The iconic phrase ‘proof beyond reasonable doubt’, which for well over a century has been associated with the Anglo-American legal system, is one that calls attention to the concepts of judgement, fact, evidence, credibility, doubt, probability - concepts that have for many generations occupied theologians, casuists, scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and, more recently, literary scholars.

The casuistry of Romantic individualism underlies and ultimately resolves the tensions between Godwin’s and Scott’s approaches to justice in their novels and in their overt politics, and I track both authors’ experiments with creative jurisprudence to conclude that they were not nearly as different from one another as is generally assumed.Ĭontents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors List of Abbreviations Introduction K.Sinanan& T.Milnes PART I: FORGING AUTHENTICITY Genuity or Ingenuity? Invented Tradition and the Scottish Talent M.Russett 'A Blank Made': Ossian, Authenticity, and the Possibilities of Forgery D.Moore Authenticity Among Hacks: Thomas Chatterton's 'Memoirs of a Sad Dog' and Magazine Culture D.Cook PART II: ACTS OF SINCERITY The Scandal of Sincerity: Wordsworth, Byron, Landon A.Esterhammer Making Sense of Sincerity in The Prelude T.Milnes Too Good to be True? Hannah More, Sincerity, and Evangelical Abolitionism K.Sinanan Sincerity's Repetition: Carlyle, Tennyson and Other Repetitive Victorians J.Wright PART III: MARKETING THE GENUINE By Its Own Hand: Periodicals and the Paradox of Romantic Authenticity S.Lodge Acts of Insincerity? Thomas Spence and Radical Print Culture in the 1790s J.Halliwell PART IV: THE CASE OF AUSTEN Austen, Sincerity and the Standard A.J.Dick 'Facts are Such Horrible Things!': The Question of Authentic Femininity in Jane Austen A.Tauchert Notes Bibliography Index Godwin’s and Scott’s emphasis on a backward-looking, historical understanding of personal judgment over modern legal principles and procedures appears to be philosophically conservative, yet they theorize social justice as a function of a legal system properly sensitive to the individuality of the accused’s character. This essay examines moral and legal justice in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and in Scott’s Guy Mannering (1815) alongside their authors’ involvement in real cases, from Godwin’s role in the treason trials of the 1790s to Scott’s decisions as rural magistrate in Selkirkshire. Though William Godwin and Walter Scott stated politically opposite goals in their differently historical novelistic projects, they shared an underlying investment in personal judgment as a corrective provided by the implicit suggestion that the novel itself is more capable of solving certain problems than is the courtroom. The essay ultimately offers a new perspective on the novel's two endings as radically different culminations of Caleb's rhetorical education, while also suggesting that the more conciliatory attitude to rhetoric they evince had a significant legacy for Godwin's oeuvre, and may have informed Romantic-era fiction more broadly. Focusing on Caleb's oral and written attempts to vindicate his reputation, the essay argues that despite Godwin's commitment to absolute sincerity in interpersonal and institutional relations, the novel shows rhetoric to be necessary and potentially compatible with the principles of truth and justice. From that vantage, the novel is presented as a key moment of transformation in Godwin's thinking about the relationship between truth and its linguistic construction.

This essay examines William Godwin's ambiguous attitude to the rhetoric and contingency of truth claims in his 1794 novel Things As They Are or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, situating its preoccupation with narrative plausibility in relation to the classical rhetorical tradition, specifically Cicero's De Inventione.

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