<i>Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940</i> by Ren Pepitone

Examining a century’s worth of societal evolution in Britain through the conservative, intensely masculine, and intensely white Inns of Court, Pepitone has produced a gripping analysis of how elite institutions navigated social change and threats to their power and status in society. Although this book is at its core a legal and gender history, it offers valuable insights for historians of urbanism, Britain, its empire, imperialism, anticolonialism, and women’s and feminist histories. As a legal history, the book diverges from previous interventions by insisting on the “centrality of gender as an analytic category” (6). The English bar was an exclusively male preserve for over 500 years, and Pepitone demonstrates that the homosocial culture of the inns, and the fraternity that they cultivated among their members, is instrumental in understanding the values of Victorian legal professionals. The book effectively argues for making masculinity an “essential category of analysis” to understand elite institutions broadly (3).Through its choice of methods and subjects, however, the book is not limited to the categories of social, legal, or gender history. Not only does it deftly traverse those disciplines, but the book’s structure also offers insights into the histories of urbanism, class, race, imperialism, and feminism. The first chapter establishes the homosocial, masculine, and conservative culture of the Inns of Court, demonstrating how the institutions relied on their claim to ancient traditions and historic legacy to embed themselves in Victorian imaginations. As the identity of Britishness coalesced around ideas of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy, the Inns of Court and the barristers that they produced reified them, reproducing and strengthening the rhetoric and logic of white masculinity as central to Victorian self-identification.Each subsequent chapter traces how, over the course of the nineteenth century, the conservative, white, masculine character of the Inns was intruded upon, creating anxiety and resistance within the institutions as they were inevitably forced to confront change. The chapters examine how the very geography of London intruded upon the Inns’ ancient and idyllic setting as the city expanded and grew denser. The impact of the rising middle class of Victorian Britain on the profession illustrates how the ideals of gentlemanliness, on which the fraternal rituals of the Inns were founded, were in flux as British society underwent rapid evolution. The Inns faced the pressures of nationalism, Liberalism, and the looming threat of impositions from new political factions in Parliament. Late in the century, the imperial dimension became more pronounced with the arrival of Indian students to the Inns. As the narrative turns to the twentieth century and the dislocations of global conflict, women also entered the Inns; Pepitone’s focus on Helena Normanton, a white woman, and Cornelia Sorabji, an Indian woman, produces a particularly rich discussion on the complex intersections of patriarchal and racist structures during this period.This pattern of intrusions upon the Inns enables the book to explore concisely the dynamics of change over time, while also demonstrating how some intrusions provoked far greater anxieties than others. Pepitone shows that concern over the radicalism of Indian nationalists, racial paranoias of being overrun by foreigners, and parochial hostility to female colleagues ran much deeper than the threats to the gentlemanliness of barristers that had been posed by the commercial growth of London or the sexual impropriety of its members as the admixture of classes grew more intense. Foreigners were perceived as posing a greater challenge than women to the heterogeneity of the Inns’ white male homosocial culture and were therefore regarded as more profound threats to the very identity of the legal profession.As a social and legal history of British barristers and the institutions that they inhabited, this book in many ways feels like a neat spiritual successor to Lemmings’ Professors of the Law.1 Yet the book also vastly complicates existing conversations in the field by not only providing a much-needed injection of gender history into the mix, but also by drawing on perspectives from geographers, urban and art histories, and Black, queer, and feminist histories. Pepitone lays out a story not of decline, but of the adaptability of conservative and powerful institutions at the apex of society whose “longevity depended on the gendered, classed, and racialized underpinnings of institutional power” (18).