[...]... Fielding sketches in the initial prison scene in Amelia For Fielding and the other eighteenthcentury novelists, the law' s invasion of the family signals its end This is as true for Roxana and Clarissa as it is for Amelia If the Vicar of Wakefield's family is finally rescued from the prison, it is because the Vicar has domesticated the prison instead of the prison savaging the family The family stands... described by Antonio Gramsci in the following way: "If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen (and hence of collective life and of individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (together with the school system, and other institutions and activities)."35 One... beginning and groweth to perfection in this manner: When a reasonable act once done is found to be good and beneficiall to the people, and agreeable to their nature and disposition, then do they use it and practise it again and again, and so by often iteration, and multiplication of the act it becometh a Custome; and being continued without interruption time out of mind, it obtaineth the force of a Law. 29... of the peculiar traditions of English law The novel and the law, then, will be treated as partners in forging a modern "collective consciousness." As the novelists encounter the new and recall the old, they hammer their representations upon the anvil of the law in order to create what Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer have called the "'permissible' parameters and forms of individual identity" in the. .. trade supported by law and what today would be called ideology Rather than relying on the coercive power of the law to maintain social order and the fine distinctions of meum and tuum, Mandeville recommends other means of controlling the multitude for whom, in the words of Rt S Neale, "[pjroperty was the material basis of civil society and its alienating consequences constituted the network of social... by supplying the stage for feelings of natural revulsion on behalf of the hero, provides the opportunity for the dissemination of a new, more continent system of values than the young Tom had practiced In the words of Michel Foucault, it "reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday... for the individual to differentiate him or herself, as Amelia and Evelina both learn at Vauxhall At the same time, however, the history of the individual represented in novels - individualism's drama of autonomy and subjection - plays itself out in the family' s domestic sphere, in the association of competing individuals that make up civil society, and finally in the shadow of institutions under the. .. law played a directive part There was a revolution in historiography that generated new interest in describing and explaining continuity and change, custom and innovation over time.1 There were the political revolutions that generated new theories of power and authority.2 And there were the commercial revolutions that generated new forms of social life.3 Just as the law played a directive role in the. .. granted that since the law was worth studying, it must be capable of being rationalized and reduced to principles." Daniel Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941; rpt Gloucester, Mass: Peter Smith, 1973), p 20 6 Family and the law Bernard Mandeville, desires (the motor of competition) should be free to further the general good by promoting trade, which he calls the "Principal, but not the only... successfully in a competitive market society; that is, it enables them to exert their wills over against the wills of others who oppose them Social power - another phrase for the attainment of happiness - is predicated on the internalization of the juridical discourse This is part of the law' s cultural function, and the novels "imagine the real" by making an alignment between juridically induced and rational . Sant Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Public Conscience in the Private Sphere by John P. Zomchick Family and the law in eighteenth-century. Family and the law in eighteenth-century fiction offers challenging new interpretations of the public and private faces of individualism in the eighteenth-century