The below article on ‘Dublin Types: The Solicitor’ from Irish Society (Dublin) of 28 November 1891 wittily documents the evolution of a typical late-Victorian member of the profession during his first decade as a sole practitioner.

Although prejudice against the telephone went out with the billy-cock hat, many of the other details in this piece still ring true today!

“Some Dublin Types

By SUPERCILIUS

IV. – A SOLICITOR

“The day he is sworn in he goes around to the various newspaper offices in town with the following item of interesting news, neatly written out in his best ‘apprentice’ hand:

“Admission of a solicitor.

Yesterday, before the Right Honourable the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Mr. So and So, B.A., L.L.B, was sworn in a Solicitor of the High Court of Justice in Ireland.  Mr So and So, who took a high place in the final examination, and served his time with the eminent firm of De Liver and File, intends practising, we understand, in Dublin at No.  __ Dame street.”

The Dublin newspapers can usually afford space for the insertion of this little puff preliminary for the young solicitor. There is perhaps sometimes a cynical editor who has conscientious doubts whether such an announcement comes within the category of news. He has misgivings whether it is a matter of general interest to his readers and thinks that if he were to do his duty, it ought perhaps to be charged for as an advertisement. But the editor is human, though cynical, and the sight of the young man with his new silk hat, his dressy black coat and his shining black bag, all of which must have cost money, and the reflection (for editors know everything) that it costs £500 to be sworn in, and the excited eager face of the applicant, all appeal to the better nature of the editor, and induce him to put in the item of intelligence free of charge. Good-natured editors in Princes’ Street have been known even to add to it on their own account that “we predict a rapid success for this able young lawyer.”

And then he goes down to the courts and stands in the hall, a conspicuous figure by reason of his newness and niceness of dress, to be congratulated by Messrs De Liver and File, his late masters, and by any young barristers whom he happens to know. The young barristers are particularly friendly to him because they see in him a prosperous attorney in posse, and he is glad to talk to them because it is well to be seen among wigs and gowns, and because no briefs can reasonably be expected from him just at present. Later on, oh! how he avoids the reproachful looks of those same young barristers, who say to themselves as he passes by with a brief for some Senior Junior, ‘I stood you to lunch the day you were sworn in and you have never given me as much as a guinea brief from that day to this!’

 And he takes an office, as the newspaper rightly ‘understood’ he would do, at  No. ___ Dame street, where his father and mother and sisters come down to see how he is getting on. He furnishes it very plainly, because plain furniture looks more business-like, than a great display of useless desks and chairs and tables. His cousins and people chaff him and ask him if he is going to get the telephone in, and he takes them up seriously, a little angrily, and says, No, he is not going to make a fool of himself like So and So, but means to set to work and do what business he can get in in a quiet and unostentatious manner as possible.

And so, he does set to work seriously, to do what little business in the way of agency he gets; and very well and efficiently he does it. But as to the quiet and unostentatious manner, I am not so sure about that. For he drives to court when, in all conscience, he might walk, and he keeps old documents in his bag and takes them out and places them on the table before him in court, just as if they hold some continuing interest for him; he scans the list eagerly and marks it with a blue pencil, as if he were noting the order of his own motion; and the way he takes leave of you is by saying that he must hurry off to file an affidavit. Innocent little devices, no doubt. And why should he not make use of them if they can avail him aught in the hard game he has to play?

When business flows in, and he gets genuine work to do, the outward show and circumstance diminish, and for some years he is more constantly in his office, and less frequently in court, where he sends his clerk or his apprentice to issue his writs and file his documents. Ten years perhaps of hard work and drudgery elapse. His energy and a good connection, and fortunate circumstances of one sort or another, have by this time made him a good practice, and he is at last the prosperous attorney.

 What a wonderful ten years it has been! What a shrewd, sharp man it has made him! The number of people he has met, the strange stories he has heard, the wrongs he has righted, the wrongs that he has failed to right, the rogues he has encountered as clients or as foes, the ‘fishy’ cases he has been in, the questionable things that he was called upon to do and did reluctantly, and yet, as of course – how they have changed him! Some things perhaps he did that caused him doubts and scruples at the time and cause him even graver misgivings now.  But on the whole, he has been an honest man, and has earned the right to be called, as he always is called by his counsel in court, ‘that most respectable and eminent solicitor, Mr. ___.’ He has made some good investments, earns a good income and has an ever increasing business. He is on familiar terms with many eminent Queens Counsel and gets a salute even from several of the judges. He knows everything about everybody and nods to every other man he passes in the street.

Those ten years have brought a wonderful change on the young B.A., who took a high place at his final and blushed in the editor’s room. He would require a great deal of hard reading now to take even the lowest place at the final; for he has lost the spirit of the B.A. and the student’s faculty of making up books. He is now a man of facts, figures, deeds, and schedules, with a great capacity for making up cases and a curious disregard of the textbooks. He is a Dublin solicitor, and when I say that I need scarcely add that he has lost the faculty of blushing.

Meanwhile he has had a social side to his life, for he has married a wife and is the father of a youthful family. He lives ‘down the line,’ and keeps a yacht at Kingstown, upon which he entertains a goodly company of people, among whom is a young barrister who hates yachting, but feels bound, in justice to himself, to respond to the invitation of a solicitor.

Where is the silk hat of a swearing in day? And has it had a successor? Probably not. For he now dresses carelessly in a blue serge jacket and a billy-cock hat, his spruceness diminishing according as his business increases.”

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