Gossip, hearsay, and the character exception in Victorian law and literature

Abstract

This article contrasts the uses of gossip in fiction to legal rules against the admission of hearsay evidence, particularly as they both impinge on nineteenth-century formulations of the idea of character. Looking at Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford and the controversial decision in R v Rowton (1865), especially its discussion of the meaning of character and the best, admissible means of accessing it, I argue that the novel's more capacious rules of evidence repurpose hearsay and find other uses for it: a sociological one of creating and maintaining communal boundaries; an epistemological one of confirming, discovering or otherwise creating knowledge, and a narratological one of generating plot.