David Langwallner: Good Dickens

From top: First edition of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens; David Langwallner

‘God rest ye merry gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
Remember Christ our Saviour
Was born on Christmas Day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy
Comfort and joy
Oh, tidings of comfort and joy’

Hymn featured in ‘A Christmas Carol’

I am a huge fan of Charles Dickens and, although many find his novels overly sentimental, as if that were a criticism, from the perspective of a lawyer, the second oldest profession as I must admit or confess to being a member, he is a treasure trove of insight.

Not that he cared for lawyers very much and, from those that populate his books, very few charitable evaluations of character are made. Lawyers appear in no less than 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans though, not pleasant ones. Uriah Heap (‘David Copperfield‘) is a “red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger,” while he reads, makes “clammy tracks along the page … like a snail.” Mr. Voles (‘Bleak House’), “so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.”

This is of course most evident in Bleak House and the epic suit of chancery that is Jarndyce v Jarndyce, a case that goes on for an eternity and ends in the liquidation of the client’s assets. The lawyers are enriched unjustly. The clients suffer.

Jaundice and Jaundice drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.

The Christmas story nonpareil is his A Christmas Carol, with the figure of Ebenezer Scrooge the epitome, then and now, of dishonest business practices. A man dedicated to the pursuit of profit at the expense and exploitation of others. A corporate monster, like many of whom I have had the displeasure of meeting and serving.

He is of course not isolated in the collected Dickens oeuvre populated by a whole array of greedy Victorian businesspeople such as the infamous Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times and a plethora of lawyers who, as a profession and as mentioned earlier, get the full force of Dickensian odium and contempt and rightly so. It is the culture of greed and human exploitation that most strokes his ire.

Of course, Dickens was the great chronicler of the instabilities and social malaise of Victorian society to which our present woe-begotten age is returning He is not isolated as such a chronicler and such later social realist writers as Orwell in How the Poor Die or depression-era literature such as The Grapes of Wrath said as much, but not with the same everlasting grip on the public imagination.

Dickens was the spokesperson for injustice in 19th century Victorian England. He was not just a writer but a speech and paper giver and the prototype of a public intellectual. His serialised books were followed avidly by a vast readership. Often there was a melodramatic quality of what would happen next, and Dickens was in effect the voice of the people. Vox Populism.

Mr. Micawber ends up in a debtor’s prison and in a reflective moment defines happiness and unhappiness. Happiness income one pound one shilling outgoings one pound unhappiness the obverse.

Thus, take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves in classic Thatcherite terms but equally the commoditisation of human existence has clearly penetrated Mr. Micawber. In covid times, the awful truth is that frugality does or may not matter nor does pensions or education and many will be destroyed in covid and post covid era if there is such an era.

Micawber of course defined himself in terms of money and in that respect, he was a failure. Now no one may have much money or much worth anything. a devalued and debased universe of quasi-internment and the debtor’s prison or bankruptcy or in fact Malthusian death through suicide or mental health deterioration and indeed physical health decline.

And when anyone has the temerity to present themselves like Oliver Twist with his bowl of porridge and ask for more, then the authorities of the modern-day workhouses go berserk. Are you not happy with your existing pile of gruel? Well, not really. We need more to survive and have a decent standard of living and in Ireland and elsewhere that has created a society of artful dodgers and tax avoiders and just as in the world of Lionel Bart’s musical to survive, we must pick a pocket or two or as Stiglitz would have it, socialism for the rich plutocrats and capitalism for the poor.

Let us all visit the Ghost of Christmas future and mend the error of our ways and reflect on how incompetence, ideology, short termism, greed and neo liberal madness has destroyed our social fabric and, if we have any sense of individual or collective decency, let us all embark on  Scrooge’s voyage of purification and redemption and help the Bob Cratchits of this world and their families.

David Langwallner is a barrister, specialising in public law, immigration, housing and criminal defence including miscarriages of justice. He is emeritus director of the Irish Innocence project and was Irish lawyer of the year at the 2015 Irish law awards. Follow David on Twitter @DLangwallner

Pic: Wikipedia

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