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The character of social connection in law and literature: lessons from Bleak House

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 November 2009

Gary Watt
Gary Watt*
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Abstract

This paper argues that law and society are disconnected in practice, and that this is attributable, in part, to law’s disconnection from the arts and humanities in our schemes of formal education. When we draw out the legal yarn from its cultural fabric, we find that it is remarkably thin. It is especially inadequate to describe the complexity of human interconnection, and even lacks a language to express such commonplace connections as unmarried romantic cohabitation and non-profit clubs. To understand human interconnection and the law’s connection to society, we must read the law ‘in context’ – as being one fabric, one textile, with other literatures – and we must read with an appropriate ethic. To that end, this paper reads the law in the context of Dickens’s Bleak House, which has been called ‘a novel of connections’, and Forster’s Howards End, which exhorts us to ‘connect the prose and the passion’.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , September 2009 , pp. 263 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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