About this book
Focusing on everyday legal experiences, from that of magistrates, novelists and political philosophers, to maidservants, pauper men and women, down-at-heel attorneys and middling-sort wives in their coverture, History and the Law reveals how people thought about, used, manipulated and resisted the law between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Supported by clear, engaging examples taken from the historical record, and from the writing of historians including Laurence Sterne, William Godwin, and E. P. Thompson, who each had troubled love affairs with the law, Carolyn Steedman puts the emphasis on English poor laws, copyright law, and laws regarding women. Evocatively written and highly original, History and the Law accounts for historians' strange ambivalent love affair with the law and with legal records that appear to promise access to so many lives in the past.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- A Beginning: ‘History’, by Stephen Dunn
- 1 Its Ziggy Shape
- 2 Law Troubles: Two Historians and Some Threatening Letters
- 3 Letters of the Law: Everyday Uses of the Law at the Turn of the English Nineteenth Century
- 4 The Worst of It: Blackstone and Women
- 5 Who Owns Maria
- 6 Sisters in Law
- 7 Hating the Law: Caleb Williams
- 8 The Kind of Law a Historian Loved
- An Ending: Not a Story
- Bibliography
- Index