Celebrity in 18th-Century London

In the delight at recognizing ourselves in the mirror that the past seems to hold up, we have perhaps forgotten to ask a few pertinent questions. Are we gazing at ourselves, or at something altogether different? Are we forgetting to look past our own image in the glass to that other picture that lies there, half obscured, refracted through our present, but perhaps still traceable?

Celebrity today has a particular narrative that describes and defines it. The story may be different in different places but the elements are common enough to run through all Western culture. This narrative, put simply, is one of rise (often from obscurity, poverty and ugliness), stardom, fall (usually through moral failure) and rise again.  To sustain their celebrity, stars in all walks of life need to be tested. A rock star is compromised by drugs, a ballerina crippled by injury, a president tempted by an intern, a soccer superstar surrounded by sirens. These trials haunt them, refine them, strengthen them and, if all goes according to the script, they emerge stronger, more brilliantly shining, more durable and admirable. The story is partly classical, making of every celebrity a wandering Ulysses, but it is mostly Christian: the carpenter’s son born in obscurity who achieved notoriety, was tested by temptation, was humiliated and crucified and who rose again to immortality. When Bill Clinton humbly atones in a thousand interviews for the sin of his affair with Monica Lewinsky we know that his resurrection has begun. His period in the wilderness and his ‘crucifixion’ in the press (for so the English-speaking world describes the darkest days in the celebrity story) are over. But when we read the scorn heaped on footballers Francesco Totti or David Beckham for showing their arrogance and vanity, we understand that their trials are just beginning. Few in our culture of many stars make it into celebrity Elysium; some never emerge from the wilderness, many we forget about, a few step out of their own story.

This narrative, though, is new, a creation of the twentieth century. Even the persona of ‘a celebrity’, the translation of a bundle of attributes and behaviours into a proper noun, is only a century and a half old. The Oxford English Dictionary finds the first printed use of the word ‘celebrity’ as applied to a person in 1849, and the persistent identification of individuals as ‘celebrities’ only entered everyday culture, in England at any rate, with the explosive growth of the popular press and mass literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. I have never read it in any eighteenth-century letter, journal, novel or newspaper. ‘The celebrated Dr Johnson’; ‘the season’s most celebrated beauty’; even, remarkably, the philosopher David Hume writing that people saw in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s odd behaviour ‘an act to gain celebrity’: those formulations are there, but never the notion that a person is, or wants to be, ‘a celebrity’. Although one might argue that the reason for this is that the phenomenon was so new that no noun, had yet emerged to describe it, I would like to suggest that in the absence of that noun lies the difference between our own culture of celebrity and that which was created in the eighteenth century. That is, the people of that period did not inhabit a world full of celebrities as we think of them today, but they were nonetheless extremely interested in, and avid consumers of, some of the attributes of celebrity that we still recognize.

It is within the etymology and pedigree of the words ‘celebrated’ and ‘celebrity’ themselves that we can peel away some of the layers of meaning and begin to distinguish celebrity from its close companion – and often rival – fame. In the eighteenth century someone possessing celebrity was at a simple level someone celebrated, the centre of a throng, a person surrounded, the object of joyous attention. Celebrity was about being with others, together, adored in the here and now by an audience. Fame, since Classical times, had also been about recognition and achievement, but it had always had an unearthly quality that went along with worldliness, a touch of immortality, of death, remembrance and a place in history.

In the first half of the eighteenth century a process occurred by which a nascent culture of celebrity began to form side by side with an existing culture of fame. Sometimes the two overlapped, often they were directly in opposition. But between about 1763, when the Peace of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War and opened Britain and Continental Europe to one another again, and the mid-1780s, when the political and moral climate began to harden in the prelude to the French Revolution, something approaching a cult of celebrity did sweep Europe, incorporating selected members of all sorts of groups and élites, from actors to aristocrats, courtesans to naval captains, magicians, soldiers, politicians and preachers. It was feverish, sensational and evanescent, driven underground at the century’s end by religious revival, war, the collapse of optimism in many fields of endeavour, and the harsh moral climate that was the result.

Three things came together at the turn of the seventeenth century in London that created a climate in which the seeds of this new culture germinated and grew: a limited monarchy, the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act  which had controlled the numbers of printing presses and to some extent printing, and a public interested in new ways of thinking about other people and themselves. Other countries may have had one or more of these things. Holland, for instance had a free press but a limited audience, while France had a plethora of writers and readers investigating new forms of identity thrown up by the turbulent debates and discoveries of philosophes and natural scientists, but a monarchy that still dominated politics and culture. So it was in London, by accident much more than design, that the conditions were right for an explosive growth of interest in the sort of earth-bound and limited fame that celebrity represented.

