Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom by Wendie Ellen Schneider (review)

By the end of the Victorian period, English (and by extension, North American and Australian) trial procedure was distinguished from its continental European counterpart by its commitment to very different roles for judges, juries, and barristers. These differences were the product of profound variations in jurisprudential thought, legal practice, and social experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with England insisting on the truth-finding function as well as the political efficacy of lay participation in trials (in the form of the jury) and the emergent art of cross-examination (performed by barristers who increasingly claimed some of the powers exercised by judges in the continental model, and whose conduct in court was governed only by noble ideals of gentlemanly restraint and professional character). Wendie Ellen Schneider’s Engines of Truth: Producing Veracity in the Victorian Courtroom, a crisply and elegantly written study, promises new insights into the ways in which Victorian trial procedure “approached the question of truth-telling with unprecedented seriousness and adopted an array of innovative strategies to guarantee veracity in trials” (2). Overall, though, the result is uneven, and ultimately it promises rather more than it delivers.

The novelty and strengths of this book are two-fold: its close attentiveness to the law of perjury, which flourished as a strategy to countermand the nineteenth-century expansion of categories of witnesses considered competent to testify, and its interest in bringing metropolitan experience into conversation with trial procedure in British India. The latter move is particularly topical and necessary, as legal historians—as well as literary critics—are (rather belatedly) recognizing the need to situate important developments in the rule of law at home alongside the qualification or denial of equivalent rights and liberties to subjects abroad, particularly in times of conflict or on the frontiers of Empire. As a consequence, Schneider’s strongest work appears in chapters 3 and 4, where she investigates experiments with alternatives to perjury prosecutions in India and in the new English Divorce Court, both arenas in which “the impetus toward mendacity was thought to be too strong for even cross-examination to counter it” (99). In India, where Thomas Macaulay and James Fitzjames Stephen implemented the ideas they formulated at home—with the passage of the Indian Penal Code in 1860 and the Indian Evidence Act in 1872—jurists debated the imposition of shame-based sanctions. In the Divorce Court, the controversial work of the Queen’s or King’s Proctor was to find proof of adultery that would undermine a petitioner’s case, thus “grafting an inquisitorial component onto the law of divorce” (176). Neither experiment was ultimately successful, and after the passage of the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898—when even criminal defendants were considered competent to testify and all parties could now speak on their own behalf in court—cross-examination became the dominant vehicle for the work of forensic truth assessment.

While many of the details in chapters 3 and 4 are freshly interesting and presented to the reader with an admirable clarity, the narrative arc of the overall argument is perhaps less novel than the author claims. The weaknesses of this book arise from its failure to engage with the enormous body of recent historical work and criticism of so-called truth-telling as a cultural enterprise. Schneider opens with the claim that her study “ranges somewhat more widely than is typical of most works of legal history, considering newspaper accounts of cases, novels, and works of psychology, among other things; [her] goal in doing so is to reveal the complex connections between the law and the historical context in which it was taking shape” (4). She follows this with an opening reference to Walter Houghton’s fifty-year-old work on the idea of Victorian earnestness and some brief, sketchy summaries of the plots of several novels, primarily by Anthony Trollope. The book almost wholly fails to engage with the...