In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, John Bell commissioned hundreds of actor portraits in dramatic roles, which were published as book illustrations in the series Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre. These portraits contributed significantly to the emergent culture of theatrical celebrity. While paintings and engraved prints of actors mostly peddled a mode of celebrity that was sustained by audience applause within the theater walls, Bell’s illustrations created a parallel visibility for the performers outside the theater, which was only tenuously and unevenly associated with their stage celebrity. The performers’ images circulating through Bell’s books realigned the contours of the late eighteenth-century market for theatrical celebrity.

No abstract

Most scholarship that links John Locke’s ideas with eighteenth-century representations of childhood approaches children as Lockean peda gogic subjects ready for moral and intellectual education. This article instead brings to bear on Daniel Defoe’s representation of children Locke the political thinker, who articulates in Two Treatises of Government (1689) a person’s right to “liberty and property.” Locke’s influential theories of owner ship are partly responsible for the eighteenth-century investment in distinguishing between property and persons, and often reduce children to a state of compromised personhood. The numerous children who lurk in Defoe’s densely textured narrative worlds are evidence of a cultural sidelining of the child in new models of selfood based on property rights. The child in Defoe’s fiction is persistently framed as a problematic economic entity. Such reduction of children to a bare economic function is of a piece with emergent notions of Lockean Man as a bearer of fundamental property rights. The many children born in the course of Defoe’s narratives are consistently marginalized, pointing to their complex narrative function in stories about protagonists who are intent on property accumulation.

No abstract

This is a portrait of five-year-old Miss Rose, who shone brightly albeit briefly on the London stage in the years 1769–70 before fading away into the gloom of historical obscurity (Fig. 1). She stands here as Tom Thumb, the eponymous diminutive hero of Henry Fielding's farce. With impressively plumed helm, her beautiful black eyes fierce, chin set in a determined tilt, padded right leg stretched out aggressively, and her somewhat chubby hand gripping the hilt of her sword, Miss Rose looks ready to engage some unseen enemy just outside the picture frame. Impressive as she looks, however, there is something poignant about this little girl's confidently heroic stance in the context of her prematurely terminated theatrical career. Miss Rose appears on the Haymarket stage in the summer of 1769, garners much praise and a small degree of celebrity, and then disappears from the theatre by 1771. Her departure is shrouded in nebulous but persistent accusations by her mother, Elizabeth de Franchetti, that she was being blackballed by the powerful theatre managers David Garrick and Samuel Foote, who for some reason refused to employ her despite her talent. After lingering a few years on the offstage London entertainment scene of concerts and variety shows, she drops out of historical view altogether before she is nine years old.