I. Introduction

Lord Nathaniel Lindley was of particular prominence during his career, which spanned the second half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, but he remains of relevance today. He is not an overlooked, underappreciated or an otherwise ‘marginalised’ legal actor.¹ Through his judicial role and his academic writing, Lindley had a clear hand in shaping doctrinal thought in private law. His name remains present on one of the leading texts in company law.² Lindley’s role in creating legal change is well recognized by the literature which surveys doctrines in this area of law.³ Despite his prominence, Lindley’s biography and his life remain relatively unknown.⁴ This article redresses the balance by focusing on Lindley’s early life and his professional career. In 1850, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, Lindley was called to the bar and by 1854, began practice as a barrister in the court of chancery. In 1875, he became a judge and by 1881, he was appointed to the court of appeal. There he was chosen to serve as master of the rolls. Almost nine years later, in 1900, Nathaniel Lindley became Lord Lindley and lord of appeal. He resigned from this post in 1905 and died in 1921.

How did Lindley reach this position in the upper echelons of the legal profession? This was after all an accomplishment that only a handful of others achieved. A set of answers to this question can be found in a memoir Lindley wrote prior to his death in 1921. The memoir is noted but little used in legal history.5 This is because the information contained in it is not easily digestible and the document is not widely available. It is ordered chronologically and consists of over 150 pages of handwritten script.⁶ When transcribed, the memoir contains about 50,000 words. A copy of the autobiography is located in Lincoln’s Inn, the inn from Lindley’s time at the bar, together with some other professional paraphernalia. A reading of this document sheds some much-needed light on Lindley’s personality and on the lives of those in the legal profession more generally.

In undertaking this task, this article critically examines Lindley’s autobiographical memoir. It considers whether self-told narratives and these kinds of private documents should be given prime status in legal and historical work, as is traditionally the case. Archival documents are, for most conducting legal and historical research, a treasured resource. They have a somewhat prized status. This is not only because of the rarity of documents in English legal history and the manuscript tradition,⁷ but also because materials which are held in archives are usually private records. They were written for private consumption and so authored in a way that was uninfluenced by worries about contemporary readership and the reaction of one’s peers. It follows that these documents can be used to create a reliable and honest account of an individual’s feelings about events, the circumstances in which they made decisions and ultimately, their choices.⁸ These are the sources which are traditionally used to construct life stories and legal biographies. This article, rather than extolling the value of these sources, raises some wider methodological issues. It questions the meaning of private or personal documents and challenges our understanding of the value of self-told narratives in legal and historical research.⁹

The article begins by explaining why Lindley decided to write a memoir and the natural biases that should be expected when reading this form of document. In his autobiography, Lindley attributes his success to three factors. The first is the role of family members in supporting his career and the influence of family members and their traditions in his professional development. The second is the relative ease in career progression. The third factor which helped Lindley to progress was his professional connections and friendships. Here, he presents himself as a lawyer’s lawyer and as a non-political actor. We deal with these claims in turn.

II. Motivations, Biases and Aims

What motivates a person to write their own biography or tell the story of their life? For the most part, biographies are written at the end of an era – whether that be a watershed moment, the end of a political era, or, indeed, a lifetime. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this general rule.¹⁰ Lindley’s autobiography, however, presents us with a typical example. He wrote his biography in a moment of political and national flux, which was at the tail end of his legal career. He wrote over the course of 1914, following the outbreak of the first world war. It is also clear that he updated this memoir at several points during the late 1910s.¹¹ The outbreak of the war and its end prompted reflection. Those writing and re-telling the narrative of the period and the story of the war sought to diagnose its cause. How had nations, politicians and diplomats come to engage in military activity that resulted in such a catastrophic loss of life? In asking such questions, they sought to understand who was to blame for the conflict and how it could be prevented from escalating and occurring again.¹² Lindley was, no doubt, influenced by the zeitgeist of the time. He too looked to the past as a way to understand how things had come to be in the present.

