The Reader and the Jury: Legal Fictions and the Making of Commercial Law in Eighteenth-Century England
Martin A. Kayman, University of Coimbra
Volume 9, no. 4, July 1997
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In articulating the emergence of a new form of prose fiction with concurrent transformations in property and social relations, critical attention during the 1980s focused on the relation of the early novel and the criminal law. This was by no means surprising, given the work of English social historians of the 1970s such as Douglas Hay and E.P. Thompson, who showed the importance of the law in general, and the criminal law in particular, in the social transformations of the eighteenth century. In the words of John Brewer and John Styles, “the notion of ‘the rule of law’ was central to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen’s understanding of what was both special and laudable about their political system”; the concept of “the Law” functioned as “an idealization, a potent ‘fiction’ … which commanded wide-spread assent from both patricians and plebeians.” … The Law which produced both general assent, and indeed pride, in the English was of course the “Common” Law, whose superiority to the arbitrary government of absolutist monarchs had ostensibly been proved by the Revolution. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Sir William Blackstone, the first professor of English Law (Oxford, 1758 — 66), demonstrated the virtues of this law in protecting the individual’s property by “assigning to every thing capable of ownership a legal and determinate owner,” while, at the same time, guaranteeing the subject’s most precious possession — liberty — by means of “the glory of the English law,” trial by jury.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Law” include:
Manley’s “Feigned Scene”: The Fictions of Law at Westminster Hall
by KATHRYN TEMPLE (ECF 22.4, Summer 2010)
“Extraordinary and dangerous powers”: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams
by QUENTIN BAILEY (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
“A Living Law to Himself and Others”: Daniel Defoe, Algernon Sidney, and the Politics of Self-Interest in Robinson Crusoe and Farther Adventures
by COBY DOWDELL (ECF 22.3, Spring 2010)
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