Chapter 10

The Law-Writer

n the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say

more particularly in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, Mr

Snagsby, Law Stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the

shade of Cook’s Court, at most times a shady place, Mr Snagsby

has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in skins and

rolls of parchment; in paper―foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white,

whitey-brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office-quills, pens, ink,

India-rubber, pounce, pins, pencils, sealing-wax, and wafers; in

red tape, and green ferret; in pocket-books, almanacks, diaries,

and law lists; in string boxes, rulers, inkstands―glass and leaden,

penknives, scissors, bodkins, and other small office cutlery; in

short, in articles too numerous to mention; ever since he was out

of his time, and went into partnership with Peffer. On that

occasion, Cook’s Court was in a manner revolutionised by the new

inscription in fresh paint, PEFFER and SNAGSBY, displacing the

time- honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend, PEFFER

only. For smoke, which is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself

round Peffer’s name, and clung to his dwelling-place, that the

affectionate parasite quite overpowered the parent tree.

Peffer is never seen in Cook’s Court now. He is not expected

there, for he has been recumbent this quarter of a century in the

churchyard of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, with the wagons and

hackney-coaches roaring past him, all the day and half the night,

like one great dragon. If he ever steal forth when the dragon is at

rest, to air himself again in Cook’s Court, until admonished to

return by the crowning of the sanguine cock in the cellar at the

little dairy in Cursitor Street, whose ideas of daylight it would be

curious to ascertain, since he knows from his personal observation

next to nothing about it―if Peffer ever do revisit the pale glimpses

of Cook’s Court, which no law-stationer in the trade can positively

deny, he comes invisibly, and no one is the worse or wiser.

In his lifetime, and likewise in the period of Snagsby’s “time” of

seven long years, there dwelt with Peffer, in the same law-

stationering premises, a niece―a short, shrewd niece, something

too violently compressed about the waist, and with a sharp nose

like a sharp autumn evening, inclining to be frosty towards the

end. The Cook’s-Courtiers had a rumour flying among them, that

the mother of this niece did, in her daughter’s childhood, moved

by too jealous a solicitude that her figure should approach

perfection, lace her up every morning with her maternal foot,

against the bed-post for a stronger hold and purchase; and further,

that she exhibited internally pints of vinegar and lemon-juice:

which acids, they held, had mounted to the nose and temper of the

patient. With whichsoever of the many tongues of Rumour this

frothy report originated, it either never reached, or never

influenced, the ears of young Snagsby; who, having wooed and

won its fair subject on his arrival at man’s estate, entered into two

partnerships at once. So now, in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, Mr

Snagsby and the niece are one; and the niece still cherishes her

figure―which, however tastes may differ, is unquestionably so far

precious, that there is mighty little of it.

Mr and Mrs Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but,

to the neighbours’ thinking, one voice too. That voice, appearing

to proceed from Mrs Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook’s Court very

often. Mr Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through

these dulcet tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald, timid man,

with a shining head, and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking

out at the back. He tends to meekness and obesity. As he stands at

his door in Cook’s Court, in his grey shop-coat and black calico

sleeves, looking up at the clouds; or stands behind a desk in his

dark shop, with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at

sheepskin, in company with his two ’prentices; he is emphatically

a retiring and unassuming man. From beneath his feet, at such

times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently

arise complainings and lamentations in the voice already

mentioned; and haply, on some occasions, when these reach a

sharper pitch than usual, Mr Snagsby mentions to the ’prentices,

“I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster!”

This proper name, so used by Mr Snagsby, has before now

sharpened the wit of the Cook’s-Courtiers to remark that it ought

to be the name of Mrs Snagsby; seeing that she might with great

force and expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her

stormy character. It is, however, the possession, and the only

possession, except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box

indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a

workhouse (by some supposed to have been christened Augusta);

who, although she was farmed or contracted for, during her

growing time, by an amiable benefactor of his species resident at

Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most

favourable circumstances, “has fits”―which the parish can’t

account for.

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a

to proceed from Mrs Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook’s Court very

often. Mr Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through

these dulcet tones, is rarely heard. He is a mild, bald, timid man,

with a shining head, and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking

out at the back. He tends to meekness and obesity. As he stands at

his door in Cook’s Court, in his grey shop-coat and black calico

sleeves, looking up at the clouds; or stands behind a desk in his

dark shop, with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at

sheepskin, in company with his two ’prentices; he is emphatically

a retiring and unassuming man. From beneath his feet, at such

times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently

arise complainings and lamentations in the voice already

mentioned; and haply, on some occasions, when these reach a

sharper pitch than usual, Mr Snagsby mentions to the ’prentices,

“I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster!”

