Polly Peachum and the Aristocrats: Celebrity, Class, and Gender in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract: The unparalleled success of The Beggar's Opera created a certain discrepancy; while the work was highly critical of the social and political elite, the actress who created the role of Polly Peachum, Lavinia Fenton, was routinely associated with a string of aristocrats. This article examines the resulting struggle over Fenton's presumed emotional and political attachments. By analyzing female celebrity through the prism of class, I argue that this struggle had placed the actress, and her relations with aristocratic men, as a central emblem of the contemporary revaluation of social status.