Stern on Blackstone's Page and Trollope's Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction @ArsScripta @CambridgeUP

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Blackstone’s Page and Trollope’s Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction in A History of Punctuation in English Literature (Elizabeth M. Bonapfel, Mark Faulkner, Jeffrey Gutierrez, and John Lennard, eds., Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming, 2024). Here is the abstract.

This book chapter explores connections between law and literature by attending to print format, page layout, and typography. It considers William Blackstone’s use of the colon in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), showing how he exploits the sign as a means of achieving the balance, rationality, and clarity that he seeks to attribute to the common law more generally. The chapter then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873). Chapter 25 provides Mr. Dove’s opinion letter as to the legal status of the diamonds that drive the plot. Trollope noted in his autobiography that this chapter was composed by the barrister Charles Merewether. What has not been recognized is that Merewether transcribed most of the letter from a leading work on inheritance and estate law, A Treatise on the Law of Executors and Administrators by Edward Vaughan Williams. It is hard to tell whether Trollope or Merewether (or both) were responsible for the differences in wording (though some are likely to be Trollope’s). However, the letter also features a very Trollopean use of the dash to signal hesitation and temporization, generally at Mr. Dove’s expense. These examples from Blackstone and Trollope show how the conjunction of the legal and the literary may present distinctive typographical features, in addition to more frequently studied features involving legal norms, analytical styles, and doctrinal questions.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

McClain and Tait on Household Intimacy and Being Unmarried: Family Pluralism in the Novels of Anthony Trollope @ProfLMcClain @BU_Law @athenais1674 @URLawSchool

Linda C. McClain, Boston University School of Law, and Allison Anna Tait, University of Richmond School of Law, have published Household Intimacy and Being Unmarried: Family Pluralism in the Novels of Anthony Trollope at 72 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 1 (2023). Here is the abstract.

Many critics rightfully claim that the marriage market and an inquiry into its innermost workings are at the heart of Anthony Trollope’s novels, but this Article argues that his novels also depict—on the periphery or sometimes just hiding in plain sight—a set of curiously nonmarital households. These households vary in form, but include widows and widowers living on their own, mothers and daughters living collectively, and male cousins sharing space and the work of daily living. Critics have debated whether Trollope was simply a realistic social historian—chronicling families as he found them— or whether he constructively used literary license to make broader points. On the first reading, Trollope presents a vast ecosystem of family pluralism, a terrain in which multiple kinds of families existed outside of the marital framework. Leaning more into literary imagination, it is possible to suggest that Trollope uses his range of household sketches to facilitate an exploration of how households and families can operate outside of the sexual and financial economies of marriage. In this context, his nonmarital households offer a rich composite portrait of how “functional” families operate, how the strength of intimacy flourishes outside of romantic relationships, and the challenges of maintaining a household outside of the marital norm. This Article offers a study of Trollope’s nonmarital families, with extended analysis of five novels in particular, The Bertrams, Rachel Ray, The Small House at Allington, Ralph the Heir, and Mr. Scarborough’s Family. In so doing, the Article presses on the question of Trollope's approach by exploring how he engages in both undertakings: to capture the range of domestic households both in small villages and the heart of Mayfair, and also to imaginatively explore the family as a site of affective possibility, multiple intimacies, and nonmarital ordering.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fishman on A Random Stroll Amongst Anthony Trollope's Lawyers @HaubLawatPace

James Fishman, Pace University School of Law, has published A Random Stroll Amongst Anthony Trollope’s Lawyers. Here is the abstract.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) resides in the pantheon of nineteenth century English literature. Overcoming a miserable childhood, he became an official with the post office and is credited with introducing the familiar red mailbox. While working full time in his postal position until 1867, he still managed to publish 47 novels, travel books, biographies, short stories, collections of essays, and articles on various topics. Trollope has been described as the novelist of the ordinary for his realistic description of English society. Law and legal issues flow through Trollope’s fiction. The legal system held a special importance to him as the skeleton upholding the social and political framework of the country. Over one hundred lawyers appear in his work and eleven of his novels feature trials or hearings. The law intrigued and exasperated him. Along with the lawyers and legal issues he depicts are ideas of the law and legal system that are part of elaborate philosophical and jurisprudential traditions, which he recognized. This article examines Trollope’s changing attitude toward lawyers. It describes the structure of the Bar in terms of class, status and reputation. Trollope believed the legal system should ensure justice, and those who labored in the law should be the vehicle of that pursuit. Justice for Trollope was the meting out of rewards and punishments as the consequence of a right or wrong decision. However, the law, as he depicted it, was often an impediment to this process, and lawyers were unreliable guides. Initially Trollope portrayed lawyers critically as caricatures as evinced by such names as Alwinde, O’Blather, Slow & Bidewhile, Haphazard, and Chaffanbrass. He was outraged that barristers (lawyers who appear in court) put loyalty to their clients ahead of the search for truth and justice. The adversary system was flawed as the enactment of laws in accord with the laws of nature assumes an inbuilt moral compass in humans that contains self-evident truths of right and wrong. Trollope felt there was no reason why a right-minded person could not intuitively recognize the truth, so criminal law’s adversary system was unnecessary. The legal system sought not the discovery of the truth but was more interested in aiding the guilty defendant to escape punishment. Another grievance was that cross examination in a trial submitted honest witnesses to torture and distracted them from testifying as to the truth. As he matured as a writer and achieved success, Trollope’s understanding and appreciation of the legal profession changed. He met and become friends with leaders of the Bar, and they influenced his descriptions of lawyers, who became realistic and often admirable human beings. Beyond the legal problems of its characters, Trollope’s later novels incorporated the social, political, and jurisprudential issues of the times and engaged the Victorian legal culture in a broader sense of history, traditions, continuity and change. Trollope’s attention to the faults of the adversary system had its source in principles of natural law, which posited that God-given universal axioms of right and wrong gave individual guidance or a map for reaching the right result in a legal controversy. Natural law principles were challenged during the Victorian era by positivist notions that law is what the statute books say, and legislators enact. These divisions lurk in the background of his later portraits of lawyers and the legal system. In his later period Trollope created a realistic characterization of the legal profession at the time that offered universal insights into human nature.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Cathrine Frank's Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 Now Available in Paperback