Lindley’s situation in 1914, when he began writing, was this: he had enjoyed a long and successful career as a lawyer and had reached the height of his profession. With failing physical and mental health, his legal career had now ended. He retired and looked to his children – and in particular, his third child, Jessie Louisa Lindley – to care for him.¹³ It was primarily for this audience, namely his descendants, that he allegedly wrote his memoir. Lindley made this clear in a passage, which explained how he learned first to behave like a judge:

Lindley professed the readership for this document was his family rather than his professional colleagues. This is doubtful. For a memoir that was written primarily for family members, there is scant detail on his family, his parents or the early life of his own children, which they might not remember and would probably be interested in. This is especially true given that his family was spread disparately across the British empire. There are other sections and notes which suggest that he believed that those in the legal profession might also eventually read his memoir. As the rest of this article will show, he identified with his professional persona most of all and wrote of little else aside from his career in this document.

In contrast to his thoughts about judicial etiquette, which Lindley did not wish to discuss in depth, one of the explanations that he expanded upon in some detail was how his career had come to a close. His career, the start, the middle and the end, were all at the focus of his autobiography. Lindley described his physical and mental deterioration which brought about an end to his career. He suffered mental and physical ailments that curtailed his ability to function in a courtroom. Lindley explained that:

Over the course of the next decade, Lindley took up other roles. None were as prestigious as his role in the house of lords but his health declined sharply in 1914. He remained active in the local community which surrounded his home in Norwich. After he left judicial office, he joined the Swainsthorpe bench of justices and offered justices of the peace advice on judging.¹⁶ In this capacity, he was still able to impart knowledge that he had accumulated in his vast legal career, although he had no real influence over the making of the law. By 1914, Lindley could not act even in this role any longer. He explained that ‘[o]n the 5th August [1914] I sat on the Bench at Swainsthorpe for the first time since I lost the use of my right eye a year ago and I practically resigned my post of chairman’.¹⁷ He left purely for health reasons. It was job that he enjoyed. He stated that ‘I found my impaired sight and increasing deafness and failing memory prevented me from attending properly to my work in the chair’.

III. Early Life, Background and Family

Comparatively little was said in Lindley’s memoir about his family, his siblings, and his children.¹⁹ He wrote in his memoir that he had a good relationship with his family. He believed that his parents and his early childhood influenced his career trajectory. This was most apparent in his explanations of how he managed to flourish at the bar and in the first part of his career. He said:

Lindley’s relationship with his father was, he thought, instructive. His father was not a judge or politician – John Lindley FRS (1799–1865) was a professor of botany at University College London. These notes perhaps give us some insight into what Lindley believed were his father’s personality traits and the level of time and attention which his father had for Lindley while growing up. Lindley attributed his ‘power of close attention’, the ‘importance [he] attached to method, zeal and perseverance’ and his determination to make full use of his own ‘moderate ability’, to his father’s training.²¹ Lindley’s mother was not, in his view, influential in terms of developing his character to foster a set of professional skills or in setting out his career path. Nevertheless, his mother, Sarah Freestone (1791–1869), was an equally important force in his life. Lindley believed that his mother played a role behind the scenes in assisting the work of John Lindley, her husband and his father. The relationship between his mother and father was a supportive one as Lindley believed that his mother ‘did a great deal for my Father; especially in the way of covering the microscopical slides with paper and of mounting his dried specimens on large sheets of paper and relieving him from all household troubles’.²² This is the same role that Lindley saw his wife, Sarah Katherine Teale (1831–1912), as fulfilling. He explained that as a child, his personal relationship with his mother was stronger than his relationship with his father. He remarked ‘[w]hen we were children we were rather afraid of my father who at times was irritable and rough, and we used to go to my mother for comfort. She was a dear loving woman active and alert’.²³ It is noticeable that Lindley said much about his mother’s nurturing and his father’s professional persona, and in particular, the lessons which he taught him and proved to be later in his professional life.

