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Law, Equity, and Conscience in Victorian England

This paper is concerned with the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 18751 and the controversy surrounding them. The administrative reform of the Judicature was less obviously controversial than some other Victorian reformist legislation, such as the Factory Act, or the Married Women's Property Act, but legal debate about the Judicature Acts brings the law into dialogue with moral debates in the broader arena of Victorian culture. As a response to a crisis of authority in the country's legal institutions, this debate was one significant manifestation of the general conflict between authority and individualism that pervades Victorian discourse. The key terms of the legal debate were law, conscience, and equity, underwritten by the vague but powerful concepts of justice and natural law, and throughout the debate the relationships between legal usage and other forms of language were persistently questioned. The terms were also tested, and the questions asked, in such central literary texts as Daniel Deronda, Idylls of the King, and The Ring and the Book, and in the writings of such culturally central figures as Charles Darwin and Frederick Denison Maurice.