and the Bar at mid-century, as both professions work to define themselves and their professional ethics.

The boundaries between the press and the Bar were far more fluid than they are today. The difficulty of making a living at the Bar often meant that barristers supported themselves as journalists. The lives of Stephen and Dickens illustrate the intersections between the legal system and literature at this time. Fitzjames Stephen has a highly successful legal career: he was the Legal Member of the Viceroy’s council in India, he was a practicing barrister for 14 years, and he served for twelve years on the High Court Bench. Stephen is also one of the most important Victorian legal theorists, writing two historical works on the British legal system.

He comes from a legal and literary family; his father is the Under Secretary of the Colonial Office, and Fitzjames’ brother Leslie is an author and a critic as well. Leslie marries one of William Thackeray’s daughters and is the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Fitzjames Stephen has a significant literary career writing hundreds of articles and literary reviews for the Saturday Review and Pall Mall Gazette between 1855 and 1875. Stephen is called to the Bar in 1854 and begins writing for the Saturday Review in 1855; his legal and literary careers begin at almost the same time.

Charles Dickens’ literary career needs no review; the outlines of his legal career are less well known—he was a clerk in a solicitor’s office, he was a court reporter (a kind of stenographer), and as a journalist, he also reported on the Police Court and the Press Gallery of Parliament. Before his career as a novelist, he thought about becoming a barrister: in 1839 he entered his name at the Middle Temple (Collins 177). Although he was never called to the Bar, he kept a number of terms at the Middle Temple even after his literary career took off.

Dickens also desired to become a magistrate. In 1843 he writes, “I would that I were a Police Magistrate. I think I should be a pretty good one” (Collins 178). We can see both men shifting between legal and literary careers, often at the same time, so it is interesting that they are so defensive of one profession and critical of the other. The national events of the 1840s create a professional conflict over ethics that will function as the prelude to Stephen and Dickens' feud.

Stephen gives his most critical article about Dickens the title, “The License of Modern Novelists.” I believe Stephen is consciously using “license” to also refer to the “license of counsel” controversy that occurred in the 1840s. This scandal was taken up by the press, contributed to strained relations between the Bar and press, and was one where novelists like Charles Dickens strenuously attacked the law for its failures.

The license of counsel controversy begins in 1840 when Lord William Russell, the Prime Minister’s uncle and a Member of Parliament, is murdered. The police arrested his valet, Courvoisier, for the murder. Noted barrister Charles Phillips defended Courvoisier. During the trial, damaging evidence against the defendant was discovered, and although Courvoisier confessed his guilt to Phillips, he refused to change his plea, and he told the barrister that he expected to continue his defense as if he were innocent. During the trial, Phillips attempted to throw suspicion on the housemaid; he also accused the police of improperly eliciting a confession, and most worryingly of all for many Victorians, he made a solemn appeal to God in support of his client’s innocence (Lewis 88). Although Courvoisier is found guilty and executed, when the aspects of his defense became public knowledge, there was an outcry in the popular press; the main criticism of Phillips was that he had put his relationship to his client above his relationship with the truth.

There was a great deal of public anger over the lawyer's conduct, and Charles Dickens was especially outraged. He writes two letters questioning the role of advocacy and the license of lawyers to the Morning Chronicle using the name “Manlius.” He states,

Dickens criticizes Phillips’ actions on the grounds that they will discourage virtuous men from apprehending criminals and witnesses from testifying. One of the results of zealous advocacy—the unlimited license of counsel—is to make innocent people the objects of suspicion.

Many journalists were extremely critical of the Bar and relations between the Bar and press continued to deteriorate, culminating in the Bar-Press War of 1845. The Oxford and Western circuits banished any practicing barristers who also reported for newspapers, holding that it was “not consistent with the dignity and the independence of the bar for a barrister to report to the newspapers” (May 221). Of course, many barristers, like Fitzjames Stephen, initially relied on journalism for their incomes, and the press retaliated by criticizing the legal profession in general and individual lawyers in particular at any time they could. In the face of this hostility, Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, reporter for the Times and a member of the Oxford circuit, tried to make peace between the two disciplines with his article in Law Magazine, “On the Principle of Advocacy as Developed in the Practice of the Bar.” Talfourd writes, “When we consider the true relation of the Bar to Literature, we feel sure that nothing can permanently place them in hostile positions. No other great occupations of human energies are so nearly allied” (qtd. in Cairns 143). Talfourd’s plea for reconciliation illustrates how similar the disciplines are—I would suggest that this is why they have become so competitive with each other. Faced with unrelenting pressure from the Press, the circuits finally relaxed their rules on barristers practicing journalism. So we see one discipline, the press, attack and critique the professionalism of another, the law, specifically for failing to represent the truth, and the Bar-Press War suggests also that the blurry boundaries between the professions are starting to harden perhaps along class lines, setting the stage for Stephen’s feud with Dickens.

In his 1857 article in the Edinburgh Review, “The License of Modern Novelists,” Stephen presents his most thorough critique of Dickens specifically and literature in general in his review of Little Dorrit. Stephen had previously deplored the fact that most people got their knowledge of the law from novels, and he repeats that critique here, saying that Dickens’ novels “justify the opinion we have formed on the influence exercised by such novels over the moral and political opinions of the young, the ignorant, and the inexperienced. They tend to beget hasty generalizations and false conclusions . . . they caricature instead of representing [sic] the world” (125). Because novelists like Dickens do not represent legal issues faithfully, they encourage some readers to make false conclusions about moral and political institutions. Stephen is essentially accusing Dickens of being a kind of novelistic demagogue. This is Stephen’s main criticism of Dickens, and he makes it in other venues as well.

