Siddons, Celebrity and Regality: Portraiture and the Body of the Ageing Actress

Abstract

During the eighteenth century the concept of celebrity was in its formative stages. Although the effects and consequences of public recognition existed before this time, its by-products — including journalistic voyeurism, public obsession and image manipulation — were manifestations of a commercial culture that became especially strong in England during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Despite the ostensible differences between developing ideas of celebrity in the eighteenth century and a fully formed concept of celebrity perpetuated through the mass media of modernity, there are many continuities between Georgian London and twenty-first-century global culture. Mechanisms of publicity that were only in the process of invention in the eighteenth century remain: image-making, puffing, idolatry, the collapse of distinctions between public and private, and an obsession with the body. Furthermore, as Richard Dyer has argued, ‘stars’ can serve the function of either reinforcing dominant value systems or patching over often unspoken cultural problems,1 and these ideological operations existed as strongly in the ‘pre-cognitive’ celebrity culture of the eighteenth century as they do today.2 What changed in the intervening centuries was the way these ingredients gradually overturned the continuity and longevity of public ‘fame’ in favour of the evanescence and replaceability of ‘celebrity’.3 KeywordsEighteenth CenturyRoyal AcademyRoyal FamilyRomantic CriticIconic ImageThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.