Who does this sound like to you? A spoiled little rich girl who turns up to parties wearing the latest fashions, gets paid to be seen with the other beautiful people, and graces the cover of every magazine because she’s ‘famous for being famous’. She has no talent. She doesn’t do anything. She’s just a glamorous socialite, with a wealthy daddy, whose only skills are an innovative use of makeup, being spotted by the paparazzi, and dating famous guys.
Hands up if you’re thinking Kim Kardashian? And why not – she’s very much our celeb du jour. Perhaps you’ve only just woken from a coma, having bumped your head in 2006, and Paris Hilton is your go-to reference? Both are good guesses, but this enraged rant is my summary of how harrumphing cynics felt in the 1930s about a high-society beauty named Brenda Frazier. And yes, I realise you don’t get too many sexy Brendas gracing the covers of magazines these days, but this one was properly glam. Brenda Frazier* might’ve seemed your quintessential D-lister; the omnipresent party girl swishing from event to event with paparazzi lolloping behind. And she was exactly that. But unlike some modern celebs – who seem to stalk fame with a wolf-pack mentality – she had celebrity dumped in her lap without ever really asking for it.
In 1936, the fabulously monikered society columnist Cholly Knickerbocker* declared: ‘It may seem a bit early, but I – here and now – predict Brenda Frazier will be one of the belles – if not the Belle – of her season.’1 Two years later, he was proven correct when the seventeen-year-old was declared the standout stunner at the debutante ball held in New York’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. This was the party in the elite social calendar, the glitzy, champagne-drenched springboard for a new cohort of privileged youth, and Frazier’s instant elevation to ‘Glamour Girl #1’ launched her not just into high society, but into the newsstands, dentists’ waiting rooms, and hair salons of America. Immediately, her pale-powdered face was everywhere, offset by her dark curls and distinctive scarlet lipstick. Journalists and photographers chased her around town, feverishly documenting her glamorous existence. Within six months she’d appeared thousands of times in the American press, made the cover of Life magazine, graced adverts for products she couldn’t or wouldn’t use herself (she posed in a car advert despite not being able to drive), and was a byword for prestigious glamour.
By 1939, another influential gossip journo, Walter Winchell, had decided the unparalleled scale of her fame as a ‘celebrity debutante’ necessitated a whole new word: celebutante.2 Brenda Frazier erupted like a glitter-filled volcano to become an all-pervading American icon of beauty. To the public it probably felt like an overnight success story, but we know Cholly Knickerbocker had pinged her on his radar a couple of years before. In fact, she’d already been a fixture of café society since the age of twelve. Even as a child, Brenda Frazier had been creepily objectified for her looks; though struggling with low self-esteem, others had seen something uniquely beautiful in the schoolgirl. By fourteen she was probably sexually active with adult men,* encouraged by her ruthlessly ambitious mother. It was just one of several factors that shattered her childhood innocence.
Brenda also witnessed her parents’ alcoholism, their infidelities, bitter divorce, and custody arguments. Oh, and then there was the death of her first stepfather, the arrival of a new stepfather, the death of her biological father, and her mother’s grasping efforts to prematurely access Brenda’s vast trust fund, which was locked until she reached adulthood. And we’re not done yet. Her mother had arranged for Brenda to undergo painful surgery on her Achilles tendons, ostensibly to prevent swelling but mostly to give her shapelier legs when sporting high heels. Long before Cholly Knickerbocker decided to elevate her to public scrutiny, Brenda Frazier had already been living the exhaustingly dramatic life of a soap opera character. It’s no surprise her nickname in the press was ‘poor little rich girl’. Fame only made things worse: unhappy romances, anorexia, bulimia, depression, pills, alcohol abuse, multiple suicide attempts, and poor mental health would dog her for the rest of her life.
Brenda Frazier’s arrival into bewildering and painful celebrity is also a fitting prologue for this chapter. She serves both as handy historical avatar for the ‘famous for being famous’ poseurs, and as a painful reminder of the humanity behind the headlines; the celebrity victim who never desired fame and couldn’t adapt when it crashed down upon her. Her massive celebrity was sudden, superficial, and short-lived (though her name popped up in tabloids for years to come). She’d possessed no obvious skills, had left formal education at fifteen, and would openly admit: ‘I’m not a celebrity. I don’t deserve all this. I haven’t done anything at all. I’m just a debutante.’ So why the big deal?
The media saw the ‘poor little rich girl’ as ideal headline fodder; she offered up the moreish gateau of privilege, wealth, and beauty drizzled with the curdled custard of family discord and bitterly contested lawsuits. Frazier was fascinating; she was made into a celebrity because she looked like one, because she was a doe-eyed trust fund millionaire in a time of economic depression, and because her screwed-up family provided a perfect counterweight for the perfection of her photogenic face. She didn’t have to do anything except be Brenda Frazier. Her celebrity image was forever beyond her control; it was attributed to her, making her what the film theorist James Monaco has called a quasar. In his words: ‘it is not who they are or what they do, but what we think they are that fascinates us’.3
Becoming a celebrity sounds exciting. Scroll through social media and you’ll find thousands of young people imitating the perceived aristocracy of media success. Some wannabe digital influencers even pretend to have sponsorship deals because that’s what internet fame looks like, and you’ve gotta fake it till you make it.4 Several psychology studies have found young people rank ‘being famous’ at the top of their ambitions.5 But becoming a celebrity can be a shockingly bizarre, existentially debilitating metamorphosis done to a person with or without their consent. And, when it goes wrong – and it often does – it can devour the soul.* Fame can be fun, or it can be a Faustian pact with the devil. It dumps barrowloads of cash, parties, and private jets at the celebrity’s feet, but it also entitles the public and media to savagely interrogate their right to exist in our eyeline. It invites emulation, obsession, and fantasising; but it can also bring demonising, dehumanising, and degrading aggression.
Most celebs, therefore, slide up and down the axis of adoration. One week they’re loved, the next week we hate them, but we remain invested in their story because they’re frosted mirrors for reflecting who we are, who we think we should be, and who we want to be. Brenda Frazier had fame thrust upon her when she wasn’t emotionally ready, and it broke her. She was never hated – at worst, people booed her for her lack of substance – but nor was she beloved either. She was just a famous beautiful woman; a compellingly gorgeous image, attached to a car crash of a family, who was easily replaced when she got married and settled down. Her job was to fill column inches and sell products.
However, some celebrities aren’t made this way, they don’t get to slide around being loved and loathed depending on who they’ve insulted or hooked up with that week. Instead, they’re moral agents specifically designed as inspiring role models, or as dangerous monsters who threaten public decency. Such binary tropes of hero and villain, exemplar and transgressor, superhuman and barely human, operate on a more extreme level than ordinary celebrity. But, often, these people also had their fame unexpectedly hurled upon them.
It was 4.45 a.m., on a cold September morning in 1838, when Grace Darling glimpsed an unfolding tragedy through a telescope. She was on watch duty at the Longstone Lighthouse built proudly upon one of the Farne Islands. Her family’s job was to guide the ships passing along the Northumbrian coastline of north-east England. As she stared into the murky dark of a treacherously stormy night, Grace was startled by the shadows of a terrible shipwreck; the SS Forfarshire, a paddle steamer carrying sixty passengers and crew, had smashed into the rocks and been ripped asunder. Its bow had become lodged on jagged rocks while the rest of it had sheared off and sunk, sucking most of those aboard down to their cruel deaths. Grace could see no survivors through the gloom. If anyone had escaped, they might be clinging to an outcrop known as Big Harcar Rock, but they’d be a mile out to sea, in a howling gale. Only the dawn light would confirm it, and by then it might be too late.
Grace raced to alert her parents, William Sr and Thomasin. It was just the three of them in the lighthouse; most of her siblings had moved away, and her only remaining brother, William Brooks Darling, was ashore with the herring fleet in North Sunderland. The trio agreed that he and the local fishermen wouldn’t dare launch a rescue in such bad weather. If anyone clung to that rock, only the Darlings at Longstone were close enough to save them. The responsibility fell on William Sr’s shoulders. He was an experienced oarsman who knew the rocks; but he didn’t trust in his own strength. He couldn’t do it alone. William agonised over endangering his family, but the choice was taken out of his hands when Grace volunteered to join him. At 7 a.m., the dawn light revealed movement on Big Harcar Rock. Survivors! They had to act. Grace and her father launched their boat and began to row.
