On the 18th-Century Origins of Celebrity Worship

Modern celebrity culture began not with Hollywood, nor with the Internet, but in the 18th century, when the modern meanings of the words “celebrity” and “star” first became widespread. Famous people have existed for millennia, but the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome sought eternal renown, while medieval saints attained their canonical status only after death. Celebrities are people known during their lifetimes to more people than could possibly know one another. For many centuries, rulers and conquerors were the primary celebrities.

Only in the 18th century did publics begin to take a strong interest in a large number of living authors, artists, performers, scientists, and politicians. In 1782, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published an autobiography in which he confessed to spanking fantasies, then complained that everyone was gossiping about him. After basing an 1812 poem on his own life, Lord Byron woke up to find himself famous. By the 18th century, a host of performers and authors had stalkers and groupies; by the 19th, many received hundreds of letters yearly requesting autographs. 19th-century celebrity chef Alexis Soyer, a French cook based in London, sold his own brand of bottled sauces and put pictures of himself wearing his trademark red beret on the labels. A century before the rise of radio and television commercials, celebrities endorsed wigs, face creams, powders, pianos, and bottled water. Well in advance of charity telethons and stadium concerts such as Live Aid, celebrities held benefits for victims of res, earthquakes, and yellow fever.

Why did modern celebrity culture emerge when it did? As literacy expanded dramatically among all classes in North America and Europe, so too did the number of those able to read about celebrities. As leisure time increased, more people had more time to visit the theaters, opera houses, and lecture halls where they saw celebrities in person. Even more fundamentally, democratic movements in England, France, and the United States gave rise to a new emphasis on individuality. The Romantic cult of genius that ushered in the 19th century led to the fin de siècle worship of personality exemplified by Oscar Wilde. In 1911, a theater producer explicitly speculated that the star system loomed so large in the United States because Americans were what he called “an individual-loving people.” New visual media catered to that affection. In the 1860s, affordable, compact photographs of celebrities became widely available in shops and via mail order. In the 1890s, heavily illustrated niche magazines devoted to stage stars began to flourish, anticipating the movie magazines that became popular in the 1910s.

Most importantly, democratization made people eager to track current events that they saw themselves as shaping. Celebrity culture would not have taken off without newspapers, but far from imposing curiosity about famous individuals on the public, newspapers used an already existing fascination with celebrities to attract more readers. Until the 1830s, newspapers in England, France, and the United States were costly publications, sponsored by wealthy patrons and read by a small, select group of subscribers who received their papers by mail. In the 1830s, the news became more commercial. To increase circulation, publishers began to charge readers only a penny instead of the traditional six cents, and began to rely on advertisements, subscriptions, and daily sales, including street sales, to turn a profit. Instead of targeting a select group of insiders willing to pay handsomely for exclusive, specialized information, the new penny press appealed to general interests in an effort to reach the largest number of readers possible.

Newspapers were so identified with celebrities that in 1841, when one of the most successful new penny papers purchased its own steamship in order to deliver news from across the Atlantic at record speeds, the publisher named it the Fanny Elssler, after a world-famous Austrian ballet dancer who had just toured the United States. Steamships and newspapers helped celebrities to expand their fame; in turn, celebrities helped to attract publics to those novel forms of transport and communication.

As the number of commercial papers grew and competition for readers increased, newspapers found that they could not limit themselves to influencing readers; they also needed to please them. Articles about celebrities, especially when illustrated with lithographs and engravings, were a reliable way to boost circulation. An 1862 issue of the Illustrated London News covering the Prince of Wales’s marriage sold 930,000 copies, more than three times the magazine’s usual circulation rate. Addressing journalism students in 1912, a US newspaperman explained, “In publishing a newspaper you endeavor to print what the people want to read.” The people wanted to read about celebrities. In turn, celebrities themselves became aware of the power of the press, even arguing with editors about their coverage. In 1829, for example, two popular actors sent a letter to a London newspaper, addressed “To the Publick,” in which they accused the publication of misrepresenting them. The editor published their letter to demonstrate his fairness and to avoid a libel suit, but he also published it because the actors were leading figures in London’s theater scene, and celebrity sells.

At the very moment that newspapers first came to depend on publics for their success, technological changes in paper production and printing were making those publics larger than ever before. In the 18th century, the most successful newspapers had circulations in the low thousands and information still took weeks to travel between capital cities and the provinces. By 1825, a top-selling Parisian newspaper was reaching 16,000 subscribers; by 1880, the leading Paris daily had more than 500,000 readers. Steamships and railways began to deliver newspapers to readers around the world with unprecedented speed. By the 1860s, transoceanic telegraph cables enabled news to travel around many parts of the world almost instantaneously. By the 1880s, a famous actress could get married in London and have the news published in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Chattanooga within a week.

