Excepting the Aristocratical

Ian Gilmour

  • Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650-1950 by John Habakkuk
    Oxford, 786 pp, £65.00, September 1994, ISBN 0 19 820398 5

Lawyers have seldom had a good press. According to Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, a lawyer could ‘scarcely fail to be a dishonest man’, though that, he added, was ‘less a subject for censure than regret’. Shelley’s friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, being himself a barrister, could not go quite so far, but his verdict was almost as sweeping:

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