GIS Interdisciplinary Seminar: 'Gossip, Scandal and Sociabilities'
GIS Sociabilités seminar 'The Politics of the ‘Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'
Seventh thematic session on 'Gossip, Scandal and Sociabilities', 7 November 2025 (17:00 - 19:00) at Université Paris Cité, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges (room 830)
- Rebecca Anne Barr (University of Cambridge) - 'Eliza Haywood's Tattle Life'
- Matthew Kinservik (University of Delaware) - 'The Duchess of Kingston's 1776 Bigamy Trial as a Social Media Event'
Session chaired by Clara Manco (Univ. Paris Cité) and Sophie Vasset (Univ. de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89146236342?pwd=pWJLKBDuQcFit4We5GePWm04eC3jJi.1
Abstracts & bios:
"Eliza Haywood's Tattle Life"
In June of this year, a Northern Irish couple successfully unmasked the proprietor of an online gossip site, ‘Tattle Life’, a platform which invited ‘commentary and critiques of people that choose to monetise their personal life as a business and release it into the public domain.’ Rather than pleasurable idle talk, Tattle Life was a ‘Trolls’ paradise’ (The Guardian), which licensed the publication of vicious slurs and defamation. The anonymity of the modern public sphere affords the perfect conditions for circulating defamatory attack—and for consuming such allegations. Eliza Haywood’s The History of Betsy Thoughtless (1751) provides two instances of gossip’s gendered repercussions and its narrative effects. In Betsy Thoughtless, secret information about women’s conduct, sex and sin has a transformative capacity: derailing the courtship narrative and killing off the heroine's guardian. But scandal and gossip works reflexively in Betsy Thoughtless: its presence challenging the motivations of readers and the evidentiary processes (character, credibility, circumstantiality) by which the novel itself gains credence for its fictions.
Rebecca Anne Barr is Associate Professor in the Faculty of English, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College. She has published widely on eighteenth-century fiction, sexual violence, and the history of the novel, with occasional forays into contemporary culture. Her book Killjoy Comedy: sex, sensibility, and humor in 1750s Fiction is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.
"The Duchess of Kingston's 1776 Bigamy Trial as a Social Media Event"
The Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial before the House of Lords was a cause célèbre that captivated the attention of Londoners, high and low, in the revolutionary year of 1776. Both a high-stakes legal process and a cynical moral spectacle, the trial was designed for maximum exposure. The nature of the trial and the different ways it was documented, exploited, and amplified make it feel strikingly modern, inviting us to explore 18th-century practices that adumbrate Twitter streams, Instagram posts, group chats, Substacks, and other social media conventions.
Matthew Kinservik is a Professor at the University of Delaware, after completing a PhD at Penn State University. His book, Sex, Scandal and Celebrity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) is a landmark in celebrity studies, and his articles have been published in The British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, and the Harvard Library Bulletin.
