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Essays in Criticism 56.2 (2006) 188-199



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The High Commission of Literature

University College London
The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel. By Lisa Rodensky. Oxford University Press, 2003; £52.

Lisa Rodensky's study of the relation between legal theory and practice in the nineteenth century and the evolving treatments of states of mind in the Victorian novel is a formidable achievement. As a contributor to the field of 'law and literature', Rodensky has an evident advantage: she combines the skills of a trained lawyer, experienced in legal practice and commanding an impressive knowledge of legal history, with those of a developed and sensitive literary critic and scholar. The detailed, forensically precise readings and arguments in her book are never less than stimulating, and she handles with unusual even-handedness the potentially rivalrous relation between her two disciplines. 'My aim here', she declares, 'is to bring to bear rhetorical and historical analyses in a way that does justice to law and literature. The legal texts are neither subordinate nor superordinate to the literary, and the literary functions neither as supplement to nor master of the legal.' Her book goes to the core of what the novel, that powerful institution of our culture, does – or at least the core of one potent fictional tradition.

The Crime in Mind compares and meditates on the implications of the treatment of the inner life in fiction and in law, specifically concerning itself with the issue of the knowability of states of mind and thus of intentions. This is a vast and potentially unmanageable terrain, and Rodensky keeps her focus tightly on her chosen aspect of the subject by examining the legal and moral ramifications of the novels she chooses as her main texts: Oliver Twist, Adam Bede, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda – adding James Fitzjames Stephen's 1885 piece of non-fiction The Story of Nuncomar [End Page 188] and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (a work she is now editing) as the surprising and intriguing topic of her final chapter. Stephen's irritated and challenging views in essays from the 1850s onwards on the epistemological liberties taken by the Victorian novel, as well as his contributions to contemporary legal debate on the shifting definitions of criminal responsibility, help to unify and give vividness to Rodensky's discussions of a succession of matters arising in the fiction, such as the legal and moral complications of unforeseen consequences, the status of an 'accessory before the fact', attempted crimes and crimes of omission.

The seriousness of Rodensky's undertaking is daunting, and the questions it raises about our culture and the influence of fiction profound. She asks, for example, about the intensive representations of the inner life in the Victorian novel, 'what might the consequences of such representations be for social and cultural attitudes toward the basic elements of crime and toward criminal responsibility more generally?' For Fitzjames Stephen, defending legal institutions and traditions against the critiques of existing law that frequently drove 'novels with a purpose', the answer in 1857 was a gloomy one: 'The production, among … readers, of false impressions of the system of which they form a part – especially of the falsehood which tends to render them discontented with and disaffected to the institutions under which they live – cannot but be a serious evil, and must often involve great moral delinquency'. Stephen's institutional affiliations and loyalties as a member of the legal system sensitise him to the epistemological arrogations of the novel in its polemical representations of contemporary reality, in particular its assaults on the workings of the law. He powerfully denounces its prejudicial invention, and self-authenticating revelation, of a hidden truth in controversial stories, stories which were then used to show up the injustice of the status quo ('The novelist makes his facts', he says). For Stephen, then, Dickens's famous invocation of a visionary power in chapter 47 of Dombey and Son, a power which would see more truth than any individual human being could, then make that vision public, is going to be questionable...

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