Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800 by Chelsea Phillips (review)

Abstract

Speculative Enterprise is an exceptionally well written book that narrates complex financial events accessibly, drawing from an impressive range of sources, both in theatrical studies and in economic history. Like Katherine Binhammer’s recent book Downward Mobility: The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel (2020), Burkert’s shows that narrative representations of finance urged audiences not to be passively victimized by an increasingly rapacious financial culture that extracted value from attention, desire, and moral sentiment. Burkert’s exploration of eighteenth-century British financial and theatrical history is a tremendously useful contribution to economic humanities that offers a glimpse into the origins of financial manipulations of the modern entertainment industry.