Pulling themselves through the ferocious waves and howling gale, the Darlings drew close enough to realise there were too many survivors to fit in the coble. They’d have to make two trips. William leapt onto the rock to assess the situation, leaving his daughter in sole command of their escape; she skilfully bobbed between the jagged edges, riding the surging waves and keeping the boat out of trouble. The Darlings took five people off the rock and left four strong men behind. Back they rowed to the lighthouse, where Thomasin and Grace began caring for their new arrivals. William and two of the survivors got back in the coble and returned for the remaining four. By 9 a.m., two hours after they’d set out, everyone was safely back on dry land. Soon, Grace’s brother and his fellow fishermen turned up. They’d valiantly braved five miles of savage stormy waters only to discover the shipwreck had already been evacuated.
Several heroes announced themselves on that cold September morning, but only one would become an instant celebrity. Actually, instant isn’t quite right; it took a week for news of Grace Darling’s heroism to spread. Initial media focus instead fell on the cause of the shipwreck, with immediate questions being raised about the SS Forfarshire’s seaworthiness. An inquest found that its boiler had been poorly maintained, and accusations of criminal negligence were an obvious journalistic scoop. But, within a week, regional newspapers sought a new angle on a complex legal case, and the story of the survivors’ escape was the solution. That, in turn, led to the rescue. And that led to Grace.
A journalist named David Kennedy of the Berwick and Kelso Warder set the tone for the ensuing deluge of praise, declaring the rescue was ‘amongst the noblest instances of purely disinterested and philanthropic exertion on behalf of suffering individuals that ever reflected honour upon humanity’. Kennedy wasn’t one for pithy understatement – perhaps he’d been at the cooking sherry? – but his hyperbolic prose kickstarted a public obsession with Grace Darling, and launched a feedback loop as local, regional, national, and international newspapers excitedly reprinted each other’s content.
Already the myth was being created. Kennedy erroneously reported that Grace had convinced her reticent father to launch the rescue, and that she’d been awakened by the survivors shouting for help. Neither was true, but they boosted her role in the story. Instead of a brave woman working under her father’s guidance, the newspapers invented a proactive heroine booting her cowardly dad up the arse as she sprinted off to fetch her oars. It remained a potent lie; in some later versions, he was airbrushed out entirely, leaving Grace to be depicted rowing solo. But Grace’s recasting was also born of her marketability. Most obviously, she defied gender expectations.
As Darling’s biographer, Hugh Cunningham, has convincingly argued,6 the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke had previously set out a framework for thinking about sensory aesthetics. His most crucial point was the power of the sublime and the beautiful.7 Beauty equated to love, comfort, feelings of human intimacy, and also notions of perfection; this was associated with female delicacy. By contrast, the sublime generated the sensation of awestruck fear in all its eye-popping, heart-pounding physicality. It was the thrill and panic of being in mortal danger, as if staring over the edge of a cliff. The dreaded zenith of sublime terror was the murderous deep; every marine voyage was a game of chicken played with the Grim Reaper. Only men were allowed to play.
And yet, somehow, a young lighthouse keeper’s daughter hadn’t flinched as she danced between the fangs of peril’s gaping jaws. Women just didn’t do that sort of thing! They did needlepoint and were supposedly allergic to the very notion of adventure. Grace Darling was a woman beyond compute. We see such bafflement in the overwrought tribute published in The Times: ‘Surely, imagination in its loftiest creations never invested the female character with such a degree of fortitude as has been evinced by Miss Grace Horsley Darling on this occasion. Is there in the whole field of history, or of fiction even, one instance of female heroism to compare for one moment with this?’
It was clearly an overreaction – the ghost of Joan of Arc was probably scribbling her affronted complaint from the afterlife – but such is the casual hyperbole of celebrity coverage, with stars frequently declared the most beautiful, the sexiest, the best, the worst, the most exciting, the most scandalous, the wealthiest; and then, six months later, the pecking order changes and in come a new batch of glorious and villainous creatures. Celebrity culture demands a never-ending carousel of ranked superlatives, and ongoing fetishisation of novelty. Grace Darling was simply the shiny new thing of 1838, one prematurely thrust into the pantheon of historical greats by gasping observers with short memories.
But there was more to her appeal than defiant femininity. Ironically, Grace Darling was herself the perfect storm. Not just a Burke debunker, she was also an ordinary, anonymous member of the lower classes living her life on the faraway edge of northern England. This was a Romantic trope; she seemed both earthy and authentic, and yet somehow representative of a national fantasy. As Hugh Cunningham perceptively notes, Darling seemed to embody a fictional character, Jeanie Deans, created by the celebrated Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott for one of his most successful novels, The Heart of Midlothian. Jeanie is a paragon of virtuous charity, she walks from Scotland to London to exonerate her sister of a crime, and the ordinary, innocent, northern Grace seemed to occupy the same emotional space in Britons’ hearts.
Oh, and then there was that name! Is there a more inspiring, elegant name than Grace Darling? It literally means ‘Divine Salvation Beloved’ – you could dump a million quid in the lap of any advertising agency, give them a year, and they’d still fail to brainstorm anything as catchy. The Monthly Chronicle presumably spoke for many when it asked: ‘Were two such words ever before combined to form a name? The one expressing the natural quality of the bearer of it, and the other defining what her deeds have made her in the regard of others.’ The Scotsman was bluntly honest: ‘Had Grace Darling been a married woman, dwelling in some poor alley in an ordinary town, and with no rarer or prettier an appellation than Smith, Brown, McTavish, or Higginbottom, a greater deed would, perhaps, have won her less favour.’ Her fame glinted with the golden sheen of nominative destiny, as if Dickens – in his most sentimental mood – had created her for the page.
The combination of all these factors was overpowering; her celebrity was a Venn diagram of overlapping wow-factors and it made the public desperate for access to her life. Journalists raced to interview her family; artists scrambled to paint her; sightseers flocked to her family home; strangers wrote her letters begging for locks of her hair; a national fund was raised in her name; her likeness was mass-produced in Staffordshire pottery; drawings of her family were exhibited publicly to huge crowds; a circus promoter asked whether she fancied being exhibited, like some exotic performing beast; and a theatrical impresario offered her thick wodges of cash to play a heavily fictionalised version of herself in a London play. She cautiously declined.
This last request was odd. Was the truth not interesting enough? Apparently not. The first four books published about Darling were works of fiction. It seems people couldn’t resist reshaping her into something even more perfect. The fact that she then died tragically young, just four years after the rescue, meant her brand was both frozen in its glorious prime and yet easily divorced from an unquibbling corpse. Though her family valiantly struggled to correct the record, Grace Darling had already become public property; her heroic hour was a malleable and exploitable legend. She was exactly what people needed her to be. And when she wasn’t, they invented her anew.
So delighted were Britons with their plucky heroine, it was only a decade after her death before Victorians rushed to canonise two more maidens of devotion: Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Recently, Seacole has been restored to the history books after having been forgotten in the twentieth century. A fascinating figure, she’s become an icon of black history, and the recipient of a well-intentioned campaign to give her equal status to the more privileged Nightingale. This has accidentally led to some modern mythmaking, but both women were already semi-mythic figures in their lifetime, so perhaps it’s somewhat fitting?
We’ll begin with Nightingale, who was indeed properly live-in-a-country-house, summer-in-Italy posh – I mean, her sister was called Parthenope,* for goodness sake! – but young Florence was a source of constant disappointment to Ma and Pa. They desperately wanted her to swish through high society, in an assortment of fancy frocks, with a respectable husband draped on her arm. She, however, was a talented mathematician who embarked on the quaintest of rebellions by announcing that God had called her to heal the sick. How bloody selfish! Nightingale ditched her suitable boyfriend, picked up some practice abroad, and got her big chance with the outbreak of the Crimean War. In 1854 Britain ganged up with France and Ottoman Turkey in a bid to stop Russian imperial expansion.
It was a perfectly sensible war apart from the fact it was a disaster. The British Army’s logistics were horrendously disorganised, and the onset of a cruel winter soon blasted its weary men into chilly desperation. Though Russian bullets and sabres thudded into British flesh, the greatest enemy was disease. Soldiers requiring medical care were shipped off to military hospitals in Turkey, but they might’ve been safer languishing in their tents. Ward hygiene was appalling. Nobody washed their hands, faeces were smeared on floors and walls, rats scurried around at leisure, bedsheets were infested with lice, and the amputated limbs hacked from screaming soldiers were simply fed to nearby dogs.
