On July 28, 1902, the Dublin Leader published the entirety of a one-act play by Edward Martyn, ‘The Place-Hunters,’ set in the Law Library of the time and satirising Irish barristers’ struggle between principle on the one hand and personal benefit on the other.

Characters included the idealistic nationalist barrister Hugh Daly KC and his colleague Fencesitter Fisher KC, the latter cursed with a wife whose ambition for her husband is only outweighed by her naivety. Also featured were the Right Hon Steppingstone Feathernest, Attorney -General, and Paul Doody, a Judge of the High Court with a crush on the late Queen Victoria and a hankering after a peerage.

In the course of the play, Judge Doody gets his peerage, Mrs Fisher’s naivety destroys her husband’s chances of progress, and Daly ends up being escorted from the Library by police after his frustration with the placehunting system ends in his impassioned destruction of some of its books.

You can read the play in full, and view the Leader’s beautifully drawn illustrations of its characters, by clicking through the slide-show below.

The sketch at the top gives us a glimpse into the interior of the old Law Library in the East Wing (new at the time, having replaced its predecessor behind the Round Hall only a few years previously), illustrating the practice of barristers to gather in front of its fires for warmth and gossip.

In his scene directions, Martyn describes the Library in the following terms:

“The Library of the Four Courts.  In centre at back a spacious alcove with a mantlepiece and grate in which a fire is burning.  Around it are placed some chairs.  At right is a large stained glass window on the landing of a staircase that ascends above the alcove in back, to a gallery lighted by two ordinary windows, and containing a few desks with seats. At left, below, several more desks with seats between which there is a passage for ingress and egress.  Books, papers, &c., lie on the various desks.

Several Barristers in their wigs and gowns are seated at the desks below, and a few above in the gallery, studying or writing.  Every now and then a loud voice of a man outside calls some name, whereupon a Barrister may go out at left.  There is frequent movement.  Some occasionally get up to consult others, to go out at left, or to go up and down staircase to or from the gallery.  Others come in at left, both from gallery or from below, while Law Clerks and odd Attendants go in and out in the same way.”  

Martyn’s description of the Law Library of 1902 corresponds with photographs and other contemporaneous accounts. Although today’s Law Library is situate elsewhere in the Four Courts, and has no fireplaces, the in and out and upwards and downward movement referred to in his almost poetic account remains a key feature of its interior today.

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