Criminal Acts and Controlling Figures: Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature

JEMCS 2.1 (Spring/Summer 2002) Criminal Acts and Controlling Figures: Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature Cheryl L. Nixon Paul Baines, The House ofForgery inEighteenth-Century Britain. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999. 195 pp. $94.95. Lance Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 232 pp. $49.95. Thomas M. Curley, Sir Robert Chambers: Law, Literature, and Empire in the Age of Johnson. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1998. 698 pp. $87.50. Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 218 pp. $42.50. Netta Murray Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth-Century London. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998. 217 pp. $89.95. Dieter Paul Polloczek, Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 269 pp. $65.00. The individual and his/her relationship to a rapidly changing society, as mediated by rapidly changing forms of narrative representation, is one of the fundamental concerns of eighteenth century literary studies. Rooted in Ian Watt's well-known thesis concerning the rise of individualism and the novel's attempt at realism, this rubric of "representing the individual in society" con nects the development of the novel to social change. In his recent The English Novel inHistory, 1700-1780 (1999), John Richetti locates as one of the novel's most important functions its ability to "render individuals as (potentially) both socially constructed and individually defined" (8). As he explains, eighteenth-centu ry a[n]arratives of all kinds return consistently to that largest of Nixon 127 questions: where is the authority that can judge subjectivity? That is, how should domestic and political relationships be con stituted? Who rules and who serves and who benefits from the arrangement?" (4). The study of eighteenth-century "law and lit erature" has an obvious affinity with these questions, and italso provides a general approach to answering them. The study of law and literature both focuses and complicates the relationship between individual, text, and society. The social world can be delimited and richly realized by exploring the law's definition of that world; the individual can be investigated as he/she occu pies positions on the margins (the criminal) or at the center (the magistrate); and the novel's formal history, including its role in the definition of fact and fiction, can be charted by comparing it to legal texts. Although very different in focus, argument, and source mate rial, all six law and literature studies under investigation here engage with these issues. Most importantly, too, these books expand the analysis of literature into a larger examination of tex tual culture, allowing print and manuscript, fact and fiction, and unknown and canonical sources to be juxtaposed in new ways. In their historicist work, these studies build on earlier theoretical explorations of eighteenth-century law and literature, represented by the groundbreaking work of John Bender, Peter Linebaugh, and John Zomchick. Yet these works also represent a new phase in legal/literary studies in that they explicitly or implicitly critique Foucauldian notions of the law, moving away from the penitential model of the law and towards a reassertion of the individual's abil ity to locate or subvert power within disciplining social structures. Additionally, some critics, notably Bertelsen, demonstrate how the connections between law and literature can be used to complicate Habermas' conception of the public and private sphere. The the oretical assertions of these critics stem from their research methodology; their reconstruction of specific legal systems and analysis of archival records in their totality allow these authors to locate real individuals and understand their position in the daily functioning of the law. Hal Gladfelder's Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth Century England: Beyond the Law offers a strong example of the compelling ways in which the study of law and literature allows cultural and narrative forms to be investigated simultaneously. The first part of his study provides a fascinating introduction to popular accounts of the deviant individual, showing how these texts voice a need for the social regulation of the criminal while simultaneously encouraging the reader's identification with and 128 The Journal...