«A footnote in legal history». Critica della giustizia e Englishness in Arthur and George di Julian Barnes

Abstract

The article considers Julian Barnes’ novel Arthur and George (2005) as an outstanding case study of the presence of justice and the law in contemporary neo-Victorian fiction. The novel is a biofiction on Arthur Conan Doyle’s commitment to campaigning in favour of George Edalij, an unjustly imprisoned young solicitor of Parsee origins, in a legal case that led to the institution of the Court of Appeal in 1907. Arthur and George engages with some crucial tropes of the Victorian novel, notably the nexus between testimony, evidence, knowledge and truth, which sustains the thematic core of the novel, and the epistemological concern with knowledge and belief. The novel subtly addresses issues of national identity, cultural and political ethos and renews Barnes’ concern with the indeterminacy of truth and the difficulty of ever knowing the past.