Lindley did not believe that women should have equal political or professional status with men; he was not sympathetic to the suffragette movement, for example. Given the views that Lindley presented here in his memoir about his life and his influences, this point about his political views may be unsurprising. His ideals about gender roles were outlined more clearly in some private correspondence. He explained in 1910 that ‘I do not believe in “votes for women”; and I feel pretty confident that the country as a whole is against them’.²⁴ After the women’s suffrage bill in 1913 was rejected, he remarked, again in a letter, ‘the nation is getting angry with the militant suffragettes and I hope that the government will put them down without any squeamishness now’.²⁵ Lindley believed in strict division between the private and public sphere; the function of women therein was to assist in domestic life. The autobiography of Lindley’s son, Francis Oswald, confirms this. He noted that ‘[m]y father, … always encouraged and expected his sons to take a serious view of their professions’.²⁶ Lindley did not see the role of women in the domestic sphere as a lesser purpose but a different and complementary position. He wrote in another letter that ‘I always think that wives’ work is hard and sometimes harder for their living than their husbands’ and [they] get less real relaxation’.²⁷

Lindley was born as the second male child. He had an elder brother, George, who died of scarlet fever in 1831 when Lindley was three years old. Lindley was one of three surviving children; he was the middle child and between two sisters, Sarah and Barbara. Expectations for him – as the only surviving male – were no doubt high. His eldest sister Sarah married Sir Henry Pering Pellew Crease in 1852. He noted that ‘[i]n the Autumn of 1859 we went to Worthing; and my sister Mrs (Sarah) Crease and her 3 children left England for British Columbia and I have not seen her since’.²⁸ Sarah Crease’s diaries tell us more of her brother ‘Natty’s’ upbringing and his relationship to the Crease family than the single glib line which appeared in Lindley’s memoir. Lindley also managed the trust that was put together for Sarah; he invested it and returned the profits to Sarah, whom he called Totty, every six months. Away from England, the Crease family struggled financially and were in need of liquid capital.²⁹ From the Crease collection of diaries and letters, we see the family ties and responsibilities which were hidden and obscured in the memoir. Debts and financial difficulty were concealed and not matters for public discussion. Even the type of money – bank notes and paper money or bills and letters of credit – a person held was seen as a marker of wealth.³⁰ Share ownership in a bank would provide access to credit.³¹ Where there was open discussion of indebtedness among those with a high social standing, it was usually due to legal proceedings and Margot Finn shows that individuals attempted to recast explanations in order to uphold notions of moral character.³² Sarah Wilson has argued that status and these aspersions of bad and good character influenced the understandings of fraud and financial crime.³³ Debts, financial struggles and maintaining perceptions of affluence were not the only matter that Lindley revealed only in his private letters.

Religious beliefs were not expounded upon in the memoir either but these views were plainly articulated in personal correspondence. Sarah Crease’s letters note that her father was a member of the Church of England but chose science over religion. Sarah, on the other hand, did not. She wrote to her father on his death bed to urge him to have greater faith.³⁴ She held views on religion that her biographer, Kathryn Bridge, describes as typical of the time and place in which she lived.³⁵ Lindley’s younger sister, Barbara, presumably had also felt a strong connection to the Church of England as she married Reverend Edmund Thompson in 1867.³⁶ Lindley’s views on religion were discussed in the memoir but the pages are missing; his views can be found in other sources. Lindley, like his father, was not an overtly religious individual. He debated the importance of holding religious beliefs and even challenged the views of Sarah, his eldest sister, in the later decades of his life.³⁷ This said, Lindley was not an atheist nor was he agnostic.

Lindley was a member of a community in England which was bound by kinship ties that were based upon religious affiliation. He wrote to his sister Sarah about his new daughter-in-law. He explained that she ‘is a tall, bright, intelligent, affectionate, simple lady … we are all very pleased with her. I wish she was not a Roman Catholic, that is her only drawback’.³⁸ Lindley also said shortly after the coronation of George V that ‘the public want the assurances of the King that he is not and will not be a Roman Catholic’,³⁹ because George had objected to some religious wording in the accession declaration.⁴⁰ It is evident that Lindley was not blind to religion as a marker of socialisation. Religion was not only a set of beliefs but as Searle notes, part of the ‘[d]istinctions in wealth and social order’.⁴¹ Lindley’s memorial service was held at Temple Church in London, the church of Inner and Middle Temple. It had religious iconography and a musical theme that was part of a traditional Anglican funeral service.⁴²

