The study of fictional representations of law demands a contextual criticism. In this chapter I attempt to establish this context for the subsequent analysis of my chosen novels by presenting a short account of the intellectual and social history of European law since the eighteenth century. The ultimate aim is not to supply a mere background for critical analysis, but to enable the novels themselves to be read as texts in the cultural history of the modern nomos. For Cover, every normative world is specific to the culture which gives birth to it. The “thickness of legal meaning” in every society must be comprehended before its juridical practices can be properly understood. In the following essay in the “thick description” of modern, Western law I aim to establish what Dominick LaCapra calls a “viable interaction between the forms of literature and forms of life” in the post-Enlightenment era and to establish some specific connections between these developments and formal and thematic changes in the novel's treatment of law.

The “noble pile” under attack

There is no more paideic paragraph in English legal writing than the conclusion to Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England(1765–9). Here Blackstone articulates a “Whig interpretation” of the development of English law, in which its “fundamental maxims and rules … have been and are everyday improving, and are now fraught with the accumulated wisdom of the ages.”