For all the running around with guns and swords, it was typhoid, typhus, cholera, and dysentery that did most of the killing. The Crimean War was a full-blown crisis; one made embarrassingly obvious by the presence of W. H. Russell – arguably the world’s first war correspondent – whose urgent battlefield updates were speedily whizzed off to The Times by the revolutionary telegraph machine. Britain had blithely stumbled into a military catastrophe, only to have the bad luck of broadcasting its humiliating blunder to the world’s media. But that same journalist’s reports also inspired Seacole and Nightingale to cross the oceans and do their bit, so not all bad, then.
Determined to launch her do-gooding career, the well-connected Florence Nightingale gained authorisation from a family friend – the Secretary of State for War, Sir Sidney Herbert – to lead a team of thirty-eight volunteer nurses to Scutari hospital in Turkey. She arrived in early November 1854, when things were at a low point. More than 4,000 men died that winter, and the obstinate army doctors battled with her over every little thing. They didn’t want some opinionated woman meddling in the chain of command. Defiantly, she implemented regular laundry, clean towels, proper cutlery, improved rations, and better ventilation. She also counted the dead and notified their families, which the military had neglected to do. These things helped, but it was the arrival of the Sanitary Commission in March 1855 – which flushed the sewers, removed rotting animal corpses, and rebuilt the hospital foundations – that quite literally stopped the rot and dramatically reduced fatality rates.
In truth, Nightingale’s greatest impact came after the war, not during it, because it was there that she fired up her big brain to prove the efficacy of hygiene protocols. The arrival of revolutionary germ theory soon explained why leaving men to wallow in their own shit wasn’t too clever. History has thus remembered her as a badass epidemiologist with a penchant for pie chart innovation, but – let’s be honest – a flair for eye-catching data visualisation isn’t why the Victorians became Florence fans. No, her sudden fame was built during the crisis, and was erected not on scientific rationalism but along religious lines.
She became ‘The Lady with the Lamp’; a ministering ‘guardian angel’ patrolling the wards each night like some docile saint. The first image depicting this vision of Christian heroism was published in The Illustrated London News and it had a huge impact as a cultural meme. Punch magazine soon joined in, publishing a poem in December 1854 with the lines:
Upon the darkness of the night how often, gliding late and lone,
Her little lamp, hope’s beacon-light, to eyes with no hope else has shone!
As Mark Bostridge has shown in his excellent biography,8 this visual conjuring alluded to a celebrated recent painting, titled The Light of the World, by the Pre-Raphaelite master William Holman Hunt which showed a bearded Christ with lamp in hand, knocking on an old door overgrown with weeds. Florence Nightingale was thus romanticised as a gender-swapped, proxy-Christ in a snug-fitting apron. The glowing light offered hope and comfort, but also spiritual salvation. The truth, of course, was that she needed a lamp to avoid slipping over on the blood-stained floors. But, well, that’s somewhat less romantic.
Nightingale’s sister became her most enthusiastic champion, and, two years after the Crimean War, Parthenope Nightingale married another Florence devotee in Sir Harry Verney, MP.* Having influential supporters bolstered Florence’s influence, but the public was also emotionally invested in her celebrity thanks to the press coverage; during the war, her name cropped up in 200 separate pieces in The Times alone. There was also a constant outpouring of imagery in magazines and papers, songs were written about her, and her name became a potent brand attached to pubs, commercial products, newly launched ships, and even a noted racehorse.
But what about Mary Seacole? She was fifteen years older than Nightingale, but her identity was somewhat more nuanced than the poor, black widow of modern romance. Born Mary Grant, to a free black mother and a white Scottish officer, she was a bi-racial Brit of solid reputation. She’d grown up in the hospitality trade, and became a property-owning businesswoman when she later inherited her mother’s hotel in Jamaica, but she’d also learned how to administer herbal remedies to British expats struggling with tropical fevers. She called herself a doctress, and caring for others’ needs was her thing. After her husband’s death, she travelled to Panama, where she attempted to curb an outbreak of cholera. When Russell’s reports of the Crimean bungling arrived in Jamaica, she presumably considered herself qualified to join the nursing corps. But Jamaica was a long way from Turkey, and she had a business to run. So, why leave it all behind?
Seacole was ultimately a loyal champion of the Empire. Though legally considered a mixed-race ‘mulatta’ – she faced overt racism on her travels, particularly in Panama – Seacole felt a strong affinity for Britain’s military men (such as her father), and pride in her mixed ‘creole’ and Scottish heritage. She’d also befriended several of the officers whose regiments had been stationed in Jamaica, and – without her own kids to raise – perhaps felt some maternal instincts towards a few of the fresh-faced youngsters being shipped off to a foreign battlefield. In any case, her autobiography tells us she travelled to London in the hope of joining Nightingale’s nursing staff, but was turned down.*
Undaunted, she sailed out to the Crimean front lines to open a general store with her business partner, Thomas Day. She somewhat optimistically titled it the ‘British Hotel’, which, in fairness, sounded rather fancy. It actually proved to be less battlefield Ritz, more wobbly snack shack built of driftwood, but any port in a storm. From this rickety establishment she sold useful goods to the soldiers but also to the tourists who enjoyed sitting on the hill with a picnic, watching while men were blown apart and bayoneted in the hazy distance. She also entertained the French, British, and Turkish officers with her own brand of Jamaican cooking and rambunctious humour.
Seacole set up her sutler’s shop at Balaklava near the front lines. Nightingale’s hospital was far away in Turkey. Separated by such distance, the pair probably never met, but modern retellings seek commonalities between their stories, even going so far as to call Seacole ‘a Crimean nurse’. This is a slightly tricky area, and not all historians are comfortable with this label, instead arguing she was primarily an entrepreneur with only a sideline in folk remedies.9 However, a recently recovered Australian news report from 1857 tells us she did spend the first couple of months volunteering at Balaklava Wharf, refreshing soldiers’ bandages and offering them hot tea before they boarded the hospital ships.10 To me, that’s volunteer nursing.
Also, when running her hostel, Seacole certainly cared for whichever soldiers hobbled her way with painful scrapes and dodgy tummies, and even treated a few lightly injured men on the battlefield. Exuding huge warmth, and wielding a variety of poultices and concoctions, she ‘nursed’ the men in the same way a mum nurses a kid through flu. In return, the grateful soldiers started calling her ‘Mother Seacole’. By contrast, Florence Nightingale was not one of life’s great huggers, and was more doggedly diligent, ramrod-straight clipboard warrior than guardian angel. But if Seacole did some nursing, it was Nightingale who revolutionised its professional practice and should rightly take more prominence in its history.
Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two women is how they handled fame. Seacole had apparently sold her Jamaican hotel to fund the Crimean adventure and was ruined by the war’s unexpected end. Her schlepp back to Britain took many months, but she received the warmest of welcomes. When news of her bankruptcy was reported, her old Crimean acquaintances threw a fundraising party to get her back on her feet, and Seacole’s subsequent autobiography11 – which is an absolute hoot, though a tad unreliable – became a bestseller. She returned to Jamaica, then came back to London, where Queen Victoria offered her financial aid to ensure relative comfort.
Seacole still wanted to be helpful and, in 1857, offered her nursing services to the British Army in India. We don’t have any evidence she made the journey, but she was certainly serious about it.12 In the meantime, she posed for paintings and photos, and sometimes sported mysterious medals that historians squabble over (awarded by whom? The Turks? The French? The British Army? Herself?). Such conspicuous embracing of fame aligns neatly with her identity as aspirational outsider craving acceptance; every name-drop in her memoir clangs like a frying pan tumbling out of a cupboard. She wasn’t subtle in her self-promotion, but she was hugely admired, and with good reason. Hooray for Mary Seacole!
Nightingale, meanwhile, despised fame. Her father also found it bizarre, though her sister, Parthenope, was an enthusiastic cheerleader. Florence did all she could to prevent fame’s alien tentacles from slithering into her private life, including refusing to pose for any photographs, until Queen Victoria – an avid photography buff – demanded she give the people what they wanted. Nevertheless, Nightingale’s heroic reputation kicked open doors that would have stayed bolted, even to a woman of lofty privilege, and she was able to parlay her Crimean kudos into significant influence as a hygiene campaigner. When charitable donations poured in from a grateful public, she funnelled them into the world’s first modern nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Her huge celebrity would serve as barely tolerated means to the noblest of ends.