This proper name, so used by Mr Snagsby, has before now

sharpened the wit of the Cook’s-Courtiers to remark that it ought

to be the name of Mrs Snagsby; seeing that she might with great

force and expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her

stormy character. It is, however, the possession, and the only

possession, except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box

indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a

workhouse (by some supposed to have been christened Augusta);

who, although she was farmed or contracted for, during her

growing time, by an amiable benefactor of his species resident at

Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most

favourable circumstances, “has fits”―which the parish can’t

account for.

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a

round ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable

drawback of fits; and is so apprehensive of being returned on the

hands of her patron Saint, that except when she is found with her

head in the pail, or the sink, or the copper, or the dinner, or

anything else that happens to be near her at the time of her

seizure, she is always at work. She is a satisfaction to the parents

and guardians of the ’prentices, who feel that there is little danger

of her inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a

satisfaction to Mrs Snagsby, who can always find fault with her;

she is a satisfaction to Mr Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to keep

her. The Law-stationer’s establishment is, in Guster’s eyes, a

Temple of plenty and splendour. She believes the little drawing-

room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in papers

and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in

Christendom. The view it commands of Cook’s Court at one end

(not to mention a squint into Cursitor-street) and of Coavins’s the

sheriff’s officer’s back-yard at the other, she regards as a prospect

of unequalled beauty. The portraits it displays in oil―and plenty

of it too―of Mr Snagsby looking at Mrs Snagsby, are in her eyes as

achievements of Raphael or Titian. Guster has some recompenses

for her many privations.

Mr Snagsby refers everything not in the practical mysteries of

the business to Mrs Snagsby. She manages the money, reproaches

the Tax-gatherers, appoints the times and places of devotion on

undays, licenses Mr Snagsby’s entertainments, and

acknowledges no responsibility as to what she thinks fit to provide

for dinner; insomuch that she is the high standard of comparison

among the neighbouring wives, a long way down Chancery Lane

on both sides, and even out in Holborn, who, in any domestic

passages of arms, habitually call upon their husbands to look at

the difference between their (the wives’) position and Mrs

Snagsby’s, and their (the husbands’) behaviour and Mrs

Snagsby’s. Rumour, always flying, bat-like, about Cook’s Court,

and skimming in and out at everybody’s windows, does say that

Mrs Snagsby is jealous and inquisitive; and that Mr Snagsby is

sometimes worried out of house and home, and that if he had the

spirit of a mouse he wouldn’t stand it. It is even observed, that the

wives who quote him to their self-willed husbands as a shining

example, in reality look down upon look down upon him; and that

nobody does so with greater superciliousness than one particular

lady whose lord is more than suspected of laying his umbrella on

her as an instrument of correction. But these vague whisperings

may arise from Mr Snagsby’s being, in his way, rather a meditative

and poetical man; loving to walk in Staple Inn in the summer time,

and to observe how countrified the sparrows and the leaves are;

also to lounge about the Rolls Yard of a Sunday afternoon, and to

remark (if in good spirits) that there were old times once, and that

you’d find a stone coffin or two, now, under that chapel, he’ll be

bound, if you was to dig for it. He solaces his imagination, too, by

thinking of the many Chancellors and Vices, and Masters of the

Rolls, who are deceased; and he gets such a flavour of the country

out of telling the two ’prentices how he has heard say that a brook

“as clear as crystal” once ran right down the middle of Holborn,

when Turnstile really was a turnstile leading slap away into the

meadows―gets such a flavour of the country out of this, that he

never wants to go there.

The day is closing in and the gas is lighted, but it is not yet fully

effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr Snagsby standing at his shop-

door looking up at the clouds, sees a crow, who is out late, skim

westward over the leaden slice of sky belonging to Cook’s Court.

