Female Dishonour, Transgression and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century England, c.1750-1790

Abstract

Historical celebrity has been well established in eighteenth-century England, with examinations of female celebrity primarily extended to performative professions and the elite. While crime and transgression in historical celebrity has been explored on an individual case basis, the broader context of multiple women crafting and manipulating a public persona and becoming celebritised due to their association with crime is less established. Through a series of case studies from different class backgrounds and social transgressions this thesis examines the self-fashioning choices and opportunities for women raised to public attention through crime during the second half of the eighteenth century, exploring the process of celebritisation they experienced, their own agency in shaping a celebrity persona, and the cultural desires and anxieties which their cases came to embody. It focuses on their performative choices and the relationship between fictional narrative and these women’s purported personal histories, the combined authorship of public personas created by celebrity object and audience, and reading their celebrity persona as a crafted ‘text’, shaped by and enabling widespread commentary on contemporary ideologies of femininity, respectability and sensibility.

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