Thirty-eight nurses volunteered to join Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. Seven fishermen, plus Mr Darling, went to the aid of the SS Forfarshire. Mary Seacole had a business partner called Thomas Day. All of these other people threw themselves into the challenges, yet we don’t remember their names. The razzle-dazzle process that transforms nobodies into exemplary heroes is a curious one because sometimes it celebrates valour while simultaneously ignoring it in others. None of these forgotten people were any less altruistic than the eventual superstars bathed in limelight, but it was only Darling, Nightingale and Seacole who emitted the right sort of narrative charisma. The media found them intrinsically fascinating, and so only they were forged into public heroes, while their comrades in risk slunk back into anonymity.
If we re-examine Brenda Frazier’s sad rise, or Grace Darling’s elevation to heroism, we might easily assume that it’s the media which determines celebrity success; the newspapers pluck someone out, bung them on the front page, and hey presto: HERO! Well, yes, that can happen. But I want to hammer a couple of dents into that pristine notion. The relationship between the media, celebrities, and public is full of tension; sometimes it’s collaborative, sometimes it’s coercive, and sometimes it’s combative. As consumers, we’re not all blinking, gullible numpties who can be mindlessly injected with propaganda.
This idea of media indoctrination was popular in the 1950s,* and is known as the Hypodermic (or magic bullet) theory. It argued that pop culture – and by extension the media – softens our resistance to top-down control, seducing us with a life of empty materialism and fake variety as a way of distracting us from political revolution. The damning phrase often cited was: ‘freedom to choose what is always the same’. As much as I love the shouty stylings of Rage Against the Machine, this notion is as simplistic as a toddler’s drawing of a horse. It’s not totally wrong, just as the kid’s drawing probably includes four legs and a head, but the whole thing is strangely distorted.
For example, Two Step Flow Theory says: ‘Okay, yes, the media does have a big effect, but it’s filtered indirectly through middlemen and social networks.’ We’re more easily influenced by our friends, neighbours, family members, and trusted colleagues than by bold fonts on billboards and broadsheets. But our friends must get their ideas from elsewhere – including the mass media – so perhaps it’s propaganda as meme culture, with indoctrination being a viral process? Nice idea. But then scholars had another spin of the Big Theory wheel, and began to ask why we engage with media and pop culture in the first place – what do we get out of it? Their answer, Uses and Gratifications Theory, hands power back to the consumer and argues that we aren’t passive idiots, but rather take pleasure in engaging with news, culture, and entertainment. We aren’t victims, we’re customers with some agency to choose.
We don’t just believe what we’re told, not least because sometimes it’s fun, or psychologically stimulating, to resist. But also, we’re not all the same. From even the most embryonic days of newspaper publishing in the early 1600s, commercial pressures have driven media editors towards satisfying public desires. While many media bodies tried to shift attitudes (and often succeeded), they had to work within the terms of the deal struck with the consumer. Deviate too far, and the customer would simply switch to another product. The powerful architect of late-Victorian journalism, W. T. Stead, argued that newspaper editors were much more in tune with the public than politicians, because every day was essentially a re-election campaign: ‘The editor’s mandate is renewed day by day, and his electors register their vote by a voluntary payment of the daily pence.’13
People choose to consume popular culture, and that means they influence the stuff they’re given, just as the stuff they’re given influences them. It’s a feedback loop. The media undoubtedly affects us, but in much more subtle ways than total indoctrination. On top of that, there’s also a deeper complexity. We’re irrational fools with warped biases and ideological presets. Psychologists call these confirmation bias and selective exposure, which are two interlocked concepts that prove how individuals don’t just swallow everything they encounter, but instead pick and choose what to absorb, and what to reject, based on whether it reinforces pre-existing ideology.14 It’s this puzzling lack of objectivity that can see us presented with seemingly persuasive information, only to remain irrationally entrenched in our wrongness.*
That same stubbornness also influences how we respond to celebrity culture. Rather than a smooth transmission from mass media to consumer, resulting in a new celebrity being instantly welcomed into the nation’s hearts, the creation of historical celebrities often required something closer to bartering, or perhaps even wrestling, until the new star was either accepted or slung back into oblivion. Celebrities rising to reputation wasn’t due to their being glitter-sprayed automatons in some Orwellian power game; the public weren’t brainwashed sheep bleating in excitable acceptance towards whoever the media decided should be famous. No, the truth is, celebrity is a three-way equation, much like the chemical reaction needed for fire: one can’t spark a flame without the triangular relationship of heat, fuel, and oxygen; and one can’t produce celebrity without the interaction between a subject, an audience, and a media industry.
But that interaction didn’t necessarily have to be positive. The media could choose to trash someone or praise them; the public could embrace the star or reject them; the celebrity could go with the flow, or put up a fight. This trialogue is always needed, but it can be fraught with resistance. Perhaps we see this in the response to the child superstar Master Betty. While most of Britain went crazy for him, smashing up theatres in their quest to bask in his cutesy glory, a small cohort of cynics stubbornly refused to be coerced by the tsunami of praise. Leigh Hunt and various satirists weren’t taken in by Bettymania, and, within eighteen months, were smugly saying ‘I told you so!’ when the bubble burst. But why weren’t they charmed by the boy genius when everyone else went bonkers for Betty?
For Hunt, it was painfully personal. He’d been a whizzkid too, first emerging on the literary scene with his schoolboy poetry compilation Juvenilia, some of which he’d composed aged just twelve. Hunt was foremost among the defenders of youthful creativity, but, now in his twenties, he seemed to be scared by Betty. Hunt perhaps transposed his own regrets at having been prematurely overhyped onto another younger model.15 Master Betty’s fame was so intense for one so young that the only direction of travel was down. Failure is the only consequence when success is unsustainable, and so it proved for the boy wonder.
But, other satirists had different reasons to prick the balloon. Audiences are complex and rebellious; sometimes it’s an act of defiance to go against the crowd, sometimes stuff just isn’t to our tastes, and sometimes it’s just funny to tip over sacred cows and watch their chunky legs flail pathetically in the air, simply to horrify those who worship them. Much of anti-fandom’s appeal seems to come from challenging orthodox opinions. Many of us will hate-watch movies and TV shows for the pleasure of savaging them; that might involve watching some ironically godawful B-movie about Nazi space-sharks, but there’s also pleasurable haughtiness to be found in trashing good quality, mainstream stuff that is really popular. Among my friends, Love Actually is either a wonderful romantic comedy, or a cinematic crime that needs to be ceremonially eviscerated with bloodthirsty relish. Oddly, both factions will watch it again and again in a ritual of group amusement.16 In short, Master Betty was the Richard Curtis of the Romantic Era.
If we leap back another century, we find an even more divisive celebrity – indeed, the earliest example in this book. Weirdly, this paradigm-busting maverick wasn’t some illustrious actor in fancy shoes, or a romantic poet offering swoon-worthy ballads, but rather a conservative churchman in a ludicrous wig who became a simultaneous hero and villain, depending on how people voted. His name was Doctor Henry Sacheverell, and he was an ambitious Anglican minister who gave a fiery speech from the pulpit of St Paul’s Cathedral on 5 November 1709, attacking ‘false brethren’ in the church. Delivered on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s plot to blow up King James I and his Parliament, it was immediately perceived as a political broadside against the Whig party by pro-royalist Tories, and thus Sacheverell was thrust into the centre of a political maelstrom. And, in case you’re not up on your maelstroms, the eighteenth-century public loved ’em!
Before long, 100,000 copies of his speech had been sold, with estimates suggesting as many as 250,000 people may have encountered the text.17 London’s population was probably no larger than 600,000 people. His next speech was attended by a huge mob, desperate to get into the church. Alarmed at his sudden popularity, Queen Anne’s ministers in the Whig government attempted to try him for sedition; but he’d selected his words too carefully, so they instead successfully charged him with High Crimes and Misdemeanours in the House of Lords. The punishment was suspension from his post and the burning of two of his speeches; not exactly the harshest of sentences in a legal system where someone could be hanged for 200 different offences, but, no matter, for it was still perceived as splashing petrol on an already crackling fire.
Sacheverell became a living martyr to the cause; an Anglican hero cheered like a champion boxer as he paraded through the streets, and was commemorated with window illuminations and bonfires across England. The excitement soon turned to violence, and riots broke out in defence of his reputation. Capitalising on his unexpected fame, he began touring the country, escorted on his travels by huge retinues of horse guards; he was wined and dined by the great Tory magnates, cheered by vast crowds in various cities, and wherever he went he preached and hollered against the Whig government in his distinctive style.