The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn

Garden, into Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Here, in a large house, formerly a house of state, lives Mr

Tulkinghorn. It is let off in sets of chambers now; and in those

shrunken fragments of its greatness, lawyers lie like maggots in

nuts. But its roomy staircases, passages, and antechambers, still

remain; and even its painted ceilings, where Allegory, in Roman

helmet, and celestial linen, sprawls among balustrades and pillars,

flowers, clouds, and big-legged boys, and makes the head ache―as

would seem to be Allegory’s object always, more or less. Here,

among his many boxes labelled with transcendant names, lives Mr

Tulkinghorn, when not speechlessly at home in country-houses

where the great ones of the earth are bored to death. Here he is

today, quiet at his table. An Oyster of the old school, whom nobody

can open.

Like as he is to look at, so is his apartment in the dusk of the

present afternoon. Rusty, out of date, withdrawing from attention,

able to afford it. Heavy broad-backed old-fashioned mahogany and

horse-hair chairs, not easily lifted, obsolete tables with spindle-

legs and dusty baize covers, presentation prints of the holders of

great titles in the last generation, or the last but one, environ him.

A thick and dingy Turkey-carpet muffles the floor where he sits,

attended by two candles in old-fashioned silver candlesticks, that

give a very insufficient light to his large room. The titles on the

backs of his books have retired into the binding; everything that

can have a lock has got one; no key is visible. Very few loose

papers are about. He has some manuscript near him, but is not

referring to it. With the round top of an inkstand, and two broken

bits of sealing-wax, he is silently and slowly working out whatever

train of indecision is in his mind. Now, the inkstand top is in the

middle: now, the red bit of sealing-wax, now, the black bit. That’s

not it. Mr Tulkinghorn must gather them all up, and begin again.

Here, beneath the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory

staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and

he cutting it dead, Mr Tulkinghorn has at once his house and

office. He keeps no staff; only one middle-aged man, usually a little

out at elbows, who sits in a high Pew in the hall, and is rarely

overburdened with business. Mr Tulkinghorn is not in a common

way. He wants no clerks. He is a great reservoir of confidences, not

to be so tapped. His clients want him; he is all in all. Drafts that he

requires to be drawn are drawn by special-pleaders in the Temple

on mysterious instructions; fair copies that he requires to be made,

are made at the stationers, expense being no consideration. The

middle-aged man in the Pew, knows scarcely more of the affairs of

the Peerage, than any crossing-sweeper in Holborn.

The red bit, the black bit, the inkstand top, the other inkstand

top, the little sand-box. So! You to the middle, you to the right, you

to the left. This train of indecision must surely be worked out now

or never.―Now! Mr Tulkinghorn gets up, adjusts his spectacles,

puts on his hat, puts the manuscript in his pocket, goes out, tells

the middle-aged man out at elbows, “I shall be back presently.”

Very rarely tells him anything more explicit.

Mr Tulkinghorn goes, as the crow came―not quite so straight,

but nearly―to Cook’s Court, Cursitor street. To Snagsby’s Law

Stationer’s, Deeds engrossed and copied, Law-Writing executed in

all its branches, etc., etc., etc.

It is somewhere about five or six o’clock in the afternoon, and a

balmy fragrance of warm tea hovers in Cook’s Court. It hovers

about Snagsby’s door. The hours are early there; dinner at half-

past one, and supper at half-past nine. Mr Snagsby was about to

descend into the subterranean regions to take tea, when he looked

out of his door just now, and saw the crow who was out late.

“Master at home?”

Guster is minding the shop, for the ’prentices take tea in the

kitchen, with Mr and Mrs Snagsby; consequently, the robemaker’s

two daughters, combing their curls at the two glasses in the two

second-floor windows of the opposite house, are not driving the

two ’prentices to distraction, as they fondly suppose, but are

merely awakening the unprofitable admiration of Guster, whose

hair won’t grow, and never would, and, it is confidently thought,

never will.

“Master at home?” says Mr Tulkinghorn.

Master is at home, and Guster will fetch him. Guster

disappears, glad to get out of the shop, which she regards with

mingled dread and veneration, as a store house of awful

implements of the great torture of the law: a place not to be

entered after the gas is turned off.

Mr Snagsby appears: greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing.

Bolts a bit of bread and butter. Says, “Bless my soul, sir! Mr

Tulkinghorn!”

“I want half a word with you, Snagsby.”

“Certainly, sir! Dear me, sir, why didn’t you send your young

man round for me? Pray walk into the back shop, sir.” Snagsby

has brightened in a moment.

