… Image George White (based on the painting by James Thornhill), ‘Jack Sheppard’, 1728, WikiCommons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J-Sheppard-Thornhill.png Image Samuel Ireland, after William Hogarth, ‘John Henley with five unknown … century. By the turn of the eighteenth century, celebrity was a common form of fame that relied upon print and other media as well as on a modern sense of the self as a distinct, individual character. Eventually, the word ‘celebrity’ … prints and material artefacts that were sold as commodities. Modern celebrity is thus posited as the product of a modern media ecology in which words and images about people, and especially about exceptionally interesting people, could …