Barristers are in courts, solicitors are behind the scenes.
To amplify a bit: you might have a family solicitor to handle all your legal needs such as wills, deeds of sale, filing a suit at law, etc. But if you ever had to go to court for anything serious, your solicitor would engage the services of a barrister, who would be your mouthpiece in court. They would work together, but the solicitor would sit silently (if he was there) and maybe pass notes, but the barrister would be hired for his ability to present the best oral case for your side. The solicitor would probably have the better understanding of fine points of law (although not always - see Rumpole of the Bailey) while the barrister would have the knack of persuasion, especially juries. It’s the barrister who wears the gown and wig.
In the US, of course, some attorneys specialize in trials, but (at least in a small office) they will probably also do their own legal research. In movies (Anatomy of a Murder, The Verdict) even a small-time lawyer will have a brilliant but washed-up sidekick to do legal research. So the specialties might exist, but the title is the same (lawyer or attorney).
Roddy
Thanks!
And I got it, I did say Don Miguel didn’t remember 
My understanding of barristers and solicitors was that originally it was a polite fiction to allow someone who practiced the genteel art of law to be paid indirectly, so as to avoid the stigma of being a mere money-grubbing fee earner like any common workman.
A bit more complicated than that. The various Common law, eccelestical and equity courts had different types of lawyers. You had solicitors, attorneys, proctors etc. You also had two distinct ranks of Barrister (actually 4 but lets not confuse it further). Barrister and Sarjents, the latter has now been abolished.
Barristers had to qualify (be “called”) at one of the Inns of Court. It was an expensive and lengthy process, followed by a pupilage in the Chambers (law offices) of an established Barrister. Solicitor, attorneys etc did not need to train as such (they usually needed to start working with an established practitioner and learn the ropes).Barristers were the only ones allowed to appear before the superior Courts (known to this day as “right of audience”) and thus command some pretty serious fees.
Barrister’s were thus (and still are) much more highly qualified, elite and educated than the average solicitor or attorney. To this day , the ratio is about 10 solicitors to 1 Barrister.
In my own law school year of 200, only 4 were considered to have gotten the grades to apply to qualify as Barristers. Of which 2 (myself and one more girl) actually got in.
So in short, the class difference was and is (to an extent) great,
So if the scion of a shabby genteel family wanted to assume the respectable mantle of being a Barrister, it sounds like a long and expensive process, which would rule out anyone who didn’t have a generous sponsor. A younger son in a family with money (who would not be inheriting the estate but might inherit some kind of income) would seem more likely.
Pity the shabby genteel, they have so few real options.
Roddy
No, Lady Catherine is herself from the nobility. She is the daughter of an Earl which is why she is “Lady Catherine” rather than “Lady de Bourgh” as she would be if she had her title from her husband. She was Darcy’s aunt as his mother was her sister Lady Ann (?) Darcy who married the previous Mr Darcy - obviously also the daughter of an Earl. Their titles are “courtesy” titles and not passed on to their offspring. If you want another fictional example of the Lord/Lady Christian Name convention think of Lord Peter Wimsey, younger son of the Duke of Denver.
Basically yes. Not mention they needed smarts. There were financial aid programmes and the Bar was one of the few places where a boy of real talent might rise irrespective of social background, but they were often cut off from qualifying for these due to legal or social constraints.
[QUOTE=MarcusF]
No, Lady Catherine is herself from the nobility. She is the daughter of an Earl which is why she is “Lady Catherine” rather than “Lady de Bourgh” as she would be if she had her title from her husband. She was Darcy’s aunt as his mother was her sister Lady Ann (?) Darcy who married the previous Mr Darcy - obviously also the daughter of an Earl. Their titles are “courtesy” titles and not passed on to their offspring. If you want another fictional example of the Lord/Lady Christian Name convention think of Lord Peter Wimsey, younger son of the Duke of Denver.
[/QUOTE]
To elaborate. All daughter of Earls were entitled to style themselves as Lady <Firstname>. If they got married they would use the title which was highest.
I think Dickens actually was the first to explicitly define and illustrate this term, which was starting to appear in British popular discourse just as he was starting to make his way as a writer.
Dickens was also, I believe, the first widely read author who presented the bulk of his characters as types, rather than unique individuals. That is, he exploited the nature of the huge, anonymous, urbanized environment of London where there are so many people that by sheer repetition one starts to recognize characters as types. In his very early writing about the cityscapes he was observing, he indeed set out to describe the shabby genteel gentlemen as a type, and in so doing, was effectively defining the term.
It’s important to remember that the connotations of this particular term—at least in the beginning—are very specific to the discourse of this period, and specific to London, England. The semantics derive from the context of his time, tied to the particular economy and the self-awareness that London society was experiencing during the mid nineteenth century, and, as such, it is not really a term that would be used that much in America or other countries.
This how Dickens describes shabby genteel people:
[QUOTE=Dickens, from Sketches by Boz]
CHAPTER X—SHABBY-GENTEEL PEOPLE
There are certain descriptions of people who, oddly enough, appear to appertain exclusively to the metropolis. You meet them, every day, in the streets of London, but no one ever encounters them elsewhere; they seem indigenous to the soil, and to belong as exclusively to London as its own smoke, or the dingy bricks and mortar. We could illustrate the remark by a variety of examples, but, in our present sketch, we will only advert to one class as a specimen—that class which is so aptly and expressively designated as ‘shabby-genteel.’
