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PR events like falling from her horse,
sans drawers,
in
St James’s Park and arrange for portraits of her by such
luminaries as Sir Joshua Reynolds to be engraved so that
cheap prints could be sold to her fans in their thousands.
Kitty Fisher was one of Britain’s very first celebrities in
the sense of an individual becoming famous for being
famous. A one woman brand. From humble beginnings
as a London milliner Kitty became so well known that
her name, so they say, lives on in a nursery rhyme:
Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
But ne’er a penny was there in’t
Except the binding round it
To decode the rhyme we need to know that Locket
was Georgian slang for vagina and that it was common
practice for courtesans such as Kitty to keep their money
in a pocket tied to their thigh with ribbon. In his 1759
portrait Kitty Fisher as “Cleopatra” Dissolving the Pearl,
Sir Joshua Reynolds shows a scene from an ancient
legend. At a magnificent banquet held in Alexandria
to impress Mark Antony, Cleopatra pulled a giant pearl
from her ear, dissolved it in her wine, and drank it.
The scene might also allude to the rumor that Kitty
Fisher once ate a five pound note on a piece of bread.
You can see the Reynolds portrait of Kitty Fisher at
Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. When the great
lover Casanova (pictured above - not such an oil painting
really?) met Kitty on a trip to London. he wrote:
She had on over a hundred thousand crowns’ worth of
diamonds. Goudar told me I could seize the opportunity
to have her for ten guineas, but I did not want to do so.
She was charming, but she spoke only English.
Accustomed to loving with all my senses, I could not
indulge in love without including my sense of hearing.
Kitty’s scandalous life style provided the gossip sheets
with plenty of material and although she wrote to the
Public Advertiser
complaining about the
little scribblers
she kept on indulging in attention grabbing behaviours.
The wealthy and the famous did not yet guard their
privacy, their carriages and sedans were often ostentatious
affairs plastered with self advertising coats and arms,
liveried footmen and dashing horses with plumes.
Kitty and the Georgian rich enjoyed very public
perambulations in the parks and the pleasure gardens
in the full expectation of attracting a crowd. Why have
money and not flaunt it seemed to be their ethos.
The First Celebrity Revolution
Kitty Fisher was in the right place at the right time.
Eighteenth century London played host to the first
celebrity revolution. Wealth alone bred celebrity and
a new showily wealthy class sprang up from the profits
from the growing British Empire, from new financial
services like banking and insurance and (really nothing
but nothing is new) from a rise in property values. At the
beginning of the century London had 12 newspapers,
by the end this had risen to 53 alongside publications
like
The Tatler
, which began with the express purpose of