Lindley’s relationships with his siblings – and his eldest sibling in particular – were far more important and instructive in building his personality than he gave credit to in his memoirs. While noting the importance of his father in his life, it is interesting that Lindley spoke little of his own role in the home as a father or his own children.⁴³ Lindley disclosed nothing about how he shaped the lives of his children – and in return the impact that they had upon his life. His children did have a close relationship with him.⁴⁴ One nephew (Arthur Crease) in British Columbia proposed Lindley as a godfather to his son but Lindley declined owing to the distance between them.⁴⁵ One of Lindley’s sons, Walter, followed in his footsteps and edited the fifth to the eighth editions of Lindley’s treatise on the law of partnership, and became a judge in the lower courts in England.⁴⁶ He had doubts that another of his sons would work hard enough to make it as a barrister and instead intended for him to go to Sandhurst.⁴⁷ None of Lindley’s children were discussed in detail in the memoir except for his daughter Mary.

Although it is not made explicitly clear here, it is likely that Mary committed suicide.⁴⁹ Some in Victorian Britain saw this as murder and a crime against God, while others took a more secular view of it and saw it as rational choice.⁵⁰ Lindley presumably fell somewhere in the middle. The dates, which Lindley gave here in his memoir, were also likely to be incorrect. He wrote to his sister Sarah in 1896 to note Mary’s illness. It was worded in a similarly vague manner.⁵¹ This limited emotional expression was characteristic of maleness in Victorian Britain. John Tosh explains that ‘[s]ilent, reserved and unshaken by waves of emotion … represented the most extreme form of manliness as self-control. The stiff upper lip held out the hope of an unequivocal masculinity’.⁵² Lindley did not write again to his sister upon Mary’s death, perhaps fearing Sarah’s rebuke or her censure. Fitting with Tosh’s assessment of Victorian masculinity, in Lindley’s memoir, it was his wife who experienced the intense emotional turmoil after their daughter’s death rather than himself. He continued later to say that:

Almost two or three years had elapsed since Mary’s death. Yet, his wife’s vacation, and this incident which precipitated it, was obviously still of some note in Lindley’s mind two decades later when he wrote his memoir. The death of one of his sons, Percy Hooker, on the other hand, was not discussed in the memoir.⁵⁴ Lindley appeared to have had a close personal relationship with his daughters especially. He would take them on circuit with him even though this was against the informal rules.⁵⁵

In summary, the nexus of relationships in Lindley’s own private and family life were obscured in his autobiography. It is evident that he had a close and influential relationship with some of his children and family members but they were not discussed here. Rather, he focused upon his childhood and identified his father as a scientist but little more was said about influential characters. The discussion of the women in his life was somewhat muted by comparison. His wife, mother and sister held, in Lindley’s view, caring or nurturing roles, which did not seem to have a direct link to his personality nor his professional skills. He supported them financially and they alleviated his domestic capabilities in his view. His family members also provided companionship and preferred their company to that of the barristers and judges who were also on circuit. Lindley’s memoir, therefore, does not tell us about ‘firsts’,⁵⁶ but it does tell us about gender roles and norms in Victorian society. It fits in with what was typical in terms of the expectations of behaviour and norms of the time. Those in the judiciary were not pioneering ideas of equality and sameness. To shed light on private lives, personal correspondence provides a fuller insight into these relationships. We now turn to discuss the early part of Lindley’s judicial career.

