Abstract
In the spring of 1759, Kitty Fisher was the most famous sexual celebrity in the English-speaking world. She was only 17, and fresh on the scene as a leading courtesan. Yet already she was so well known as to be regularly and casually referred to by poets, journalists and writers of all kinds. The public appetite for news about her seems to have been huge.1
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Notes
- 1.
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London, 2012), chapter 6.
- 2.
The Public Advertiser (24 and 29 March 1759).
- 3.
Marcia Pointon, ‘The Lives of Kitty Fisher’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (2004), 77–97; ‘Catherine Maria Fischer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
- 4.
[Ange Goudar], The Chinese Spy, 6 vols (London, 1765), vol. 6, 208.
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Dabhoiwala, F. (2016). Kitty Fisher: The Commodification of Celebrity. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_32
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