Sacheverell was both a criminal and a champion of moral virtue; a patriot and a seditious threat. Moreover, he was a conservative theologian who’d somehow ended up acquiring the glamour of the rockstar rebel, or the dandy highwayman. He didn’t just become merely famous, he was transformed into a noisy focal point for identity politics, and then commercialised into a lucrative brand. And it’s this last part which made him an early celebrity, in my eyes. As the historian Brian Cowan writes:
His effigy was reproduced and distributed in paint, print, cloth, wax and sculpture by a rapidly growing commercial art market that seized on the politics of personality and charisma as a sales technique … The Whig Observator exclaimed that ‘Sacheverell’s picture is now more hugg’d and admir’d than any that we have in the late editions of our Common-Prayer books’ … Hostile observers such as the Whig cleric William Bisset observed with disgust that ‘nine parts in ten of the publick houses, whether taverns, ale-houses, or brandy-shops, are staunch conformists; and most of them have the Doctor’s picture in their chief drinking rooms, and some, as I have seen, his sign at their doors’.18
Cowan goes on to describe how, at the height of Sacheverell’s new fame, penny loaves were inscribed with his name and the year, medals were issued, commemorative plates were struck, ceramic statuettes were made, babies were named in his honour, his chubby face appeared on wax-seals so people could stamp it into their letters, and he stared out from ladies’ fans, decks of cards, tobacco pipes, and coat buttons. His name was shouted by rioters, by voters, by enemies and allies alike; he even helped the Tories triumph in the new election, meaning if you think modern celebs telling people how to vote is new, I have news for you – it’s literally there on the first page of celebrity’s 300-year-old history.
Doctor Henry Sacheverell was an old-school religious figure propelled into an aggressively politicised culture and rendered tradeable commodity. I must stress, celebrity culture was extremely young in 1709, and the next-earliest case studies in this book didn’t turn up until the mid-1720s, some fifteen years later. So it’s remarkable that Sacheverell was already every inch the modern celebrity. But there’s no doubting he was both hugely famous and deeply divisive: a hero to those of his political persuasion; to others a threat. He was a quantum quasar, if you will.
Henry Sacheverell’s heroic fame was born of a cause. He was a strong orator and a talented self-promoter, but his power came from widespread engagement. Conservatives needed him, or someone like him, as a talismanic figurehead for their movement. Sixty-five years later, across the Atlantic, there was an even greater need for a figurehead when America was unshackling itself from British rule. The odds were against them. Britain was a military superpower; the American Continental Army was a ragtag bunch of farmers and clerks, equipped with whatever weapons, uniforms, and footwear could be bought, borrowed, or stolen. The only hope of victory was in uniting the Thirteen Colonies behind the cause, drawing in French support, and trusting in the military leadership of a new hero. And that last bit was crucial.
From the moment he was appointed commander of the revolutionary army in 1775, George Washington was the focus of a propaganda campaign designed to transform him into a unifying American symbol. It wasn’t just fame that was thrust upon Washington, but the hopes of a nation. As the historian Antoine Lilti describes it: ‘Cities and counties were named after him, his portrait was widely distributed through every media channel, newspapers enthusiastically reported his smallest movement as though reporting incredible exploits. Celebrations were organized in honour of “His Excellency,” and public parades celebrated his birthday every year …’19
As with Sacheverell’s notoriety and Bettymania’s wild excesses, such hero worship didn’t go without criticism. Once independence was secured, some feared America’s experimental republicanism would be endangered by the seductive idea of another Great Man ruling from on high. Would King George be replaced by another King George? John Adams – who ended up serving as America’s second president – feared his own star being overshadowed by the quasi-monarchical razzamatazz of Washington’s reverence. The new leader was variously hailed as a master military tactician, a great orator, and a throbbing intellectual genius, but all three were exaggerations. A bustling machine churned out presidential puffery, not so far removed from the cynical propaganda later adopted by the Corsican upstart Napoleon Bonaparte.20
What’s particularly intriguing is how reluctant Washington seemed to be in his fame. A naturally cautious politician, possessing all the flamboyance of a bowl of porridge, he was so self-effacing that even the idea of writing his own memoirs felt too much like self-congratulation. Despite being America’s most famous person, he was modesty incarnate. Indeed, a little too modest? The historian John Ferling has asked if this was a conniving strategy of faux-reticence: was Washington not really the public-spirited, spartan hero but actually a glory-obsessed fame monster? Was his turning down the chance to write an autobiography history’s most epic humblebrag?21
I’m less cynical. I suspect Washington recognised the importance of his symbolism, but felt awkward squeezing into the superhero’s spandex, perhaps because of natural self-consciousness, but also because self-aggrandisement wasn’t behaviour befitting a privileged gentleman such as himself. Having won the war, and led America through its wobbly first steps, Washington’s reputation was already guaranteed, but his legacy acquired an extra golden sheen when he voluntarily resigned his presidency in 1796. This decision saw his heroic cult supercharged even further by a new association with Cincinnatus, the ancient Roman warrior who took up emergency powers in Rome’s darkest hour only to return to his farm when the danger had passed.
Washington hadn’t pulled a Caesar, nor done a Napoleon. He wasn’t a grubby despot, clinging to power; he’d voluntarily returned the keys to the President’s House and wished the next guy good luck. His work was done; he was incorruptible. This meme of moral perfection continued to expand in popular culture until – by 1809 – his childhood had been dramatically rewritten so that, even as a small boy, it was claimed he’d been too honest to lie to his dad about smashing a hatchet into a beloved cherry tree. George Washington had begun adulthood as a loyal British soldier and ended it as an American secular saint, romanticised beyond reality.22
This is how celebrity heroes are forged. The person does something exciting, the media takes notice, it greys out others around them – so the star image seems more vibrant by comparison – and then the public and the media collaborate on mythologising this new icon, or rejecting them. Anyone, at any time, was capable of heroic deeds, but to be recognised as heroic meant having others apply the heroising filter. Heroes are always invented, even if the raw material is already there. As the sociologist Gary Alan Fine has argued, such heightened reputations are contracts struck with the public, who agree to think of the hero in a new way. But this also requires the de-personhood of the individual.23 Heroes must have their flaws and foibles painted over. Their lives are rewritten as hagiographies.*
Meanwhile, villains have their positive character traits warped or obliterated to fit an almost demonic model of public evil: we see this with serial killers where the guy who ‘keeps himself to himself’ is reconstructed as the ‘loner’ when the finger of suspicion starts jabbing away. The good guys become perfect role models, the bad guys irredeemable threats to public decency.24 Complicated people are made into fairy tales; nuance is told to sod off and die! It’s a process that’s been repeated countless times, perhaps most obviously with military heroes.25
Take, for example, Britain’s naval titan Horatio Nelson. He rose to fame by kicking Napoleon’s arse at the Battle of the Nile, and he celebrated by launching into an open affair with the married Emma Hamilton; it was a romance that couldn’t have been more obvious if he’d painted her famously voluptuous breasts on the side of his flagship. Such adultery was usually humiliating, perhaps even career-destroying, but Nelson’s shining lustre mostly inoculated him against reputational annihilation. Mistresses were nothing new, but Nelson behaved terribly to his wife, Frances, and that was much less forgivable to some of his senior naval colleagues, who refused to visit Nelson and Emma’s shared home. Regardless, the affair was still allowed to play out; satirists eagerly mocked Lord Hamilton for being a blind old cuckold, and increasingly sexualised Emma’s image, but the barbs left little injury on the adulterous power couple at the heart of Regency high society. Nelson’s heroism defused the explosive anger, leaving only sniggers of innuendo.26
But as soon as the French sniper’s bullet fatally punctured Nelson’s body at the Battle of Trafalgar, the harsh rules of decorum kicked back in. With Lord Hamilton already dead, and her heroic lover’s body returning home preserved in a brandy barrel, Emma Hamilton was exposed to a howling gale of moral backlash. Without his protection to shelter her, she was ostracised. Frances Nelson assumed the dignified role of grieving widow, but Emma wasn’t permitted to grieve in public. Nelson, having already been a celebrity, became something else in death: the upstanding icon of British masculinity – a naval hero. He had died protecting his country from foreign invasion, and his adventures with other people’s wives were hushed up so that only his valour, and not his libido, stood erect atop Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The Nelson brand required whitewashing for the benefit of society. Britain needed its champion; it didn’t need Emma Hamilton.27 As the decades rolled on, his biographers stopped referring to the affair altogether, or decried Emma Hamilton as a terribly judged episode in his life which was best left ignored. She’d risen from working-class sex worker* to diplomat’s wife to celebrity beauty to notorious mistress, but now she cycled back to shameful indignity. Indeed, such was her poor reputation that the painter most associated with her numerous portraits, George Romney, was also posthumously dissed by Victorians appalled at his collaborations with her.28 In the mythologisation process, George Washington was made incapable of lying, and the heroic Horatio Nelson was made incapable of lying with other women. All the while, their real human flaws – one being an unapologetic slave-owner, one a noted philanderer – vanished.
