The Victorian Bar

The men who acted as advocates in the Victorian courtrooms were often characters larger than life, who indulged in passionate, histrionic advocacy, showed personal double standards in sex and politics and were not above fraud and robbery as they worked among the vast crowd of pickpockets, thieves, whores and rapscallions thronging the courts.In The Victorian Bar Roy Lewis, himself a barrister, tells the full story - the successes, the failures, the scandals, the hard work, the personal enrichment and the sensational cases to which the public flocked to be entertained, and horrified, and excited. He sets these events against the background of the Victorian scene emerging from the loose living of the 1830s into the constrained and restrictive later years of Victoria's reign. And he tells the story of these years in a light, engaging and often amusing manner.