Brushes with fame: Thackeray and the work of celebrity

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 56, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 23-51

  Dames, Nicholas ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 50249132749     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2001.56.1.23     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. See Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846 (New York: McGrawHill, 1955), pp. 65-66, for the few details of the voyage that have emerged subsequent to Thackeray's death
2. Thackeray, The Tour Georges, in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, Kensington Edition, 32 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1904), xxvi, 70. Hereafter referred to as Works
3. Michael Warner has offered a similar, useful warning about reducing any analysis of a modern "public" to its institutions or specific manifestations: "the publicity of the public sphere never reduces to information, discussion, will formation, or any of the other scenarios by which the public sphere represents itself. The mediating rhetorical dimension of a public context must be built into each individual's relation to it, as a meaningful reference point against which something could be grasped as information, discussion, will formation" ("The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993], p. 236)
4. See Carlisle, The Sense of an Audience: Dichens, Thackeray, and George Eliot at Mid-Century (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981)
5. and Miller, Novels behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 14-49
6. Two important recent examples include Richard Salmon, Henry James and the Culture of Publicity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997)
7. and Linda M. Shires, "The Author as Spectacle and Commodity: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Thomas Hardy," in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1995), pp. 198-212
8. See Brandy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 371
9. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg, 2 vols, in 1 (New York: Garland, 1991), I, 356. Further references are to this edition and appear in the text
10. The OED lists 1849 as the first appearance of "celebrity" in its current guise, although the first attribution is not to Thackeray; he frequently used the word, however, in serial numbers of Pendennis that appear prior to the summer of 1849. There are a number of suggestive studies of celebrity avant la lettre, particularly in the Romantic period: see Susan Wolfson, "'The Mouth of Fame': Gender, Transgression, and Romantic Celebrity," in Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading Over the Lines, ed. Georgia Johnston (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1997), pp. 3-34
11. and Ghislane McDayter, "Conjuring Byron: Byromania, Literary Commodification and the Birth of Celebrity," in ByTomania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, ed. Frances Wilson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 43-62
12. For an acute reading of Romantic celebrity memoirs written by women, see Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997)
13. For what is still the essential discussion of Thackeray's invention of "bohemia," see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1990), pp. 193-95
14. [Patrick C. Beaton], "A Chapter on Notables,"Fraser's Magazine, 67 (1863), 479
15. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg, Joel J. Brattin, and Mark Engel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1993), p. 166
16. For the links between Thackerayan narrative and Carlyle's "heroes," see Ian Ousby, "Carlyle, Thackeray, and Victorian Heroism," The Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982), 152-68
17. Thackeray, "The Lion Huntress of Belgravia," in Works, xxxi, 324
18. Thackeray, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Resectable Family, ed. Peter L. Shillingsburg, 2 vols, in 1 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996), I, 75
19. See Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997), p. 56
20. Michael Warner has termed this process "the moment of special imaginary reference" ("Mass Public," p. 236)
21. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), p. 208
22. For Rachel, see Rachel M. Brownstein, Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)
23. for Paganini, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 200-203
24. and for an examination of the symphony conductor as an image for a certain, scientized version of charismatic power, see Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 310-12
25. and for a reading of Thackeray's syntactical, and conceptual, collapse of antithetical concepts, see Elaine Scarry, "Enemy and Father: Comic Equilibrium in Number Fourteen of Vanity Fair," Journal of Narrative Technique, 10 (1980), 145-55
26. Both Peter L. Shillingsburg and Gordon N. Ray provide detailed accounts of the resignation and how Thackeray handled his indignation over the caricatures; see Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W. M. Thackeray (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 80-84
27. and Ray Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847- 1863 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), p. 172
28. Thackeray, "'Strange to Say, on Club Paper,'" in Works, xxvii, 413-14
29. Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond, ed. Edgar F. Harden (New York: Garland, 1989), p. 212
30. See The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 204
31. Thackeray, The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century, in Works, xxvi, 153
32. and "Parisian Notabilities," Bentley's Miscellany, 56 [1864], 343-55)
33. The procedure of these journals is best summarized by Flaubert, whose definition of "celebrity" ran as follows: "S'inquiéter du mo¡ndre détail de leur vie intime afin de pouvoir les dénigrer [Look into the smallest details of their private lives so that you can disparage them]" (Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues; et, Le Catalogue des idées chic, ed. Anne Herschberg Pierrot [Paris: Librairic Générale Française, 1997], p. 57; my translation)
34. Thackeray, letter to G. H. Lewes, 28 April 1855, in The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1945-46), III, 444
35. See Thackeray, "De Juventute," and "On a Peal of Bells," in Works, xxvii, 80, 322
36. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcou (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 100-101