British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Melissa J. Ganz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781009224130
Published In: October 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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British law underwent significant changes in the eighteenth century as jurists and legislators adapted doctrines to fit the needs of an increasingly commercial, industrial, and imperial society. This volume reveals how legal developments of the period shaped and were shaped by imaginative writing. Reading canonical and lesser-known texts from the Restoration to the Romantic era, the chapters explore literary engagements with libel law, plague law, marriage law, naturalization law, the poor laws, the law of slavery and abolition, and the practice of common-law decision-making.

The volume also considers the language and form of legal treatises and judicial decisions, as well as recent appropriations of the period's literature and legal norms by the Christian right. Through these varied case studies, the volume deepens our knowledge of law and literature's mutual entanglements in the long eighteenth century while shedding light on legal and ethical questions that remain of concern to this day.

Introduction Melissa J. Ganz

1. 'Every common reader': satire, libel law, and the emergence of objective interpretive procedures, ca.

1670–1730

Andrew Benjamin Bricker

2. Perpendicular publics: contesting infrastructure at early eighteenth-century rail crossings

David Alff

3. Ambivalence, survival, and law in Defoe's 'Journal of the Plague Year'

Kathryn D. Temple

4. The court of justice and the court of conscience: legal ethics in 'Tom Jones'

Suzanna Geiser

5. 'A higher tribunal': equity, law, and the family in Sir Charles Grandison

Melissa J. Ganz

6. Mansfield, burrow, and the reformulation of the legal decision

Simon Stern

7. Novel subjects: naturalization in Richardson and Edgeworth

Stephanie DeGooyer

8. Common law and cultural difference in Scott's 'Ivanhoe' and 'Chronicles of the Canongate'

Anne Frey

9. The legal character of paupers in early nineteenth-century England

Mark Schoenfield

10. Liberty in 'Parenthesis': the case of the slave, grace (1827) and antislavery satire in the history of Mary Prince (1831)

Sarah Winter

11. Yearning for restriction in the romantic novel: propagating conservative legal norms in right-wing literary podcasts and religion-centered editions of works by Jane Austen and Mary Shelley

Nicole Mansfield Wright