The law

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Abstract

Richardson was engaged with the law in various ways during the course of his career: as a printer of bills and committee reports for the House of Commons (starting in 1733), as a printer of the Commons Journals (starting in 1742) and the State Trials series (1742), as a victim of corporate fraud (1731) and of what he characterised as literary piracy (1741–2, 1753), and as part owner of the exclusive patent to print law books (starting in 1760). Richardson’s acquisition of the law patent came late in his career, but any of these other events might have informed his thinking about the law and legal modes of argument, and indeed scholars have explored numerous contexts in which his novels address legal issues including marriage, rape, inheritance, citizenship, copyright, and liability for accidents. Another important legal dimension of his work – and one that has received less attention – involves the forensic mentality revealed in his novels, and that he displayed in defending them against critics. His characters often seem aware of their status as exemplars, as participants in the logic of the case, understood both as a unit of meaning and as an invitation to interpretation. The case is, as Conrad van Dijk observes, one of the primary ‘forms through which law becomes legible’, and one that differs from the exemplum because ‘a case is offered up for judgment and interpretation, whereas an exemplum is simply meant to be imitated’. This distinction nicely captures the ambivalence that Richardson displays when responding to critics, using language that moves between case and exemplum. The conception of the literary character as a kind of case recalls Henry Fielding’s claim, in Joseph Andrews, to describe ‘not an Individual, but a Species’, and this is one of the formulations that Catherine Gallagher cites when observing that the novel form gives a ‘special turn … [to] empiricist logic by invoking both a knowledge that types are induced from persons in the world and a further awareness that characters are deduced from types’. Because of Fielding’s legislative pronouncements on the rules of the novelist’s art (as well as his many references to legal doctrine), his work has often been associated with a forensic mentality; in what follows, I will suggest that similar resonances appear in Richardson’s work.

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APA

Stern, S. (2017). The law. In Samuel Richardson in Context (pp. 231–238). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316576755.028

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