Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision, with a permanent effect on his outlook on matter. With Walter Bagehot, who was at the same school, he formed a fruitful and stimulating friendship.
At the end of 1842 schooldays were over, and from 1843 till he went to London in October 1848 Fry was in business and acquired a practical knowledge of accountancy and shipbroking. He did not take to a mercantile life, but he found time to read widely in the classics, literature, and history, and actually wrote at the age of nineteen A Treatise of the Elective Monarchies of Europe (1846). In the spring of the same year he sent to the Zoological Society of London a paper on The Osteology of the Hylobates agilis, based on a remarkable specimen which had lived in the Clifton Zoological Gardens. This paper and another on The relations of the Edentata to the Reptiles, especially of the Armadilloes to the Tortoises, were published by the society. He worked very hard at zoology, and in 1849 in the London matriculation examination secured the prize for that subject, beating (Sir) William Henry Flower who was to become the head of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. But he was also interested in the study of the osteology of the skull, having seen fossil bones at Weston-super-Mare as early as 1838, and he worked with William Budd [q.v.], who encouraged his surgical enthusiasms. Fry also found time for thought on the subjects of free trade and education, and as the result of a continental tour in 1848 contributed an article on Germany in 1848 to the London University Magazine.
After this visit Fry decided to go to the bar, and with this in view he entered University College, London, where Thomas Hodgkin and Walter Bagehot were fellow-students. After making a brilliant mark at the college, he took his B.A. degree in 1851. He entered the chambers first of Bevan Braithwaite, the conveyancer, then of Edward Bullen, the eminent special pleader in the Temple, and lastly of (Sir) Charles Hall, the equity draughtsman, and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1854. The beginning was not auspicious. He was called at a moment when family financial affairs had been giving temporary anxiety, and for a long period briefs failed to flow in. But he was working all the while, and soon after the publication (1858) of his well-known book, A Treatise on the Specific Performance of Contracts, the tide began to turn. Fry, in the time of probation, also produced a volume, Essays on the Accordance of Christianity with the Nature of Man (1857), which secured the approval of Baron von Bunsen, who expressed surprise that there was any one in England who would write such a book.
The early years in London from 1848 to 1859 were haunted by fear of failure. Fry’s tastes were austere and his judgement too well balanced for him to entertain what seemed like false hopes. But sadness and fear of failure ended when he married in the Friends’ meeting-house at Lewes in 1859 Mariabella, daughter of the quaker barrister, John Hodgkin [q.v.]. It was about this time that Fry discarded the external peculiarities of quakerism as not being really connected with religious life. In 1859 he issued a pamphlet on this subject.
From 1859 until he was raised to the bench in 1877 Fry acquired a steadily growing practice, not only in Chancery and company work but at the parliamentary bar. He took silk in 1869 and joined the court of Vice-Chancellor James, competing with (Sir) Richard Paul Amphlett and (Sir) Edward Ebenezer Kay, who, like himself, were later to sit in the Court of Appeal. He quickly made his mark by a convincing argument in a company case in which he was opposed by Lord Westbury, Sir Roundell Palmer, and others. He succeeded and was warmly congratulated by his opponents. When James became a lord justice, Fry practised for a time before Vice-Chancellor Bacon, but eventually migrated to the Rolls court, presided over by Lord Romilly and, after 1878, by Sir George Jessel. But pressure of work in the House of Lords made it necessary for him soon to ‘go special’. This did not long have the desired effect, and his work was greatly on the increase when, in April 1877, he was offered by Lord Cairns the additional judgeship in the Chancery division authorized that year by statute. He accepted the offer with considerable misgiving, and characteristically set to work to put in writing his conceptions of his new duties. His precepts are worthy of study by all judges. Fry was the first judge appointed after the Judicature Act had merged the high court of Chancery in the High Court, the first Chancery judge to bear the title of Mr. Justice and to go circuit. His knighthood followed in the usual form. He at first dreaded the circuit work, but came to like it, and impressed the bar with his judicial versatility.
Probably Fry’s principal legal achievement took place before he passed in 1883,
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