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Law, Equity, and Conscience in Victorian England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Simon Petch
Simon Petch
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Extract

This paper is concerned with the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 18751 and the controversy surrounding them. The administrative reform of the Judicature was less obviously controversial than some other Victorian reformist legislation, such as the Factory Act, or the Married Women's Property Act, but legal debate about the Judicature Acts brings the law into dialogue with moral debates in the broader arena of Victorian culture. As a response to a crisis of authority in the country's legal institutions, this debate was one significant manifestation of the general conflict between authority and individualism that pervades Victorian discourse. The key terms of the legal debate were law, conscience, and equity, underwritten by the vague but powerful concepts of justice and natural law, and throughout the debate the relationships between legal usage and other forms of language were persistently questioned. The terms were also tested, and the questions asked, in such central literary texts as Daniel Deronda, Idylls of the King, and The Ring and the Book, and in the writings of such culturally central figures as Charles Darwin and Frederick Denison Maurice.

Type
Works in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 123 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

This paper is for Roslyn Jolly, the shaping spirit of whose critical intelligence is, to me, everywhere apparent in it. I am grateful to her, and to Warwick Slinn, of Massey University, for constructive comments on a draft of the paper, and I thank Justice L. J. Priestley, of the New South Wales Court of Appeal, and Professor James Boyd White, of the University of Michigan, for directing me to relevant legal material.

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