Carolyn Steedman's History and the Law: A Love Story invites readers to consider how a range of historical actors—both present and past—have loved the law, where love is not that of romance but of living, of the feeling that shapes how we construct ourselves and relate to the other. It makes two considered contributions. The first is to historiography; this book is an exploration of how some historians, including Steedman, have worked with legal materials, made decisions, and constructed stories of the past from this material. The second is to historians’ understanding of how people of the long eighteenth century lived the law as part of their experience and mentalité. These contributions, of course, are not and cannot be separate, with the second arising from the first. Accordingly, Steedman does not manage these themes separately but interweaves them across the book's eight chapters.
In the introduction, riffing on Stephen Dunn's poem, “History,” Steedman engages with the types of law that historians have loved. She does not attend to Chancery versus the Common Law, but to the way that historians prefer stories with beginnings and middles and ends, with victors and villains, and tragic reversals that disrupt narratives of progress that nonetheless proceed apace. The law—as is a theme across this book—is tightly bound to narratives of historical progress, a key domain where we identify the constraints on liberty and the opening up of freedoms. The introduction is followed by a series of case studies that explore different dimensions of this issue. In chapters 2 and 3, Steedman looks at the threatening letter as sent by the lower orders as part of political and personal protests; chapter 2 does so in conversation with the letters between E. P. Thomson, the academic historian paying for archival work, and Edward Dodd, collecting data on his behalf. Three chapters follow on coverture and the spaces provided, or not, for women to exercise legal-personal agency in eighteenth-century society. In the first, Steedman looks at how coverture is imagined by William Blackstone, the preeminent legal commentator of the period; in the second she looks at Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria (1798) in relation to the law of copyright and her husband, William Godwin's, ownership of her property; and in the third she looks at poor women's engagement with the poor law, and the way that coverture interfered (or often did not) with the right of settlement. In chapter 7, Steedman uses Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (1794) as a case study in hating the law, demonstrating the ways that text continually questions the possibilities of justice within the criminal system of the period. Godwin's change of heart is the subject of the following chapter as he attempts to write his History of the Commonwealth of England (1824), where like for so many historians, the big legal moments—the contractions of monarchical power through statute or the refiguring of liberty for the ordinary man—become the heroes of an evolving narrative of statehood. The hater becomes the lover—or rather he always was.
As is characteristic of Steedman's scholarship, her account resists narrative, intending to trouble how we produce stories of our records. Thus, a history coverture, as she shows, is as much an anxiety of historians of woman—who have placed particular weight on this legal device—as the realities of eighteenth-century women's lives, where the term plays a relatively small role in legal commentaries and everyday engagements between women and the law. At times this refusal of the narrative possibilities of the record is frustrating; she tells, or tries not to tell, a particular story of the law that can be easily countered by numerous alternative examples. “Yes, but . . .” is the emotion of this book's readers. Similarly, Steedman's insistence, both here but across many of her earlier works, that the law is particularly hard to access for the modern reader seems somewhat overdrawn—harder than what? Any other historical source? Not least because, for some time, legal historians have placed emphasis on the law not as a thing, but a practice, something that comes into being as it is applied, whether in courtrooms or private homes or a public house. Thus, what is to be understood in the law is much more localized and quotidian than the grand accounts of nation states. Yet even as one makes this criticism and feels this frustration, one also suspects that is and has been exactly the point of the work—there is no history of the law, or at least not one that avoids the “zigzags”—as Dunn describes it—of the past.
Steedman's book is both beautifully written and hard to read; as is appropriate for the topic, she refuses to let the reader jump ahead or to skip over the details. This is a readerly work that requires one to settle in and to consider word choice and how one topic is juxtaposed with another. Perhaps in its own way this forces a linearity through the zigzags of past and present, legal rights and wrongs, and the way that law is loved and lived.
