Show-Trials: Character, Conviction and the Law in Victorian Fiction

Victorian novels love the law. More accurately, they love to hate the law, but no major nineteenth century novel is without its complicated inheritance plot, its baroque set of switched documents or missing twins, or its melodramatic and climactic trial. Not that the law ever holds anything of real value for the novel's characters. Instead, the law exists, in Victorian fiction, to be expelled at the end of the plot or, as Adam Gopnik nicely paraphrased this tendency in a recent New Yorker essay, discussing the adultery plots in which law and human affection are in tension, "when there's a choice between law and sympathy, the law may take the lovers but the lovers take the cake."'