The constitution of trust: Legal fiction and Victorian epic

The subject of this dissertation is the relation between equity and trust in three Victorian "epics": Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1842--85), Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book (1868--9), and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876).;In the middle ages, England evolved a dual system of justice: Common law courts decided issues of "law," and the Court of Chancery decided issues of "equity." This division endured until the Judicature Acts of 1873--5 abolished Chancery. Traditionally conceived, equity---including the equitable instrument known as "the trust"---aspired to achieve a fair and flexible remedy based on the unwritten dictates of natural law or the monarch's conscience. In the legal-positivist ethos of the Victorian era, however, the natural-law maxims of equity were seen as too tacit to reflect anything but the arbitrary whim of the Chancellor.;Banished from law, equity found a home in Victorian literature. Poets and novelists fostered an equitable sense of tacit trust by exploiting legal fictions that largely went without saying and that therefore helped constitute a common culture of trust. The literary duty of holding trust itself "in trust," as it were, was especially suited to works written in the epic strain, for epics had always harbored an embedded literary genealogy tracing the movement of culture from nation to nation---with the latest epic stewarding its cultural cargo for the sake of epics and future epochs.;The epics of Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot fulfill this trust by exploiting variants of one key legal fiction: that of "the king's two bodies," which portrays the monarch as possessing both a flesh-and-blood "body natural" that promulgates positive law, and a mystical body politic that reflects the higher, unwritten law of equity. Through this fiction, Tennyson, Browning and Eliot not only examine the foundations of monarchy, executive power, and commercial credit respectively, but also imaginatively reconstitute these institutions for a more contractual, republican, and fiduciary polity.