Now, shabby people, God knows, may be found anywhere, and genteel people are not articles of greater scarcity out of London than in it; but this compound of the two—this shabby-gentility—is as purely local as the statue at Charing-cross, or the pump at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, ‘who has seen better days,’ as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness and wretched attempts at faded smartness.
We will endeavour to explain our conception of the term which forms the title of this paper. If you meet a man, lounging up Drury-Lane, or leaning with his back against a post in Long-acre, with his hands in the pockets of a pair of drab trousers plentifully besprinkled with grease-spots: the trousers made very full over the boots, and ornamented with two cords down the outside of each leg—wearing, also, what has been a brown coat with bright buttons, and a hat very much pinched up at the side, cocked over his right eye—don’t pity him. He is not shabby-genteel. The ‘harmonic meetings’ at some fourth-rate public-house, or the purlieus of a private theatre, are his chosen haunts; he entertains a rooted antipathy to any kind of work, and is on familiar terms with several pantomime men at the large houses. But, if you see hurrying along a by-street, keeping as close as he can to the area-railings, a man of about forty or fifty, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth which shines with constant wear as if it had been bees-waxed—the trousers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels,—if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neckerchief is carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man. A glance at that depressed face, and timorous air of conscious poverty, will make your heart ache—always supposing that you are neither a philosopher nor a political economist.
We were once haunted by a shabby-genteel man; he was bodily present to our senses all day, and he was in our mind’s eye all night. The man of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks in his Demonology, did not suffer half the persecution from his imaginary gentleman-usher in black velvet, that we sustained from our friend in quondam black cloth. He first attracted our notice, by sitting opposite to us in the reading-room at the British Museum; and what made the man more remarkable was, that he always had before him a couple of shabby-genteel books—two old dog’s-eared folios, in mouldy worm-eaten covers, which had once been smart. He was in his chair, every morning, just as the clock struck ten; he was always the last to leave the room in the afternoon; and when he did, he quitted it with the air of a man who knew not where else to go, for warmth and quiet. There he used to sit all day, as close to the table as possible, in order to conceal the lack of buttons on his coat: with his old hat carefully deposited at his feet, where he evidently flattered himself it escaped observation.
About two o’clock, you would see him munching a French roll or a penny loaf; not taking it boldly out of his pocket at once, like a man who knew he was only making a lunch; but breaking off little bits in his pocket, and eating them by stealth. He knew too well it was his dinner.
. . . .
It would be difficult to name any particular part of town as the principal resort of shabby-genteel men. We have met a great many persons of this description in the neighbourhood of the inns of court. They may be met with, in Holborn, between eight and ten any morning; and whoever has the curiosity to enter the Insolvent Debtors’ Court will observe, both among spectators and practitioners, a great variety of them. We never went on ‘Change, by any chance, without seeing some shabby-genteel men, and we have often wondered what earthly business they can have there. They will sit there, for hours, leaning on great, dropsical, mildewed umbrellas, or eating Abernethy biscuits. Nobody speaks to them, nor they to any one. On consideration, we remember to have occasionally seen two shabby-genteel men conversing together on ‘Change, but our experience assures us that this is an uncommon circumstance, occasioned by the offer of a pinch of snuff, or some such civility.
It would be a task of equal difficulty, either to assign any particular spot for the residence of these beings, or to endeavour to enumerate their general occupations. We were never engaged in business with more than one shabby-genteel man; and he was a drunken engraver, and lived in a damp back-parlour in a new row of houses at Camden-town, half street, half brick-field, somewhere near the canal. A shabby-genteel man may have no occupation, or he may be a corn agent, or a coal agent, or a wine merchant, or a collector of debts, or a broker’s assistant, or a broken-down attorney. He may be a clerk of the lowest description, or a contributor to the press of the same grade. Whether our readers have noticed these men, in their walks, as often as we have, we know not; this we know—that the miserably poor man (no matter whether he owes his distresses to his own conduct, or that of others) who feels his poverty and vainly strives to conceal it, is one of the most pitiable objects in human nature. Such objects, with few exceptions, are shabby-genteel people.
[/quote]
The term goes back to the 18th century. Here’s OED:
It lasted well into the post WW2 period.
In the 1960s I was sent on a course by my employer to a town South of London which had once been a popular Spa. As such, this small town was over supplied with hotels, and the one in which we were billeted was large and rather shabby, but showed signs of former glory.
There were six of us, all young men in their twenties, and we certainly felt out of place at dinner. Almost all the other residents, and there were probably only a dozen or so in a hotel with three floors and maybe forty rooms, were elderly.
They, we presumed, were permanent, and were the very embodiment of ‘shabby genteel’. They all ‘dressed’ for dinner. We would be in shirtsleeves and slacks; they dressed to the nines - the men in evening suits and the ladies in long dresses. Everyone in the large and mostly empty dining room spoke in hushed tones. It was like being on stage in a 19th century play.