Hurts Like the Dickens

Charles Dickens was a one-man wrecking crew for the image of lawyers. None of his lawyer characters is less than odious, and all of them are memorable. Just in time for Dickens' bicentennial today, the New York Times published an op-ed, "Dickens v. Lawyers," that reminds us of all the ways in which Dickens savaged the legal profession. I confess to being something of a Dickens fan. I recently re-read Bleak House with great pleasure, although, either because I've become a lazy reader or because Dickens was being paid by the word, I found a few of the "comic" chapters to be almost unreadable. For SBM Blog readers who resent what Dickens has done to the image of lawyers, may I recommend Christopher Hitchens' "The Dark Side of Dickens -- Why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men"?  Hitchens, himself a master image-destroyer and possessor of Dickensian prolixity, focuses on Dickens' hypocrises and anti-Americanism, describing the great man as  "a vain actor-manager type who used pathetic victims as tear-jerking raw material, and who actually detested the real subjects of High Victorian power and hypocrisy when they were luckless enough to dwell overseas."