The paperback edition of Cathrine O. Frank's Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 (Routledge, 2010) is now available. Here is a description of the book's content from the publisher's website.

Focusing on the last will and testament as a legal, literary, and cultural document, Cathrine O. Frank examines fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras alongside actual wills, legal manuals relating to their creation, case law regarding their administration, and contemporary accounts of curious wills in periodicals. Her study begins with the Wills Act of 1837 and poses two basic questions: What picture of Victorian culture and personal subjectivity emerges from competing legal and literary narratives about the will, and how does the shift from realist to modernist representations of the will accentuate a growing divergence between law and literature? Frank’s examination of works by Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and E.M. Forster reveals the shared rhetorical and cultural significance of the will in law and literature while also highlighting the competition between these discourses to structure a social order that emphasized self-determinism yet viewed individuals in relationship to the broader community. Her study contributes to our knowledge of the cultural significance of Victorian wills and creates intellectual bridges between the Victorian and Edwardian periods that will interest scholars from a variety of disciplines who are concerned with the laws, literature, and history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Lacey on Images of Money, Law, and Status in Trollope

Nicola Lacey, London School of Economics Law Department, has published Gamblers and Gentlefolk: Money, Law and Status in Trollope's England, as LSE Legal Studies Working Paper No. 03/2016. Here is the abstract.

This paper examines the range of very different conceptions of money and its legal and social significance in the novels of Anthony Trollope, considering what they can tell us about the rapidly changing economic, political and social world of mid Victorian England. It concentrates in particular on Orley Farm (1862) — the novel most directly concerned with law among Trollope’s formidable output — and The Way We Live Now (1875) — the novel most directly concerned with the use and abuse of money in the early world of financial capitalism. The paper sets the scene by sketching the main critiques of money in the history of the novel. Drawing on a range of literary examples, it notes that these critiques significantly predate the development of industrial let alone financial capitalism. Probably the deepest source of ambivalence about money in the novel has to do with ‘commodification’. As this concern unfolds in Trollope, it tells us a great deal about changing conceptions of property in a world in which industrial capitalism sat alongside practices of speculative investment geared simply to the multiplication of money. Trollope’s nostalgia for the world of land sits alongside an increasingly sharp critique of the power of money, and these novels illuminate the rapidly changing economic, political and social world of mid Victorian England. They also speak, as it were, volumes on the relative effectiveness of the different regulatory resources which can be brought to bear upon each form of wealth. And they open some fascinating windows on the gendering of both money and law as concepts in the later Victorian imagination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Ward on Trollope, Sensationalism, and English Law in "The Eustace Diamonds"

Ian Ward, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Faculty of Law, has published The Trials of Lizzie Eustace: Trollope, Sensationalism, and the Condition of English Law at 43 Journal of Law and Society 66 (2016). Here is the abstract.

The Eustace Diamonds was published in 1872. It was the third of Anthony Trollope's famed Palliser series. It represented, however, something of a diversion, telling the story of the ‘cunning’ Lizzie Eustace who declines to return a priceless diamond necklace to the estate of her recently deceased husband. Critics have supposed that The Eustace Diamonds can be read as a contribution to the contemporary genre of ‘sensation’ novels. Sensation novels were full of sex, crime, and scheming young women like Lizzie Eustace. The law should of course have brought to Lizzie to justice. But it does not; indeed it barely tries. For the law in The Eustace Diamonds, as in so many ‘sensation’ novels, is conspicuous only in a failure that is as metaphorical in purpose as it is prosaic.

The full text is not available from SSRN.