In addition to faulting Dickens in general for his false representations of political and legal institutions, Stephen criticizes Little Dorrit for having a cumbersome plot, for failing to represent the upper classes compassionately, for using the Circumlocution Office to satirize the British government, and for attacking abuses after they have already been corrected. He also specifically mentions that the career of Rowland Hill (inventor of the penny post) contradicts Dickens’ position that the bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office fails to recognize innovation, and he accuses Dickens of lacking imagination. He says the author is merely following the “popular cries of the day” (127) for apparently basing the destruction of Mrs. Clenham’s house on the recent news that three houses in Tottenham Court Road had fallen down (127).

In addition to identifying factual inaccuracies, Stephen takes the opportunity to attack Dickens for his faulty knowledge of the legal system, claiming that

Here, we see the upper-class barrister emphasizing the class difference between himself and Dickens, who starts his professional life as a clerk in an attorney’s office. Again, the danger with Dickens’ descriptions of the law is that, out of ignorance, he writes a one-sided view of things that may result in actual injustice and that certainly stirs up popular discontent with legal institutions.

This all results in a heated exchange with Dickens in Household Worlds. Dickens responds by saying that Stephen is angry that novelists are

At stake here for Dickens is who is allowed to “testify” about legal and political questions—who can speak for and about the country? Can the novel address social and political questions? Dickens suggests that novelists should do more than confine “themselves to the mere amusement of their readers” (97), the idle young gentlemen and ladies who are able to lightly pick up and put down their reading. Dickens’ response reveals the way that he feels Stephen has attempted to circumscribe the role of literature. just as the "license of counsel" controversy sought to circumscribe and limit an advocate's ability to represent his client.

Dickens also explains that the reviewer gets his facts wrong. Little Dorrit was in proofs when the Tottenham Court Road house tragedy occurred; thus, it was impossible for him to publish the relevant chapters of Little Dorrit in order to take advantage of current events as Stephen has indicated. He also notes that “a critical examination of a book cannot fail to observe that that catastrophe is carefully prepared for from the very first presentation of the old house in the story” (97). In other words, Stephen has been a poor reader of the novel not to notice this.

Stephen gets his facts wrong about the houses, and he also gets corrected about the career of Rowland Hill. Dickens spends pages in Household Words sarcastically detailing the setbacks and obstacles created by the government that Rowland Hill had to overcome before his postal dreams could be realized (98-99).

Dickens also responds to the more general attacks. He asks, after listing the factual inaccuracies that Stephen has unwisely made,

Dickens throws Stephen’s legal language back at him, and what is interesting is not only that Stephen uses this kind of legal language to criticize Dickens in the first place, but that Dickens uses it as well. Both critic and novelist issue charges about injustice and testimony and the limits of each other’s “license.” The criticism and defense of the novel is couched in the language of the law for both reviewer and novelist.

What is interesting about this exchange is the way a writer like Dickens frames his critiques of the law. Dickens is concerned about witnesses having their character impugned, not in the service of truth, but rather in advocacy. These criticisms seem remarkably close to some of Stephen’s criticisms in “License of Modern Novelists”—namely that the interests of truth are not being served, that people (be they authors or lawyers) are exceeding their license. Both Stephen and Dickens think the other discipline has gone too far, and they use the same language to criticize each other. The nineteenth century was a time for working out and debating the license of counsel (how far could lawyers stray from the truth in the interests of their client) and the license of novelists (how much could they use fiction to advance a social critique). But both disciplines are concerned with questions of truth and justice. Zealous advocates might not see lying in a client’s service as at odds with justice—the justice of the adversarial system is produced by the conflict between two advocates. Likewise, novelists like Charles Dickens might also claim that their distortions of facts serve a higher justice—that fiction tells the truth obliquely.

Both novelists and barristers defend themselves against each other’s charges, and both are concerned about the other’s “license.” However, this is a battle that literature wins. Stephen’s concerns about novelists’ license aren’t given much sway—either by his own society or by history. Dickens refutes him in Household Words, and over time, the novelists’ portrayal of events is the one held by the majority of people.

In terms of Stephen’s particular dislike of Dickens and disdain for his legal knowledge, this too is a battle that Stephen will lose. Dickens’ work has more than stood the test of time, and his legal knowledge has been lauded and praised, as books like Charles Holdsworth’s Charles Dickens as Legal Historian and Philip Collins’ Dickens and Crime attest. The rise of Victorian Studies has ensured that Dickens’ work has become an important historical resource for those who want to understand or analyze the Victorian legal system. But overall, this feud does show us how professions use ethics as a way to set their boundaries and define themselves against other professions.

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1865. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

Collins, Philip. Dickens and Crime. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Print.

Dickens, Charles. “Curious Misprint in the Edinburgh Review.” Household Words 16

(1 Aug. 1857): 97-100. Print.

Lewis, J.R. The Victorian Bar. London: Robert Hale, 1982. Print.

May, Allyson. The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750-1850. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2003. Print.

Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and

Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Stephen, James Fitzjames. “License of Modern Novelists.” Edinburgh Review 106

(1857): 124-156. Print.

-----. “Mr. Dickens as Politician.” Saturday Review 3.62 (3 Jan. 1857): 8-9. Print.