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Author: James, Edwin John

Biography:

JAMES, John Edwin (1811-1882: ODNB)

He was a rude, scandalous, and striving character who “stood at the fringes of professional class respectability” (Pue). The author was born on 20 Nov. 1811, the eldest son of solicitor and secondary at the City of London John James and his wife, Hester Combe. (He habitually went by his second name, Edwin.) An early foray into acting ended in failure. He then gained admission to the Inner Temple, May 1832, and was called to the bar on 29 Jan. 1836. As a barrister, he gained notoriety as “a leader in all actions for seduction, breach of promise of marriage, assault, and false imprisonment, and in all cases that involved the reputation of an actress or a horse” (Spectator). Regardless, he was gazetted Queen’s Council, was elected recorder of Brighton, and Member of Parliament for Marylebone (1859-1861). He was about to take up his appointment as Attorney-General when his career in England ended abruptly in ignominy. Despite his extraordinary annual income, about £7,000 by the late 1850s, he had run up debts in excess of £100,000. Those debts and an instance of unprofessional conduct led to his disbarment on 18 July 1861, nine days after his marriage to Marianne Hillard (divorced 1863). He then fled with his wife to New York. In America, he trumpeted his disbarment as no fault of his own. It was caused by “political jealousy and professional rivalry.” Lack of precedent in his disbarment and disdain of his radical politics favour his theory. In 1868, the same year in which he married divorcée Eliza Wilson (1825-1902), he gained United States citizenship. He returned to England in 1872, to London, where he died on 4 Mar. 1882 at his residence, 11 Bayley Street, Bedford Square. Dickens’s character Stryver in A Tale of Two Cities, “stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy,” probably was based on him. (ODNB 1 Nov. 2023; ancestry.com 1 Nov. 1823; “The Fall of Mr. Edwin James,” Saturday Review [13 Apr. 1861], 358-59; “The Career of a Q.C.,” Spectator [8 Feb. 1862], 150-51; W. W. Pue, “Moral Panic at the English Bar: Paternal vs. Commercial Ideologies of Legal Practice in the 1860s.” Law and Social Inquiry 15:1 [1990], 49-118) JC

 

Books written (1):