Abstract
Europe’s largest secular public interior, the Rotunda at Ranelagh, was erected to fulfil a social purpose. The Ranelagh complex—house, pleasure gardens, Chinese pavilion, huge Rotunda—soon became more fashionable than its older rival Vauxhall. Horace Walpole wrote, “It has totally beat Vauxhall… You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland”. However, if celebrity was guaranteed, the intimacy found there was less evident and Walpole remained as silent about it as he had been forthcoming about its celebrity visitors. This chapter theorises this development: first to explain why a need arose for such a large Rotunda; why the public was willing to pay to see celebrities; and how intimacy might flourish in such exposed spaces.
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Notes
- 1.
See the Appendix for details.
- 2.
Cumberland, George III’s youngest son, still celebrated in the 1750s for his military success at Culloden, routinely features in mid-century prints of the best known public celebrities; see Andrew Henderson, The Life of William Augustus Duke of Cumberland (London: J. Ridley, 1766).
- 3.
John Hill and G. S. Rousseau. The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714–1775 (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1982), 110.
- 4.
For Enlightenment monsters see Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); L. L. Koppers and Joan B. Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).
- 5.
See George Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press and Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 154–55.
- 6.
See Clare Brant and George Rousseau, eds., Fame and Fortune: Sir John Hill and London in the 1750s (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 8–13, for further commentary.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
See, Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Emden and Midgley (2013) are also relevant here for following up Taylor’s “social imaginary” in the public sphere. Beyond Habermas: Democracy, Knowledge, and the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
- 9.
Celebrity studies of the last two decades often make the point: see Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, eds., Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); David Worrall, Celebrity, Performance, Reception: British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2014).
- 10.
See Joseph Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’”, in Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000, ed. Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15–30.
- 11.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” 26. See p. 19 for Roach’s definition of the charismata and p. 26 for the stigmata.
- 12.
Roach also comments on the “balance” between the two and offers the biographical case of Sarah Siddons’ return to the stage as an example. “Less often noted”, Roach observes, “is what [William] Hazlitt says he is praying for … imploring Siddons to reconsider her ill-advised return to the stage in 1816, long enough after her retirement that the perfect balance between charismata and stigmata she had once been able to strike was no longer possible”. “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” 26.
- 13.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” 26.
- 14.
John Hill and G. S. Rousseau, The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 1714–1775 (New York, NY: AMS Press, 1982), 122. For Hill’s appointment at Kensington see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 242–55. By “engrossers” Walpole means imposters.
- 15.
For Hill’s knighthood see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 290–91; for his cowardice, ibid., 140–49.
- 16.
Boswell commented on Reynolds’s lovelessness, speaking from firsthand knowledge in the notary papers: “He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her”. His sister Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him “a gloomy tyrant”; see Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1996), 65.
- 17.
For his polymathy see Lemay and Rousseau (1978); Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 45–46, 335–37; Brant and Rousseau, Fame and Fortune.
- 18.
See the Appendix for more details including the dimensions. See also the front cover of this book for an illustration.
- 19.
The point is not, of course, that celebrity culture was diminishing by the early nineteenth century; if anything, it was heightening. But the late Georgian public was forever besotted with novelty and by 1803 other venues had begun to crop up in metropolitan London and also in Bath and other cities.
- 20.
For his would-be assassins see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 140–49. Hill was married to Henrietta, Viscountess of Ranelagh and sister of Richard Jones, 4th Earl of Ranelagh.
- 21.
Patrick O’Sullivan, Mark Esposito, and Nigel F. B. Allington, The Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Finance in the 21st Century: From Hubris to Disgrace (London: Routledge, 2015).
- 22.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” 15.
- 23.
Ibid., 21. See also Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 1997).
- 24.
See Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
- 25.
Christopher Lauer, Intimacy: A Dialectical Study (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). For Lauer intimacy is superlative, aiming not “just for closeness, but for a closeness beyond closeness” (2). The position appears to be paradoxical yet lies far from enshrining intimacy’s ultimate pessimism, with Lauer’s claiming that for all intimacy’s imagined impossibilities it remains central to the human condition and the ways we understand ourselves in relation to others.
- 26.
Chris Rojek, Presumed Intimacy: Para-Social Relationships in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016).
- 27.
