Having recently moved to Chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields (where the author Wilkie Collins began his short legal career and placed a number of his characters), I have been musing on connections between his description of legal practice and my own.
As a member of the family bar, I spend a significant amount of my time dealing with draft documents and agreeing/not agreeing their contents with "the other side". These days it is by e-mail. In the days of the events below, it was no doubt by messenger... Not that I have ever been quite as short and sharp as described here in Collins’s “The Woman in White”.
"The answer I wrote to this audacious proposal was as short and sharp as I could make it. "My dear sir. Miss Fairlie's settlement. I maintain the clause to which you object, exactly as it stands. Yours truly." The rejoinder came back in a quarter of an hour. "My dear sir. Miss Fairlie's settlement. I maintain the red ink to which you object, exactly as it stands. Yours truly.""
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