ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the eighteenth-century's most influential object narrator, explaining the popularity of The Adventures of a Guinea in terms of its celebrity-making functions. The Adventures of a Guinea has since fallen into sad neglect, "dropped", as Mark Blackwell has put it, from even the most eccentric list of the period's canonical works. Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea was only one of a panoply of mid-century cultural forms which marked, in tandem, the advent of a national, celebrity-based multimedia entertainment industry. The celebrities of a city, the leading lights of London, cast in lustrous porcelains, the glaring light of tabloid scandal, or the pages of it-narratives like Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea, are symptomatic of how that giddy city, that emergent nation-state, came to construct itself in a newly international market and consumer-driven world.
