ABSTRACT
In an age when presidents, prime ministers, and other politicians routinely hire advertising agencies to help them gain and retain office, it is hardly surprising that scholars should become interested in the ways that political leaders in the past constructed themselves in their publics' imaginations. Fergus O'Ferrall produced a valuable but brief outline of the changing images of the Liberator in contemporary portraiture, while others have examined his representation in English cartoons of the period. As the anthropologist Erving Goffman demonstrates in his classic study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, elements of dramaturgy are essential to the process of image construction in any place or time. This chapter focuses on only two aspects of the enterprise of image-building that surrounded Daniel O'Connell during his lifetime: the performative and the visual. Living his life on an open stage for more than three decades made O'Connell practiced in the arts of self-fashioning and sensitive to the nuances of body image.
