Attorney as an Agent: Help or Hindrance?

The primary task of an eighteenth-century attorney (similar to today) was to serve as the client’s agent, authorized to act for, or in place of, the client himself. (Pound 1944, 316). A significant part of an attorney’s workload during this period involved the administration of landed property, including managing title deeds, transferring inherited property, and the drawing up of marriage settlements. The functions of an estate agent and legal adviser were thus not clearly separated. With so many hats, an attorney’s responsibilities and obligations were often indistinguishable, leading to many potential conflicts of interest. Wealthy clients, like the Earl of Squanderfield, moreover, would engage an attorney as an agent to perform functions that were irksome or too complicated and fell out of the ordinary attorney’s purview and/or skill. Attorneys in turn exploited the possibilities of being “indispensable,” or so they thought, diluting the integrity of the legal profession and even hindering the attorney’s primary responsibility to act as an agent on behalf of the client. (Robson 1959, 91).

Hogarth’s depiction of the Earl’s lawyer looking out the window reveals the indeterminate role of an attorney and the consequential harms to the profession. As he is not participating in the negotiations, the coif-wig and gown serve as the figure’s primary identifier as an attorney. The lawyer holds the Earl’s plan to rebuild a larger home (“A Plan of the New Building of the Right Honble”) while standing behind and to the right of his “master,” emphasizing this peculiar attorney-client relationship. Hogarth, moreover, has also depicted both the Earl and attorney with hatchet-profiles, confirming the connection between these two figures. An x-ray of the painting shows the attorney initially facing inwards instead of gazing out the window. Hogarth must have thought that it was more effective to depict the lawyer not as dutiful but neglectful and distracted. (Cowley 1983, 29). The attorney’s fingers on the plan are also spread in the shape of a coronet in a visual metaphor to confirm the identity of a “foolish but powerful man’s ‘creature’”. (Cowley 1977, 24). Hogarth’s depiction of the Earl’s attorney and his relationship with the Earl reveals the attorney’s position more as a servant than as an advisor. Such a subservient position, according to Hogarth’s depiction, questions the quality of legal “advice” the attorney ever provided to the Earl and represented a pattern across the broader legal profession.

Attorney Origins

Like his professional responsibilities, the scope of the social status and position of an attorney of this period is also difficult to decipher. Men from modest means generally became attorneys, as the profession recruited attorneys from clerks and not from younger sons of the nobility and gentry -- those with independent means. (Pound 1944, 317). Some viewed the legal profession as a social bridge to a better place in society. But others criticized the profession for this very reason, viewing the potential for social mobility as a threat to the hierarchical ordering of society. (Robson 1959, 58). The social origin and position of attorneys of this period, thus, served as another topic in the debates over reform.

Hogarth’s depiction of Silvertongue, the attorney standing next to the daughter, reflects this uneasiness and ambiguity surrounding the social status of attorneys. Scholars studying Marriage à la Mode have disagreed about the social status of Silvertongue. Some have argued that Silvertongue’s position in society as an attorney may have made him worthy of an alderman’s daughter. (Cowley 1983, 38). Others have countered that the typical attorney of this period did not have the necessary money or breeding, and thus the Alderman would never have consented to the marriage of his daughter to an attorney. (Egerton 1997, 17). The later interpretation is consistent with Hogarth’s assessment of Silvertongue’s social position. The character’s name derives from a lower-class proverb: “A man that hath no money in his purse must have silver in his tongue.” (Egerton 1997, 18). Without the prestige of wealthy background, the attorney must rely on the power of his own tongue to succeed in the seduction of the Alderman’s daughter. (Cowley 1977, 35). But the absence of additional visual cues together with the attorney’s behavior in the scene may have also served as Hogarth’s own commentary on the ambiguous, yet likely reduced, social position of attorneys at this time.

Poor education & moral character

Many of the issues with the legal profession can be attributed to eighteenth-century legal education, which was broad, utilitarian, and obscure. (Lemmings 1998, 212). Education typically involved an apprenticeship to a practitioner to learn the common forms of procedure. (Pound 1944, 319). Some attorneys, however, were not as scrupulous as they ought to have been in training their apprentices. (Robson 1959, 54). Sir William Blackstone, the English jurist (1723-1780) warned that poor education for attorneys would most likely result in a monopoly of illiterate lawyers. (Lemmings 1998, 250). Many commentators of the period noted that this absence of suitable instruction bred conceit and corruption that permeated the profession. In a contemporary novel, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) depicts the lawyer as the epitome of self- interest and merely the shadow of others.

Hogarth’s Silvertongue, likewise, exhibits an even lower moral character, imbued with shamelessness. Silvertongue’s over-familiarity during the tête-à-tête with the daughter questions the quality of counsel he may have given let alone the audacity of approaching a young woman on her day of betrothal. His facial features reveal what some have referred to as serpentine guile, tempting the daughter to immoral behavior that ultimately leads to her infidelity and even death. (Cowley 1977, 34). For Hogarth, Silvertongue simply represented the absence of ethics that plagued the legal profession due to the poor educational and moral framework on which the profession rested. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), the British novelist, wrote that the moral of Marriage à la Mode was “Don’t listen to evil silver-tongued counsellors”. For these commentators, the eighteenth-century attorney’s advice was worthless and even detrimental without the proper education and resultant moral character.

Attorney à la Mode

Hogarth’s The Marriage Settlement and Marriage à la Mode do not serve as enticing advertisements of the virtues of marriage or the legal profession. While Hogarth’s depiction of lawyers is not flattering to say the least, the paintings do not serve as exaggerated caricatures but sincere warnings about the current state of the legal profession and society as a whole. The presence of not one but two attorneys in this scene emphasizes the pervasiveness of the legal profession throughout domestic life in this period, despite the poor quality of advice originating from these “representatives” of the legal profession.

The story and aesthetics are not the only instructive features, however, of The Marriage Settlement. Hogarth capitalized on the extensive audience of his works and his skill as an artist to depict a narrative in which the viewers are participants, rendering the work as a call for the viewers to take a more active role in reform. The work acts as a piece of legislative propaganda depicting the evils of this particular profession. The Marriage Settlement, thus, serves as not only a window into a private scene but also an artifact of legal reform.

Bibliography

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—. 1983. Hogarth's Marriage A-La-Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Egerton, Judy. 1997. Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode. London: National Gallery Publications.

O'Connell, Shelia. 2003. Hogarth, William. Grove Art Online. Accessed October 9, 2018. http:////www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000038499.

Robson, Robert. 1959. The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Temple, Sir William. 1701. An Essay on Popular Discontents.

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Tate, 2019, Hogarth: Hogarth’s Modern Moral Series, Marriage A-La-Mode, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/hogarth/hogarth-hogarths-modern-moral-series/hogarth-hogarths-2.

Templin, Benjamin A., The Marriage Contract in Fine Art, 30 N. Ill. U. L. Rev. 45 (2009).