Abrams on Charles Dickens' Novels in the Courts @MizzouLaw @MoBarNews

Douglas E. Abrams, University of Missouri School of Law, has published Charles Dickens' Novels in the Courts at 78 Journal of the Missouri Bar 29 (Jan.-Feb. 2022). Here is the abstract.

Professor Abrams authors a column, Writing it Right in the Journal of the Missouri Bar. In a variety of contexts, the column stresses the fundamentals of quality legal writing - conciseness, precision, simplicity, and clarity.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Utz on Boz Among the Radicals: Charles Dickens and Tax Reform @UConnLaw

Stephen Utz, University of Connecticut School of Law, has published Boz Among the Radicals: Charles Dickens and Tax Reform at 2021 British Tax Review 221. Here is the abstract.

Taxes on consumption items necessary for subsistence burdened the British middle and workings classes heavily throughout the early nineteenth century. The Weekly True Sun urged the Whig government to replace the window tax, not with a house tax, but with an income tax, and urged taxpayers to refuse to pay the window tax. Charles Dickens transcribed the seditious libel trial of the True Sun editors when he was very young and later remembered the Whig indecision on tax policy in a strongly negative editorial of his own. This article describes how Dickens played a prominent role in tax reform that followed. Note: This material was first published by Thomson Reuters, trading as Sweet & Maxwell, 5 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, E14 5AQ, in the British Tax Review as Boz Among the Radicals: Charles Dickens and Tax Reform, [2021] B.T.R., No.2, and is reproduced by agreement with the publishers.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Katz on "That Sty for Fattening Lawyers In/On the Bones of Honest Men": The Palace Court in Little Dorrit

Leslie Katz has published ‘That Sty for Fattening Lawyers In | On the Bones of Honest Men’: The Palace Court in Little Dorrit. Here is the abstract.

In Little Dorrit, there are two explicit references to the Palace Court, a court now extinct and largely forgotten. For three reasons, this paper discusses that court: first, to provide a context for the two explicit references to it in the novel; secondly, because the court plays a previously-unidentified significant role in the plot of the novel, even ignoring the novel’s two explicit references to it; and thirdly, because the court played a previously-unidentified significant role in Dickens’s own life, which role probably caused him to include in the novel the two references to the court as a kind of inside joke.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brooks on Dying Declarations @Princeton

Peter Brooks, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, is publishing Dying Declarations in Fictional Discourse and the Law (Hans J. Lind, ed., New York and London: Routledge, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

In Chavez v. Martinez, where a police officer interrogated a badly wounded—blinded and partially paralyzed—suspect undergoing treatment in the emergency room, Justice Kennedy evoked the ancient doctrine of “dying declarations,” which provides an exception to the exclusion of hearsay evidence in the case of words spoken where “the expectation of almost immediate death will remove all temptation to falsehood.” In a context once marked by the fear of eternal damnation, the brink of death was considered to produce the truth. One can find in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts—containing confessions from those about to be hung at Tyburn—material that may both confirm and throw some doubt on the unconstrained truth of the dying declaration. But here I am especially concerned with deathbed scenes in the nineteenthcentury novel as moments of the transmission of truth—or sometimes a kind of cosmic lie. My examples are drawn from Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Conrad.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Asses and Idiots and Dickens, Oh, My! @TheNLJ

Marcia Coyle examines the uses of Dickensian quotes in legal opinions in this piece for The National Law Journal, pointing out that Justice Alito's insertion of the phrase "the last is a ass--a idiot in the recently decided Collins v. Virginia is the latest appearance in a series that includes Justice Brennan's use in In re Sawyer, and Justice Stevens' in Califano v. Goldfano. Now Justice Ginsburg argued that case before the Court, by the way.

The phrase is a popular one with the judiciary. I'll cite just two other cases. See Judge Brorby, in dissent in Guidry v. Sheet Metal Workers Nat'l Pension Fund (10th Circuit) (he also cites Sam Ervin, "The rain it raineth on the just/And also on the unjust fella:/But chiefly on the just, because/The unjust steals the just's umbrella." And see Stone v. Essex County Newspapers, Inc (Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court).  