In 1899, the American opera impresario Oscar Hammerstein opened a new venue in New York called The Victoria Theater. He’d had high hopes, even if he’d saved a few bucks by installing second-hand upholstery, but it didn’t go well – all his productions floundered at the box office. By 1904 he’d had to change tack; it now became the successful home of vaudeville acts, and before long his son, Willie Hammerstein, took charge as Oscar went off in search of another challenge. Young Willie, however, didn’t share Daddy’s highbrow instincts. For him, entertainment wasn’t about quality, it was about provoking a reaction. Or, in his own words: ‘anything’s a good act that will make ’em talk!’ And so Willie started booking so-called ‘freak acts’.
Among his most memorable bookings were a squadron of salacious tabloid celebrities who’d literally shot to fame: there was Nan Patterson, a dancing girl who’d got off despite shooting her married lover in a taxi; Florence Carman, who’d allegedly gunned down her husband’s mistress; and the sensational duo Lillian Graham and Ethel Conrad, who’d shot the millionaire socialite W. E. D. Stokes in the leg while possibly attempting to blackmail him.29 As the biographer Marybeth Hamilton has noted, quoting a vaudeville insider: ‘So great did the vogue for female killers and near-killers become, that “every pawnshop gun sold to a woman practically carried the guarantee of a week’s booking”.’30 The most famous of these ‘Shooting Stars’ was the beautiful Evelyn Nesbit, who didn’t wield the pistol herself but was the cause of a murderous feud between her millionaire former lover and her violently unstable trust fund husband. It led to the so-called ‘Trial of the Century’ that flung Nesbit from the frying pan of horror into the burning fire of legal infamy (we’ll cover this horrible story in Chapter 6).31
One hundred years ago, the entertainment industry was carving out space for lurid, lucrative celebs whose brand was pure infamy. Who could resist a tap-dancing murderess singing a cutesy ballad about her beloved? Turns out, the musical Chicago is basically a documentary, but with jazz hands. Theatre historians have treated this moment as something of an outlier; Willie Hammerstein (father of the brilliant songwriter of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame) was an upstart breed of provocateur willing to boot taste and decency out of the window to instead play to the public’s basest instincts. But, in truth, criminals and villains had already been turned into entertainers for at least two centuries, and not always as dark stars whose sinister deeds baffled and transfixed the public. Sometimes they were made into folk heroes, eliciting sympathy from the mob.
If we jump back to the 1720s, following in the wake of Henry Sacheverell’s pioneering celebrity, we find two such controversial characters in London and Paris, respectively. England’s celebrity bad boy was Jack Sheppard, a young carpenter whose passion for boozing and bonking saw him take up burglary to fund his hedonism. Jack wasn’t particularly cunning in evading capture – he had a habit of returning to his favourite haunts like a dog to its own vomit – but he had a magnificent talent for escaping custody. To the astonishment of his jailers, and to the delight of the public, Sheppard managed to break out of prison four times – his final jaunt being an outrageously difficult escape from the secure ‘castle’ in Newgate Gaol, where he’d been doubly cuffed and had his legs chained to the floor.
Perhaps inevitably, this impish rogue became a working-class hero who ‘made such a noise in the town, that it was thought the common people would have gone mad about him, there being not a porter to be had for love nor money, nor getting into an ale-house, for butchers, shoemakers and barbers, all engaged in controversies and wagers about Sheppard’.32 Meanwhile, street musicians were said to have ‘subsisted many days very comfortably upon ballads and letters’ that exploited his newfound fame. Sheppard knew it too. His memoir claims he disguised himself as a beggar, just so he could join in gossiping about himself. This is now the sort of amusingly egocentric prank played by undercover celebs on American chat shows, but in the 1720s, when celebrity was barely fifteen years old, this was top-notch innovation in the art of ironic trolling.
Sheppard never expected fame, he was just a petty criminal who didn’t want to die, but when celebrity transformed him into a rousing folk hero – an apprentice boy sticking it to the man – he cheerfully played along. The finest artists in the kingdom came to draw him, so he gave them his finest pose. Silk-draped aristocracy visited him in his cells, so he charmed their socks off. Depictions of his daring escapes were circulated in pamphlets, and journalists eagerly puffed him with his explicit permission. He was a media sensation who decided to paddle along with the tide.
Plenty of the journalistic material was anonymous, so scholars furiously debate how much of it came from Daniel Defoe’s quill,33 but there’s no doubting the author of Robinson Crusoe made great hay from Sheppard’s illicit adventures, possibly forging Jack’s letter supposedly sent from Australia (it handily namechecked Defoe’s newspaper, which seems an all-too-convenient advert). Defoe also probably ghostwrote Sheppard’s authorised memoir, which Jack – showing tremendous brand awareness when moments from death – loudly promoted while en route to the noose. Oops! Sorry – spoiler alert. Yes, despite his ingenious flair for breaking chains, Sheppard finally copped it in the winter of 1724.
He’d planned his most audacious escape yet, hoping to be cut down from the gallows, carried away, and revived by his friends, but they were thwarted by the vast, jostling mob of an alleged 200,000 onlookers who’d come to stare at the sensational celebrity they’d heard so much about. Ironically, he was unwittingly killed by his own fans. Jack Sheppard’s celebrity burned brighter than an exploding star, and, though he was dead within a year, it continued to glow for decades – even in the nineteenth century, jailbreaks and escapes were described in the press using his name. Having failed to be revived at the gallows, he enjoyed the next best thing: being reanimated as the hero of a nineteenth-century novel by William Harrison Ainsworth.34 But Sheppard’s fictional afterlife was somewhat eclipsed by Ainsworth’s other romanticised miscreant.
In the novel Rookwood, Dick Turpin is an Essex butcher-turned-highwayman who rides from London to York on his horse, Black Bess. In truth, Turpin made no such ride, and owned no such steed. Nor was he a dashing anti-hero. In fact, he was a savage, pock-marked murderer and thief. We might ask why an early-Victorian novelist would choose to glamorise such a vicious thug, and the answer could be as simple as the fact that Turpin, and men like him, were no longer a threat. Ainsworth’s readers in 1834 were starting to take trains, and it would’ve been an idiotically brave highwayman who stood on the tracks and yelled: ‘Stand and deliver!’ at an oncoming battering ram of steam and speed.35 Technological progress had made the world safer: the golden age of piracy was long gone, and the highwayman had been neutralised. Writing about extinct threats was perhaps like shark-diving in the safety of a steel cage. It still got the blood pumping, but the jeopardy was mere simulation. Plus, you know, nostalgia is fun!
I should make it clear that Turpin’s reputation during his life had been somewhat glamorised too. In the 1730s, his crimes were reported with outraged alarm, but so was his fashion sense; thanks to the Whitehall Evening Post we know he favoured an open-laced hat, while his companion rode with gold lacing.36 And he performed the role of showman at his execution, bowing dramatically to the rabble and going to his death with a flourish. So, for all the mindless violence, there lurked a celebrity performer in there somewhere. Turpin understood his role, though perhaps – as the historian Vic Gattrell noted – the terror of death, or the desire to throw one last middle-fingered salute to the authorities, might explain the performative bravado with which men like Turpin met the gallows.37
Another obvious comparison was Edward Teach – better known as Blackbeard the Pirate – whose ingenious instincts for celebrity branding saw him stuff burning fuses into his thick black beard. This was all part of his performance as deranged slaughterer, and he undoubtedly spilled blood along the way – there’s no such thing as pacifist piracy – but he was a cunning tactician who much preferred intimidation over violence; why risk a dangerous sea battle when he could terrify enemy sailors into surrendering without a fight? After a two-year spell rampaging around the Caribbean and making a nuisance of himself with American coastal towns,* he was hunted down in 1718 by the coastguard and, after an exciting battle worthy of a Hollywood popcornfest, had his head sliced off by a British lieutenant. The head was apparently hoisted up on the ship’s rigging and then was displayed back on the mainland, with legend telling that someone fetched it down, plated it in silver, and turned his skull into a gruesome tankard used in a Virginia tavern. Blackbeard lived a celebrity and died as one too.
