A Desperate Call For Help, So HELP!!

My mother mentioned to me a story or book she had to read in college. It was mandatory required reading for her and so this must have been some undergraduate English class, since my mother only attended actual college classes for two years and was going for an English degree. Later she took night and weekend classes and got her degree and we are all very proud of her, but since she had to read this particular story or book for a class she attended some time in the pre-menopause years, it must have been an undergraduate class requirement. So, back on subject: this story, or book, is about a lawyer/barrister/solicitor who hires an assistant/copy-maker to work in some Victorian or Edwardian or whatever legal office. The guy does good work, steady and legible, and the boss has no problem with him, until he comes in early or late or on a weekend or something and finds the assistant in his pajamas. The guy lives at the office, which seemed to tick off the lawyer. So the boss tells the guy that he needs to find a different place to live, except that he doesn't leave. He never leaves. He continues to do excellent work, but he still lives there as well. So finally the lawyer decides that the nerve this guy has to blatantly NOT move out is somehow more important than the good work he does and has him arrested. After all, why shouldn't the guy have to pay his way like everyone else, right? So the guy gets arrested and sent to jail, which in this time period or maybe just in this part of the world, is a pay your own way kind of place. Except, no one is paying the guy's way so he has no food or clothes or blanket. And the lawyer realizes that maybe he overreacted when he had the guy sent away, especially now that he has no assistant or copy-maker or whatever, so he gives the poor guy some money, so he can have food and clothes. So, after all is said and done, he STILL pays the guy and the guy STILL doesn't have to pay his own way, and now no one is making legal copies!

Now, my mom swears the assistant was named Barnabas, but no amount of googling will bring up anything even remotely resembling fictional lawyers in Olde England. However, there are plenty of stories about Saint Barnabas and what seems to be a very incompetent medical system in the New York Department of Corrections run by St Barnabas Hospital. Now, I never went to college, although I always check "some college" on questionnaires since I took that one Saturday writing class out at the junior college. But I know that some of you (Dawn, Chandos) went to actual accredited higher-learning places and got credit for learning highly. So maybe you read this story or book and can tell me what it was? I want to know the name of it so I can buy my mom a copy. There's a lady who works with her who lives at work and so Mom calls her Barnabas behind her back, and I hate when there's a literary reference I don't get. I read The Picture of Dorian Gray just to understand a James Blunt lyric last winter.

So please please please save me from redundancy. (No wait, that's a habit if I say please too many times in a row I have to follow it with "save me from redundancy".) Please please please help me find out what this story and/or book about the barrister and/or solicitor's assistant and/or copy-maker is. Google has finally failed me.