Ways of thinking about law in four nineteenth -century British novels: 'Orley Farm', 'Paul Clifford', 'The Woman in White', 'Felix Holt

Novels participated in the intellectual debate over reform of the laws and the legal system in nineteenth-century Britain. From a law and literature perspective, they are most informative for the humanitarian and political concepts the characters and the narrators express about how the law operates in society, how the law and the legal system should be changed, and the influence of history upon representations of the law. These expressions of the law "as it is" and the law "as it ought to be," the real and the ideal, incorporate thinking that includes the influence of Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England and Jeremy Bentham's arguments for radical reform. They also reveal thinking about the law that connects to natural law theory, legal realism, positivism, and theories of evidence.;Two of the novels, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm and George Eliot's Felix Holt, The Radical, are novels written in the literary tradition of realism. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White stretches the expectations of the realistic novel that its representations will be of the law as it is to the sensation novel subgenre that includes aspects of the underworld of Victorian society including crime, deceit, treachery, and near anarchy. Collin's use of a legal framework demonstrates a closer account of the law as it is and its limitations than Trollope and Eliot. Paul Clifford by Bulwer-Lytton also attempts to demonstrate the law "as it is," while using an idealistic style to underscore his message that includes thinking about the law as it "ought to be.";Finally, because they are written by artists dependent on their imaginations, each novel urges a similar dependence on the imagination in law. Thus, thinking about law progresses to imagining about law as the novelists imagine an improved legal system, methods in which the imagination should work in the system's daily operation, and ways to circumvent the legal judgment rendered in each novel.