ABSTRACT
Edward Fitzball’s Tom Cringle, or, Mat of the Iron Hand takes its title, but little else from Michael Scott’s 1833 novel Tom Cringle’s Log, originally serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine. The melodrama weaves together two story threads, one about crime and punishment, the other about love. Years before the play begins, Stanton, then a magistrate, sentences Mat, a smuggler and wrecker, to having his hand cut off. The play takes place at an unspecified time, and its legal practices make its location difficult to identify. Scottish or Irish law may have given magistrates more power than in England, but nineteenth-century English law would likely have required a jury to condemn Mat, not simply Stanton. The actions of Walter and Elizabeth problematize the connection between religion and justice, specifically the obligation to fulfill a sacred oath to perform an unworthy deed. Though in many ways Elizabeth adheres to conventional femininity, she also violates that code and acts heroically.
