Abstract
‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ The familiar courtroom oath expresses one of Trollope’s major ideals, but as he moves from assertion to imaginative exploration of the ideal, he finds, like other Victorians, that truth is very hard to grasp. In Orley Farm he attacks the legal system and lawyers because, while organised to search out the truth, they seem to Trollope willfully to confound it. In the original reviews and subsequently, lawyers and literary critics have often addressed themselves to his management of legal issues, largely with a view to setting him straight, particularly on the ethics of advocacy, terminology, and procedure in trials.1 Nevertheless, between Robert Polhemus’s view that ‘Trollope presents, on the whole in Orley Farm, a fair and illuminating picture of the legal system,’2 and the verdict of the reviewer (one suspects, a barrister) who concluded ‘Mr Trollope knows nothing whatever of the subject on which he is so vehement,’3 we find quite a range of opinion.
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