Dickens and the Law: A Hate-Love Relationship

Charles Dickens' sustained interest in the law and the legal system reveals itself in almost every novel he wrote. In this comprehensive and engaging book, Michael Lynch, a barrister of the Middle Temple, analyses Dickens' fascination with crime and the courts and his frequent disgust with lawyers.

Dickens and the Law revisits the legal venues and characters running through Bleak House, David Copperfield and ten other Dickens novels - which have embedded the images of lawyers such as Tulkinghorn, Jaggers and Vholes in the public's memory - and, in so doing, examines how Dickens deals with some of the most profound questions of social relationships, crime and punishment, and the nature of our country's constitution.

From exposing the iniquities of the law in The Pickwick Papers, the cruelty of the workhouse and the savage buffoonery of the magistracy in Oliver Twist to the wider consideration of our society in Barnaby Rudge and Little Dorrit, Dickens not only casts an ironic eye over the legal system but gives us a close-up examination of the problems the legal system is trying to solve.

Dickens and the Law is an engrossing read for anyone with an interest in the law - and how it inspired and tormented one of the greatest novelists in the English language.

Review

'Carefully organised and thoughtfully crafted... The analysis is peppered with excerpts of Dickens' writings, and it's this combination which adds new dimension and depth to well-known characters and places.' Middle Templar Magazine