"Solicitor" - any records?

[loo]

I am trying to find out about a gggggrandfather who was, according to his wife's death cert, a solicitor.
He would have been born somewhere around 1790 probably (I have no data on his age), and probably died prior to 1837 (his wife is a widow on death in 1853, and no death is found for him 1837-1853).
Places where he may have lived include  Chelsea, Shoreditch, St. Pancras and Richmond Surrey.
I don't know where he was born or where he married, as he doesn't appear on any census, or on the IGI.
I figure my best clue is his line of work.  Any ideas where I would look for evidence of his career?  I don't have access to The Times index, and he's not on historicaldirectories.org .
The remaining family was not wealthy at all.

[bearkat]

Does this man have a name?

[behindthefrogs]

You need to look at the individual Inns of Court.  They each have their own records.

[loo]

His name is Rowland Stewart;  does that help somehow?
I'm not familiar with the English system, so did not know that it had to do with the Inns of Court - I thought maybe that was only for barristers.  In my country we just call them all lawyers.  So would I need to write to them, then?  Where can I find a list of all of the Inns of Court?

[behindthefrogs]

You are correct that today a barrister would qualify in the Inns of Court but that was not true prior to 1873.

Prior to that Solicitors worked in the Courts of Chancery.  I think in London these were trained in the Inns of Court but I could be wrong.

They dealt with Equity and some common law and presented petitions to the Lord Chancellor, rather than dealing with the laws imposed by statute or case law.  It was the fact that this dealt with trusts and things like that which caused the modern usage of the name when the courts were brought under a single control in 1873

Try Googling the various Inns and see where it gets you.  The original Inns were affiliated to either the Inner Temple, Middle Temple or Lincoln's Inn and so I suggest that youstart with these three.

David

[loo]

Thank you for the background, David.  I shall give these a try.

[loo]

I have written to Lincoln's Inn, but have not heard back yet.

I also wrote to the Law Society and received an interesting but inconclusive response.  They DO cover solicitors, but it seems their library cannot be used in any way by anyone who is not a member of the Law Society, so, presumably, I would have to hire an English lawyer to go trawl in there!
They did, however, refer me to
The New law list:  London, 1798-1802    
Continued by:  Clarke's new law list. London, Eng. :  Clarke and Sons [etc], 1803-1840.
Continued by:  Law list. London : Stevens and Sons, [1841]-1976.

Apparently these volumes may be available in national libraries outside of Britain, although only the latter one seems to be available in Canada;  it is too late for my purposes.

I also found this informative websiste:
http://www.innertemple.org.uk/archive/itad/index.asp

Thought these tidbits might be helpful info for someone else with a similar question.

Oddly, my father, a Canadian airman, was billeted at Lincoln's Inn during WW2.