Author: Phillips, Charles
Biography:
PHILLIPS, Charles (1786/7?-1859: ODNB)
A showy London barrister for most of his career, he had earlier made a name for himself as an Irish poet between 1811 and 1819. (One significant poem, an elegy for Princess Charlotte published in Newcastle in 1817, is too short to be included in this bibliography.) His father was a publican and town councillor in Sligo, where Phillips was born; his mother was Elizabeth (Johnson) Phillips. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1806, he studied law at King's Inn, Dublin, and at the Middle Temple in London; he was called to the Irish bar in 1812. He cultivated his reputation as a fiery orator: in 1819, he edited a volume of Specimens of Irish Eloquence. John Philpot Curran (1750-1817) was a friend and mentor; Phillips's memoir of him, Recollections of Curran and some of his Contemporaries (1818), proved a work of lasting value. In 1819, after moving definitively to London, Phillips married Anne Whalley, with whom he had three children. He was called to the English bar in 1821. He went on to have marked success in criminal cases and to advise the Chancellor, Lord Brougham, on reforms to criminal law in the 1830s. Brougham made him a commissioner of the bankruptcy court in Liverpool in 1842, and in 1846 he became a commissioner of the insolvent debtors court in London. He died at his home in Gordon Square in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. (ODNB 23 June 2020; DIB; O'Donoghue)