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.
