Thomas Hardy's Legal Fictions

Explores Thomas Hardy’s engagement with Victorian legal debates in his prose fiction GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup(['ISBN:9780748673247','ISBN:9780748673254']); This book examines how Hardy’s role as an acting magistrate and his lifelong interest in the law impacted on his prose fiction. Hardy’s novels and short stories are examined in the context of debates surrounding some of the seismic legal reforms of the nineteenth century, namely the birth of adversarial trial procedure, the evolving defin