Philanthropic Celebrity in the Age of Sensibility

History of celebrity branching out

“…In particular, Haffenden's research (2021) reveals that despite the impact of William Hazlitt's influential differentiation between meaningful posthumous fame and superficial earthly popularity, his contemporaries often contested this distinction by embracing the concept of “immortality while alive” and engaging in the glorification of living figures through the mechanisms of celebrity. In the same vein, I have myself (2023) proposed that the celebration of philanthropists as a unique category of public figures originated from the Enlightenment's integration of philanthropy's virtues, which evoked classic connotations of glory, into the framework of early celebrity culture.…”

“…Recent years have brought a shift in this regard, with historians of the twentieth‐ and nineteenth‐century Central Europe producing a new wave of scholarship on the topic (Giloi et al., 2022; Kohlrausch, 2019; Unangst, 2017; van Waarden & Kohlrausch, 2021). Additionally, there has been a nascent exploration of the topic in regard to the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Poland (Wesołowski, 2023; Łuksza, 2022) and Russia, with significant works dedicated, for instance, to the celebrity status attributed to Catherine the Great (Dawson, 2021).…”