Abstract
Were there really celebrities in the early eighteenth century? This book is built on the premise that there were, but it is also an attempt to understand the difficulties of that question, the factors that make this time period both a pivotal juncture and disputed terrain within narratives of celebrity’s ascent.
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- 1.
Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 14.
- 2.
David Giles, Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 3–4; Ellis Cashmore goes further, arguing that celebrity as we know it “was landscaped less than twenty years ago” and is not “an extension of historical forms”. See Ellis Cashmore, “Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century Imagination,” Cultural & Social History 8, no. 3 (2011): 405–14 (405, 413).
- 3.
Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity 1750–1850, trans. Lynn Jeffress (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 101.
- 4.
See, for instance, Tom Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- 5.
See Aviad Kleinberg, “Are Saints Celebrities? Some Medieval Christian Examples,” Cultural & Social History 8, no. 3 (2011), 393–97.
- 6.
Lilti describes the increased usage and shifting implications of the word, in both French and English contexts, in Invention of Celebrity, 102–5. P. David Marshall asserts that the word was not used in its current sense, referring to people as celebrities rather than to the quality of celebrity, until the nineteenth century. See P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 4.
- 7.
Our position is thus in keeping with the assertion by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody that “only in the eighteenth century does an extensive apparatus for disseminating fame emerge”. See “Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–11 (3).
- 8.
Key texts in these disputes include Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Phillippe Ariès and George Duby’s co-edited series Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1985–1987). For a valuable summary of the theoretical context and contemporary ramifications of such debate, see Jeff Weintraub, “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–42.
- 9.
Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 27.
- 10.
Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 49.
- 11.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; originally published, 1962), 49.
- 12.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8.
- 13.
Stella Tillyard, “Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London,” History Today 55, no. 6 (2005): 20–27 (25).
- 14.
Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 15–30 (16); Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia and Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 45.
Works Cited
Ariès, Phillippe, and George Duby, eds. Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols. Paris: Seuil, 1985–1987.
Cashmore, Ellis. “Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century Imagination.” Cultural & Social History 8, no. 3 (2011): 405–14.
Giles, David. Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989; originally published, 1962.
Kleinberg, Aviad. “Are Saints Celebrities? Some Medieval Christian Examples.” Cultural & Social History 8, no. 3 (2011): 393–97.
Lilti, Antoine. The Invention of Celebrity 1750–1850. Translated by Lynn Jeffress. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
Luckhurst, Mary, and Jane Moody. “Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity.” In Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, 1–11. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Mole, Tom, ed. Romanticism and Celebrity, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Nussbaum, Felicity. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Roach, Joseph. “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It.’” In Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, edited by Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, 15–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.
Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Tillyard, Stella. “Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London.” History Today 55, no. 6 (2005): 20–27.
Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Weintraub, Jeff. “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction.” In Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy, edited by Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, 1–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
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Jones, E.D., Joule, V. (2018). Introduction. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_1
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