The question thus arises whether the burden of adducing "clear"evidence on an issue is less than the burden of adducing "clear and convincing" evidence on an issue. If these phrases are not mere rhetoric, then each must set a precise, independent standard. If we hold, as the court apparently does, that one implication of the existence of such precise, independent standards is that juries must be instructed to find facts according to those standards, we raise the spectre of requiring trial judges in defamation cases to instruct juries as to four separate and distinct burdens of proof, falling variously on the plaintiff and defendant. That is to say that since the court today defines "clear and convincing" evidence as that which would satisfy a burden somewhere between those imposed by the ordinary preponderance of the evidence and reasonable doubt standards utilized in civil and criminal cases, and since "clear" evidence is presumably stronger than a preponderance of the evidence but not so strong as "clear and convincing" evidence, then a trial judge must instruct the jury as to the meaning of: (1) "a preponderance" of the evidence, by which most of the facts in issue must be found, (2) "beyond a reasonable doubt," so that the standard can help define other terms, (3) "clear and convincing" evidence, by which malice must be proved, and (4) "clear" evidence, by which the public character of the plaintiff's personality must be proved. A juror listening to a judge instructing him to draw such fine distinctions in his levels of belief would likely agree with Mr. Bumble: "If the law supposes that, . . . the law is a ass, a idiot."

On Charles Dickens and the law here's a selected bibliography.

Robert Coles, Charles Dickens and the Law, 59 The Virginia Quarterly 564 (Fall 1983).

Thomas Alexander Fyfe, Charles Dickens and the Law (Lawbook Exchange, 2006 (reprint 1910).

William S. Holdsworth, Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (Lawbook Exchange, 1995) (reprint).

Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Larry M. Wertheim, Law, Literature, and Morality in the Novels of Charles Dickens, 20 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 111 (1994).

Charles Dickens and Copyright Law @dkluft

Nice piece on Charles Dickens and copyright law, from David Kluft, at JDSupra.  Mr. Kluft traces the English author's interest in copyright back at least as far as The Pickwick Papers, which he dedicated to Thomas Talfourd, an early champion of copyright law.

More about Sir Thomas, lawyer, MP, and author, and the model for the character Tommy Traddles in David Copperfield, here.

Yale University Law School Library's Exhibit on Dickens, Christmas, and Law @yalelawlibrary

Yale University Law School's Library presented a special exhibit for the holidays: Charles Dickens as Herald of Christmas and Victorian Legal Historian. Take a look here.

ICYMI: Lee on The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel

ICYMI:

Julia Sun-Joo Lee has published The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel (Oxford University Press, 2012). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Conceived as a literary form to aggressively publicize the abolitionist cause in the United States, the African American slave narrative remains a powerful and illuminating demonstration of America's dark history. Yet the genre's impact extended far beyond the borders of the U.S. The American Slave Narrative and the Victorian Novel investigates the shaping influence of writings by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other former slaves on British fiction in the years between the Abolition Act and the Emancipation Proclamation. Julia Sun-Joo Lee argues that novelists such as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens integrated into their works generic elements of the slave narrative-from the emphasis on literacy as a tool of liberation, to the teleological journey from slavery to freedom, to the ethics of resistance over submission. It contends that Victorian novelists used these tropes in an attempt to access the slave narrative's paradigm of resistance, illuminate the transnational dimension of slavery, and articulate Britain's role in the global community. Through a deft use of disparate sources, Lee reveals how the slave narrative becomes part of the textual network of the English novel, making visible how black literary, as well as economic, production contributed to British culture.

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.

McAleavey on The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel

ICYMI: Maia McAleavey, Boston College, has published The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015) (Cambridge Studies in Nineteeth-Century Literature and Culture).

Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

The courtship plot dominates accounts of the Victorian novel, but this innovative study turns instead to a narrative phenomenon that upends its familiar conventions: the bigamy plot. In hundreds of novels, plays, and poems published in Victorian Great Britain, husbands or wives thought dead suddenly reappear to their newly remarried spouses. In the sensation fiction of Braddon and Collins, these bigamous revelations lead to bribery, arson, and murder, but the same plot operates in the canonical fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, and Hardy. These authors employ bigamy plots to destabilize the apparently conventional form and values of the Victorian novel. By close examination of this plot, including an index of nearly 300 bigamy novels, Maia McAleavey makes the case for a historical approach to narrative, one that is grounded in the legal and social changes of the period but that runs counter to our own formal and cultural expectations.

