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Celebrity Gossip
Gossip sells. As our culture creates more and more
technologies able to generate endless images so we
are fed more and more information about people who
are less and less real. In his 1961 work
The Image
the American cultural historian Daniel Boorstin defined
a celebrity as a person who is known for his
well-knownness, Like Homer and Plato Boorstin
mourned a past golden age where fame was based on the
solid achievement of great men. He was to a large degree
motivated by his distaste for the staged television debates
between JF Kennedy and Richard Nixon, describing
celebrities as counterfeit people with staged and scripted
identities taking part in staged and scripted pseudo events
often bearing no relationship to reality. Pseudo events - a
marvellous idea - Kitty Fisher’s riding accident?
Back to the Vector for the Virus of Celebrity
Boorstin wrote that image turns people into the
commodity called celebrity that can be sold for a
price, the success of which depends upon the means
available for getting the word out. The Georgians got
the ball rolling but it was the Victorians who developed a
celebrity culture. We might like to think of the Victorians
as a staid lot, all piano recitals in the parlour and pertly
uptight spinsters but they really weren’t dull at all.
Queen Victoria smoked marijuana for period pains and
her subjects could stock up on cocaine and laudanum at
Boots the Chemist for a night out at the Music Hall.
The use of the term celebrity first appeared in its current
meaning in the 1840s - William Makepeace Thackeray
was among the very first to use it. When the Queen of the
Scandal rags The News of The World was launched in
1843 it was an instant hit and its popularity exploded with
the advent of mass printed photographic images. Before
long the royals began to issue family photographs and
soon everyone from politicians to actors began to hand
out publicity photographs.
There were celebrity Victorian chefs like Alexis Benoist
Soyer of the Reform Club who was immortalised with
a Crosse & Blackwell sauce and who ran charitable
campaigns to improve the nutrition of soldiers out in
the Crimea. The first gossip columns arrived in the form
of society columns. In 1846 Dickens started his own
newspaper and hired society figure Lady Marguerite
Blessington to write a gossip column called Exclusive
Intelligence. Before long even the self-publicising Oscar
Wilde was railing against an increasingly intrusive press:
In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the
press. The public have an insatiable curiosity to know
everything except what is worth knowing.
The Tides of Celebrity Backlash
In Georgian times the satirical cartoonist James Gillray
had been especially affronted by one of David Garrick’s
protégées the actress Sarah Siddons when she refused
to appear for free at a charity event. He drew her as a
shameless hussy flaunting a bulging scrotal-shaped purse
and worshipped by a mindless audience with the theatre
itself collapsing and burning about them. The faces may
change over the centuries but the cry stays the same.
In 2012 The Telegraph wrote (only a little tongue in
cheek) of Kim Kardashian that:
the descent of Western civilisation can practically be
read into every curve.
