Jane Moody

Thomas Brown [alias Thomas Moore], Censorship and Regency Cryptography

The aim of this essay is to consider the inscription of censorship in Thomas Moore’s pseudonymous satire, Intercepted Letters; or the Twopenny Post‐Bag (1813). The essay proposes that the character of Thomas Brown the Younger, the poem’s pseudonymous editor, plays a crucial role in establishing the political liberty of the text. The argument demonstrates that Intercepted Letters establishes a series of allegiances—both explicit and implicit—with the defendants of contemporary libel trials such as John and Leigh Hunt, and suggests that Moore used the persona of Thomas Brown to create a form of Regency counter‐intelligence or cryptography in which the political conditions of speech and writing become a persistent and polemical subject.

Stolen Identities: Character, Mimicry and the Invention of Samuel Foote

On Saturday Noon, exactly at Twelve o’clock, at the New Theatre in the Haymarket, Mr. Foote begs the Favour of his Friends to come and drink a Dish of Chocolate with him, and ‘tis hoped there will be a great deal of good Company, and some Joyous Spirits; he will endeavour to make the Morning as Diverting as possible. — Tickets for this Entertainment to be had at George’s Coffee-House, Temple-bar, without which no Person will be admitted. — N.B. Sir Dilberry Diddle will be there; and Lady Betty Frisk has absolutely promis’d.1

Introduction: The Singularity of Theatrical Celebrity

Celebrity, the condition of being much talked about, is hardly an invisible phenomenon in the history of British theatre. On the contrary, its discourses constitute a silent yet pervasive presence in the accounts of performing lives through which that history has been written. Theatrical celebrity leaves behind many forms of material evidence: plays, anecdotes, photographs, cartoons, programmes, reviews, portraits and costumes. But despite its ubiquity, the nature of celebrity on and off the stage has scarcely begun to be addressed.