Despite all these naughty provocateurs, I previously mentioned two heroic villains: one in London, one in Paris. Jack Sheppard was the first, but now we turn to the infamous ‘Cartouche’ (real name Louis Dominique Garthausen, although he was also more famously known as Louis Dominique Bourguignon), whose short life as rambunctious gang-leader was ended when his back was broken on the execution wheel in 1721. His crime? Robbing from the rich to give to the poor. I can hear you gasp excitedly from here: yes, he was a real-life Robin Hood, minus the fannying about in trees and the twanging of longbows. Sadly, his name doesn’t scan properly with ‘riding through the glen’, so we’ll just move on.
Cartouche’s escapes, crimes, and captures were pored over by an obsessive public; his story was immediately dramatised in two plays, one of which proved so successful the police had to shut it down after thirteen performances. But, as with Turpin, we have to ask: why the appeal? Here was a dude rampaging around Paris, spilling blood, and ignoring the basic tenets of property law. Cartouche was a killer. If they’d met him in a dark alley, Cartouche’s fans might have wet their breeches in fear, but, when safely trapped in newspaper ink, he glided across the page like a romantic protagonist in some medieval fantasy. It gave him a fanbase. So why the allure?
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in exploring the power of monsters in popular culture, has argued that – for all their chilling subversion – ‘the monster also attracts. The same creatures who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies.’38 These celebrity stories were enticingly mythic, they allowed the public to experience the poetry of a compelling plot. But highwaymen were also a special breed. To explain their heroic appeal, we might invoke E. P. Thompson’s idea of social crime, meaning an illegal act that feels morally justifiable.39 Cartouche and Sheppard weren’t just threats. To the oppressed members of the lower classes, they were moral bandits, fighting the good fight with necessarily extreme tactics. This was celebrity constructed through heroic defiance.
It’s also intriguing to see just how often British newspapers invoked celebrity criminals as satirical mallets with which to thump those in power, launching into ‘whataboutery’ whenever some petty robber held up a stagecoach by gesticulating wildly not at the pistol-wielding bad guy in the tricorn hat, but at the corruption in government. As Andrea McKenzie notes,40 the low-status baddies were a problem, sure, and they’d hang for their raucous infringements, but the frequent complaints were that the real abuse was happening in Westminster and Whitehall. The real crooks were the politicians.
There were various attempts to downplay the sinister nature of the highwayman, draining his violence of its malice and instead connecting his crime to bigger corruption higher up the food chain. The highwayman was almost noble in his rebellion; an upwardly mobile commoner earning his rakish reputation at the end of a pistol. Violence gave him (or her)* a sort of aristocracy. But the historian Antoine Lilti makes an intriguing alternative suggestion: ‘One might hypothesize that Parisian interest in the figure of Cartouche came less from an acceptance of criminality than from a mix of curiosity and empathy which celebrity aroused … the success of various texts about his life was that they encouraged the feeling that Parisians constituted a public which was interested in the same things at the same time, read the same news, and attended the same plays.’41
This feels like an interesting point, so let’s develop it a little. In Lilti’s words, it’s possible public infatuation with Cartouche wasn’t them just cheering on rule-breaking resistance, but was also proof of an appetite for shared experiences and a sense of belonging to a community of conversation – this is what the philosopher Jürgen Habermas called ‘the public sphere’. Habermas argued that the idea of a general public first arrived in the early 1700s, and was aided by new innovations, like daily newspapers, that allowed people to share information. In his version, the middle-class public now became newly engaged in rational-critical debate about big, important stuff: political news, trade updates, the passage of wars, that sort of thing.
But perhaps Habermas was being a tad highbrow, because, as well as affairs of state, we know the public also devoured affairs of love and hate: celebrity sex scandals, petty feuds, love matches, and, of course, the deeds of famous criminals. Those members of the public who excitedly followed Cartouche’s crimes weren’t necessarily fans, they may simply have found it thrilling to join a citywide, or even nationwide, conversation that bonded them to their fellow citizens. This harmonises nicely with the work of Benedict Anderson, who argued that nations are real political structures built from ‘imagined communities’;42 we’ll never meet all the people in our country, or even in our nearest town, but we can feel profoundly connected to them through shared symbols such as flags, national anthems, languages, jokes, faiths, foods etc. Americans salute the flag, English people moan about the weather – we all have a thing that fuses strangers into groups.
Rather than everyone cheering Cartouche on, then, perhaps his fame was just the eighteenth-century equivalent of what it’s like to be on Twitter when a big scandal breaks. Personally, this is when I get most excited; I always feel compelled to drop what I’m doing and join in, and my heart thumps faster in my chest knowing I’m one of many eager wags desperately trying to fashion a workable pun out of some disgraced transport minister’s surname. Often, I don’t even care about this person, I may only have heard of them that morning, yet still I gobble up the breaking news and delight in taking part in the conversation. Celebrities help us belong; they glue us together. They’re the show ponies that we gather to judge en masse. And criminals have long been fertile topics of communal banter.
But why is that? What’s so interesting about criminals?
In 1775, a beautiful courtesan called Margaret Rudd was accused of forging a bond certificate, using a Captain William Adair’s name, and then asking Robert Perreau to deliver it for her. Perreau suspected a crime, reported it, and blamed Rudd for the whole thing. She initially confessed. Then she changed her mind, and retaliated by blaming him and his twin brother, Daniel, for putting her up to it. Were they wealthy fraudsters, and she a vulnerable woman? Or was she the mastermind, and they her rich stooges? The story generated a massive public response, because this was a proper whodunnit played out under the shadow of the gallows. Death awaited any guilty party. The accused and the excited public frantically waged a media war, publishing letters and adverts apportioning blame and chucking around accusations, as if they were proto-Sherlocks with a sharp eye for evidence.
The case has been carefully explored by Donna T. Andrew and Randall McGowen,43 who show that Rudd was particularly aggressive in her press campaign, complaining that the Perreaus were ‘concerting abominable falsehoods, whereby they hope to blacken my character … How falsely my enemies represented me … how undeservedly I was persecuted and traduced by them.’ But who to believe? Many papers played both sides off against each other, finding profit in the friction. Some were partisan, and launched stinging attacks on their preferred culprit. Every element of the suspects’ lives was up for grabs; their luxurious clothing and taste in furniture were obsessively reported. The case became a cause célèbre, and the trio were thrust into a strange, unwanted celebrity as the nation debated the quality of their character and capacity for cunning.
The Perreau twins hired a top-notch legal team and mounted a strong defence, which made their guilty verdict all the more shocking. Rudd, however, delivered an emotional masterclass in the witness box, convincing the blind judge, Henry Fielding, of her innocence through the fragility of her voice. The newspapers were split, some calling it a triumph for English law, others a terrible miscarriage of justice. With Rudd now off the hook, she might wisely have slunk off to the shadows, at least until the brouhaha was over; instead, she set about living her best, brashest life as the mistress of the obnoxious rake Lord Lyttelton. She flaunted her escape in everyone’s face, wearing her gorgeous frocks around fashionable Bath, and this pissed off pretty much everyone. Soon, the newspapers were almost unanimous in complaining she’d got off on a technicality and that the Perreaus deserved a pardon.
Over the next few months, the rescue campaign escalated. Petitions and letters poured in; people placed bets on a last-minute gesture of clemency, and the press levered every ounce of its influence in trying to save them, reporting with urgent pathos that Robert’s wife and kids had personally begged the royal family for a pardon. But the king was unconvinced. When the fateful day came, 40,000 spectators thronged to watch the Perreaus go to the gallows.
There was a standard rubric to public executions; the condemned were supposed to put on a show of contrition, ask for God’s forgiveness, and die with as much dignity as an asphyxiating, bladder-emptying human could muster. This ritual of atonement lingered from a godlier age when the criminal’s soul was the focus, and spiritual atonement was on offer. However, by the eighteenth century, things had changed. The new popular fascination wasn’t with souls wiped clean of sin, but with the sensational details of the crime: the who, what, when, why, and how. These were the explosive ammunition which ignited a new genre of criminal biography that got tongues wagging. The gathered crowd hadn’t come for a religious experience, they craved human drama. But faith was still meant to be part of that fatal theatre.
