Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity

Dames, Nicholas

doi:10.1525/ncl.2001.56.1.23

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…And under this new scrutiny, another parallel emerges. The eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth as has often been argued (Dames, 2001;McDayter, 1999;Olsen 2003), seems the setting for the birth of the idea of celebrity as distinct from fame, a concept that now dominates the media and keeps the chattering classes in half-appalled and half-captivated thrall.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From epitaph to obituary

Barry

2008

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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A B S T R A C T • This article explores the emergence of the obituary in British eighteenth-century print journalism, at a moment when the verse epitaph was in irrevocable decline. The new form of death memorial that the obituary represents reflected a changing attitude to death, and a new phase in its relationship with fame. Many of the features of the present-day phenomenon of celebrity can be identified as emerging in the eighteenth century, and we recognize all too well today the explosion of commerce and the new forms of deregulated media that produced this phenomenon. Death became 'news' in the context of the new transience and mobility of printed text, and the dead gained renown not only for historically momentous acts, or lasting works of art or intellect, but also for ephemeral skills and talents such as acting, singing, sports and eccentric feats of memory or agility. Celebrity — short-lived fame — became a feature of British society, and the untimely or dramatic death began to create as well as test this new kind of fame. The obituary plays a key role in this process, this article argues, and represents an important mechanism for introducing modern notions of fame and celebrity into British society.•

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From epitaph to obituary

Barry

2008

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…Someone who is a celebrity to one person or group is, within a mass culture, a celebrity to all, and even if the mark of celebrity has been lowered from Napoleon to teenage authors of scandalous novels, that is no reason why the celebrity of the latter cannot eventually equal the celebrity of the former. 10 </EXT> 5 In a consideration of Thackeray's attitude towards celebrity, Dames notes a difference between the 'lion', whose fame was potentially 'not tameable', with 'celebrity' status suggesting 'no threatened demise at the hands of lionhunters, no fear that these lions pose any ethical or even criminal questions'. 11 While his quarrel with the term 'lion' takes perhaps too little account of the etymology which Salmon subsequently investigated, Dames The story told in the autobiography is unusual, which might account for its acclaim; we learn that, having arrived from Holland as a child and having endured severe poverty on arrival, the scant leisure time he had in his early adulthood was spent lion-hunting.…”

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Longfellow, Tennyson, and Transatlantic Celebrity

Morton¹

2015

Critical Survey

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“…3 In the first article in the issue, John Morton concentrates on Longfellow's encounters with Tennyson and his British admirers during the American poet's visits to Britain in 1868-69. Longfellow is seen as both a source of celebrity adulation -he was at the time America's most prominent and beloved poet, sought after by a legion of fans on both sides of the Atlantic, and someone who in his correspondence, travels, and poetry cultivated an amiable, often intimate relationship with admirers -and as a seeker of celebrity encounters, most notably with his chief British counterpart, Tennyson, whose fame eclipsed even Longfellow's.…”

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Celebrity Encounters: Famous Americans in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Finnerty¹,

Frost²

2015

Critical Survey

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EditorialP á r a i c F i n n e r t y a n d M a r k F r o s t ( G u e s t E d i t o r s ) On 4 June 1869, a year after dining merrily with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Charles Eliot Norton in Paris, John Ruskin records the following in his diary:VERONA. -As I was drawing in the square this morning in a lovely, quiet Italian light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little daughter, a girl of twelve or thirteen, with springy-curled flaxen haircurls or waves, that wouldn't come out in damp, I mean. They stayed talking beside me some time. I don't think it was a very vain thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and his daughter talking to me at my work, some people in England and America would have liked copies of it.

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Brushes with Fame: Thackeray and the Work of Celebrity

Cited by 20 publications

References 6 publications

From epitaph to obituary

From epitaph to obituary

Longfellow, Tennyson, and Transatlantic Celebrity

Celebrity Encounters: Famous Americans in Nineteenth-Century Europe

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