Charles Austin (lawyer)

Charles Austin (1799–1874) was an English lawyer, prominent in the Railway Mania of the later 1840s.

Austin was the second son of Jonathan Austin, of Creeting Mill, in the county of Suffolk; John Austin was his elder brother. He was educated at Bury St Edmunds Grammar School. He was for a time apprenticed to a surgeon at Norwich, but was then sent to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1819. In 1822 he won the Hulsean prize for an essay on Christian evidence. In 1824 he graduated B.A. According to John Stuart Mill, Austin as undergraduate was an influential exponent of the ideas of Jeremy Bentham; and he had a reputation for brilliance as one of a group of contemporaries that included Thomas Babington Macaulay, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, John Moultrie, Edward Strutt, John Romilly, Charles Buller, and Alexander James Edmund Cockburn.

Having chosen law as a profession, Austin entered as a student at the Middle Temple, read in the chambers of Sir William Follett, then in the height of his fame as an advocate, and was called to the bar in 1827. He joined the Norfolk circuit, and went to the Ipswich, Bury, and Norwich sessions. His conversational powers were highly regarded. He wrote for the Parliamentary History and Review, and contributed occasionally to the Retrospective Review and the Westminster Review, until his rapid success as a barrister.

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