TROLLOPE AND THE LAW By the same author THE NOVEL FROM STERNE TO JAMES (with Juliet McMaster) GREAT EXPECT A TIONS (editor) LITTLE DORRIT (editor) TROLLOPE AND THE LAW R. D. McMaster Professor of English University of Alberta Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-18338-8 ISBN 978-1-349-18336-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18336-4 © R. D. McMaster 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-40013-5 Ail rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly & Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First Published in the United States of America in 1986 ISBN 978-0-312-81891-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McMaster, Rowland. Troilope and the law. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Troilope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Knowledge-Law. 2. Troilope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Characters-Lawyers. 3. Law in literature. 4. Lawyers in literature. I. Title. PR5688.L36M34 1986 823'.8 86-1274 ISBN 978-0-312-81891-3 To juliet Contents Acknowledgements VllI Texts and Abbreviations IX Preface X 1 TROLLOPE AND THE LAW: A Prospect 1 2 SEX IN THE BARRISTER'S CHAMBERS: Lawyer and Client in Orley Farm 32 3 MR CHAFFA NBRASS FOR THE DEFENCE: Trollope and the Old Bailey Tradition 50 4 LARES ET PENATES: Solicitors and Estates 69 5 THE LAW AND POLITICS 89 6 LADY ANNA: The Solicitor-General as Prospero 119 7 MR. SCARBOROUGH'S FAMILY: The Idea of the Law 135 Notes 155 Index 171 VII Acknowledgements I record here my gratitude to the people and institutions who have enabled me to write this book: to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofC anada, for a leave fellowship to work on it; to the University of Alberta, for a research grant that enabled me to consult the Trollope papers in the Bodleian; to the Bodleian Library, and to Lloyds Bank, the Trollope Trustees, for permission to quote from those manuscripts; to the National Library ofIreland and to the Biddle Law Library, University of Pennsylvania, for providing me with information © from their collections. Chapter 7, 1981 by the Regents of the University of California, is reprinted from Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 36, No.2, September 1981, pp.135-156, by per mission of the Regents. My warm personal thanks are due to Professor W. F. Bowker, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Law Research and Reform, at the University of Alberta, a humane and learned friend, who helped me through many a legal and historical problem puzzling to the layman. For kind encour agement, I am grateful to Professors Ruth ap Roberts and John Hall. And most of all my thanks are due to Professor Juliet McMaster, a learned Trollopian, and, most happily for me, my wife. Vlll Texts and Abbreviations I have used the Oxford World's Classics editions of Trollope's novels with the exception of The Macdermots of Ballycloran (London: John Lane, 1906). References are by volume number (in cases where the original issue was two volumes) and page. For other works of Trollope, I have used: An Autobiography, World's Classics paperback edition, edited by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page with introduction and notes by P. D. Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Thackeray (London, 1879); The Life ofC icero (London, 1880); and The New Zealander, edited by John Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). AA An Autobiography OF Orley Farm CYFH Can You Forgive Her? PF Phineas Finn ED The Eustace Diamonds PR Phineas Redux LC The Life of Cicero RH Ralph the Heir MM Miss Mackenzie TC The Three Clerks NZ The New Zealander WWLN The Way We Live Now IX Preface Several distinguished scholars have drawn attention to the importance of law and lawyers in Trollope's fiction, and lawyers themselves have taken a steady interest in his works. That more has not been written on the subject is perhaps explained by the apprehensiveness it arouses: a literary critic is apt to be daunted by the technicalities of law, and lawyers may feel that literary criticism is not their line. But then, Trollope himself was not a lawyer, and what we are interested in are those aspects of the law that were of essential impor tance to him or which clarify the meaning of his works. Such investigation is timely in that the social history of English law is, to judge by recent studies, a matter of increasing general interest. I think I am not merely displaying a partisan interest in the subject when I see the law as having central importance in Trollope's view of society, more important than the Church, the secular life of which he depicts in the Barchester series, and of equal importance with politics, which the law blends with and on which he concentrates in the Palliser series. In the law, Trollope finds not only a machinery for the practical functioning of society but an expression of spiritual principles integral to the English way of doing things. This philosophical view of English law, however, goes along with a good deal of satire, some of it misguided, on the venality and viciousness of lawyers and the harshness of certain legal procedures. Looking at Trollope's novels in the light of nineteenth century English legal history has some practical advantages for the interpreting reader. It is over a century since Trollope died. Practices that we take for granted - for instance, that the prisoner in a criminal trial has a right to defence counsel, or that the prisoner can be called as a witness to give sworn testimony, etc. - were either fairly recent or not yet allowed. For the American, Commonwealth, or foreign reader, x