The confined room, strong of parchment grease, is warehouse,

counting-house, and copying-office. Mr Tulkinghorn sits, facing

round, on a stool at the desk.

“Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Snagsby.”

“Yes, sir.” Mr Snagsby turns up the gas, and coughs behind his

hand, modestly anticipating profit. Mr Snagsby, as a timid man, is

accustomed to cough with a variety of expressions, and so to save

words.

“You copied some affidavits in that cause for me lately.”

“Yes, sir, we did.”

“There was one of them,” says Mr Tulkinghorn, carelessly

feeling―tight, unopenable Oyster of the old school!―in the wrong

coat pocket, “the handwriting of which is peculiar, and I rather

like. As I happened to be passing, and thought I had it about me, I

looked in to ask you―but I haven’t got it. No matter, any other

time will do―Ah! here it is!―I looked in to ask you who copied

this?”

“Who copied this, sir?” says Mr Snagsby, taking it, laying it flat

on the desk, and separating all the sheets at once with a twirl and

a twist of the left hand peculiar to law-stationers. “We gave this

out, sir. We were giving out rather a large quantity of work just at

that time. I can tell you in a moment who copied it, sir, by

referring to my Book.”

Mr Snagsby takes his Book down from the safe, makes another

bolt of the bit of bread and butter which seemed to have stopped

short, eyes the affidavit aside, and brings his right forefinger

travelling down a page of the Book. “Jewby―Packer―Jarndyce.”

“Jarndyce! Here we are, sir,” says Mr Snagsby. “To be sure! I

might have remembered it. This was given out, sir, to a Writer who

lodges just over on the opposite side of the lane.”

Mr Tulkinghorn has seen the entry, found it before the Law-

stationer, read it while the forefinger was coming down the hill.

“What do you call him? Nemo?” says Mr Tulkinghorn.

“Nemo, sir. Here it is. Forty-two folio. Given out on the

Wednesday night, at eight o’clock; brought in on the Thursday

morning at half after nine.”

“Nemo!” repeats Mr Tulkinghorn. “Nemo is Latin for no one.”

“It must be English for some one, sir, I think,” Mr Snagsby

submits, with his deferential cough. “It is a person’s name. Here it

is, you see, sir! Forty-two folio. Given out Wednesday night, eight

o’clock; brought in, Thursday morning, half after nine.”

The tail of Mr Snagsby’s eye becomes conscious of the head of

Mrs Snagsby looking in at the shop-door to know what he means

by deserting his tea. Mr Snagsby addresses an explanatory cough

to Mrs Snagsby, as who should say, “My dear, a customer!”

“Half after nine, sir,” repeats Mr Snagsby. “Our law-writers,

who live by job-work, are a queer lot; and this may not be his

name, but it’s the name he goes by. I remember now, sir, that he

gives it in a written advertisement he sticks up down at the Rule

Office, and the King’s Bench Office, and the Judges’ Chambers,

and so forth. You know the kind of document, sir―wanting

employ?”

Mr Tulkinghorn glances through the little window at the back

of Coavins’s, the sheriff’s officer’s, where lights shine in Coavins’s

windows. Coavins’s coffee-room is at the back, and the shadows of

several gentlemen under a cloud loom cloudily upon the blinds.

Mr Snagsby takes the opportunity of slightly turning his head, to

glance over his shoulder at his little woman, and to make

apologetic motions with his mouth to this effect:

“Tul-king-horn―rich―in-flu-en-tial!”

“Have you given this man work before?” asks Mr Tulkinghorn.

“O dear, yes, sir! Work of yours.”

“Thinking of more important matters, I forget where you said

he lived?”

“Across the lane, sir. In fact, he lodges at a―” Mr Snagsby

makes another bolt, as if the bit of bread and butter were

insurmountable―“at a Rag and Bottle shop.”

“Can you show me the place as I go back?”

“With the greatest pleasure, sir!”

Mr Snagsby pulls off his sleeves and his grey coat, pulls on his

black coat, takes his hat from its peg. “Oh! here is my little

woman!” he says aloud. “My dear, will you be so kind as to tell one

of the lads to look after the shop, while I step across the lane with

Mr Tulkinghorn? Mrs Snagsby, sir―I shan’t be two minutes, my

love!”

