Table Of ContentCharacter: Writing and Reputation in
Victorian Law and Literature
EDINBURGH CRITICAL STUDIES IN LAW, LITERATURE AND THE
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Melbourne) edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsllh
Character: Writing
and Reputation in Victorian
Law and Literature
Cathrine O. Frank
For my son, Oliver
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Character-Building: Narrative Theory, Narrative
Jurisprudence, and the Idea of Character 1
1 Incriminating Character: Revisiting the Right to Silence in
Adam Bede and The Scarlet Letter 31
2 Gossip, Hearsay, and the Character Exception: Reputation on
Trial in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and R v Rowton 83
3 Defamation of Character: Anthony Trollope and the Law of Libel 116
4 Dignity, Disclosure, and the Right to Privacy: The Strange
Characters of Dr. Jekyll and Dorian Gray 165
5 The English Dreyfus Case: Status as Character in an Illiberal Age 207
Works Cited 225
Index 238
Acknowledgments
Research for this book was aided early on by a Minigrant from the University
of New England and by two sabbaticals. I’m grateful for the focused time
for scholarship and hope the next book won’t take as long. Thanks to Nan
Goodman, Gary Watt, and Kieran Dolin whose invitations and editorial
oversight gave me the opportunity to work up initial thoughts about portions
of this book, and to Caroline Shaw who looked over proposals and fomented
conference panels. Likewise, I thank Anat Rosenberg and Gordon Bigelow
for a memorable ASLCH dinner conversation about Trollope, Stevenson, and
Wilde, which sent me home with new things to read. Warmest appreciation
goes to Nora Frank whose visits made it possible for me to attend conferences
at all.
Bill MacNeil’s enthusiasm for the project has been a real boon. An email
from Bill, from whatever part of the world he happens to be in, brims with
cheerfulness or wry observation, and I read it, encouraged. Thanks also to the
anonymous readers who pushed me to answer questions I suspected I ought
to say more about, pointed me towards new reading, and let me know I was
on a right road. And of course thanks to Laura Williamson and Sarah Foyle
at Edinburgh University Press for shepherding the project along.
An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Gossip, Hearsay, and the
Character Exception in Victorian Law and Literature” in Law and Humanities,
vol. 9, no. 2 (2015), pp. 172–202 and is reprinted by permission of the
publisher (Taylor & Francis, Ltd, http://tandfonline.com). A portion of
Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Privacy, Character, and the Jurisdiction
of the Self: A ‘Story of the Door’ in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde” in English Language Notes, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 215–24. Copyright 2010,
Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the
publisher. www.dukeupress.edu. Likewise, my discussion of George Edalji’s
case appeared first in the chapter “Narrative and Law” in Law and Literature,
edited by Kieran Dolin, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 42–57.
Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
Acknowledgments vii
Finally, I thank Oliver. This book has grown along with him—often right
next to him, in fact, during this last, strange year—and while I didn’t always
appreciate his input, including the insertion of a friendly cat, I suspect he was
more patient than it seemed. I know he already understands the satisfaction
of completing a book.
Introduction: Character- Building:
Narrative Theory, Narrative Jurisprudence,
and the Idea of Character
The real effective education of a people is given them by the circumstances
by which they are surrounded. The laws are the great schoolmaster, as the
ancient statesmen and philosophers well knew, and it is time we should
again learn the lesson. What shapes the character is not what is purposely
taught, so much as the unintentional teaching of institutions and social
relations.
J. S. Mill (1846)1
That we shall know with whom we have to do, is the first precondition of
having anything to do with another.
Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies” (1906)
Character- Building in the Nineteenth Century
When John Stuart Mill declaimed that “The laws are the great schoolmaster,”
he yoked law to education in a way that emphasized its formative and nor-
mative functions for “a people,” but he needn’t have looked to the ancients
for the view, also expressed by the eighteenth-c entury magistrate Patrick
Quolquhon, that “What education is to an individual, the laws are to soci-
ety” (qtd. in Wiener 47). These links between education and law, individual
and society not only frame out the first half of the nineteenth century, they
also reveal a shared foundation in what historian Martin J. Wiener describes
as “the character-b uilding task of law” and law’s often tacit moral agenda
(53).2 Indeed, Mill’s comment that law’s lessons were best experienced as an
1 Qtd. in Carlisle, John Stuart Mill 147. The passage comes from one of Mill’s leading articles
on Ireland in the Morning Chronicle.
2 Mill’s belief that structural reforms could change social relations, and hence the kind of
character “a people” could develop, places him in an interesting relationship with other
2 CHARACTER: WRITING AND REPUTATION
“unintentional” form of instruction informs the nineteenth- century shift
from public spectacles of punishment and their explicitly deterrent objective
towards this subtler moral management. Yet Mill’s use of the passive voice and
his focus on “a people” render the collective body a passive object of political
philosophies and policy reforms that, as he well knew, relied on the individ-
ual’s cognizance of the socio- legal landscape, his active effort to contain or
direct his impulses in appropriate ways, and his responsibility for the harms
that resulted from a failure to do so. Secular utilitarianism and Christian
evangelicalism thus shared an ethic of self-d enial which also informs law’s
moral agenda and identifies character- building as an ongoing practice. From
James Mill to James Fitzjames Stephen, the dominant if sometimes implicit
view was that “consequentialism would build character” (55).3
To the extent that character- building implies a movement away from an
underdeveloped or misaligned moral state towards a valued ideal (a Charles
Kingsley school of Muscular Christianity), drawing attention to it inevita-
bly invites the term’s conservative associations.4 I am less interested in the
evaluative dimensions of character, however, than I am in the narrative pro-
cesses through which character is built or, to follow the many compound
forms listed in the OED, the way character is “drawn,” “formed,” “made,”
“moulded,” “read,” and “trained”—a ll of which usages (with the exception
of “character- drawing” and “character- making”) are illustrated by citations
dating initially from the nineteenth century.
But what precisely was the thing thus acted on? Certainly, to speak of
character itself can carry moralistic connotations, but the character concept
has been known by a variety of terms whose conflation risks underappreciat-
ing their historical usage and connotative variety.5 In writing about character,
social reformers who downplayed determinism in order to highlight individual capacity
(Wiener 48).
3 See Wiener on law’s relation to what he refers to as the broader discourse of character
(38– 45) and internal reforms that supported the character- building function (52– 83).
4 See Hall. See also Blinka on character as “social, cultural, and ideological battleground”
(90).
5 See Amelie Oksenberg Rorty on the wide range of terms for character and the danger of
trying to make one historically specific variant serve as the single best name for the “class” to
which it belongs (537– 53). For example, “Person” comes from drama and law and theology,
“the unified center of choice and action, the unit of legal and theological responsibility”
(542), but “character” lacks this unified core and consists instead in a set of “traits,” “dis-
positions,” and “habits” that determine how one responds to environmental circumstances
and experiences and therefore the roles for which one is best suited, that is, those which are
best calculated “to bring out his potentialities and functions” (539–4 0). This latter under-
standing seems to suit a status- bound social model in which the external observation of
how a person fulfils his role is the way “to know what sort of character a person is,” whereas
