Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers challenging
interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the
eighteenth-century English novel. John P. Zomchick begins by surveying
the social, historical and ideological functions of law and the family
in England's developing market economy. He goes on to examine in detail
their part in the fortunes and misfortunes of the protagonists in
Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's Roderick Random,
Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield and Godwin's Caleb Williams. Zomchick
reveals in these novels an attempt to produce a 'juridical subject': a
representation of the individual identified with the principles and aims
of the law, and motivated by an inherent need for affection and
community fulfilled by the family. Their ambivalence towards that
formulation indicates a nostalgia for less competitive social relations,
and an emergent liberal critique of the law's operation in the service
of society's elites.