Criminality and the Common Law Imagination in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself. It draws on 3 case studies adultery, child criminality and rape testimony that demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries. Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary 'construction' of childhood by 19th-century fairy-tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.