IV. Making the Transition from Barrister to Judge

Lindley’s memoir makes some understated points about the difficulty he found in making the transition from barrister to judge. In the early years of his legal career, he worked as a chancery barrister. Here, he argued a number of important cases and was well versed in the equitable doctrines, which were used in this court. Like most legal practitioners, he specialized in one area of law. Yet, as the doctrines of common law and equity were split and the procedure separated by the court structure in the English legal system, Lindley had experience of one of the two halves of the legal system. He wrote an influential treatise on the Law of Partnership in 1860 and this cemented his place as one of the leading lights on the equity side. Company law at this stage in history tended to be argued in the equity courts and the law of trusts was pertinent to complaints.⁵⁷ The Law of Partnership became the prime work in its field, displacing the rival texts of Bisset,⁵⁸ Gow,⁵⁹ Collyer,⁶⁰ Watson,⁶¹ and Wordsworth.⁶²

When it came to his judicial appointment to the house of lords, Lindley considered it was not down to his friends but rather his expertise, specialism and career at the chancery bar. When the Judicature Acts 1873–1875 came into effect, the two streams of law and equity would be fused and otherwise change the way doctrines were applied.⁶³ Lindley wrote that: ‘I can only suppose that a Chancery man was wanted to help the judge in the Common Pleas to do the work to which they were unaccustomed but which they would have to do when the new act came into force’.⁶⁴ Lindley’s specialism was, he believed, one of the reasons for his appointment – but it was not without issue. As well as the substantive law, the procedure also differed in the court of equity when compared to the courts of common law.

The legal scenery, however, changed considerably when Lindley was appointed as a judge. Receiving an initial appointment as a judge was an important step in a lawyer’s career – but it was not a transition that all made. Indeed, even Lindley considered not becoming a judge because he earned more as a well-respected barrister.⁶⁵ Lindley noted the difficulty of making the leap from barrister to judge in his memoir. When he worked as a judge, he had to know something of common law and criminal law in addition to the law of equity and trusts, which he knew well. He explained:

Lindley’s memoirs allude to the deficit of legal knowledge, which was caused by his specialism and training at the chancery bar.⁶⁷ Yet, the problems were more pronounced than described here. The difficulties in moving from a court of equity to the common law courts were not only gaps in learning which could be filled by further legal research. He struggled to manage the courtroom. In his memoir, he revealed that he prepared well but this did not tend to his nerves:

The struggles of moving from arguing a case as a barrister to becoming a judge weighed heavily on Lindley’s mind.

The court of chancery operated more through written pleadings than oral proceedings.⁶⁹ Cases were overseen by one judge – the chancellor, vice-chancellor or a master.⁷⁰ There was no jury, unlike in the courts of law at that time.⁷¹ The jury was a new hurdle. Lindley revealed in his memoir that when he was a judge, ‘I also felt the want of experience in dealing with juries and the difficulty of assuming that facts which I regarded as too clear to require comment ought often to be left to them in my summing up’.⁷² Lindley’s private views are recorded in greater detail in his judicial notebooks. He found allowing the jury to decide the verdict and then determining the sentence himself to be a difficult task. For most offences, with the exception of murder, there was a wide range of sentences which might be used. After the accused was convicted, Lindley’s trial notebooks show that in his own mind, he wrestled with himself and could not easily determine a correct length of imprisonment. In one instance, he crossed out the number of years to be sentenced – a total of four times until he settled on fifteen.⁷³ As his notebooks show, this task became easier as time went on. In his later notebooks, he ceased second guessing himself and questioning his opinion on the correct length of sentence.

Lindley also struggled to learn how to control a jury – he found them unpredictable. They often in his opinion returned the ‘wrong’ verdict. He made entries in his notebooks when he thought the jury did not find the correct verdict – usually in murder trials.⁷⁴ On one occasion, he even told the jury to go back into the jury room to come up with another decision. In one case where three were accused of murder, William Tidbury was found to be guilty – but of being an accessory after the fact. In the course of two hours of summing up,⁷⁵ according to the newspaper report, Lindley had given the jury what he thought were clear instructions: if ‘no evidence was offered there must be a verdict of “Not Guilty”’.⁷⁶ Lindley said that finding Tidbury guilty of being an accessory after the fact was:

Lindley dismissed the jury’s verdict and interpreted the evidence in the way he perceived to be correct.

Judges in these situations advised on questions of law, while the jury decided matter of fact.⁷⁸ The legal problem here was this – an accessory could only be convicted of a crime of which the principal party must be acquitted but only in limited circumstances.⁷⁹ As none of those circumstances applied to the two acquitted defendants, the secondary party, Tidbury, could not be convicted of being an accessory to an offence the primary parties are found not to have committed, unless the offence be first proved in respect of a different primary party. The jury should have – if they followed Lindley’s instructions – returned a verdict of not guilty and released Tidbury.

