Complete and unabridged, with 54 full-page plates by William Hogarth, Joseph Wright of Derby and Johann Zoffany. London, 1728: a stage-struck girl named Lavinia Fenton is cast in a new ballad opera about thieves and jailers, becomes the toast of the town overnight, and leaves it all for a duke. Pearce wrote popular histories of the London stage as well as fiction, and knew exactly how the Beggar's Opera scandal worked — Gay's satire made Rich gay and Gay rich, as the joke of the season had it. Fifty-four plates, among them portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and John Singleton Copley, reproduce the faces and fashions of the Georgian stage world that made and unmade Lavinia Fenton.