Pornographic Celebrity and the Characters of <i>Harris's List</i>

Abstract

The nature of celebrity—its preoccupation with denigrating, knowing, and not knowing its object—and mass media's role in its creation and dissemination means that for as long as modern celebrity has existed, it has been in proximity with a voyeuristic uncovering of private parts and hidden correspondences. Arguing for a longstanding relationship between celebrity and the pornographic, we read the long-running serial Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1760–94), a catalogue of women working in the London sex trade, as a key example of what pornographic celebrity does with character. Harris's List's treatment of Kitty Fisher, Margaret Woffington, and Harris himself points to how character and celebrity are underpinned by circulation, replication, and commutability. Economies of citation and reiteration structure the constitution of celebrity and eighteenth-century character.