Trials of Conscience in Victorian Law and Literature

Trials of Conscience in Victorian Law and Literature traces modulations in the meanings of the word conscience to examine how it concentres interactions between Victorian law and literature. This thesis argues that while legal discourses, increasingly positivist and utilitarian in character, self-consciously shifted away from conscience—now associated with morally inflected conceptions of interiority and the word “I”—literary representations of conscience manifest anxieties about the relationship between individuals and the law: the power of the law to shape or corrupt interior conscience, or the ways resources of legal language influence how individuals articulate moral crises, and their reflexive judgments of themselves.