The Ritual Culture of Victorian Professionals by Pionke Albert D.;

Author:Pionke, Albert D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Trollope’s Subtle Critique of the Law in Orley Farm

The initial critics of Orley Farm were united in disliking two significant aspects of the novel: the first, obviously, was Trollope’s overt attack on the law as dishonest; the second was his inclusion of the group of commercial gentlemen represented most prominently by Kantwise and Moulder. The writers for both The Home and Foreign Review and the North British Review were particularly vocal, with the latter lamenting Trollope’s habit of featuring “mean,” “hateful,” and “contemptible” portraits of low life in his novels in general, and rhetorically asking of Orley Farm in particular, “What object, for example, is to be gained by the elaborate portraiture of such a person as Mr. Moulder” (390). In fact, Moulder, Kantwise, and the rest of the characters in Great St. Helens are central to Trollope’s second, subtler attempt to challenge the charismatic authority of the law by revealing its fundamentally commercial character.27

Just as he had been instrumental in raising the perils of cross-examination, the solicitor Dockwrath is the individual responsible for connecting the legal and commercial worlds of Orley Farm. Having taken up residence in the commercial room of The Bull in Leeds on his way to use the new evidence he has discovered to induce Joseph Mason to reopen legal proceedings against Lady Mason, Dockwrath is challenged by Moulder to justify his presence in space customarily set aside for traveling “lords of the road” and their sample cases (6.44). His general response, “‘In this enterprising country all men are more or less commercial’” (6.48), is swiftly applied to his own case in language appropriate for an attorney with Dockwrath’s command of legal diction: “‘Taking the word in its broadest, strictest, and most intelligible sense, I am a commercial gentleman’” (6.48). The next day, during his conversation with Joseph Mason, Dockwrath reveals the aspect of his professional character that especially qualifies him as commercial: unlike the elder Round, he is “‘sharp,—very sharp indeed’” (7.60). His sharpness is recalled much later in the novel by Chaffanbrass, first in Aram’s office (62.564), and later during Dockwrath’s cross-examination at the trial (68.619), where sharpness comes to imply self-interested money grubbing.

As Trollope represents it, the law itself is rather “sharp” throughout Orley Farm. In the reader’s introduction to Furnival, for example, the narrator discusses the “well-understood” system in which advocates are retained more to neutralize other advocates than to plead effectively for a client, but a system designed above all to enrich the opposing barristers” (10.85). Later, Furnival himself reveals the degree to which commercial maneuvering has entered into his practice when he pays his clerk, Crabwitz, ₤50 to attempt to bribe Dockwrath to drop the case (25.228). It is in the final presentation of Chaffanbrass, however, that law and commerce are brought closest together: “Considering the lights with which he had been lightened, there was a species of honesty about Mr. Chaffanbrass which certainly deserved praise. He was always true to the man whose money he had taken, and gave

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