Mrs Snagsby bends to the lawyer, retires behind the counter,

peeps at them through the window-blind, goes softly into the back

office, refers to the entries in the book still lying open. Is evidently

curious.

“You will find that the place is rough, sir,” says Mr Snagsby,

walking deferentially in the road, and leaving the narrow

pavement to the lawyer; “and the party is very rough. But they’re

a wild lot in general, sir. The advantage of this particular man is,

that he never wants sleep. He’ll go at it right on end, if you want

him to, as long as ever you like.”

It is quite dark now, and the gas-lamps have acquired their full

effect. Jostling against clerks going to post the day’s letters, and

against counsel and attorneys going home to dinner, and against

plaintiffs and defendants, and suitors of all sorts, and against the

general crowd, in whose way the forensic wisdom of ages has

interposed a million of obstacles to the transaction of the

commonest business of life―diving through law and equity, and

through that kindred mystery, the street mud, which is made of

nobody knows what, and collects about us nobody knows whence

or how: we only knowing in general that when there is too much of

it, we find it necessary to shovel it away―the lawyer and the law-

stationer come to a Rag and Bottle shop, and general emporium of

much disregarded merchandise, lying and being in the shadow of

the wall of Lincoln’s Inn, and kept, as is announced in paint, to all

whom it may concern, by one Krook.

“This is where he lives, sir,” says the law-stationer.

“This is where he lives, is it?” says the lawyer unconcernedly.

“Thank you.”

“Are you not going in, sir?”

“No, thank you, no; I am going on to the Fields at present. Good

evening. Thank you!” Mr Snagsby lifts his hat, and returns to his

little woman and his tea.

But, Mr Tulkinghorn does not go on to the Fields at present. He

goes a short way, turns back, comes again to the shop of Mr

Krook, and enters it straight. It is dim enough, with a blot-headed

candle or so in the windows, and an old man and a cat sitting in

the back part by a fire. The old man rises and comes forward, with

another blot-headed candle in his hand.

“Pray is your lodger within?”

“Male or female, sir?” says Mr Krook.

“Male. The person who does copying.”

Mr Krook has eyed his man narrowly. Knows him by sight. Has

an indistinct impression of his aristocratic repute.

“Did you wish to see him, sir?”

“Yes.”

“It’s what I seldom do myself,” says Mr Krook with a grin.

“Shall I call him down? But it’s a weak chance if he’d come, sir!”

“I’ll go up to him, then,” says Mr Tulkinghorn.

“Second floor, sir. Take the candle. Up there!” Mr Krook, with

his cat beside him, stands at the bottom of the staircase looking

after Mr Tulkinghorn. “Hi-hi!” he says, when Mr Tulkinghorn has

nearly disappeared. The lawyer looks down over the handrail. The

cat expands her wicked mouth, and snarls at him.

“Order, Lady Jane! Behave yourself to visitors, my lady! You

know what they say of my lodger?” whispers Krook, going up a

step or two.

“What do they say of him?”

“They say he has sold himself to the Enemy; but you and I

know better―he don’t buy. I’ll tell you what, though; my lodger is

so black-humoured and gloomy, that I believe he’d as soon make

that bargain as any other. Don’t put him out, sir. That’s my

advice!”

Mr Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the

dark door on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer,

opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.

The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished

it, if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and

grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the

middle as if Poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In

the corner by the chimney, stand a deal table and a broken desk; a

wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner, a ragged

old portmanteau on one of the two chairs, serves for cabinet or

wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks

of a starved man. The floor is bare; except that one old mat,

trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No

curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discoloured

shutters are drawn together; and through the two gaunt holes

pierced in them, famine might be staring in―the Banshee of the

man upon the bed.

For on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty

patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer,

hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there,

dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look

in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until

the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and

left a tower of winding sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling

with his whiskers and his beard―the latter ragged too, and grown,

like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as

the room is, foul and filthy as the air, it is not easy to perceive what

fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through

the general sickliness and faintness, and the odour of stale

tobacco, there comes into the lawyer’s mouth the bitter, vapid

taste of opium.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick

against the door.

He thinks he has awakened his friend. He lies a little turned

away, but his eyes are surely open.

“Hallo, my friend!” he cries again. “Hallo! Hallo!”

As he rattles on the door, the candle which has drooped so long,

goes out, and leaves him in the dark; with the gaunt eyes in the

shutters staring down upon the bed.

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