When Sally Salisbury, a London-based prostitute, non-fatally stabbed the Hon. John Finch in late 1722, it caused a print media explosion. Texts purporting to give her life history and illustrate her true character included a broadsheet, two unauthorized long-form biographies, a (pirated) serial in The London Post, and an Old Bailey trial account. Salisbury also inspired songs, novels, and mezzotints that were printed decades after her death. But her textual traces also include fake letters written in Salisbury’s voice to failed Jacobite rebellion leader Francis Atterbury in Pasquin, a printed eulogy in The Briton that ultimately mocks Philip, Duke of Wharton, inclusion in multiple versions of The Newgate Calendar, and even her body acting as a touchstone in reportage when 150 coffins were stolen in 1747.

This talk uses Salisbury’s surprising archive to interrogate the creation of early celebrity via the intersection of fame, profit, and reputation. It also considers what those who create print objects do with the lived experiences and stories of (in)famous people, particularly beyond traditional biographic modes. While we will probably never know just how famous Salisbury was in her own time, I argue these printed traces demonstrate the uneasy coexistence of durable fame and temporary celebrity that continues throughout the deep eighteenth-century, impacting cultural memory and larger questions of who, exactly, makes history.

Biography:

Bethany Qualls is a scholar, editor, and teacher based in San Francisco. A lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis, her current book project is Flying Reports, Fame, and Fortune: Gossip beyond Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Print Culture. Recent work includes “Selling Sex, Work, and Literature: Then and Now” for Syllabus and creating the Re(un)Covered Podcast. She has also published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, and the collection A Spy on Eliza Haywood.

 

The event will take place online.  To register:  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/715271856377?aff=oddtdtcreator