This book provides an expansive view of celebritys intimate dimensions. In the process, it offers a timely reassessment of how notions of private and public were negotiated by writers, readers, actors and audiences in the early to mid-eighteenth century. The essays assembled here explore the lives of a wide range of figures: actors and actresses, but also politicians, churchmen, authors and rogues; some who courted celebrity openly and others who seemed to achieve it almost inadvertently. At a time when the topic of celebritys origins is attracting unprecedented scholarly attention, this collection is an important, pioneering resource.

Emrys D. Jones is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at Kings College London, UK. He previously lectured at the University of Greenwich, and studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities. 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 previously a lecturer at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth for ten years. Her research is into womens 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 examining the significance of the stagecoach in eighteenth-century fiction. 

1. Introduction: Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule.- 2. Nell Gwyns Breasts and Colley Cibbers Shirts: Celebrity Actors and their Famous Parts: Elaine McGirr.- 3. Anne Oldfields Domestic Interiors: Auctions, Material Culture and Celebrity: Claudine van Hensbergen.- 4. Peeping and Public Intimacy in Susanna CentlivresThe Busy Body(1709): Victoria Joule.- 5. Garrick, Dying: James Harriman-Smith.- 6. Doctor Sacheverell and the Politics of Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary Britain: Brian Cowan.- 7. Farcical Politics: Fieldings Public Emotion: Rebecca Tierney-Hynes.- 8. A Man in Love: Intimacy and Political Celebrity in the Early Eighteenth Century: Emrys D. Jones.- 9. The ARMS of Friendship: John Duntons Platonic Aquisitions: Nicola Parsons.- 10. I make a very shining figure: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the intimate publics of authorship: Clare Brant.- 11. Foote, Fox, and the Mysterious Mrs Grieve: Print Celebrity and Imposture: Ruth Scobie.- 12. Notorietys public interiors: Mid-Georgians Combining Celebrity and Intimacy, with an Appendix on the Rotunda at Ranelagh: George Rousseau.- 13. Body Double: Katherine Hepburn at Madame Tussauds: Laura Engel.