I read a quite interesting discussion of how novelists—Trollope and Austen are the two examples—influence social change not through direct calls for reform but indirectly, simply by showing the ill-effects of certain institutions: “Primogeniture, Legal Change, and Trollope” by Saul Levmore in Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (ed. Martha Nussbaum and Alison LaCroix). As part of a 2013 law-and-literature collection, Levmore discusses primogeniture in three of Trollope’s novels. His main point is that by devising plots that deal with its effects—elder sons who were sometimes profligates, younger sons and female children who were often forced to marry for money—Trollope’s novels likely influenced public opinion on the institution of primogeniture and the laws enabling it. No soap boxes; just a realistic portrayal of existing conditions. A few quotations:

Literature may play an important role in drawing attention to disappointing

outcomes, and thus accelerating reform, experimentation, or simply the

instability of rules. It may not have played a role in the evolution of tort law

or tax law, to take two examples, because gripping tales rarely depend on

whether a jurisdiction uses strict liability or negligence, or relies more on

a value added tax or excise taxes. But inheritance law often has serious

impact on family dynamics, monarchal succession, and wealth, and these are

not overlooked subjects in literature or in any social class's conversations.

Literary treatments of inheritance law, whether explicit or subtle, would be

bound to affect readers’ own perceptions of these matters, as well as their

own behavior when transmitting wealth.

The narrow point advanced here, that Trollope's novels expose the

weaknesses of prevailing inheritance rules, requires more effort than

the larger claim that the successful novelists celebrate the unfortunate

without advancing particular social reforms. Trollope's unfortunates are

often women, but he seems content to insist that they be constant in their

affections and modest in any calls for change on their account. Lady Anna

(1874) is representative.

If primogeniture brings about a world, and associated novels, in which

eldest sons are coddled and then weakened, and daughters made to spurn

love, then we must not neglect the impact on younger sons. In this period,

gentlemen did not pursue careers in finance and law, though they could try

the military, the church, and certainly the parlor—in search of heiresses.

In the Palliser novels, the younger son (and brother), Jeffrey Palliser, needs

someone with a very substantial income of thousands a year. In contrast

we meet clergymen who need but three hundred (pounds) or so, but no

significant woman, needing to make her way in society, could make do with

that.

It is too easy to enjoy Trollope's work but to think it less socially significant

than other authors’ works dealing with poverty, working conditions, war,

and other serious matters. I have, however, suggested or insisted that

primogeniture was no unimportant thing. It affected marriage patterns,

educational investments, expeditions to new worlds, the makeup of the

clergy, the identity of monarchs, the pattern of land ownership, and

investment in new industries. In nearly all these matters the relationships

between the sexes was implicated. And in all these areas, Anthony Trollope,

in the manner of significant novelists everywhere, unsettled conventions by

building sympathy for the disfavored and by spinning tales of the unintended

and often unattractive consequences of prevailing law.

In his Conclusion Levmore argues that in the United States, which never had primogeniture laws (It was settled in large part by younger sons!), philanthropy and naming hospitals, museums, libraries, etc. after the donors proved a much surer means of effecting a principal goal of primogeniture—that of preserving the legacy of the family name in perpetuity.