Legal discourse and novelistic form

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.005

3 - Legal discourse and novelistic form

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 January 2012

Eleanor Shevlin

Edited by

Robert L. Caserio and

Clement Hawes

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Robert L. Caserio: Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
Clement Hawes: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

. . . the customary law is a fiction from beginning to end: and it is in the way of fiction if at all that we must speak of it.

Jeremy Bentham, Of Laws in General (c. 1782)

The Novel . . . gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene in so easy and natural a manner, and to them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion . . . that all is real.

Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785)

The law, woven inextricably into the fabric of eighteenth-century English life, exercised a pervasive presence across social ranks. For most persons the law served as their main exposure to government and politics, but its associations stretched far beyond governance and state affairs. Literal and figurative reminders of the law passed every day before the eyes of the English populace in the form of public executions, marriage settlements, bankruptcies, gaming restrictions, debtors' prisons, land enclosures, wills, navy press gangs, deeds of ownership, estate disputes, to list only a few. Those and similar reminders also filled the pages of eighteenth-century fictional narratives. Reworked as plot devices, thematic threads, or instruments of verisimilitude, matters of law infused fictional narratives with the stuff of lived experience and contributed to their persuasiveness “that all is real.” It is perhaps unremarkable that eighteenth-century novels, given their concern with replicating the real of everyday experience, embraced the law. More noteworthy but less acknowledged is the extent to which the law embraced fiction.

Fictions of law arose “to resolve novel legal questions through arguments of equivalence and creative analogical reasoning”; they signify “the growing pains of the language of the law.” As English society shed its feudal past and moved steadily to a capitalist mode of operation, its legal system remained rooted in its medieval origins. When new situations occurred that existing laws either did not cover or could not handle adequately, fictions were devised and treated as fact in order to circumvent the inconveniences or inadequacies occasioned by outmoded jurisprudence.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the English Novel , pp. 46 - 62

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521194952.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2012

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