yet the receipts of the author amounted to no more than £726. This led to a rupture with Chapman & Hall, as his publishers, and betaking himself to Bradbury & Evans. The book exercised a great influence for good.
Dickens suffered severely from piracy. He brought an action against the pirates who had printed and issued on their own account both Martin Chuzzlewit and The Christmas Carol. He won his case easily, yet he had himself to pay all the costs incurred in his own behalf; and when, a couple of years later, he was advised to take proceedings against renewed piracy, he refused, writing: "It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to a much greater wrong in the Law. I shall not easily forget the expense and anxiety, and horrible injustice of the Carol case, wherein, in asserting the plainest right on earth, I was really treated as if I were the robber instead of the robbed." In fact, he lost heavily by the Carol. His receipts had been little over £700; and the legal expenses amounted to something like double that sum.
My father, without the excuse of Charles Dickens, entertained a like great prejudice against lawyers.
One of his remarks was to this effect: "Last century, English travellers suffered risks and provocation from highwaymen. But they enjoyed the privilege and satisfaction of being entitled to shoot the footpads who would rob them of their purses. The highwaymen are gone, but the lawyers remain—and we are not allowed to shoot them, more's the pity."
My father entertained a high opinion of Peter the Great. When asked his reason, he replied: "Peter came to London and saw Westminster Hall swarming with attorneys and barristers. 'In Russia,' said he, 'there are but two of these men, and on my return, it is my intent to hang them both.'
"There is one thing about lawyers," continued my father, "that I cannot understand. Go to a solicitor and ask the simplest question, and his reply will be, 'We must obtain a counsel's opinion.' Do not these attorneys know their proper business? I say to a mason, 'I want a course of bricks laid to raise my pigsties a few inches,' and he does not say, 'We must get the opinion of an architect before I touch a brick.' Do not these solicitors act the part of jackals to the barristers?"
