'Clarissa' and the law: Inheritance, abduction and rape

Clarissa's status as a propertied female triggers many legal questions whose answers are dependent upon an understanding of eighteenth-century inheritance and criminal law. This dissertation augments discussions of law as metaphor in Clarissa with an analysis of law as fact in the novel. Based on primary legal documentation, it provides a historical reconstruction of the legal realities attendant upon eighteenth-century abducted and raped propertied females and analyzes how these realities shaped Clarissa's world.;Richardson's knowledge of the law was derived primarily from his Parliamentary printing and attendance at the debates. Using this knowledge of law, Samuel Richardson incorporated both the civil and criminal laws as the matrix for the novel, tightly embedding within the narrative legal precedents tacitly understood by his more informed readers. One of Richardson's key themes concerns early eighteenth-century values of money, land, and acquisitions, all transactions reinforced by law. Against this background, Clarissa's atypical inheritance from her grandfather becomes the motivating event in the novel, as it distinguishes Clarissa as a feme sole with legal rights quite comparable to those of her brother James Jr.;Furthermore, numerous questions have not been asked nor answered about a woman's legal options regarding abduction, attempted rape, and completed rape. The medieval statutes in effect in the eighteenth century, while providing us with Parliamentary black letter law, conflicted with the reality of how courts handled these capital offenses. Analysis of these medieval statutes and eighteenth-century case law reveals how inheritance law and the criminal laws were interrelated. Specifically, under the abduction statute, when a propertied female who had goods and property was abducted, the courts treated defendants harshly; in contrast, juries regularly mitigated the capital offense of rape, resulting in a high acquittal rate for most alleged rapists.;With such a reconstruction of eighteenth-century inheritance and criminal law that has been lost to us today, we can interpret Clarissa in its much needed legal-historical context.