Sanger (2013) demonstrates how slippery these “affects” are, even when in the public domain.
- 28.
See Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958).
- 29.
In the absence of a cultural history of narcissism one turns to individual psychoanalytical thinkers: Freud, Jung, Melanie Klein, et al.
- 30.
See Rousseau, “Afterword: On the Trail of John Hill,” in The Notorious Sir John Hill, 327–46.
- 31.
For Hill as itinerant actor, ibid., 11–12.
- 32.
Hill was employed to collect plants, flowers, seeds, trees, fossils, shells, and coins, but Richmond was so keen on his stage at Goodwood that he enthusiastically encouraged Hill to act on it and mingle with the imported actors. It is impossible to quantify Hill’s time in each sphere, and Richmond himself seems not to have done so provided Hill did not neglect his primary employment in collecting.
- 33.
For Hill on the Goodwood stage see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill.
- 34.
Hill and Rousseau, The Letters and Papers of Sir John Hill, 4–22, passim.
- 35.
Ibid., 3.
- 36.
John Rich, Mr. Rich’s Answer to the Many Falsities and Calumnies Advanced by Mr. John Hill … And Contained in the Preface to Orpheus, an English Opera, as He Calls It (London: J. Roberts, 1739).
- 37.
See the two images in Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 23, 26.
- 38.
See Rich, Mr. Rich’s Answer to the Many Falsities and Calumnies Advanced by Mr. John Hill, 22, still the fullest source for Hill’s furore with Rich.
- 39.
For the full story see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, Chapter 15, 231–39.
- 40.
Hill also published a tract putatively written by an impoverished female actress who was in the audience and disturbed by Garrick’s pronunciations; see John Hill, To David Garrick, Esq; The Petition of I. In Behalf of Herself and Her Sisters (London: Printed for M. Cooper and J. Jackson, 1759).
- 41.
Gentleman’s Magazine (January 1759).
- 42.
See Rousseau (2017), 181–83 for a detailed account of Hill’s translation of Saint-Albine. The Actor appeared in two editions (1750 and 1755), the second shedding no new light on the work’s original composition. See John Hill, The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing. Interspersed with Theatrical Anecdotes, Critical Remarks on Plays, and Occasional Observations on Audiences (London: Printed for R. Griffiths, 1750).
- 43.
The Department of Prints and Drawings in the BL contains more than two dozen of these prints.
- 44.
For a list see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, xvii–xxi.
- 45.
Roach, “Public Intimacy: The Prior History of ‘It’,” 26, citing Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
- 46.
See Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), Chapter 3, 93–115; for modern endorsements of Hill and dramaturgy, see Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques, and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times as Told in Their Own Words, New Rev. ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), 96–98, 159–61.
- 47.
Cole and Chinoy, Actors on Acting, 96.
- 48.
Ibid., 96.
- 49.
See, for example, Elspeth Jajdelska, Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600–1750: Studies in Social Rank and Communication (London: Routledge, 2016) and Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).
- 50.
For the growing luxury of the mid-Georgians see Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 51.
See Katherine E. Ellison for the new information overload at mid-century. Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: Routledge, 2006).
- 52.
Hill’s patron Bute makes the point as well as anyone; see John Brewer, “The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-Study in Eighteenth-Century Political Argument and Public Opinion”, The Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1973), 3–43.
- 53.
Hence psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s term “projective identification”, referring to traits within us which we loathe sufficiently to cathect onto others because the psychological projection makes us feel better.
- 54.
D. E. Allen, “Review Essay of George Rousseau’s The Notorious Sir John Hill,” Archives of Natural History 40, no. 2 (2013), 363–64.
- 55.
The Bow Street Runners consisted in all of six men and was founded by Hill’s antagonist, the magistrate Henry Fielding, just months before the paper wars between Fielding and Hill broke out: another strand in the complex web of relations between the biographical Fielding and Hill.
- 56.
See M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (London: Longman, 1995).
- 57.
Brant and Rousseau address these issues in their introduction, Fame and Fortune.
- 58.
Roach (1993), 23; Émile Durkheim and Karen E. Fields, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1995); Rojek, Presumed Intimacy: Para-Social Relationships in Media, Society and Celebrity Culture, especially 58–59.
- 59.
Roach, The Player’s Passion, 23; Cole and Chinoy, Actors on Acting.
