Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Victorian Novel

FAIN: FEL-289675-23

Hilary Margo Schor
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)

Research and writing of a book examining the role of legal categories and law in the development of Victorian novels. 

The argument of this book-length project, “Thinking Like a Lawyer in the Victorian Novel,” is that the major novels of the high Victorian period are a vital source of experimentation in formal law itself. Far from an excrescence, a “pestilential breath” on the body of the law, as Jeremy Bentham claimed, legal fictions had the power not only to obstruct but to use language to transform the world—a power shared and wielded brilliantly by Victorian novelists. In an age of constant and world-changing legal reform, the best place to understand the romance as well as the terror of law, the ability to make and remake the world, is in the Victorian novel. For those who had no legal existence, women, Jews and bastards among them, there was no more potent weapon than the law and its fictions – and it was an instrument of redemption as well as discipline, one that holds possibilities for us today.