Gossip's weaving work: Revealing the 'unhistoric' in 'Middlemarch', and, Translating private sorrows into sympathetic communities: Charlotte Smith's poetry and the eighteenth century funerary monument

This paper examines how George Eliot uses gossip as the privileged discourse in her novel Middlemarch to establish a historic account of the 1830's in London, England. Based on Eliot's own philosophy, supported by other theorists of her time, her historic account is "unhistoric" in the way she focuses on how history effects individual lives. Gossip in Middlemarch is the discourse to force private notions out into the public sphere. It is privileged in the particular role of aligning private thoughts with public values; becoming the historical lens through which Eliot presents her account of "hidden lives." Gossip demonstrates how historical events affect individuals in the way that personal notions must become aligned with public notions to be a part of a community.; Charlotte Smith's frequent references to her private life within her public work can create tensions maintaining the proper separation of private life from public poetic personae, particularly for a woman poet. This paper looks at Smith's use of her private sorrows as a rhetorical device to create a community of sympathetic readers. Because of her prolific use of footnotes, prefaces, and plates, Smith's poetry can be read within the context of a culture of mourning that uses funerary monuments for the transmission of social values. Though she works within both traditions of a culture of sensibility and a culture of mourning, Smith will stretch and revise these traditions to fit her particular need for a dependable community of patrons.