Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology

The eighteenth-century model of the criminal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the facts of a case could ‘speak for themselves’ - was abandoned in 1836, when legislation enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony. Increasingly, professional acts of interpretation were seen as necessary to achieve a just verdict, thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given by eye witnesses at criminal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound impact of the changing nature of evidence in law and theology on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Already a locus of theological conflict, the idea of testimony became a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate about the ethics of literary and legal representation. She argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated, and reacted against, the example of their storytelling counterparts at the Bar.

• Breaks new ground in terms of its conclusions about the relationship between legal advocacy and literary advocacy • Original work that is cross-disciplinary, embracing law, literature and theology - areas in which there is currently much interest • Written by an author who is a lawyer as well as a literary critic and therefore brings very special expertise to the topic

Acknowledgements; Introduction: justice and the impulse to narrate; 1. Eye-witness testimony in the construction of narrative; 2. The origins of the novel and the genesis of the law of evidence; 3. Criminal advocacy and Victorian realism; 4. The martyr as witness: inspiration and the appeal to intuition; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.