ABSTRACT

No Name is principally a protest against the law which determines the social position of illegitimate children. But the prosecution of this main purpose involves, as a subordinate purpose, a plea in behalf of the connexion to which such children owe their existence. Hence the… stage-trick of exhibiting the virtuous concubine in contrast to the vicious wife is brought forward to give effect to the piece. Andrew Vanstone, when a mere boy, is privately married in Canada to a wife whom he afterwards discovers to have been a woman of profligate character; but, inasmuch as her irregularities are all antenuptial, thereis no pretext for dissolving the marriage, and the only resource of the husband is to pension her off, on condition that she shall never trouble him by asserting her conjugal rights. Mr. Vanstone then returns to England, and finds an accommodating young lady, who is content to discharge the duties and assume the name of his wife, without being too particular in demanding a legal right to them. On the death of his real wife, Mr. Vanstone marries the mother of his children, but is prevented by an untimely death from making a new will, his former one being invalidated by the second marriage. The consequence is that his property goes to the heir-at-law, and his children are left penniless, because a cruel jurisprudence does not permit them to be made legitimate by the subsequent marriage of their parents. Against this state of the law, Mr. Collins, through the mouth of the family solicitor, declaims in the following strain:—

I am far from defending the law of England, as it affects illegitimate offspring. On the contrary, I think it a disgrace to the nation. It visits the sins of the parents on the children; it encourages vice by depriving fathers and mothers of the strongest of all motives for making the atonement of marriage; and it claims to produce these two abominable results in the names of morality and religion. But it has no extraordinary oppression to answer for, in the case of these unhappy girls. The more merciful and Christian law of other countries, which allows the marriage of the parents to make the children legitimate, has no mercy on these children. The accident of their father having been married, when he first met with their mother, has made them the outcasts of the whole social community: it has placed them out of the pale of the Civil Law of Europe.