Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law Literature and Theology

The eighteenth-century model of the criminal trial - with its insistence that the defendant and the facts of a case could ''speak for themselves'' - was abandoned in 1836 when legislation enabled barristers to address the jury on behalf of prisoners charged with felony. Increasingly professional acts of interpretation were seen as necessary to achieve a just verdict thereby silencing the prisoner and affecting the testimony given by eye witnesses at criminal trials. Jan-Melissa Schramm examines the profound impact of the changing nature of evidence in law and theology on literary narrative in the nineteenth century. Already a locus of theological conflict the idea of testimony became a fiercely contested motif of Victorian debate about the ethics of literary and legal representation. She argues that authors of fiction created a style of literary advocacy which both imitated and reacted against the example of their storytelling counterparts at the Bar.