The Reader and the Jury: Legal Fictions and the Making of Commercial Law in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract

In articulating emergence of a new form of prose fiction with concurrent transformations in property and social relations, critical attention during 1980s focused on relation of early novel and criminal law.2 This was by no means surprising, given work of English social historians of 1970s such as Douglas Hay and E.P. Thompson, who showed importance of law in general, and criminal law in particular, in social transformations of eighteenth century. In words of John Brewer and John Styles, the notion of 'the rule of law' was central to seventeenthand eighteenth-century Englishmen's understanding of what was both special and laudable about