The book is divided into two main sections: Part I: Downward Mobility and the Safety Net of the Law, which covers Smollett and Smith, and Part II: The Pen as a Weapon Against Reform of the Law, which focuses on Scott and the proslavery novel. Chapter one, Bad Citizens and Insolent Foreigners: Tobias Smollett\u2019s Elite Outsiders and the Suspension of Legal Agency, notes that a frequent theme of Smollett\u2019s writing is that legal agency should be assigned according to who is \u201c\u2018deserving of it.[4]<\/a> Wright observes that Smollett\u2019s novels \u201ccas[t] elites not primarily as enforcers of the law so much as victims of it\u201d and \u201ccommon folk\u201d as \u201coffenders\u2026 who use jurisdictional advantages to abuse the legal system.\u201d[5]<\/a> Wright cross-references Smollett\u2019s bitter response to his own legal misfortunes with the portrayal of law in his works in a particularly effective way.<\/p>\n Chapter two, Covert Critique: Genteel Victimhood in Charlotte Smith\u2019s Fictions of Dispossession, reframes Smith as a \u201dkey adapter of the French and German pitaval<\/em>\u2019(sic), a literary genre in which \u201dtraditionally marginalized litigants \u2014 including women, the enslaved, and orphans \u2014 gain justice through the courts.\u201d[6]<\/a> Wright investigates the ways in which Smith \u00a0\u201cconverted\u201d the \u201cpitaval\u201d(sic)<\/em> \u201cfrom progressive to reactionary by selectively translating tales of female aristocrats or members of the gentry\u201d who had fallen on hard times.[7]<\/a> Wright reveals how Smith employed the novel to express discontent over women\u2019s lack of legal agency, and redress the gender imbalance \u2013 in the furtherance of garnering empathy solely for privileged white women. The interplay of history, nostalgia, and the divine right of the \u201cdeserving\u201d classes within Smith\u2019s works is especially cogent.<\/p>\n Chapter three, Letters of the Law: Ambivalent Advocacy and Speaking for the Voiceless in Walter Scott\u2019s Redgauntlet,<\/em> \u00a0describes Scott and other educated men as being \u201cconflict[ed] between the safeguarding of their own privilege and the upholding of their professional responsibilities as advocates for the lowly.\u201d[8]<\/a> The \u201cprivileged advocates\u201d in Scott\u2019s novels may \u201chave no reservations about speaking for the lowly,\u201d but Wright argues \u201cthey do so in a way that reinforces their own power and social standing and does little to effect systemic change\u201d \u2013 something that gains resonance when learning of Scott\u2019s legal education and his position as Laird of Abbotsford.[9]<\/a> Indeed, Wright seems to identify a voyeuristic concern possessed by Scott (and the privileged classes in general) regarding the plight of the less fortunate that borders on schadenfreude<\/em>.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n The final chapter of this excellent book is easily its most powerful \u2013 and its most haunting. \u00a0The \u00a0\u201cnoxious politics\u201d of the early nineteenth century British proslavery novel makes it an infrequent source of study,[11]<\/a> but in the chapter, \u00a0\u201cMasters of Passion and Tongue: White Eyewitnesses and Fear of Black Testimony in the Proslavery Novel,\u201d Wright addresses the genre head-on. Finding that \u201cwell-meaning\u201d but \u201cpatronising\u201d portrayals of black people in antislavery texts \u201creinforced the very same racist notions promoted by supporters of slavery,\u201d[12]<\/a> she examines the proslavery novel as a form of propaganda in favour of curtailing the rights of black people to serve as witnesses against their white oppressors. Wright compellingly observes that the \u201ccontradictions\u201d within the proslavery novel had an \u201dunintended and paradoxical outcome\u201d in a \u201crichness of representation of black people that was largely absent\u201d from antislavery literature.[13]<\/a><\/p>\n The epilogue, \u201cAbiding the Law,\u201d, explores the mythologization of the eighteenth century by recent Anglo-American legal scholarship. Wright, for example, highlights the glorification of the eighteenth century in David Cameron\u2019s 2012 address to the European Court of Human Rights, which emphasised Britain\u2019s supposed reverence for the rights of the marginalized that dates back to the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. Wright demonstrates that the truth is more complicated than this speech would suggest; indeed, she observes that Cameron and Ronald Reagan interpret the century very differently \u2013 the former viewing it as an era that eroded individual rights and the latter as expanding them.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n Keenly researched and persuasively conveyed, Defending Privilege<\/em> is a fascinating, dynamic, and wonderfully engaging book. Brimming with originality and insight, Wright\u2019s stunning work reminds us \u00a0\u201cof the more nuanced legacy to which we all are heirs.\u201d[15]<\/a> The novels of Smollett, Smith, Scott, and proslavery advocates manipulatively \u00a0\u201cforegrounded the plights of characters whose status or class privilege does not prevent them from seeing themselves as beleaguered minorities\u201d over the genuine hardship of those who are subjected to inequality and discrimination.[16]<\/a> For Wright, \u00a0\u00a0\u201cthe specter of authoritarianism\u201d looms over these texts and their modern-day descendants.[17]<\/a> In an increasingly conservative climate, where right-wing world leaders conceal their true motives behind a noisome fa\u00e7ade of patriotism, Wright\u2019s book is a welcome and timely read indeed.<\/p>\n Barbara Elin Hughes-Moore is Doctoral Researcher, Cardiff School of Law and Politics, and Reviews Editor, Romantic Texualities<\/a><\/p>\n [N.B.: Dr. Hughes-Moore received a free copy of Defending Privilege from the publisher in exchange for her honest review.\u2013Ed.]<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> \u00a0Nicole M. Wright, Defending Privilege: Rights, Status, and Legal Peril in the British Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University press, 2020), at 1 (hereinafter Wright).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Wright, at 2.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Wright, at 11-14.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Wright at 21-22.<\/p>\n <\/a>Wright, at 43.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Wright, at 17.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Id.<\/em><\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Wright, at 91.<\/p>\n [10]<\/a> Wright, at 103-107.<\/p>\n [11]<\/a> Wright, at 108-109.<\/p>\n [12]<\/a> Wright, at 111.<\/p>\n [13]<\/a> Wright, at 144.<\/p>\n [14]<\/a> Wright, at 149-150.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/defending-privilege.jpg?resize=200%2C300&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n