Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors

306 Pages·2018·2.74 MB·English

by  Emrys D. Jones

Intimacy and Celebrity
in Eighteenth-Century
Literary Culture
Public Interiors
Edited by Emrys D. Jones
and Victoria Joule
Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century
Literary Culture
Emrys D. Jones · Victoria Joule
Editors
Intimacy and Celebrity
in Eighteenth-Century
Literary Culture
Public Interiors
Editors
Emrys D. Jones Victoria Joule
Department of English Independent Scholar
King’s College London Cardiff, Wales, UK
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-76901-1 ISBN 978-3-319-76902-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934671
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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Cover credit: An Inside View of the Rotundo in Ranelagh Gardens (1751). Etching and
engraving on laid paper, by N. Parr after Canaletto. Published 2 December 1751 by Robert
Sayer, Fleet Street. Reproduced by permission of the David Coke Collection
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer
International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
E ’ A
ditors cknowlEdgEmEnts
We would like to express our thanks to our families, to all our contrib-
utors, to everyone who attended our Celebrity and Intimacy panel at
BSECS 2017, and also to colleagues past and present at the University
of Exeter, the University of Greenwich and King’s College London. We
have both benefited from fellowships at Chawton House Library in the
time since we first began planning this volume; it is a wonderful resource
and scholarly refuge to which we are both grateful.
For permission to use our beautiful cover illustration, we must thank
its owner David Coke. We hope that the various ideas and characters that
populate this book do justice to the buoyant society represented in the
image.
v
c
ontEnts
Introduction 1
Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule
Part I Theatre
Nell Gwyn’s Breasts and Colley Cibber’s Shirts: Celebrity
Actors and Their Famous “Parts” 13
Elaine McGirr
Anne Oldfield’s Domestic Interiors: Auctions, Material
Culture and Celebrity 35
Claudine van Hensbergen
“Peeping” and Public Intimacy in Susanna Centlivre’s
The Busy Body (1709) 59
Victoria Joule
Garrick, Dying 83
James Harriman-Smith
vii
viii CoNTENTS
Part II Politics
Doctor Sacheverell and the Politics of Celebrity
in Post-Revolutionary Britain 111
Brian Cowan
Farcical Politics: Fielding’s Public Emotion 139
Rebecca Tierney-Hynes
“A Man in Love”: Intimacy and Political Celebrity
in the Early Eighteenth Century 165
Emrys D. Jones
Part III Authorship
“The ARMS of Friendship”: John Dunton’s Platonic
Acquisitions 189
Nicola Parsons
“I Make a Very Shining Figure”: Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu and the Intimate Publicity of Authorship 211
Clare Brant
Foote, Fox, and the Mysterious Mrs Grieve: Print Celebrity
and Imposture 233
Ruth Scobie
Part IV Intimate Notoriety: A Case Study
Notoriety’s Public Interiors: Mid-Georgians Combining
Celebrity and Intimacy, with an Appendix on the Rotunda
at Ranelagh 259
George Rousseau
CoNTENTS ix
Epilogue: Body Double—Katharine Hepburn at Madame
Tussauds 293
Laura Engel
Index 299
n c
otEs on ontributors
Clare Brant is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture
at King’s College London, where she also co-directs the Centre for Life-
Writing Research. She has published widely on eighteenth-century lit-
erature and other subjects, most recently Balloon Madness: Flights of
Imagination in Britain 1783–1786 (Boydell & Brewer, 2017), and
co-edited Fame and Fortune: Sir John Hill and London Life in the 1750s
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Brian Cowan is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in
Early Modern British History at McGill University. He has been a vis-
iting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of Durham
University and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of
Texas at Austin. He is currently working on the age of enlightenment
volume of The Cultural History of Fame for Bloomsbury Academic and
is editing with Scott Sowerby The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in
Later Stuart England for Boydell & Brewer.
Laura Engel is a Professor in the English department at Duquesne
University where she specialises in eighteenth-century British litera-
ture and theatre. She is the author of Austen, Actresses and Accessories:
Much Ado About Muffs (Palgrave Pivot, 2014), Fashioning Celebrity:
Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making
(ohio State UP, 2011), and co-editor with Elaine McGirr of Stage
xi
xii NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
Mothers: Women, Work and the Theater 1660–1830 (Bucknell UP,
2014). She is currently working on several projects: co-curating an
exhibition with Amelia Rauser called “Artful Nature: Fashion and the
Theater 1770–1830” at the Walpole Library, editing a new book series
“Performing Celebrity” with the University of Delaware Press, and com-
pleting a book project entitled “Women, Performance, and the Material
of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915”.
James Harriman-Smith is a lecturer in Restoration and eighteenth-cen-
tury literature at the University of Newcastle. He completed a Ph.D.
on Shakespeare and eighteenth-century writing about acting in 2015
at Cambridge University under the supervision of Fred Parker, and has
published articles on Shakespeare’s early editors and the theatre, on
Diderot and English acting, on Madame de Staël and Shakespeare, and
on Charles Lamb and vagabonds.
Emrys D. Jones is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and
Culture at King’s College London, UK. He previously lectured at the
University of Greenwich, and studied at oxford and Cambridge uni-
versities. His first monograph, Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-
Century Literature, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. He
is a co-editor of the journal Literature and History, and also editor of
Criticks, reviews website of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies. His current research examines the phenomenon of the levée and
other sites of formal hospitality in the eighteenth century.
Victoria Joule is an independent scholar based in Wales. She was previ-
ously a lecturer at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth for ten years.
Her research is into women’s writing, life-writing and the theatre of the
long eighteenth century and she has related articles published in journals
and an edited essay collection. She is currently completing a monograph
on the writer Delarivier Manley and working on a larger project examin-
ing the significance of the stagecoach in eighteenth-century fiction.
Elaine McGirr is a Reader in Theatre and Performance Histories at
the University of Bristol. Her current research unites her interests in
celebrity, repertory, and reception by exploring the impact of celebrity
actresses on the interpretation and understanding of canonical drama.
Publications include Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber,
The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis and Eighteenth-Century Characters,
the co-edited collection Stage Mothers, as well as chapters and articles on