Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T05:57:44.811Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE: THE TRIAL OF MADELEINE SMITH AND COLLINS'S THE LAW AND THE LADY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2016

Sara Murphy
Sara Murphy*
Affiliation:
New York University – Gallatin School of Individualized Study
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

“A trial and a literary text,” Shoshana Felman once noted, “do not aim at the same kind of conclusion, nor do they strive toward the same kind of effect. A trial is presumed to be a search for truth, but technically it is a search for a decision; and thus. . . it seeks not truth but finality: a force of resolution.” Literature, on the other hand, Felman posits, is characterized by “a search for meaning. . . for heightened significance, for symbolic understanding” (Felman 55). Trials function to curb the proliferation of meanings in favor of finality, if not absolute truth, whereas literature allegedly forgoes such determinacy. A corollary of this distinction has to do with language itself: while law seeks to fix linguistic meaning, literature draws attention to the inherent instability of meaning.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 163 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Altick, Robert. Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murders and Manners in the Age of Victoria. New York: Norton, 1970.Google Scholar
Bachmann, Maria, and Cox, Don Richard, eds. Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003.Google Scholar
Bandes, Susan, ed. The Passions of Law. New York: New York UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Barbato, Joseph. “Scotland's Bastard Verdict: Intermediacy and the Unique Three-Verdict System.” Indiana International and Comparative Law Review 15 (2004–2005): 543–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ben-Yishai, Ayelet. Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourne Taylor, Jenny. “Introduction.” The Law and the Lady by Collins, Wilkie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. vii-xxiv.Google Scholar
Bourne Taylor, Jenny. “The Later Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Ed. Taylor, Bourne. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. 79–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burney, Ian. Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. The Law and the Lady. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Wilkie. The Letters of Wilkie Collins. 2 vols. Ed. Baker, William and Clarke, William. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Volume 2.Google Scholar
A Complete Report of the Trial of Miss Madeleine Smith for the Poisoning of Pierre-Emile D'Angelier. Revised and corrected by Morrison, John, Esq., Advocate. Nimmo: Edinburgh, 1857.Google Scholar
Dames, Nicholas. Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting and British Fiction 1810–1870. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. “The Demeanor of Murderers.” Selected Journalism 1850–1870 by Dickens, Charles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997. 476–80.Google Scholar
Farmer, Lindsay. Criminal Law, Tradition, and the Legal Order: Crime and the Genius of Scots Law 1747-Present. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Ed. Moretti, Franco. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. 1: 336–64.Google Scholar
“The Glasgow Poisoning Case.” Times (Thursday, 2 July 1857): 5.Google Scholar
Gewirtz, Paul. “Victims and Voyeurs: Two Narrative Problems at the Criminal Trial.” Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. Ed. Brooks, Peter and Gewitz, Paul. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. 135–61.Google Scholar
Gordon, Eleanor, and Nair, Gwyneth. Murder and Morality in Victorian Britain: The Story of Madeleine Smith. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Grossman, Jonathan. The Art of the Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Hume, David. Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland, Respecting Crimes: With a Supplement by Benjamin Robert Bell. 2 vols. Edinburgh: 1844. Vol. 2.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Karin. “Plain Faces, Weird Cases: Domesticating the Law in Collins's The Law and the Lady and the Trial of Madeleine Smith.” Ed. Bachmann and Cox. 283–306.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The Letters of Henry James. Selected and ed. by Lubbock, Percy. Vol. 1. New York: Scribner's, 1920.Google Scholar
Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kennedy, Rosanne. “Legal Sensations: Sexuality and Textuality in a Victorian Murder Trial.” Romancing the Tomes: Popular Culture, Law and Feminism. Ed. Thornton, Margaret. London: Cavendish, 2002. 69–86.Google Scholar
Kent, Christopher. “Probability and Sensation in the Novels of Wilkie Collins.” Dickens Studies Annual 20 (1991): 259–81.Google Scholar
Langbein, John. The Origins of the Adversary Criminal Trial. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.Google Scholar
MacEachen, Douglas. “Wilkie Collins and British Law.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 5 (Sept. 1950): 121–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacGowan, Douglas. Murder in Victorian Scotland. Westport: Praeger, 1999.Google Scholar
“Madeleine Smith.” Saturday Review (11 July 1857): 26–28.Google Scholar
Manchester Guardian (1857): 2.Google Scholar
Meyler, Bernadette. “Wilkie Collins' Law Books.” The Secrets of Law. Ed. Sarat, Austin, Umphrey, Martha Merrill, and Douglas, Lawrence. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012. 135–71.Google Scholar
“Miss Madeleine Smith.” Lancaster Gazette (Sat. 19 July 1857): 6. Rpt. from the Glasgow Citizen.Google Scholar
Rancière, Jacques. Politics and Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Rockhill, Gabriel. New York: Continuum, 2006.Google Scholar
Rodensky, Lisa. The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature and Theology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
“Scotch Verdicts.” New York Daily Times (30 July 1857).Google Scholar
Scott, Walter. Journal. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890.Google Scholar
Siemens, Catherine. “Appellate Lawyers in Petticoats: Access to Justice in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 8.2 (Summer 2012). Web. 14 March 2014.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Sheila. “What Is the Matter With Mary Jane? Madeleine Smith, Legal Ambiguity, and the Gendered Aesthetic of Victorian Criminality.” Genders Online Journal 2002. Web. 15 October 2013.Google Scholar
Umphrey, Martha Merrell, Sarat, Austin, and Douglas, Lawrence. “Madness and Law: An Introduction.” Umphrey, Sarat, and Douglas, eds., Law's Madness, Ed. Umphrey, Martha Merrell, Sarat, Austin, and Douglas, LawrenceAnn Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 1–28.Google Scholar
Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Wiener, Martin. Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar