Fictional Representation of the Law in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION iS obsessed with the law: with its operations, with its justifications, with its limits. Indeed, this is one of the most important of the set of changes heralded by Defoe: whereas the universe of the seventeenth-century romance was bounded and controlled by cosmic justice, reflected in already given quasi-mythic narrative structure, the universes of Defoe, Fielding, Radcliffe, Godwin are limited by various manifestations of human law. Thus I shall discuss here some of the ways in which novelists of the age represent the law, legal characters, and legal processes, and I shall be particularly concerned to uncover a set of attitudes which lies below the fictional surface. There are three cardinal points on which eighteenth-century representations of the law are oriented. First, there is a strong ambivalence in expressed attitudes toward legality, and consequently a blurring of the line between lawyer and criminal, whether in realist or in Gothic writers. Second, there? is a recurrent and all too apparently painful problem about the circumstantial justification of crime. And third, there is a consistent discrediting of English legal mechanisms and institutions, and concomitant speculation about other systems, whether these are located abroad or in internal subcultures.' But we shall return to these points explicitly later; in the