• The first extended study of the prevalent bigamy plot, filling an important gap in the history of the Victorian novel
• Revises the common view of the Victorian novel that links its narrative structure to courtship and marriage
• Provides an exhaustive appendix of nearly 300 novels featuring a bigamy plot and detailed close readings of familiar and unfamiliar novels

A New Book From Ian Ward

Sex,Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Ian Ward

The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, and the author of a number of books on law, literature and history including 'Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives' (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 'Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination' (Cambridge University Press, 1999), ‘The English Constitution: Myths and Realities' (Hart Publishing, 2004), 'Law, Text, Terror' (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and most recently 'Law and the Brontes' (Palgrave, 2011).

 CONTENTS

Introduction: Dark Shapes 1

Angels in the House 4

At Home with the Dombeys 9

The Disease of Reading 16

Pleasing and Teaching 24

1 Criminal Conversations 29

One Person in Law 32

Newcome v Lord Highgate 38

Carlyle v Carlyle 46

Oh Reader! 51

2 Fashionable Crimes 58

The Sensational Moment 61

Fashionable Crimes 66

Mrs Mellish’s Marriages 73

The Shame of Miss Braddon 81

3 Unnatural Mothers 88

The Precious Quality of Truthfulness 90

Hardwicke’s Children 95

R v Sorrel 101

The Lost and the Saved 108

4 Fallen Angels 118

Walking the Streets 121

The Murder of Nancy Sikes 127

Contemplating Jenny 134

Because Men Made the Laws 142

Index 149

Hart Publishing (2014) (available in hardcover and various ebook formats)

Law In "A Christmas Carol"

Barry Sullivan, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, has published A Book that Shaped Your World: Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, in volume 50 of the Alberta Law Review (2013). Here is the abstract.

"To celebrate the Alberta Law Review's fiftieth volume, the book review editors invited friends and alumni to put aside for a moment their required reading, and reflect briefly on the books that have shaped their approaches to life and the law." Professor Sullivan chose to reflect upon the perennially popular A Christmas Carol, to thoughtful and poetic effect.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 

More Resources On Dickens and the Law

Excellent, excellent post from Rechtgeschiedenisblog Blog on Dickens and law, listing online resources and recent posts and giving some analysis. This blog is in general a great resource for legal history and related areas, such as law and literature.

Additional Dickens and law resources:

"Lesser Breeds Within the Law"--Gresham College lecture by Dr. Angus Easson
Dickens' 1842 Reading Tour--Launching the Copyright Question on Temptuous Seas--Philip V. Allingham
Dickens 2012 Website: From Law To Literature Walk

Here's a post from the Mirror of Justice on Dickens and the Catholic legal imagination.

The Law Is a Ass--a Idiot

Michael Ruse writes about his favorite Dickens novels here.  He lists The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, and notes Dickens' amazing ability to write about the experiences of children.  He also notes the prevalence of law in Dickens' works: here he is on The Pickwick Papers:

My absolute favorite bit is when Sam is in the witness box in the trial of Mr. Pickwick on a charge of breach of promise, and the trouble he causes for the other side. But Sam having supper with the posh servants of Bath is a pretty close second. Dodson and Fogg, the shifty lawyers, are pretty good too, as are the drunken medical students. 

Here's Mr. Ruse on Oliver Twist:

There are some lesser novels of which I am incredibly fond, Dombey and Son and Oliver Twist in particular. I love the bit when Mr. Bumble has married the matron of the workhouse, is now under her thumb, and (being accused of a crime) told that in law even though his wife may have been the main party he is the one responsible. Most people know the first line but miss the far funnier last lines.


“It was all Mrs. Bumble. She would do it,” urged Mr. Bumble; first looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

“That is no excuse,” replied Mr. Brownlow. “You were present on the occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass — a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.”

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets, followed his helpmate down stairs.

Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens

Google honors Charles Dickens today, with a Google Doodle devoted to him. The celebrated writer was born 200 years ago today, February 7, 1812. Below: a short and highly selective bibliography on Dickens and the law.


Markey, Maureen E., Mr. Tulkinghorn as a Successful Literary Lawyer, 14 St. Thomas L. Rev. 689 (2002).

McChrystal, Michael K., At the Foot of the Master: What Charles Dickens Got Right About What Lawyers Do Wrong, 78 Or. L. Rev. 393 (1999).

Osborn, John J., Bleak House: Narratives in Literature and Law School, 52 N.Y.L. Sch. L. Rev. 339 (2007).

Schramm, Jan-Melissa, Dickens and the Law, in A Companion to Charles Dickens 277-293 (David Paroissien, ed., Wiley, 2008).

Wertheim, Larry M., Dickens’ Lesser Lawyers, 46 S. D. L. Rev. 695 (2001).


See also

Corcos, Christine A., An International Guide to Law and Literature Studies (Hein, 2000). Sections on Dickens and his works.

Papke, David R., Law and Literature: A Comment and Bibliography of Secondary Works, 73 Law Libr. J. 421 (1980). Section on Dickens.

(Dan) Solove's Law and Humanities Institute Bibliography About Specific Writers: Dickens Page

Dickens On Design

Here, from The Guardian.

Dickens and Christmas

Maureen Dowd considers Charles Dickens' thoughts on Christmas at the end of his life, noting that we will celebrate the bicentenary of his birth on February 7, 2012. Michiko Tanukani reviews two new biographies that explore his life and accomplishments.

A Charles Dickens Exhibit

Care for a little Dickens with your December? The British Library has mounted a new exhibit, A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and and the Supernatural, which features, in addition to materials from "A Christmas Carol" (we have to see those), a letter from Dickens to his wife Catherine (marital flap), and documentation of his views on spiritualism (he had his doubts). More on the exhibit, Dickens, ghosts, general spookiness, and whether the writer might just have gotten his idea for one ghost story from another author from the Guardian.

Whodunit? BBC Plans To Answer the Edwin Drood Question This Year

The BBC will offer an answer to The Mystery of Edwin Drood in a new adaptation by Gwenyth Hughes. The new version will air on BBC4 later this year.

Equity In Law and Literature

Gary Watt, Reader and Associate Professor in Law, School of Law, University of Warwick, and an editor of the journal Law and Humanities, has published Equity Stirring:The Story of Justice Beyond Law (Hart Publishing). Here's an abstract.

Sir Frederick Pollock wrote that 'English-speaking lawyers ...have specialised the name of Equity'. It is typical for legal textbooks on the law of equity to acknowledge the diverse ways in which the word 'equity' is used and then to focus on the legal sense of the word to the exclusion of all others. There may be a professional responsibility on textbook writers to do just that. If so, there is a counterpart responsibility to read the law imaginatively and to read what non-lawyers have said of equity with an open mind. This book is an exploration of the meaning of equity as artists and thinkers have portrayed it within the law and without. Watt finds in law and literature an equity that is necessary to good life and good law but which does not require us to subscribe to a moral or 'natural law' ideal. It is an equity that takes a principled and practical stand against rigid formalism and unthinking routine in law and life, and so provides timely resistance to current forces of extremism and entitlement culture. The project is an educational one in the true etymological sense of leading the reader out into new territory. The book will provide the legal scholar with deep insight into the rhetorical, literary and historical foundations of the idea of equity in law, and it will provide the law student with a cultural history of, and an imaginative introduction to, the technical law of equity and trusts. Scholars and students of such disciplines as literature, classics, history, theology, theatre and rhetoric will discover new insights into the art of equity in the law and beyond. Along the way, Watt offers a new theory on the naming of Dickens' chancery case Jarndyce and Jarndyce and suggests a new connection between Shakespeare and the origin of equity in modern law.

James Boyd White and Ian Ward have both praised the book.

'This beautiful book, deeply learned in the branch of jurisprudence we call equity and deeply engaged with the western literary tradition, gives new life to equity in the legal sense by connecting it with equity in the larger sense: as it is defined both in ordinary language and experience and by great writers, especially Dickens and Shakespeare. Equity Stirring transforms our sense of what equity is and can be and demonstrates in a new and graceful way the importance of connecting law with other arts of mind and language.'

James Boyd White, author of Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force

'Equity Stirring' is a fine example of interdisciplinary legal scholarship at its best. Watt has managed to produce a book that is fresh and innovative, and thoroughly accessible. Deploying a range of familiar, and not so familiar, texts from across the humanities, Watt has presented a fascinating historical and literary commentary on the evolution of modern ideas of justice and equity.

Ian Ward, Professor of Law at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

To order copies of Equity Stirring, click here. Readers of the Law and Humanities blog can get a 10 percent discount by using the Code Word "EQUITY" in the special instructions field. Now, aren't you glad you read this blog?