In 1688 the Protestant monarchs William and Mary accepted the English throne under certain conditions that Parliament defined and laid out in the Bill of Rights in the following year. In doing so they symbolically and actually placed themselves under a degree of parliamentary control. In 1701, the Act of Succession, which more or less arbitrarily conferred the British crown on the Protestant Hanoverians, stripped any lingering clouds of the divine away from the monarchy, making it quite clear that Parliament chose kings and could, if it so wished, depose them as well. The Hanoverians were a stolid lot, entirely lacking the creepy magnetism of their predecessors the Stuarts, and they were kept on a tight financial rein by a watchful Parliament. Once installed they made few attempts to accrue to themselves the sort of mystical authority that French monarchs, for instance, still asserted. George I (r.1702-14) had little interest in his new country, George II (r.1727-60), after a grand coronation, lapsed into a similar indifference, and by the time George III (r.1760-1820) came to the throne what cultural authority and mystical aura was left in the court had drained away into the vibrant commercial spaces of the capital city. Theatre, the crucible of celebrity, had for two centuries existed in London beyond the ambit and control of St James’s. As the court shrank in importance, all kinds of spaces for entertainment proliferated alongside it. It was from the performers and the audiences of these new centres of power – Parliament included – that the stars of celebrity culture would emerge, at once earthly, yet touched with the aura of mystery and magic that kings used to have.

At about the same time as Parliament limited the monarchy, the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse. After that, anyone became free to set up a printing business and broadsheets, newspapers, pamphlets, book and prints were soon being produced in great numbers. The law of personal libel was so weak as to be non-existent. Almost anything could be written about almost anyone and newspapers needed to take only the most cursory of precautions when they discussed the actions or opinions of individuals (though they had to exercise some caution when it came to the crown and to the institutions of government). By the 1750s public figures were casually referred to in the press by the initials of their names or titles, while the King was simply called ‘a certain great personage’, or ‘a very great personage’. If these short cuts were used, no slander or gossip was unprintable, no accusation needed to be justified. So when, in 1769, the newspapers reported that, ‘an assignation at the White Hart at St. Albans between L—- G—— and a certain great D—e, was disconcerted by the forcible intrusion of my lord’s gentlemen’, readers would easily have identified the great Duke as the King’s brother the Duke of Cumberland, and his lover as the society beauty Lady Grosvenor, and looked forward with salacious anticipation to the next chapter of their sorry story. By 1770 there were sixty newspapers printed in London every week and a sophisticated network of news gathering and distribution right across the nation.

So it was that a free press and a weak libel law created a climate of speculation and gossip far freer, more direct, personal and scurrilous than we have today. Information, paid for by eager editors, poured into publishers’ offices, and straight into type. Readers were enjoying  the heady pleasures of scandal in high places, newspapers the commercial and political value of linking stories about private life to attacks upon individuals, governments and the crown. The public was also ready to put this sort of information into a literary context. Ever since the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, ‘secret histories’, which told scandalous stories of immorality at court and in other high places, had been highly popular. Biographies of notorious and famous individuals, and the notion of fixed character that could be written as a literary construct and then used in a plot, were also becoming commonplace. The great age of biography and of the novel – which usually depended for its plotting and moral framework on the connections between private life and public events of one sort or another – was just beginning. Readers were ready and eager for life to imitate literary form and vice verse. From the 1750s, all sorts of people who wanted notoriety were leaking to, or placing in, the press intimate or scandalous details of their own lives. Celebrity was born at the moment private life became a tradeable public commodity. It had, and still has, a more feminine face than fame, because private life, and the kind of virtue around which reputations could pivot, were both seen to reside in femininity and in women.

If fame depended on posthumous memory and reputation, celebrity  was transient and febrile, created in the embrace between an audience or readers eager for entertainment and public figures who wanted recognition, adoration and wealth. ‘I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous’, the novelist Laurence Sterne declared after he had become the most talked-about writer of his day, and the fame he sought was not, he implied, the imprimatur of the future but the applause of the present. As Samuel Johnson, a trenchant critic of what he saw as a feverish modernity, wrote in 1749:

Unnumber’d Suppliants croud Preferment’s Gate,
Athirst for Wealth and burning to be great,
Delusive Fortune hears th’incessant Call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.