Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield

Abstract

Abstract In the Victorian age, a period of rapid changes and social and cultural advancement, the preoccupation with modernizing the law system emerged as a concern for both law experts and ordinary people. However, it was the realist novel that drew particular attention to the inadequacy and inefficiency of a system that needed to be reformed. Charles Dickens was the Victorian novelist who, more than any of his fellow writers, never missed the opportunity to speak of law and justice, allowing his experience in the field to reveal the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the legal system. In David Copperfield, Dickens unmercifully criticizes laws and legal procedures but at the same time he proposes changes. In the middle of the century, the laws on marriage and divorce were frequently debated in the press and in Parliament. Dickens chooses his most autobiographical novel to give his own view on those matters as well as on the necessity to reform law courts at large.