By Jan-Melissa Schramm
The eighteenth-century version of the legal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the proof of a case may well 'speak for themselves' - used to be deserted in 1836, while laws enabled barristers to deal with the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with criminal. more and more, specialist acts of interpretation have been noticeable as essential to in achieving a simply verdict, thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given through eye witnesses at legal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound effect of the altering nature of proof in legislation and theology on literary narrative within the 19th century. Already a locus of theological clash, the assumption of testimony grew to become a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate in regards to the ethics of literary and criminal illustration. She argues that authors of fiction created a mode of literary advocacy which either imitated, and reacted opposed to, the instance in their storytelling opposite numbers on the Bar.
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Extra resources for Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology
Example text
Eighteenth-century evidentiary apologetics In 1727, Thomas Woolston published the ®rst of his six Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour, a series of tracts which questioned the miraculous attestation of the ministry and resurrection of Jesus and asserted the allegorical origin of a number of biblical narratives. The ensuing controversy resulted in the renewal of his prosecution for blasphemy,29 and he was subsequently convicted, ®ned and imprisoned by the Court of the King's Bench. In 1729, Thomas Sherlock responded to the issues raised by Woolston's trial in a small publication entitled The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus, in which a narrator and some of his peers from the Inns of Court convened to assess the evidence of the resurrection, with reference to the gospels as their authorities in lieu of Littleton, Plowden, and Coke.
I also provide an explanation of changes in the format of the legal trial in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which serves as a foundation for the subsequent textual discussion. In the early modern criminal trial, belief in a protagonist's innocence was ideally generated by the delivery of `artless' and sincere speeches in both courts of law and in works of ®ction, but the (actual and perhaps anticipated) appearance of defence lawyers began to alter this, and in Chapter 2 I provide a brief analysis of Tom Jones, Amelia, Clarissa, Caleb Williams, and The Heart of Midlothian in order to assess more effectively how these paradigms of persuasion and proof were to impact upon the development of the great mid-Victorian realist narratives.
Finally, the Conclusion asks whether legal standards are the only test of truth and seeks to explain why the criminal trial became such an important fact-®nding model for authors. I conclude that the rise of the third-person realist novel is simultaneously in imitation of, and in reaction against, the increasing prominence of the activities of defence counsel. Their competition with authors for the most truthful representation of the `real' ensured that testimony remained a focal point for the expression and attempted resolution of many of the era's most persistent epistemological anxieties.