A Novel between Gossip and a Court Testimony

The Peculiar Case of Benjamin Victor's Widow of the Wood (1755)

Abstract

This paper analyses a curious pseudo-documentary narrative entitled The Widow of the Wood, published anonymously in 1755 by a largely forgotten writer and theatre person, Benjamin Victor. It recounts real events that took place in Staffordshire in 1752 and could be best described as a cunning widow’s amorous trickery. In the article I explore the subtle ways in which what is in fact a documentation of a court trial and a gossip chronicle is turned into a novel, and I try to track down the techniques of ‘novelisation’ as used in eighteenth century English literature, endeavouring to articulate how one discourse has been translated into another. The paper concludes by linking the case to the thematic and discursive role of gossip in eighteenth century English society and literature, namely novels.