| In the increasingly bourgeois society of Victorian Britain, the lawyer took on new prominence as the guardian and enforcer of civil order. Popular anxieties about the legal system led to ongoing discussions in the press and in Parliament, and to legal reform movements. Representations of lawyers and of the legal system in fiction were an important part of this conversation. My dissertation examines fears and concerns surrounding the law, and how they are expressed in such subgenres of the novel as the satire, the novel of sentiment, the sensation novel, realist fiction, and children's fiction. Famous and sensational trials make disguised appearances in the novels, as do arcane legal conceptual debates. Novelists helped their readers grapple with complicated legal issues in layman's terms. One work in particular, Charles Dickens's Bleak House, has had a significant impact because it reinforces commonly held fears about the legal system. But Bleak House gives us only part of the picture. By looking at a range of novels, by Lewis Carroll, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope, as well as Dickens, some of which inflame and some of which help mediate these fears, we can understand the range of subject positions people occupied in relation to law and justice in Victorian England. |