The steamships and railways that delivered the news also delivered celebrities themselves. Many performers, authors, and reformers took advantage of the new mode of travel, crossing the Atlantic to conduct readings and deliver lectures that were 19th-century versions of 21st-century TED talks. Best-selling British novelist Charles Dickens visited the United States in 1842; in 1845, abolitionist Frederick Douglass traveled to England. Three decades later, extensive railway networks enabled celebrities to easily visit both a nation’s major cities and its more obscure nooks and crannies. In the 1880s, star actors Edwin Booth (1833–1893) and Helena Modjeska (1840–1909) could perform in world theater capitals such as Paris, London, Berlin, Warsaw, and New York and in small towns ranging from Davenport, Iowa, to Zanesville, Ohio. Performers spent so much time traveling that actor Maude Adams (1872–1953) had sliding scenery installed on her customized train car so that she and her troupe could rehearse between stops.

Cheap postage rates, photography, the penny press, telegraphic news agencies, and steam and train travel all provided channels through which celebrities, publics, journalists, and photographers could interact with one another. They did so long before the rise of the Hollywood studio system. Far from creating modern celebrity culture, movie studios simply adapted one that the theater had invented decades earlier. “Star” was a 19th-century term coined in English, along with “étoile” and “vedette” in French, to designate a theatrical troupe’s most compelling lead actors. In 1855, a young middle-class woman living in Glasgow announced, “Unless there is some Star in the theatre we do not go.” In the 21st century, live theater has become a niche form of entertainment, albeit one still able to generate blockbusters such as Hamilton.

But before the advent of film, millions of people regularly attended the theater each year. In 1865, London shows attracted almost twelve million viewers a year; in 1905, New York City alone had eighteen million theatergoers, with Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago all competing to host equally vibrant theater scenes. In 1886, the United States had almost 300 touring theater companies. By 1900, Paris and London each had over a hundred playhouses, many seating around 3,000 people. Theatrical networks were global: a hit play might open in London, then travel through the United States; make the rounds of the British Empire; or start out in Paris, then be adapted for performance in Berlin, Stockholm, and New York.

Not surprisingly, given the depth and breadth of the theatrical celebrity system, early film producers used stage stars to lure people to the new medium of cinema. The famous 1896 Thomas Edison film now known as “The Kiss” was originally billed “The May Irwin Kiss,” because it featured famous theater performer May Irwin in a popular scene from her hit play The Widow Jones. The very term “movie star” existed precisely because stars were presumed to belong to the theater. Many of the most famous early lm producers, directors, and performers, including Lillian Gish, D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Barbara Stanwyck, started on the stage, and some shuttled between Hollywood and Broadway for years.

Though Hollywood did not invent stardom, it did briefly change celebrity culture in one important way. 19th-century theatrical celebrities exercised significant autonomy. They had the power to choose their roles, control their schedules, select supporting casts, design costumes and sets, lease and manage theaters, and craft their public personae. From the 1930s through the 1950s, at the height of the studio system, a few freelance film stars, such as Carole Lombard and James Stewart, retained some of the independence enjoyed by their theatrical predecessors. But most lm moguls effectively used restrictive contracts, well-oiled publicity departments, and their influence over the press to control what movie stars could do and what the public could learn about them. During the decades when notoriously dictatorial studio heads Louis B. Mayer, the Warner Brothers, and Harry Cohn reigned supreme, many stars received orders about what roles to play, whom to date, and how to dress. In exchange, they received the support of a powerful, integrated entertainment industry. Stars who balked, such as Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn, often found themselves subject to retaliation, lawsuits, smear campaigns, and periods of unemployment.

The critics who produced the first serious analyses of celebrity in the 1930s and 1940s had two reference points: the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the fascist, propaganda-driven personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Not surprisingly, given those contexts, those who first theorized celebrity culture had little good to say about it. In 1944, Leo Lowenthal built on Adorno’s writings to suggest that 19th-century “heroes of production” renowned for their great deeds had devolved into 20th-century “idols of consumption” best known for the cars they drove and the soaps they bought. Lowenthal got his history wrong—celebrity culture had always included heroes of production and idols of consumption—but his audience right. Intellectuals have been decrying the ills of celebrity culture ever since. Although towering figures such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall argued for popular culture’s utopian, redemptive potential, few have applied those more optimistic frameworks to celebrity culture. In 1977, when Richard Dyer established celebrity studies as an academic field, he took the studio system as paradigmatic of the many other forms of celebrity that preceded, followed, and coexisted alongside it.

Taking 1940s Hollywood as the norm has distorted our understanding of how celebrity culture works by making it seem inevitable that a concentrated power exploits and manipulates both celebrities and publics alike. Not only did Hollywood not invent celebrity, its version of celebrity culture was an aberration. The decline of the lm studios in the 1960s, the breakdown of broadcast television that began in the 1980s, and the rise of the Internet since the 1990s have returned celebrity culture to its more anarchic 19th-century roots. Today, the fact that no single medium or industry controls stars or stardom has made more visible how strongly publics and celebrities have always influenced the course of celebrity culture and how their moves have been crucial to keeping it alive.

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Excerpted from The Drama of Celebrity. Used with permission of Princeton University Press. Copyright © 2019 by Sharon Marcus.