Mr Chaffanbrass for the Defence: Trollope and the Old Bailey Tradition

Abstract

Mr Chaffanbrass, Trollope’s most famous barrister, is identified with the Old Bailey, the very ‘cock of this dunghill’. He is, says Trollope:

a little man, and a very dirty little man. He has all manner of nasty tricks about him, which make him a disagreeable neighbour to barristers sitting near to him. He is profuse with snuff, and very generous with his handkerchief. He is always at work upon his teeth, which do not do much credit to his industry. His wig is never at ease upon his head, but is poked about by him, sometimes over one ear, sometimes over the other, now on the back of his head, and then on his nose; and it is impossible to say in which guise he looks most cruel, most sharp, and most intolerable. His linen is never clean, his hands never washed, and his clothes apparently never new. (TC, 482)

Adding a gratuitous racial slur, Trollope says Chaffanbrass looks more like ‘a dirty old Jew’ (OF, ii 129) than the solicitor he is untroubled to associate with, Mr Solomon Aram. Felix Graham, the fastidious young barrister of Orley Farm, is horrified at the prospect of assisting Chaffanbrass, ‘as though he had been asked to league himself with all that was most disgraceful in the profession; — as indeed perhaps he had been’ (ii, 73).