Toward the legal profession the attitude of Dickens is never ambiguous, and ever and anon, as in the following instance, he expresses it with concise clarity:[1]
"The one great principle of the English law is, to make
business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly,
and consistently maintained through all its narrow
turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme,
and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let
them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to
make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will
cease to grumble."
No less favored with warmth of feeling is the famous
Circumlocution Office, to which much eloquence is devoted
in a chapter "containing the whole science of
government." There are pages of satirical description,
the keynote of which is found in an early paragraph:[2]
"This glorious establishment had been early in the field,
when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of
governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen.
It had been foremost to study that bright revelation, and to
carry its shining influence through the whole of the official
proceedings. Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution
Office was beforehand with all the public departments
in the art of perceiving—How Not To Do It."
It is recognized as something of an anomaly that Meredith
should have begun publishing fiction along with
George Eliot, and fifteen years before Hardy and Butler,
for he belongs with the latter as post-Victorian in art and
character. He represents at once the maturity of the
nineteenth century and the embryonic promise of the
twentieth, whose new currents were already meeting and
