Following the success of the Trollope Society’s 2026 conference, Trollope: The Law & Transgression, held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, we are delighted to present a series of online Zoom talks featuring conference speakers exploring law, morality, justice, gender, religion, inheritance, equity, and social transgression in the novels of Anthony Trollope.

Trollope and the Equitable Judgment of Human Failings

Professor Gary Watt 

In Where the Shoe Pinches (Pólemos, 2016), Professor Watt examined The Warden and Septimus Harding’s pursuit of what Harding calls “true equity”. This presentation extends that enquiry across the chronicles of Barsetshire and into a contemporary church land dispute with echoes of The Vicar of Bullhampton. It argues that Trollope’s fiction promotes the Aristotelian virtue of equity (epieikeia) in the judgment of others. Aristotle writes in his Rhetoric that: “It is equity to pardon human failings, and to look to the lawgiver and not to the law; to the spirit and not to the letter…to the character of the actor in the long run and not in the present moment; to remember the good rather than evil” (i.13.1374a). This Aristotelian equity, which was adapted into English law by Chancery judges motivated by a clerical concern for mercy, leads us amongst other things “into the temptation of loving the leading ecclesiastical characters for their weaknesses as much as for their strengths” (Durey, 2002).

Gary Watt is Professor of Law, University of Warwick. Founding co-editor of the journal Law and Humanities; General Editor of the book series A Cultural History of Law (Bloomsbury); Monographs include Trusts and Equity (OUP), Dress, Law and Naked Truth (Bloomsbury, 2013), Equity Stirring (Hart, 2009), Shakespeare’s Acts of Will (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Shakespeare and the Law (OUP, 2024). Publications on Victorian literature and the law include articles and chapters on Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope.

Register free for the complete series of conference talks

You only need to register once, you can then attend any of the conference talks without needing to register again. You can cancel your registration at any time.

8 October 2026 at 8pm, Professor Gary Watt – Trollope and the Equitable Judgment of Human Failings

14 January 2027 at 8pm, Gilly Wilford – Unexpected Interventions: The Deus ex Machina in Court

11 March 2027 at 8pm, Dr Tom Crewe – How Bad is John Caldigate?

8 April 2027 at 8pm, Dr Frederik Van Dam – ‘Some gross insufficiency in the laws of extradition’: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux

13 May 2027 at 8pm, Professor Linda McClain and Claire Laporte – A Taxonomy of Transgression in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: A Conversation
(The previously advertised date for this meeting was 12 November 2026.)

Click here to register on Zoom to attend Trollope: The Law & Transgression Conference Series

We will send you an email with instructions on how to join. Using Zoom is easy, just click on the link in the email and follow the instructions. Please note that you will not be able to join the meeting until 8.00pm (UK time) on the day.