Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ioannou, Maria

Titel

'[O]ur legal fictions': Law Reform, Jurisprudential Concerns and Benign Aspects of the Law in Charles Dickens's Bleak House

Ist Teil von

• Dickens quarterly, 2020-06, Vol.37 (2), p.131-149

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Literature Online (LION eBooks)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• [...]there are moments in the novel where the legal system appears beneficent; these, as I shall argue here, serve an overall function that has been overlooked. [...]I examine benign examples of the workings of the legal system in Bleak House, suggesting the ways in which the novel is associated with a jurisprudential and philosophic, rather than monolithically condemnatory, response to the law. The "conceptual framework and attendant vocabulary of indirect violence" did not exist at Dickens's time, yet Bleak House is full of instances of such violence, as when Nemo's handwritten document, a packet of letters and the promissory note in the possession of George construct "a fatal trap for Lady Dedlock" (22). Eliza Lynn Linton, in an 1851 article in Household Words on marriage laws in England, clearly distinguishes between Justice and legal rules when she says that existing court decisions and legislation are "an example of the great Injustice done to [women], and of their maltreatment under the eyes of a whole nation, by the Law" (260).