Book Talk: Belief in Evidence and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

What makes us believe anything told to us by another person? This old problem, fundamental to a jury-trial system, newly animated legal writing and changes in evidence law in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which we could think of as a kind of “age of evidence.” As evidentiary ideas from philosophical quarters affected evidence-thinking in legal circles, and as this thinking then slipped into culture more broadly, novelists of the nineteenth century registered and complicated the relationship between belief and evidence.

Geoffrey Baker is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches classes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. He has published Belief in Evidence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford UP, 2026), The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists (Palgrave, 2017), and Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2009).