Lindley seemed to find the role of the judge and the task of managing the courtroom was less troubled as the years progressed. Yet, he did not learn to enjoy his experiences in criminal courts. He wrote in a letter to Henry Crease, his brother in law and fellow lawyer,⁸⁰ in 1882 that ‘[m]y circuit only finished last Saturday; the work at Bristol was hard and I am right glad of a holiday’.⁸¹ A year later in 1883, he had not changed his mind about disliking the assizes. Lindley explained again to Crease that ‘I have not to go on circuit until July. We are looking forward to a longer spell of quiet at home than usual’.⁸² By this point, Lindley had been judging for seven or eight years. He had been in the court of appeal since 1881. This initial feeling of uncertainty and dislike persisted. These were no longer the thoughts of a novice learning his trade but of an experienced judge who maintained a sincere dislike for moving outside of his specialism in private law and administering criminal justice and travelling around the provincial courts in his judicial career.

V. Connections, Networks and Friendships

Connections, networks and friends were no doubt important in Lindley’s rise to the top of the legal profession. The extent to which they influenced his career is difficult to unpick from reading his autobiography. He named those in the legal profession to whom he felt he owed a debt of gratitude and had benefitted from their guidance. When it came to his move from the high court of justice to the court of appeal,⁸³ he identified his mentors and patrons clearly. In explaining how – or why – he was appointed to the court of appeal in 1881, he said: ‘I was extremely pleased by this promotion and I do not know what brought it about. I never sought it; but judging from Mr Gladstone’s letter I think I owe it to Lord Coleridge’s good opinion of me confirmed by Lord Selborne’.⁸⁴

Lord Selborne, Roundell Palmer (1812–1895) was lord chancellor and responsible for appointing judges. Unlike Lindley who was deeply private, Lord Selborne did not confine his faith, his thoughts and interpersonal relationships to the private sphere.⁸⁵ Lindley developed a strong relationship with Selborne. Lindley explained that ‘Lord Selborne was always most kind to me and was truly a great friend and good man. He was naturally a shy and unobtrusive man and that made him less popular with strangers than he otherwise would have been’.⁸⁶

Lindley had made a number of other close connections and strong friendships over the years. He was part of an exclusive group of lawyers as he explained in his memoir:

This information helps us to understand how and why Lindley was promoted. It is difficult to imagine that he got on with every single lawyer in his peer group but the insights provided here reveal the way that the bar and legal profession functioned at the time. As Abel states, the ‘behaviour [of barristers] was governed by implicit understandings reinforced by informal sanctions’.⁸⁸ Individuals conformed and integrated within the legal community. The bar and profession were proudly self-regulating,⁸⁹ and Lindley especially so. He pushed for changes ‘without any Government assistance at all’.⁹⁰

Lindley had what are now famed disagreements with fellow judges when deciding cases.⁹¹ Perhaps those in the judiciary did not allow dissent to move beyond the case itself or ego to creep into an intellectual discussion. It is also likely that Lindley did not see his autobiography as a vehicle through which he would settle scores or provide honest assessments of his contemporaries. This contention is supported by his remarks about going on circuit. While we know that Lindley was generally unhappy working in a criminal court and being away from his family,⁹² he parcels up this experience with others in a positive manner. He said that ‘[h]owever I learned much on circuit. I saw many places of great interest, and was most kindly received by everyone with whom I came in contact, and had many invitations from country gentlemen which I accepted and greatly enjoyed’.⁹³ He was similarly pleased with the help of one of his marshals, who assisted him on circuit, and remarked on their supportive performance:

Lindley again noted the admiration that he had for those in the legal profession. It is perhaps unreasonable to appear to be cynical of his expressions of gratitude. Indeed, he – at this point in his career – had little to be disgruntled or complain about. His colleagues had not treated him poorly – his career had gone well. He had reached the highest point that a lawyer could achieve. It is likely that he had few regrets and in these circumstances, he felt it was churlish to complain. Yet, during his career, when his personal success was less certain, Lindley was more honest about his personal relationships and forthcoming about those which he enjoyed less. His letters to his sister were detailed in this respect and it was in these documents he commented on those colleagues he found less likable. He proceeded to note one unnamed pupil whom he did not enjoy training.⁹⁵ Lindley had several pupils who became established lawyers in their own right. Frederick Pollock, for example, was one of his.⁹⁶

A theme that recurs more evidently in the document is the improvements and developments within the legal academy and the profession itself. This is the historical context which Lindley places his narrative within. He was a firm part of efforts to improve the resources, which were available to members of the legal profession, in the nineteenth century.⁹⁷ Indeed, he was keen to place himself within these internal shifts, notably the scientification of law. He discussed his thoughts on law in the German-speaking world and the translation of Thibaut’s text.⁹⁸ These German jurists were well known for conceiving of law as a science.⁹⁹ This was not Lindley’s only link to science. His father was a scientist.¹⁰⁰ It was particularly common at this point in the nineteenth century to see law as a science, and this was the way that Lindley portrayed himself.¹⁰¹ Law was thought to be an objective subject. In doing so, this delineated law from the humanities – it was not subjective nor concerned with ideological questions. This premise would be so later in the early twentieth century with the advent of legal realism and again in the second half of the twentieth century critical legal studies movement in the United States and the growth of socio-legal scholarship in United Kingdom.¹⁰² Lindley was far keener to discuss his professional associations with lawyers and less so his personal relationships with those in science or politics.

By convention, the law lords were not to speak in the house of lords (the legislative chamber), although as Patrick O’Brien’s empirical study shows this convention was ignored by some outspoken and vocal characters.¹⁰³ Indeed, Lindley did not think he was an active legislator in the house of lords. He explained that he spoke seldom:

Despite presenting an appearance in his autobiography as an apolitical actor, Lindley did indeed have political views and political connections. He thought of himself as a liberal who had shifted his allegiances later in life. He wrote at the rear of his notebook ‘[l]ittle wonder if I am a disgusted Liberal. So much for my politics’.¹⁰⁵ This was how he thought of himself but the political shifts in the latter part of his life were seismic. In the 1890s, the issue of Irish home rule divided those in the liberal party.¹⁰⁶ Those who no longer agreed with Gladstone’s leadership, liberal party policy and Irish home rule formed the liberal unionists; they later joined with the conservatives in the 1895 election. Sir William Cameron Gull, the son-in-law who helped to edit the fifth edition of Lindley’s treatise,¹⁰⁷ was a member of parliament for the liberal unionist party as well as a barrister and justice of the peace.¹⁰⁸ The beginnings of the labour party in 1900 as a working class and trade unionist movement further blurred the lines between the liberals and the conservatives.¹⁰⁹ There was a formal union of the conservative and liberal unionist parties in 1912.

Lindley’s politics may not have been inconsequential; they seemed to correlate with the timings of his promotions in the judiciary. When he was appointed to the court of appeal in 1881, it was under Gladstone’s liberal government. Lindley was aware of the importance of political affiliation. He wrote in 1890 in a letter to his brother-in-law, Henry Crease, who was by this point judge in the supreme court of British Columbia and close to retirement,¹¹⁰ that ‘[w]e have had many changes amongst the judges lately and I cannot say much for the new appointments. The present Chancellor is too much influenced by political partisanship and predisposed to be a good dispenser of important patronage’.¹¹¹ The lord chancellor in 1890 was Hardinge Giffard, Lord Halsbury – a member of the conservative party. Lindley was not the only one to make this observation about Halsbury’s appointments. Lord Halsbury was lord chancellor again in 1900, when Lindley was appointed to the house of lords. Halsbury was part of a conservative-liberal unionist coalition government. Lindley was appointed in a time where political affixation was important in the judicial appointment procedure, although, this, of course, did not detract from his legal abilities. Lindley instead preferred to focus upon his legal achievements. He did not discuss the developing political context in England or his own political views as he narrated his own life. These friendships, ties and his familial links to politics were left out of his autobiography. This aspect of his life was revealed through his personal correspondence.

VI. Conclusion

Overall, this article has argued that legal autobiographies and memoirs should be used critically and their contents treated with caution. This observation might well be expected. It essentially suggests that there are differences in opinion about the pushes and pulls in the legal profession and causes of an individual’s success. Indeed, where there are several biographies of an individual, biographers adopt different and diverging views about an individual’s life. As the title of this article suggests, the autobiography, the life itself, and the legal biography are three – if not more – distinct and separate entities. It is natural that in writing about an individual’s life there are a variety of narratives and differences in interpretation. Despite the disagreements and departures in analytical reasoning which are inherent in narrating the trajectory of a person’s life and their career, this article adds to the methodological considerations in legal biographical writing. It has shown that one way forward is to triangulate these sources with other primary and secondary sources to verify and challenge some of the propositions commonly contained in judges’ memoirs and self-told narratives.

Lindley’s attempt to create a judicial persona through his memoirs has been successful: his view was persuasive. It has made considerable inroads into the works which are written about him. Lindley’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was written in 2004 by Gareth Jones and Vivienne Jones,¹¹² who said that Lindley was ‘[s]ound and careful, impeccably impartial, he was the lawyer’s lawyer, devoted to the law, never tempted by political ambition, and never the creature of any politician or party’.¹¹³ Gareth and Vivienne Jones thought of Lindley as far removed from party politics and the events in the period in which he lived. His life was far richer than this; his network of friends, his mentors, his influences and his life extended far beyond those individuals who inhabited the courtrooms in England and the then British empire.

Through his memoir, Lindley presented himself and his life in a certain manner. He viewed his legal work as being akin to science – his ideas were thus presented as objective and apolitical. It is perhaps the nature of a professional biography to place the subject within the narrative and the network of that profession rather than that of their family or other surroundings. Here, Lindley was keen to portray himself as being embedded within the community of lawyers; he avoided appearing partisan, individualistic or outspoken. Such admissions of his ideology would shatter perceptions of Lindley as an independent and accomplished judge who acted without preconceived views and a set of experiences. By avoiding open discussion of his politics or his religious views, Lindley did not engage in a battle of beliefs and rather appeared as a model for judicial independence.¹¹⁴ He did, however, hold these views and possess strong convictions. These opinions were articulated clearly in private correspondence.

Lindley’s career and his climb to the top of the profession was not a smooth evolutionary process. It was full of peaks and troughs; there were various moments of pressure and insecurity in his personal and professional life. These details were not dissected nor addressed in his memoir. This may be perhaps simply due to the passage of time and the nature of memory: it is difficult to remember the exact feeling one experienced half a century ago. Sources, such as letters or notebooks, which were written at those particular moments recollect precise details about cases and events as they happened. This omission may also have less to do with memory and more, again, to do with the nature of the legal profession and the judiciary itself. If Lindley would have presented himself as he felt – uncertain, hesitant and full of doubt – it would have done little to instil confidence in his lawmaking. For those who were convicted by him or were subject to his judicial scrutiny, admissions of self-doubt may have fuelled complaints and undermined perceptions of justice. Lindley only recalled individual decisions with an air of confidence and certainty, while privately acknowledging his hesitancy.

For judges, like Lindley, who hid their views and connections, considerable work needs to be undertaken to uncover their early life, places of socialisation and private life. Charlotte Smith argues that undertaking biographical work such as this is important, as judicial decisions cannot be considered in an abstract way or removed from their historical setting; they are ‘a powerful reminder of the inescapability of a case’s context, and of the social and religious mores at play’.¹¹⁵ Indeed, as Paul Mitchell says, these studies tell us about legal change and show how doctrinal shifts occurred, it ‘requires an understanding of the context in which the idea emerged and flourished’.¹¹⁶ As judges, lawyers, and legal writers gave rise to new law and legal meanings, the contextual framework which shaped their decision – in other words, the social, political and religious mores of those particular legal actors – cannot be readily ignored.