Nixon, 1
# 038
DRAFT: IN PROGRESS
Legal and Familial Record-keeping: Late 18th-Century Chancery Court Reports and Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House
During the Romantic era, legal record-keeping underwent major changes, signaling the law’s interest in accounting for itself with more accuracy and predictability. Legal records take a newly standardized form that seems at odds with the rebellious forms of Romantic literature; the law’s new textual shape, however, offers a way of tracing it as a formal and not merely thematic concern of Romantic literature. Exploring the depiction of the law in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House, this essay examines how Smith uses the structures of legal record-keeping to self-consciously critique her legally-determined and romance-driven plot. In addition to making this type of formal and thematic comparison, Romantic law and literature can be connected through their larger ability to construct the “modern” textually. The legal historian Holdsworth, in his Sources and Literature of English Law, divides the history of legal records into four distinct phases and labels the late eighteenth century, “the period when law reporting was standardized;” in his 18-volume A History of English Law, he explains that this period ushered in the “modern system” of legal record-keeping (XII, 103). He makes it clear that this is a necessary prerequisite for the full realization of a “modern theory as to the authority of decided cases” or precedent-based case law (XII, 146). In both law and literature, then, textual practices enable ideological developments. This essay explores those textual practices by uncovering a broad range of print and manuscript legal materials that can be compared to Smith’s novel and used to reveal the family ideology she is constructing.
In its final volume, The Old Manor House features the corrupt actions of Mrs. Lennard who, in hiding a last will and testament, has forced the novel’s hero, Orlando, to enter into a protracted legal case. Orlando’s discovery of the will provides the novel’s dramatic resolution, overshadowing what would typically serve as a romance novel’s resolution: his marriage to Monimia, Mrs. Lennard’s ward. In its undermining of the romance plot, this legal plot encourages a re-reading of the earlier volumes. Most specifically, Mrs. Lennard’s relationship with Monimia, central to the romance structure and gothic imagery of the first volume, deserves closer scrutiny. Mrs. Lennard perverts the legal relationship between guardian and ward; understanding the textual nature of the law is central to understanding this abuse. The manipulative record-keeping practices of this fictional family are highlighted by the newly-organized record-keeping practices of the factual law. Smith, like the law itself, demands a more standardized legal record-keeping and more predictable legal processes. Ultimately, both Smith and the legal record are united in imagining an ideal left unachieved: both seek an organized record of the family, as it offers the promise of organizing the family itself. An examination of the Chancery Court’s print commentaries, treatises, and reports and its manuscript records reveal the difficulty of defining the laws that define the family. In attempting to connect these factual records to the fictional novel, this essay hopes to complicate the idea of a unified factual/fictional record and raise larger questions about the attempt to locate a stable definition of the family.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, as Holdsworth explains, finalizes an “evolution [in which] English lawyers have invented a wholly original method of developing law,” a method in which lawyers “worked out in theory and applied in practice the general rule that decided cases are authoritative” (HEL, XII, 157). For decided cases to be known, they must be published. And, the Romantic era witnesses “a change that will revolutionize the conditions under which reports [of cases] are made and published. That change is the introduction of the modern system under which reports are made and published as soon as possible after the decision of the cases” (HEL, XII, 103). In An Historical Sketch of the Equitable Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery, D.M. Kerly connects this change in legal reporting to the development of equity law itself. He explains, “[A]t least until the publishing and citation of contemporary reports becomes an established practice, it must often happen that conflicting decisions will occur and create uncertainty, and questions will arise form time to time for the determination of which no precedent exists” (185-6). Kerly cites several Chancellors who complain of the lack of clear reports, such as “Lord Redesdale writing at the end of the eighteenth century [who] could still complain of the extreme scarcity of authority” (187). “The scarceness and unreliability of the reports until the end of the [eighteenth] century,” Kerly argues, provides an explanation for why, “so many important decisions should have remained to be decided by the later Chancellors” (187).
Although revolutionary, these new changes seem, in hindsight, surprisingly basic. The most important development at the end of the eighteenth century is the publication of summaries of precedent-setting cases on a yearly basis. Due to regular, timely publication, important decisions were able to circulate quickly. Simultaneously, newly-regularized goals of case reporting were employed: the summaries select precedent-setting cases, record facts accurately, emphasize the contested issue, offer a careful abridgment of the proceedings, detail all important evidence, and convey the judge’s full opinion and decision (HEL, XII, 114-115). As a result, these summaries take what a literary critic would recognize as a newly standardized narrative form, as each presents a clear headnote labeling its subject matter, offers a marginal gloss of its central conflict and decision, provides a chronological “plot summary” of the case’s participants and actions, overviews the arguments of the plaintiff and defendant’s lawyers, emphasizes the Chancellor’s finding by detailing his explanation of the precedents and his decision, and cites related cases in the marginal text. By meeting these basic demands concerning textual circulation, purpose, and form, court reporters in each of the major courts allowed case decisions to be both accessed and understood. Standardized record-keeping allows a practice of reporting of cases and basing law upon those past cases—in short, the entire system of precedent-based case law—to be developed (HEL, XII, 107).
