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Celebrity

 

The Female Tatler discourages the fashioning of celebrities because doing so uplifts certain individuals above their proper status. In one of her earliest issues, Mrs. Crackenthorpe editorializes on a conflict surrounding the Drury Lane Play House, in which raising actors’ salaries is at issue. She takes this event as an opportunity to comment upon a trend in which eighteenth-century actors and actresses "do their utmost off the stage to appear the persons they represent on it, and sometimes out-do ‘em in dress and extravagant living" (no. 6). As actors and actresses play kings, princesses, lords, and nobles, they expect to live and dress these parts in their daily lives.

Interior of Drury Lane Theater. By Thomas Rowlandson. 50

Ever pointing fingers, Mrs. Crackenthorpe blames the audience, in part, for the pretenses of the players. "If the town would not tantalise ‘em further than to give ‘em loud claps on every just performance, and despise ‘em when the play’s over, they’d value themselves upon good action only: but when people of note shall caress ‘em, and embrace ‘em, they forget they are but parrots of other men’s elaborate studies, and begin to value themselves upon realities" (no. 6). At the heart of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s critique stands hostility toward actors’ ability to live extravagantly and mix with persons of quality, without having the breeding and pedigree of quality.

Mrs. Crackenthorpe also rails against establishing preachers as celebrities. She writes that she has observed in churches, "if the divine expected happens not to preach, half the church empties at a strange face" (no. 37). Such behavior, she suggests, offends both God and the speaker.

At the same time that she condemns uplifting certain figures to the status of luminary, Mrs. Crackenthorpe sets herself up as a celebrity of sorts, requesting a portrait painter ("the States of Holland having desired the favour of Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s picture, she designs to sit speedily, and desires Mr. [Jonathan] Richardson to let her know when he’s left at leisure"), filling an entire issue with her family history, and plainly establishing her drawing room as the place to see and be

Engraved Ticket for a Benefit Performance. By William Hogarth51

seen in London (nos. 43 & 12). Clearly Mrs. Crackenthorpe treats her own celebrity with humor—that is, her solicitation of Jonathan Richardson’s attention, for example, aims for comic effect—but her exalting of her own status also draws attention to the way in which her critique of celebrity centers around class issues. Actresses and preachers should not be fashioned as celebrities because doing so grants them an inappropriately prominent status and distracts them from their appointed tasks, while Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s sense of self-importance is appropriate to her station.

Of course, Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s establishment of herself as a celebrity raises interesting questions about the status of the periodicals writer during the eighteenth century. See Authorship and Publication Details for further discussion on this issue.

 

 

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