Philanthropic Celebrity in the Age of Sensibility

This book investigates the first moment in history when philanthropy was used as a self-standing claim to fame and philanthropists started being considered as a distinct breed of public figures.In search for the cause of this development, it examines the way in which public images of early philanthropists in different parts of Europe were shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a comparison between a British prison reformer John Howard, an Alsatian pastor and humanitarian Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, and Stanisław Staszic, a key figure of Enlightenment politics in Congress Poland. Revealing parallel mechanisms at play in different national contexts, it argues that famous philanthropists ushered in a new genre of fame, ‘philanthropic celebrity’, that placed Enlightenment ideals about virtue within the framework of early celebrity culture.In an original marriage of biography, cultural history, and media studies, Adrian Wesołowski contributes new answers to questions such as: What are the origins of our collective fascination in the figures of great philanthropists? Did secularisation of charity entail a change in the perception of its famous performers? Were the roots of the late eighteenth century ‘humanitarian revolution’ mainly economic or rather cultural?

Adrian Wesołowski is a Research Fellow at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. He studies social and cultural history in modern and early modern Europe with particular focus on history of philanthropy and history of the public sphere.