This book provides an expansive view of celebrity's 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 celebrity's 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 King's 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 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 examining the significance of the stagecoach in eighteenth-century fiction.