Clara Reeve and the Problem of Romance

Abstract

As Walpole’s justificatory second preface to The Castle of Otranto suggests, romance posed a problem for eighteenth-century critics concerned to comprehend, categorise and privilege certain emerging forms of prose fiction in terms of a new literary ideal of verisimilitude.1 Romance, as I have suggested, could be said to have posed a similar problem for the law. Jeremy Bentham’s nascent legal positivism, and even Blackstone’s attempted rationalisation of English law in the Commentaries, could be read as conforming to a juridical version of verisimilitude, to the ideal of ‘truth’ in the text of law. Bentham denounced Blackstone’s mythologisation of the origin of English law, however, condemning in particular what he saw as Blackstone’s glorification of a kind of legal folklore, his production almost of a romance of English common law.2 The premodern textual body of the law, moreover, was perceived by Bentham and Blackstone to disturb the essential ‘truth’ of law. The pre-Enlightenment texts of English common law constituted a dizzying labyrinth of virtually incomprehensible custom-based rules and regulations with no discernible rationale. Lawyers spoke of the law’s ‘foul smell’ and ‘loathsome savour’, of its capacity to disease reason, to provoke the imagination, to induce melancholy or even madness.3KeywordsMoral SenseLiterary TextReal Estate OwnershipLegal TitleAncient RomanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.