- 60.
Durkheim (1912), 208.
- 61.
For his diverse insignia at the Bedford coffee-house see Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 134–37.
- 62.
For information overload in relation to the news see Ellison, Fatal News.
- 63.
For theories of the temperaments then see H. A. Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and S. Finger, eds., Brain, Mind and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2007).
- 64.
Chris Walsh, Cowardice: A Brief History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 5–42.
- 65.
See Ryan M. Milner for the meme’s public infiltration into the interior. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. The Information Society Series (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016).
- 66.
Gaston Bachelard, Richard Kearney, and Mark Z. Danielewski, The Poetics of Space (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 3.
- 67.
Georges Poulet, The Interior Distance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964). A sub-discipline about public interiority has begun to shape itself: see, for example, R. Campe and J. Weber, Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern and Contemporary Thought, Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Werner Huber et al., eds., Dramatic Minds: Performance, Cognition, and the Representation of Interiority, Austrian Studies in English (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2015). However, it remains inchoate and in need of amplification, tasks this book addresses as its core function.
- 68.
No study such as Walsh’s (Cowardice: A Brief History) exists for notoriety.
- 69.
Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
- 70.
See David Lemmings and Ann Brooks, Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives. Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014); Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns, Doing Emotions History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Jan Plamper and Keith Tribe, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 71.
For loneliness see John E. Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
- 72.
Henry Woodward (1714–1777), the actor and pantomimist who attacked Hill, not to be confused with John Woodward, the polymathic physician and antiquarian with whom Hill had disputes.
- 73.
Charles Churchill and Douglas Grant, The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 6–7, ll. 113–34.
- 74.
Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).
- 75.
Henrietta Hill, An Address to the Public, by the Honble [Sic] Lady Hill; Setting Forth the Consequences of the Late Sir John Hill’s Acquaintance with the Earl of Bute (London: n. p., 1788), 20.
- 76.
See n. 54.
- 77.
See n. 67.
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Appendix
The information in this Appendix is confirmed in David Coke, Ranelagh: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming). I am deeply grateful to David Coke for many types of assistance in gathering information about the Ranelagh Rotunda.
Appendix
The Ranelagh Rotunda measured 45.72 metres diameter on the inside, and 56.36 metres exterior diameter, and was 18.25 metres high to the pitched roof, larger than any other public secular interior in Europe. The Vauxhall Rotunda was less than half this size. The use of this interior space within a pleasure garden was an English invention (as was the commercial pleasure garden itself), and several other similar spaces followed Ranelagh’s example, i.e., the Pantheon in Oxford Street and the Albert Hall. No other nation than the British created spaces of this sort for public entertainment in the eighteenth century. During the eighteenth century speculation existed that the Pantheon in Rome inspired the Rotunda but little similarity exists between them apart from shared circularity. In 1741, when the Rotunda opened, no large, indoor, public social spaces existed anywhere. There were parks, promenades, passeggiatas, especially in southern Europe, but nothing indoors for common folk who could afford the price of admission. European regional and national courts had their ballrooms and assembly rooms, but these were for gentle folk and royalty. The English contribution to public interior spaces was to open these assemblies to anyone who could pay two shillings and sixpence at Ranelagh (one shilling at Vauxhall) and dress respectably, as guards at the entrance denied entry to the ill clad. Foreigners visiting England were amazed at the freedom of association allowed by such places and, probably, also worried by it, as royalty and the common people were not permitted to circulate on the Continent in this proximity. Foreign commentators in mid-Georgian London noted that despite the half-crown admission cost, the breadth of society in the Rotunda was as wide as possible.
Multiple prints of the Rotunda were made after 1741. The one reproduced on the front cover of this book is the earliest version of this image, which continued to be reprinted throughout the century (up to 1880 when it was included in Views of the City of London). These prints were framed and displayed in middle-class homes, as well as inns, taverns, and other public places. They were also kept in bound albums and extra-illustrated (or Graingerised) books. Prints of the Rotunda after Canaletto’s designs were initially produced as souvenirs of a visit and sold on site.
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Rousseau, G. (2018). Notoriety’s Public Interiors: Mid-Georgians Combining Celebrity and Intimacy, with an Appendix on the Rotunda at Ranelagh. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_12
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