This interdisciplinary study of legal and literary narratives argues that the novel's particular power to represent the interior life of its characters both challenges the law's definitions of criminal responsibility and reaffirms them. By means of connecting major novelists with prominent jurists and legal historians of the era, it offers profound new ways of thinking about the Victorian period.

The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey (1885) examines some of the most controversial events of 18th century English colonial legal history from the point of view of Victorian England's most important legal authority. An experienced barrister, journalist, Legal Member of the Governor-General's Council in India, author of the inaugurative and consolidatory History of the Criminal Law of England (1883), and, finally, a justice on the Queen's Bench, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen argues that far from being the victim of a judicially-engineered execution, Nuncomar (a powerful...

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex...