Belief in evidence in the nineteenth-century novel / Geoffrey A. Baker.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baker, Geoffrey, 1973- author.

Series:

Law and literature (Oxford)

Law and literature

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Belief and doubt in literature.

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Evidence, Criminal, in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2026]

Summary:

What makes us believe anything told to us by another person? How does this work in scenes of judgement where we operate almost exclusively with report from others, like a trial by jury? Thomas Reid declared in 1785 that 'we give the name of evidence to whatever is a ground of belief'. Such formulations both echo and were echoed by seminal writings on the law of evidence, and Belief in Evidence traces the fundamental relationship of these two terms in British evidence-thinking and in nineteenth-century novels. John Locke's articulation, in 1690, of how we believe things we have not experienced ourselves motivated the first systematic treatise of English evidence law, Geoffrey Gilbert's The Law of Evidence (1754), and Locke's grounds for belief were repeatedly invoked by later treatises. This became a sort of Age of Evidence, during which evidence law solidified in disciplinary terms and became dispersed beyond the legal profession. Both following and complicating legal notions of evidence and belief, the novel in England in the era of realism tested many of the same mediating factors delineated by Locke and evolving evidence law: the age and experience of persons called upon to believe; the perceived character of witnesses and defendants; the number of witnesses; and how belief is conditioned by place and identity. Staging complex scenes of judgement, authors like Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope all confronted the problematic relationship between belief and evidence, which became central to their models of realistic representation.

Contents:

Introduction : belief in evidence

Age of evidence : evidence treatises, evidence-thinking, and the nineteenth century

‘A belief in the marvellous’ : the age of evidence in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Belief in experience : the evidence of Austen

The evidence of others : belief in character in Victorian fiction

Social justice in Middlemarch : evidence by the numbers, hearsay, and the ‘public voice’ in the age of reform

Other belief : the evidence of national difference in Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed February 20, 2026).

Other Format:

Print version: Baker, Geoffrey, 1973- Belief in evidence in the nineteenth-century novel

ISBN:

9780198944409

0198944403

OCLC:

1548420093

Publisher Number:

CIPO000314130

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license