{"id":1226,"date":"2018-04-18T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/?p=1226"},"modified":"2018-04-17T16:07:34","modified_gmt":"2018-04-17T21:07:34","slug":"a-culture-of-litigation-arguing-daily-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/2018\/04\/a-culture-of-litigation-arguing-daily-life\/","title":{"rendered":"A Culture of Litigation: Arguing Daily Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mark

Mark Schoenfeld<\/p><\/div>\n

Written by Mark Schoenfield, Professor of English<\/em><\/p>\n

In Samuel Foote\u2019s\u00a01770\u00a0The Lame Lover<\/em>, a neophyte attorney explains that \u201ca great lawyer\u2019s business is always to make the choice of the wrong,\u201d since \u201ca good cause can speak for itself, whilst a bad one demands an able counsellor to give it a colour.\u201d Aided by a Vanderbilt University Research Scholars Grant<\/a>, I explored various archives concerning British culture, 1770-1835, for my project, A Culture of Litigation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

During visits to the Huntington Library in Pasadena, Calif., and the National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh, I read accounts, both real and fictional, demonizing and glorifying that \u201cpalladium of justice,\u201d the trial by jury. I found significant legal cases that reshaped public understandings of property, scandalized the British public about aristocratic ethics, and made lawyers famous and rich and lionized. In this blog, however, I will share two cases that illustrate the extent to which jury trials had become a part of daily life and its arbitrations.<\/p>\n

On July 30, 1819, a shoemaker brought an action against a \u201creverend intruder\u201d for burning two of his books. It seems a clergyman, Mr. Venables, called upon the Drake residence while the shoemaker was away, and looking around, asked his wife for permission to burn two \u201cbad\u201d books (alas, unidentified in the trial, according to newspaper accounts). When she demurred, he assured her that he would replace them with two good books. According to the only witness called, \u201cMrs. Drake said it was a matter of indifference, she had rather have a good book.\u201d Mr. Venables burned the books and left before the shoemaker returned. In his opening address, Mr. Drake\u2019s lawyer declared the case was brought \u201cnot to recover damages, but to teach officious and overzealous men that their enthusiasm furnished them with no excuse for intruding with presumption and arrogance into the houses of their neighbors.\u201d What else, the lawyer queried, \u201cshould induce him to be guilty of so gross a breach of good manners?\u201d Declaring that he \u201crespected religion as [much] as any man,\u201d he opined he did not like to see her \u201ctight laced and choked with starch.\u201d Summing up, he assured the jury that the defendant \u201chad infringed upon the rights of an Englishman and must now take the consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""Law,

“Law, Logic and Loggerheads” (1791), The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University<\/p><\/div>\n

The attorney for the defense, after deriding his opposition\u2019s hyperbole, assured the jury that \u201cthe duty of every clergyman\u201d required \u201cascertaining\u201d his flock\u2019s moral instruction. He also declared seeking legal remedy was not asserting English rights, but on the contrary, simply bad\u2014and \u201cunmanly\u201d\u2014manners. He concluded that he, the defense counsel, would \u201chave been the first\u201d to burn an \u201camorous poem or an invidious novel.\u201d The judge declared \u201cNo Englishman need tamely suffer his house to be ransacked by a clergyman, nor (if he could help it) by his wife,\u201d and recommended the smallest possible damages; the jury returned for one farthing\u2014plus costs\u2014for the cobbler. In part because of its comical staging, this trial presents many key issues of English litigation: the indeterminate line between breaches of manners and legal crimes; the significance of intent; the tension of church and state as moral litigators; and the value of reputation. Its rhetorical gestures reflect those of the most serious cases of sedition (which is tangentially mentioned in the case) and of bodily assault and libel (both of which are also alluded to). It reiterates the question of reading as socially dangerous, and the dynamic of gender in the household as a miniature of the body politic. (Stamford Mercury<\/a>, August 6,1819; Examiner<\/a>, August 8,1819).<\/p>\n

A second example: The Reverend Thomas Vialls was a suspicious parson. Finding his gardener\u2019s lunch was a slice of corned beef on bread, he immediately confiscated it to compare it with his own round of beef and loaf of bread. The similarity was, at least to him, striking and improbable enough to bring an action for theft. At trial, he declared, \u201cI know the beef to be mine from its complexion!\u201d<\/em> After the gardener, James Sharpe, was acquitted, he brought a suit against Vialls for malicious prosecution. Charles Phillips<\/a>, speaking for the plaintiff, began by noting his own delicate position of \u201cadvocating the cause of humble poverty against pampered oppression.\u201d His solution was to render the tale comic. Turning to Viall\u2019s testimony of his beef\u2019s complexion, he conceded \u201cthe merit of originality\u201d:<\/p>\n

Gentlemen, in poetry, I have read of the tints of the morning, the verdure of the fields, the blush of the rose and the emerald of the sea, but never until now did I hear of the complexion of a cold corned round of beef. I dare say there was a lily whiteness about the fat, and a modest, saltpetre, Aurora-like redness about the lean. (Fairburn\u2019s Edition of [Sharpe v Vialls]<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"The

The Beef-Headed Parson, George Cruikshank. British Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Phillips calculated his ridicule to exploit assumptions about charity, and about the jury as a guarantor not only of justice, but of the social order. The verdict of this second trial was not trivial; the jury found, \u201calmost instantly\u201d in favor of the gardener for \u00a350, probably more than two years of his salary, although only a nuisance for Vialls, except for bearing costs and the public humiliation. Afterwards, John Fairburn, famous for elaborate and wildly popular editions of scurrilous Crim Con<\/a> trials, published the case. Underscoring its social significance, a poem was appended to the trial, \u201cThe \u00a0Twickenham Parson; or Beef! Beef! Beef!\u201d It reiterated the issue of charity as a social value, and highlighted Viall\u2019s corruption by a conclusion in which the two trials are conflated and crime and punishment are cleverly inverted:<\/p>\n

The worthy<\/em> PARSON curs’d such times<\/em> in grief,
\nAnd curs’d<\/em> the jury too, when he must pay
\nFull fifty pounds<\/em> for one thin slice of beef<\/em>,
\nWhich from a servant <\/em>he had filch\u2019d away.<\/p>\n

Republished elsewhere, including the widely-circulating Spirit of the Public Journals<\/a>, the poem, by making the parson a domestic tyrant and the jury the silent hero, extends the case\u2019s reach as an exemplar of social dynamics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Mark Schoenfield, Professor of English In Samuel Foote\u2019s\u00a01770\u00a0The Lame Lover, a neophyte attorney explains that \u201ca great lawyer\u2019s business is always to make the choice of the wrong,\u201d since \u201ca good cause can speak for itself, whilst a bad one demands an able counsellor to give it a colour.\u201d Aided by a Vanderbilt…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6209,"featured_media":1223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-research-scholar-grants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6209"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1232,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226\/revisions\/1232"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/universityfundingprograms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}