This chapter reads scenes of judging and judgment in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) in the context of debates about the nature and scope of equity as well as the value and limits of the laws regulating familial relations. Through Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s interventions in disputes concerning marriage, custody, and inheritance, the novel affirms the value of equity as the basis for judgments in the Court of Chancery while showing the need to apply equitable principles to everyday life. The central principle underlying Richardson’s equitable jurisprudence is impartiality. Sir Charles’s and Harriet’s ability to assume other perspectives allows them to mediate conflicts in fair and flexible ways without issuing arbitrary or subjective decisions. Richardson’s commitment to equity shapes his experiments with epistolary form, prompting readers to examine conflicts from multiple points of view. Through his accounts of domestic disputes and his formal experiments, Richardson shows the need to extend the era’s equity jurisprudence to rectify injustices enshrined in and fostered by English common and statutory law.

This chapter argues that naturalization, the process of transforming aliens into subjects through law, was a crucial process in eighteenth-century law and literature. The attempted passage of several naturalization bills across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generated conflicting accounts about whether nationality could be a fictional process. Samuel Richardson and Maria Edgeworth take up these conflicting accounts in their novels. In Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), Richardson upholds the traditional view, which considered naturalization to be part of a return to an original common human nature expressed in natural law. In Harrington (1817), by contrast, Maria Edgeworth endorses a newer, Lockean, contractual and voluntarist approach: the idea that naturalization could be achieved through a Parliamentary statute without the necessity of natural law. These case studies reveal how novelists responded and contributed to naturalization’s transformation from a supposedly natural process to an explicitly fictional process.

When Sterne (unsuccessfully) pitched to Robert Dodsley the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, he was directing his novel to the very man whose career had been built on writing and publishing texts which sat on generic boundaries, such as his play The Toy-Shop (1735). Through an analysis of experimental texts in this tradition, including novels such as Jane Collier and Sarah Fielding’s The Cry: A Dramatic Fable (1754) and Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), which imported dramatic devices into mid-century prose, this chapter contextualises Sterne’s mise en page experimentation within a wider mid-century fascination with hybrid print forms. Sterne was arguably aware of the theatrical heritage of sermon punctuation when he displaced these typographic characteristics from his professional work into his fiction, where such visual markers appeared innovative and surprising. By analysing Sterne’s sermonic punctuation and linking it to his development of a mid-century aesthetics of typesetting the novel, I suggest that Sterne drew from Anglican works published from within his professional context while responding to a 1750s fashion for printing closet drama and dramatic novels.