Legal Intimacies: Slavery and Marriage in Victorian Law and Literature

InOliver Twist(1837), Dickens explains that Oliver's father had been "solemnly contracted" to marry Oliver's mother, but was already married to another woman. A "clanking bond," this marriage becomes a metaphorical slavery. In reality, legal thinkers turned to slavery law to litigate England's domestic future, drawing on cases that regulated enslaved people's movements to support changing marriage policies for metropolitan English families. By readingOliver Twistin relation to these legal intimacies, we can see how the Victorian family was legitimated through its encounters with the recent history of British slavery and enslaved families excluded from English family law.