Defamation of Character: Anthony Trollope and the Law of Libel

Abstract

Chapter three considers how libel laws enabled character to go on the offensive during the rise of professional journalism. While novelists certainly capitalized on the public taste for scandal and its interest in famous trials when devising plots, surprisingly few seem to have taken up the issues of libel and slander explicitly. However, Anthony Trollope’s ongoing engagement with the press makes him a notable exception. Chapter three situates Trollope’s novels of the 1860s and ‘70s within significant developments in libel law. Beginning with the period of his editorship of St Paul’s Magazine and publication of Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1873), it argues that these years mark an historical junction of legal, literary, and journalistic concern with libel to which Trollope was particularly attentive because so many of his characters brought reputations with them from one novel to the next. Ending with The Prime Minister (1876), Cousin Henry (1879), and new legislation for enlarging freedom of the press, the chapter concludes that Trollope’s ethics of representation and method of literary characterization anticipated the limits of libel law and opened the way for what might be a more effective means of protecting character through privacy.