The Court of Chancery, the records of which will be examined later in this essay, offers a clear example of Romantic era changes in the textual practices of the equity law. Between 1789 and 1817, Francis Vesey Junior collects and immediately publishes important cases in the form of yearly reports; he produces one volume per year covering the years 1789 through1816. To highlight the originality of printing immediate yearly reports, Vesey Junior can be compared to the work of his father, Francis Vesey Senior. Published in 1771 through 1773, Vesey Senior’s reports cover the years 1747 through 1756, allowing a gap of more that twenty years to separate some cases’ decisions and publication. Seeming to call attention to the very obviousness of his work, Vesey Junior’s preface to his Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery argues that “works of this nature are so universally allowed, and the occasional want of them has been so sensibly experienced, that it is unnecessary to alledge any other reason for an attempt to promote the design, than the encouragement , by which it is sanctioned” (I, i). The preface continues on to define this “design,” explaining, “The plan here adopted it that, which seems to meet with the most general approbation. The facts are stated in their natural order, and in a manner as concise as possible…. The arguments of the Counsel are united…The judgements are stated as fully and with as strict regard to accuracy as possible; and I have been particularly anxious by presenting the language used to given not my own construction only, but as nearly as possible the very words in which the opinion of the Court was expressed” (I, ii). The preface also offers an explanation of the marginal notation and indexing of the cases. Vesey Junior concludes his preface with a statement of the most radical aspect of his plan, explaining, “my intention is to continue it annually in the usual manner” (I, iii).
While the legal report is entering this stage of formalization, the Romantic era novel has, in many ways, achieved formalization and seeks to actively critique its earlier forms. Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House engages in this activity. The Old Manor House is often considered Smith’s most formally interesting novel, as it uses recognizable, even formulaic, romance conventions to subvert the romance structure on which it relies. Focusing on the novel’s fairytale elements, Joseph Bartolomeo demonstrates how they reveal the limits of the romance; he explains, Smiths “parodic self-consciousness about the conventions of romance as they operate in the novel advances an implicit but potent critique of the ideology they support, one that objectifies women and celebrates female powerlessness” (647). Jaqueline Labbe similarly analyzes how Smith “undermines” (228) and “questions”(229) the romance by creating a “property romance, wherein the origins, continuation, and resolution of the romance are contingent on landed property,” which is characterized by the difficulty of “distinguish[ing] fact from fiction, noble sentiments from acquisitive desire” (217). Smith critiques the “artificiality” (Bartolomeo 647) and “fictionality” (Labbe 229) of the romance as a model for the two central characters’ relationship
Following the lead of The Old Manor House’s first volume, which traces the evolving romance between Orlando and Monima, critics read the novel as an ironic commentary on the idealized romance. But, the novel can be read through its third volume, which features Orlando’s legal case, a hopeless inheritance suit in equity. If emphasis is placed on the legal plotting of novel, Smith can be seen as writing in a self-conscious, ironic, and highly critical mode similar to that used in her romance plot. Smith often conflates her critique of the romance and the law: both are unnatural ways of organizing human, and especially familial, relationships. This conflation is most obvious in the novel’s final scene, when Orlando locates the last will, the object of his inheritance suit, in a highly romanticized manner. Smith’s depiction of the law is argumentative; the law as a constraint on the family, the law is tool of powerful, and the law can be used to serve immoral purposes. Just as with the romance, Smith argues that the law needs to be restructured while she uses it to structure her novel. The law, like the romance, needs to be rewritten,. In this way, a demand for better legal texts—for better record-keeping—is embedded in the novel.
A very specific relationship connects the factual legal record to specific legal plots of Smith’s novel: the legal relationship between a guardian and ward. Monimia is cared for by her cruel guardian-aunt, Mrs. Lennard; this relationship generates conflicts that are charted and resolved by the novel’s romance and legal plots. Smith uses this familial structure to organize a narrative structure; linking the concerns of Smith’s romance and legal plots is a formulaic figure central to each: the female orphan. In Monimia, Smith creates a traditional romance heroine. Submitting to an evil surrogate parent, she is locked up in a gothic castle (she “sat alone in her turret” [27] , where “every night [her aunt] was to lock the door of the room where her niece lay, and to take away the key” [28]), suffers from physical abuse (in an early scene Mrs. Lennard gives the “terrified, trembling girl a violent blow” [18]) , and is deprived of an education (she must hide her books, explaining “my aunt Lennard would never allow me to have pens and ink” [42]). Monimia’s relationship to her cruel aunt provides a more emotionally and physically repressive doubling of the property-centered relationship between the novels’ hero, Orlando, and his wealthy distant relative, Mrs. Rayland. Smith’s families are more constructed and more artificial than these structures might initially suggest.
Importantly, both of these women are legal entities. Mrs. Rayland is the legal owner of the land Orlando, as the sole male in the Rayland family line, should inherit and thus controls his present actions and future aspirations. Mrs. Lennard is the legal guardian of Monimia, acting out an abusive form of the guardian’s legal control of the ward’s body. Both the hero and heroine prove dependent on non-biological parental figures who seem to delight in torturing of them; Monima’s physical entrapment in the castle makes concrete Orlando’s economic entrapment as he tries to win Mrs. Rayland’s favor. These families have not been naturalized; it is the surrogate parents’ rejection, rather than acceptance, of familial claims that gives them their power. And, most importantly, both are parental figures enact that power in increasingly ways that are increasingly legal in form and content.
Although this economic power held by Mrs. Rayland has been emphasized by critics such as Labbe (219-221), Mrs. Lennard is clearly the most powerful woman in the novel. Technically Mrs. Rayland’s mere companion and head-servant, Mrs. Lennard comes to guard her just as she guards Monimia. When first introduced, Mrs. Lennard is described as being “so much superior to her mistress in understanding, that she soon governed her entirely…she was in fact the mistress of the supercilious being whose wages she received” (10-11). Mrs. Lennard’s control of Mrs. Rayland is noted throughout the novel, as when Orlando’s sister explains that as Mrs Rayland “became more feeble through age, and as her mind became weaker, [Mrs. Lennard] seemed to acquire over her more power,” because Mrs. Rayland “had not resolution to throw off a yoke she had been accustomed to so many years” (431). By giving Mrs. Lennard control over Mrs. Rayland, which, in turn, structures Mrs. Rayland’s relationship with Orlando, Smith emphasizes the arbitrary, convoluted nature of family power.
The women’s power creates legal crises that shape the novel. Although critics have argued that the novel’s female characters are overshadowed by the novel’s hero (Schofield 161, Rogers 76), the orphan-heroine and her guardian-aunt organize the plot by creating the hurdles Orlando must overcome. Mrs. Lennard’s challenges frame the novel, dominating the first and last volumes. In the first volume, Mrs. Lennard refuses to allow Orlando to see Monimia; Smith casts this in, to use Bartolomeo’s term, “the extravagant romance” (2), writing, for example, “no knight of romance ever had so many difficulties to encounter in achieving the deliverance of his princess, as Orlando had in finding he means merely to converse with the little imprisoned orphan” (28). In the last volume, these exaggerated romance difficulties metamorphose into exaggerated legal difficulties. Mrs. Lennard triggers this generic change when she performs the most single most important act of the novel: she hides the last will that names Orlando heir to his aunt’s estate, RaylandPark. As a result, Orlando’s careful plotting of his inheritance fails; the constructed orphan-guardian family undermines his self-constructed family romance.
In the last volumes, the law plays an increasingly central role in the novel, as Orlando enters a lawsuit to disprove an older version of the will that disinherits him. His romance barrier has become a legal barrier, as Mrs. Lennard has married the attorney, Mr. Roker (Junior), who represents the person in control of RaylandPark. Just as Orlando had to negotiate the winding staircases of RaylandPark, he negotiates the winding delays of his lawsuit. For example, when Orlando first arrives in London, he quickly learns of this brother’s lawsuits in common law and Chancery, starts his own lawsuit, determines that Mr. Roker Junior and Senior are his rival’s lawyers, and locates his brother imprisoned in Fleet prison (440-445). Similarly, the trapdoors of the locket turret are replaced by the traps laid by competing lawyers. He locates an honest lawyer, Carr, and is not taken in by the “chicane” (448, 493) of opposing lawyers including the Rokers (443, 456, 493), Fisherton (448), and Darby (498). The romance and legal plots are overtly united when Orlando, having received a repentant letter from Mrs. Lennard, is guided to a copy of the will that proves his inheritance. Orlando rescues the will, hidden in one of the secret passageways of the castle, just as he liberated Monimia from her turret many scenes earlier.
Doubling the hero’s family and organizing the hero’s conflicts, the orphan-guardian family gives narrative structure to Smith’s romance and legal plots. In so doing, the surrogate family creates an overt connection between the romance and the law. Why does the orphan-guardian relationship enable this narrative structuring? This question raises another: is the orphan-guardian relationship is anything more than a fairy-tale-derived narrative structuring device? To answer these questions, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century structure of the orphan-guardian relationship itself must be examined. Because guardianship is legally constructed, the law is an obvious place to start that examination and it quickly reveals that The Old Manor House is grounded in the real as much as the romance. Most importantly for The Old Manor House, legal guardianship allows a person who is not biologically related to the family to come into the family and control its emotional and economic structure. The guardian is given three legal responsibilities concerning the orphan: bodily care, marriage consent, and inheritance protection. Although Smith starts by exploring the first, she increasingly emphasizes the last responsibility. Mrs. Lennard’s powers are rooted in her control of Monimia’s body, but she extends her guardianship to include control of Orlando’s estate. Because Monima has no property, Mrs. Lennard must look to Orlando’s inheritance. But, it must be recognized that Mrs. Lennard’s illegal acts are a logical, if extreme, expansion of the guardian’s legal powers. The legal guardian does what the romance considers illegal: she controls an estate that is not hers.