A guest post by Mark Schoenfield, Department of English, Vanderbilt University.

Though it makes us blush, we are pleased to present Mark Schoenfield's blog on his time here this summer as one of the Short-Term Fellows. Mark is the sort of reader we always hope for, that is, one who could make use of many of our materials. We hope his take on the transformation of British courtrooms in the era of the French Revolution will be of interest to many of you. —Liz Denlinger, Curator, Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.

From 1750 to 1830, the legal landscape of Great Britain was significantly transformed. An accusatory form of trial gave way to an adversarial format—which was echoed in the periodical wars of the romantic press. With this, the myth of the ancient English jury, known as the Palladium of Justice, was consolidated to represent juries as objective adjudicators of the truth. With the rise of romantic celebrity culture, lawyers occupied positions of fame by which they moved from ornaments in the courtroom to central participants in both trials and public life; cross-examination entered the juridical space, and helped reconfigure the trial into its modern narrative form, as well as impinging upon literary representations of conflict. Property, once the symbolic grounding of family and community, became a commodity within a commodity culture, as entails were stripped away within courts, while novels relentlessly tracked the foibles of antiquated economic symbols. And yet these dramatic transformations could occur precisely because they were not radical; they covered without fully obscuring a past—call it precedent, tradition, narrative conventions—which continuously peeked through.

The book project, for which I was fortunate enough to be awarded a Short-Term Fellowship at the New York Public Library, explores key legal moments in which the collision of past and present was mediated—in courts and narratives—to produce a halting but ultimately definitive construction of the British citizen into a legal subject. During my two week stay, thanks to the amazing staff of the Pforzheimer Collection—Charlie Carter and Liz Denlinger—I was able to examine legal and literary texts, fiction and non-fiction, many of which will contribute directly to my chapters, and others of which provide a contextual background and supporting role. I made PDFs of 82 rare or unique volumes, pamphlets, broadsides, and manuscripts for which there currently exist no available electronic versions; in addition, I discovered roughly 100 works for which, once found in the NYPL, I was able to locate electronic versions on either public or commercial databases. While I am too early in the project to be certain which materials will be most critical, I thought, to give some sense of my direction, I would discuss some examples, and situate them briefly within drafts of potential chapters. (All texts mentioned below are available in the Pforzheimer Collection or the General Research Division of the NYPL.)

Among the crucial changes for the criminal law was the development of a discourse and understanding of criminal insanity, which mattered both in itself and because of its entwined relationship with the construction of theories of the self, in periodicals and novels and the general conception of intentionality. The public awareness of this issue was heightened both by King George III’s own presumed madness, and two attempts on his life by persons determined mad who ended up in Bedlam, rather than facing criminal punishment. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg made the first of these the fictive author of their Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, although she was alive—if not entirely well—in Bedlam, where (as Sketches of Bedlam makes clear) madness and criminality were considered deeply interconnected. While these poems address the power structure in Nicholson’s name, she actually wrote her own poem—addressed to George III—which demonstrates a considerably different understanding. This poem exists only in manuscript, and only at the NYPL, and this is the first stanza:

Justice with Mercy
so to Balance the scale
that Charitys Excellence
may never fail

While I may not write directly about this poem in my chapter on the Insanity defense and its effect on other aspects of criminal law, it provides a curious glimpse into the life of crucial figure in its development.

Cases for libel were at once moments for the legal system to regulate public discourse, yet the trial was also an opportunity to debate the public’s right to knowledge. In Hamilton v Stevenson, Printer for The Beacon, where the pursuer took the unusual approach of bringing an action for damages against the printer, because neither author of the article nor publisher of The Beacon were known, the latter responded by alleging the case was “an evident attempt on the part of the pursuer, to fetter the public discussion of the political conduct of public men.” Further, the defendant asked the court to require the pursuer to submit an Oath of Calumny, a by then rare 15^th century procedure, by which Hamilton might be made vulnerable to a counter-action for perjury. The jury found for the pursuer for one shilling, a seeming victory to the defendant, until Hamilton next sued for and was awarded costs by the judge , which were sufficient to topple The Beacon. I hope my reading of this case will demonstrate the complex assumptions about adjudicating truth in the romantic court room, as it at once drew on ancient forms and contemporary norms, and enacted [or maybe: “demonstrated”?] permeability between the court and the press. Property itself, especially as it was structured by the laws of entail, was subject to wide public scrutiny. A particular case involving John Vans Agnew unveils both the early legal assumptions about property as a non-commercial possession and the contemporary insistence on the alienability of land by sale.

The complexity of marriage law with its continually changing nature, as it responds to both perceptions about human desires and laws that govern property, means that it figures in novels, poetry, and the public imagination. The Royal Jester declares its centrality to humor, while the scandals of royal and aristocratic marriages found their way simultaneously into courts and broadsides, settlements and plays (such as The Queen and the Mogul and The Last Moments of Queen Caroline, to which is added The Broken Heart, a Poem). One most curious volume from 1829 that at once displays a rigid legal conception of gender and undermines it with a sympathetic rendering (and use of the masculine pronoun), tells the story of The Female Husband and his wife (pictured here).

I would like to conclude by commending everyone I worked with at the library, starting with Carolyn Broomhead, the director of the Short Term Fellowship program, who got me all set up, and concluding with the nice security guard who let me back into the check room to change into a dry shirt after getting caught in a rain storm on the last day. The Pforzheimer Collection is a remarkable resource for Romanticism, and access to it for scholars is invaluable. It has certainly provided me with rich materials for Palimpsest of Justice.