Victorian Interpretation

Victorian Legal Interpretation

i n t e r t e x t o n e M Victorian Legal Interpretation Would you some day inform them that in a legal document words have to be interpreted in a legal sense: and not by private feelings of whatever kind they may be. . . . They do not understand that legal documents are things that have to be carefully, rightfully, interpreted. —Oscar Wilde Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, as critics have often noted, is concerned with the problems of interpretation in many ways, with Chancery’s interminable delay in the interpretation of one particular legal document standing at the center of the novel’s world. Given the political, social, and individual consequences of legal judgment, it makes sense that Bleak House (and the Victorian novel is in general obsessed with the law) marks legal hermeneutics as the central site of interpretive anxiety. Moreover, the novel suggests that legal interpretation would be less confused —less foggy—if interpreters held the right morals. As Ada Clare says: “It seems very strange, as there must be right somewhere, that an honest judge in real earnest has not been able to find out through all these years where it is.”1 In contrast to Bleak House’s disquiet, an interesting confidence about the ease of legal interpretation is expressed at the start of most nineteenth-century treatises on jurisprudence. Authors devote many pages to problems of right interpretation of the law only after asserting that, in most cases, interpretation is not required. The plain or literal sense of the words alone will do. Once the difficulties have been 49 50 Victorian Interpretation admitted, however, Victorian legal theorists also often move to grounding right interpretation in ethics. The history of Victorian hermeneutics is incomplete without a discussion of hermeneutics in law, which, like scriptural interpretation, has a tradition that precedes the Romantic hermeneutics I’ve discussed. Jurisprudence was one of the traditional areas of hermeneutic inquiry prior to the extension of interpretive theory to a universal hermeneutics, and Victorian jurisprudence often looked back to specialized methods and vocabularies developed during the Enlightenment for the interpretation of the law. As in exegesis of the Bible, a lot is at stake in the interpretation of the law. A consideration of the arguments that marked legal hermeneutics shows how the hermeneutic problems that were later to become crucial to literary interpretation were first treated in highly nuanced ways in what is a more immediately practical context. In 1871, Parliament passed the Interpretation Act, according to which particular words in laws were to be interpreted in fixed ways. The Act stipulated that there were to be no exceptions, unless explicit directions were given in the original text that the words were to be interpreted in other ways. The wording of the Act is uninteresting, appearing to do no more than define terms in roughly the same way a dictionary does. Yet its passing points to the recognition of pervasive problems in ascertaining the meaning of documents. It attempted to provide a law of interpretation, a rule for interpreters to follow that would render meaning determinate. That Parliament felt that there was a need to put such a key to interpretation into law makes manifest that, despite the underplaying of the difficulties , legal hermeneutics like biblical hermeneutics was riven by the obstacles in the way of establishing an authoritative account of meaning. Legal and biblical hermeneutics were brought together in James Fitzjames Stephen’s defense of Rowland Williams, in the aftermath of the publication of Essays and Reviews. Scriptural interpretation was both the occasion for the trial and the key to Stephen’s defense of the theologian.2 The prosecutors charged that Williams’s essay demonstrated that he did not subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, as required for clergy in the Church of England, and they sought to excommunicate him. Stephen’s defense was built on “the liberty of interpretation.”3 He argued that Williams’s views were not in conflict with the Articles as he interpreted them, and maintained that interpretive questions were “designedly and intentionally left open by the Articles” (66). Like Newman before him, Stephen aimed to show that the words of the Articles can mean many different things. The ordination vows, he contended, do not bear on questions of interpretation. They say nothing about meaning, and a clergyman is free to interpret them as he sees fit. Stephen uses the indeterminacy...