Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle

Introduction: re-viewing literary celebrity

“…Literary celebrity as a way of seeing can therefore provide illumination, but it might require us to move temporarily away from what individual, well-known authors have said or done in respect of their work or person -the conscious, authorial engagement with literary celebrity that drives many studies on the subject (for example, Glass 2004, Pozorski 2012, Boyce et al 2013, Friedman 2014) -and consider instead how their work, person and relationships exist within wider networks (Galow 2011, York 2013). This is not to underplay authors' awareness of and complicity with certain fetishising processes, but it is to stand back and see the full range of the processes that extend beyond the author.…”

Transatlantic Celebrity: European Fame in Nineteenth-Century America

“…Scholars have demonstrated that by the early nineteenth century a recognisable celebrity culture existed in Europe (Brock 2006;Mole 2007Mole , 2009Eisner 2009;McDayter 2009;Berenson and Giloi 2010;Hawkins and Ives 2012;Boyce, Finnerty, and Millim 2013) and in America (Baker 1998;Sentilles 2003;Richards 2004;Blake 2006). Involving 'a cultural apparatus, consisting of the relations between an individual, an industry and an audience, that took shape in response to the industrialised print culture of the late eighteenth century' (Mole 2007, xi), celebrity culture encouraged and facilitated an obsessive fascination with a public figure's personality and biography by mass producing and disseminating visual, verbal and material representations of such individuals designed to foster ever-closer forms of communication between the famous and the non-famous.…”