Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
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Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Anna Enrichetta Soccio Anna Enrichetta Soccio is Full Professor of English Literature at the University G. d’Annunzio of Chieti and Pescara (Italy). Her fields of research are: Romantic novel, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novel and poetry, and British contemporary poetry. Amongst her latest publications: Elizabeth Gaskell,
Racconti (Editore Croce, 2017) andTransmedia Creatures. Frankenstein’s Afterlives (co-ed. Francesca Saggini, Bucknell University Press, 2018). She is sub-editor ofRSV. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and is a member of The Dickens Society, The Philip Larkin Society, The Gaskell Society, ESSE, AIA, AIDEL and CUSVE.
Abstract
In the Victorian age, a period of rapid changes and social and cultural advancement, the preoccupation with modernizing the law system emerged as a concern for both law experts and ordinary people. However, it was the realist novel that drew particular attention to the inadequacy and inefficiency of a system that needed to be reformed. Charles Dickens was the Victorian novelist who, more than any of his fellow writers, never missed the opportunity to speak of law and justice, allowing his experience in the field to reveal the oddities and idiosyncrasies of the legal system. In David Copperfield, Dickens unmercifully criticizes laws and legal procedures but at the same time he proposes changes. In the middle of the century, the laws on marriage and divorce were frequently debated in the press and in Parliament. Dickens chooses his most autobiographical novel to give his own view on those matters as well as on the necessity to reform law courts at large.
About the author
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Anna Enrichetta Soccio is Full Professor of English Literature at the University G. d’Annunzio of Chieti and Pescara (Italy). Her fields of research are: Romantic novel, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novel and poetry, and British contemporary poetry. Amongst her latest publications: Elizabeth Gaskell, Racconti (Editore Croce, 2017) and Transmedia Creatures. Frankenstein’s Afterlives (co-ed. Francesca Saggini, Bucknell University Press, 2018). She is sub-editor of RSV. Rivista di Studi Vittoriani and is a member of The Dickens Society, The Philip Larkin Society, The Gaskell Society, ESSE, AIA, AIDEL and CUSVE.
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Focus: Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Legal Perspectives in Victorian Literature
- Charles Dickens and the Rhetoric of Law in David Copperfield
- Gentlemanliness, Status and Law in Anthony Trollope’s Lady Anna
- Infanticide in Adam Bede: Hetty Sorrel and the Language of Justice
- The Abstruse Syntax of Law in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
- Late-Victorian Experiences with Italian Legislation: Stories of Sex, Madness and Social Commitment
- “Undesirable Immigrants”: The Language of Law and Literature in Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster”
- Research
- Robotics and Work: Between Fiction and Reality
- Praising the World “by Geometrical Terms”: Legal Metrics, Science and Indicators in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa
- The Voice of the People in Homer
- Elizabeth the Rhetorician. An Analysis of the Greatest Speeches by the Virgin Queen
- Book Review
- Pier Giuseppe Monateri: Dominus Mundi. Political Sublime and the World Order
