Legitimacy and illegitimacy in nineteenth-century law, literature and history

This innovative collection of essays by prominent scholars from the disciplines of literary studies, history and law explores the many ways in which notions of legtitimacy were shaped and contested in Georgian and Victorian Britain. It probes the difficulties of drawing boundaries between the legitimate and the illegitimate which continued to trouble Victorian society and which were explored in novels such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. The essays in this collection show how dilemmas over legitimacy unsettled families by challenging clear lines of inheritence; they also unsettles society, as forgers and imposters defrauded individuals, estates and institutions through widely publicised social performances which fascinated both contemporary culture and called into question the idea of legitimacy itself.