The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel

Conclusion

In t h e 1 8 9 0 s Robert Gemmell Hutchison reimagined Abraham Solomon ’s 1857 painting Waiting for the Verdict. For us Hutchison’s painting, titled Awaiting the Verdict (fig. 10), offers a glimpse of the evolving tenor of the novel’s juristic structuring later in the century, again allowing us to envisage in its narratival tension a novelistic story that is counterpoised,and tethered,to its representation in court. Hutchison’s painting immediately suggests the arrival of a Hardyesque modernism: its realism is much grittier and darker than Solomon’s.The family is fragmented instead of unified. No person looks to another. The child in the foreground is stupefied,not sleeping innocently.An idealized domestic sphere has crumbled. Everyone is older. All are urban denizens, instead of country people,as in Solomon’s painting.No windows brighten this scene,and the gas lamps that are present seem not even to be light sources. The picnic basket (barely visible) sits to the right side on the floor instead of tucked beside the older woman.Glasses and a jug of water are provided by the state.A No Smoking sign rudely intrudes, somehow adding to our sense of the family’s burden, though they themselves seem oblivious to it. And, instead of a legal clerk writing in the background, as in Solomon’s painting, Hutchison has substituted a sign posted beside the door, which reads: o ] Conclusion Instructions to Witnesses The Witness to be Examined Are [sic] Injoined To Answer to the Questions put to them To Speak aloud and in distinct terms So that the Court & jury may at once hear their answer. by Order of the Court Hutchison thus introduces into his painting a modern cynicism about authority and language. Instead of weaving the family’s story into that of the court’s, the textual signifiers mark disconnection. The very fact that we can Conclusion 165 fig. 10. Robert Gemmell Hutchison, Awaiting the Verdict (1890s). The FORBES Magazine Collection, New York © All rights reserved Image not available. read the words on this sign emphasizes that a dingy wall has been constructed and brought forward, whereas in Solomon’s picture the law courts were down a lit passage, stretched back through a series of arches. Now perspective is flattened , and the even balance of the story of a family against the background of the court curtly eliminated.Nor do any human figures bridge these two spaces, connecting them,as in Solomon’s painting.And,most important,in sharp contrast to Solomon’s painting, the door leading to the court is shut. Hutchison’s depiction signifies the arrival of an era of self-declared modernist angst, in which individuals, their perspectives isolated and fragmented, struggle with the overwhelming and impersonal sociopolitical organizations that collectively they have produced. It also provides a barometer of how the narratival tension, with its juridical literary axis, captured in Solomon’s painting continued to thrive through the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond. More than ever there would be novels telling stories that seem to belong metaphorically to the court’s waiting room, its salle de pas perdus (hall of lost steps), where fiction could rival the court even as it incorporated the court’s energies and architectonics. From the perspective of English literary history the later Victorian period is filled with novels explicitly trying to map themselves in profound, or at least creative, ways against a trial scene. A short list of interesting examples not elsewhere mentioned in this book might include Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1862), Henry Kingsley’s Austin Elliott (1863), Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial (1863), F. G. Trafford’s George Geith of Fen Court (1865), Charles Reade’s Griffith Gaunt (1866), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s An Open Verdict (1878), Maxwell Grey’s (Mary G. Tuttiett’s) The Silence of Dean Maitland (1886), H. Rider Haggard’s Mr. Meeson’s Will (1888),William Black’s Highland Cousins (1894), and Walter Besant’s The Orange Girl (1899). In this book I have tried to mark the development in the first half of the nineteenth century of such later generative intersections with the law courts. More generally, I have tried to suggest and sketch the outlines of a moment when I believe some particular historical formal developments in the novel helped make the genre...