Titled 'Chambers' in collected editions of the series
Dickens's interest in London's Inns of Court goes back to his vivid experiences of renting chambers and entertaining friends there in the early 1830s. From May 1827 to November 1828, he had worked in Gray's Inn as a clerk in Edward Blackmore's attorney's office, and then from December 1834 to March 1837 he was in chambers at 13 and 15 Furnival's Inn where latterly he lived with his new wife, first child, and sister-in-law Mary Hogarth as semi-permanent guest (see Vol. 1 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], pp. xxxii-xxxiii). Some of Dickens's earliest fiction tells of tenants in similar circumstances to himself, professional visits to lawyers in chambers (see Vol. 1 of [the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism], 'The Steam Excursion', p. 369; Pickwick Papers, Ch. 31), or 'queer' stories relating to them (see Jack Bamber's tales, ibid., Ch. 21). Writing to Forster in 1839 with 'rough notes of proposals for the New Work' to be undertaken with Chapman & Hall for Master Humphrey's Clock, Dickens commented that 'the Chapters on Chambers which I have long thought and spoken of, might be very well incorporated with it' (Pilgrim, Vol. I [14 July 1839], p. 564). Although these were never published, the idea mooted in 1839 seems eventually to find an outlet in the present item.
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