A Damsel in Distress: Geraldine Jewsbury and the Rhetoric of Knowledge Diffusion

Abstract

Despite her prolific output as a critic, novelist, and publisher’s reader, Geraldine Jewsbury is perhaps best known among scholars for the letters she exchanged with her close friend Jane Welsh Carlyle, a third-hand kind of literary significance. This essay places her in another context, examining critiques of the knowledge diffusion movement that she wrote for Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine in 1847. I argue these represent an extraordinary contribution to the discourse surrounding the movement, which includes contributions by a diversity of major authors who identified knowledge democracy as an epoch-defining cause. Jewsbury achieves this significance by repurposing familiar elements of the knowledge diffuser’s rhetoric in radical ways, turning them to the unfamiliar task of dramatizing crisis and conflict within the movement during a crisis in public confidence. Readers are confronted with a salutary struggle in which she, the true believer, must break ranks to confess and reconcile disparate convictions at war within herself, challenge leadership, and emerge with a vision that has the integrity as well as the grandeur to restore faith in movement ideals. The results offer a candid perspective on the struggle to reconcile élite culture with democratic values.