The Perreaus, decked out in their finest clothes, protested their innocence to the very end in moving scenes of mournful farewells. It proved shocking. Where was the heavenly confession? Surely guilty men would renounce their crimes in front of God? Was the real female culprit cavorting in some toff’s bed while these two patsies had taken the fall? Executions normally offered up moral absolutism, but it had failed to show up. Instead, their deaths brought only outrageous doubt. The executed twins were now posthumously retitled the ‘unfortunate Perreaus’, and their fame acquired a tragic hue, while Margaret Rudd – once defended by some as an elegant but mousy scapegoat, lured into a plot by nefarious bigwigs – now acquired the scorching epithet of ‘the infamous Mrs Rudd’.
Their respective stories were turned into plays, poems, and songs, but she bore the brunt, being repeatedly depicted as a conniving hussy who’d married the Devil himself – sadly, nobody thought to title anything Ruddy Hell! – and who’d placed her wealth and happiness over the lives of the Perreaus:
First appeared and to conviction swore,
Her smallest crime was that of being Whore;
Adultery she added to her plan,
Defying equally both God and man;
In forgery and perjury owned such art,
She palmed the Gold, while others paid the smart.44
As with Miley Cyrus, Rudd’s celebrity brand was constructed anew: she’d had two conflicting reputations thrust upon her, the wronged woman and the fatal harlot. Oddly, she seems to have enjoyed both, and did what she could to maximise her celebrity by launching a somewhat unsuccessful writing career; she then seduced the famed celebrity-hunter, and biographer of Dr Samuel Johnson, James Boswell. He was irresistibly attracted to her provocative fame, or what he called ‘the universally celebrated … feminine sensation’ of the winter of 1775–6 and ‘the most talked of woman in Great Britain’. But he knew her reputation, noting he was initially as cautious as when opposite a snake ‘that fascinates with the eyes’.45 Boswell knew Mrs Rudd was a man-eating python, but he couldn’t resist her allure. As we heard before, the monster also attracts.
Mrs Rudd had claimed to be a martyr, but was transformed into a demon. Though there was a thrilling sexual frisson attached to her alleged wickedness, which Boswell no doubt enjoyed, she became a controversial celebrity booed in the limelight for years to come, like a pantomime baddie. Her notoriousness was wholly negative, yet it was kinda fun! It seemed to be welcomed, even though it was scandalising. By contrast, Cartouche and Jack Sheppard were edgy and dangerous, they robbed and killed, but they’d exuded a class consciousness that bathed them in the warm light of underdog romance. The public wanted them to get away with it, perhaps because it was exciting to read their exploits, but also because each one of their victories felt like a win for the average Joe; a sharp kick in the shins for the privileged elite.
Criminal heroes also allowed people to vicariously vent their frustrations at a society trapping them in mundane lives. Anthropologists such as Max Gluckman46 have argued for the existence of ‘rituals of rebellion’, or so-called ‘safety valve’ occasions, when rigidly structured societies allow a brief window for booing the priest and chucking rotten fruit at the powerful. These temporary inversions of power, or rather subversions of dignity, briefly allow the shat-upon masses to release their anger, feel better, then go back to normal, allowing the system to carry on unchanged. Later scholars associated this with boisterous carnivals; but might we do it with celebrities? Heroes serve an obvious function – they’re meant to inspire and exemplify shared values, acting as beacons for ideal conduct – but, surprisingly, celebrity villains do the same. In the words of David Schmid: ‘The famous are simultaneously like us and completely other than us, inhabiting a different order of reality that we both desire and resent.’47
Goodies uphold society’s ideals, while baddies act as naughty human carnivals that test ethical boundaries. This idea was first proposed by Emile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, at the turn of the twentieth century. He argued that too much crime is bad, because then you’re living in a Mad Max dystopia with heavily tattooed heavy-metal guitarists strapped to the front of weaponised trucks (okay, he didn’t say that exactly); but, surprisingly, he also said too little crime is bad. What you need, he reckoned, was just the right amount of crime, because crime allows for punishment, and punishment is the process through which society ‘heals the wounds in the collective sentiment’ and reaffirms shared values.48
In Durkheim’s ideology, villains have a function. They’re the provocateurs who find the limits by crossing them. Celebrity often plays this role; through the provocative deeds of the stars, we’re constantly confronting ethical dilemmas about sex, drugs, booze, gender, politics, religion, and the rest. Perhaps the most extreme example is the strangest celebrity villain of them all: the serial killer – the beast who combines shocking horror with alluring mystery to produce the irresistible fascination of the gothic monster. In the words of the criminologist Scott Bonn, celebrity slaughterers, ‘tantalize, terrify, and entertain the public’.49 Rather than celebrity as monster, they are the monster as celebrity; their cold-eyed savagery becomes a baffling puzzle that we obsess over, looking for clues as to why some people are driven to kill.
This is a rationalist, modern approach to human understanding; it’s the realm of forensic psychologists and tense cinematic thrillers. Among us walk those who might be downright evil. But, in the good old days of medieval Catholic theology, it wasn’t a small coterie of nasties you had to watch out for, instead Original Sin handily wrote off the entire human race as evil. Humanity started out damned, and then had to spend a lifetime untarnishing itself with an endless ritual of prayer, holy sacraments, good works, and devout faith. Murder was basically inevitable because of Adam and Eve’s inquisitiveness; their divine punishment came pre-installed in all of us. It’s for this reason that public executions carried that spiritual power of atonement; it wasn’t just about the criminal having their soul wiped clean, it was about reminding the crowd of their own potential for sin. Attending a hanging was supposed to be a warning shot, even if the rowdy party atmosphere often suggested anything but.
But then along came the supposed Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s,* when smooth-chinned liberal philosophers stressed humanity’s ability to master their passions and adopt a rational mentality. Humans were no longer thought to be innately evil, they were products of their upbringing, and could be taught to be good and wise. If they suddenly lost their cool and killed someone, well, it was probably the ‘tempest of the soul’ whipping up the waves of emotion, leading to crimes driven by jealousy, passion, and revenge.
This pristine idea was demolished every time some high-functioning member of society decided to poison his wife or set fire to the kids for no apparent reason. The ‘why?’ of these crimes – what Hercule Poirot might call motive – couldn’t be explained by appeals to logic or passion. Some offences defied explanation. Some people were just, well, evil? In such cases, mystery became horror’s dance partner in the dark ballet of crime. Humanity’s inexplicable capacity for violence became seductively powerful, and this was heightened by a revolution in nineteenth-century journalism that embraced a new tabloid sensationalism obsessed with murder as a genre of titillation.50
In the late 1880s, the vile archetype for the modern serial killer stalked London’s East End, gruesomely murdering at least five women. He was never caught. Initially the newspapers nicknamed him Leather Apron, or the Whitechapel Murderer, but then a taunting letter – beginning with the greeting ‘Dear Boss’ – was sent into the Central News Agency. It was ostensibly written by the killer, and he’d signed it ‘Jack the Ripper’. When the papers got hold of it, a global legend was born. The horrified public was both scared and morbidly fascinated by this tabloid ruckus, and soon a gaggle of shady sorts quickly monetised the buzz: waxwork museums offered horrific reproductions of the mutilated victims, pavement artists drew their contorted bodies, the bloodstained crime scenes were opened up for paying onlookers, newspapers printed bad-taste jokes,* and penny gaff theatres gave visual tours of his rampages, alongside various other famous criminals from history (including Jack Sheppard).51
The Ripper became a lucrative gothic industry. He terrified the Victorian public, and yet compelled them to take a step closer, to pay money for access to his crimes, to bask in the brutality of his atrocities, and consume his evil output as a commercial product. ‘The monster also attracts.’ Today Jack the Ripper is the centrepiece in a London tourist attraction because his sinister brand of transgression still hooks nice, non-murderous people like us, and reels us in, acting as a profound reminder that we live in a society where eviscerating strangers is definitely not okay. Jack the Ripper crossed the line in the most heinous of ways, and some people still find the mystery of his identity incredibly compelling. Personally, I would rather read Hallie Rubenhold’s powerful book, The Five,52 which refocused the story on his victims, challenging old myths and reminding us of their stolen humanity.
Blimey! We ended up in a dark place there, didn’t we? Sorry about that. But it’s important to stress that, though there are obvious differences between the adored and hated – the Grace Darlings and the Mrs Rudds, the George Washingtons and Jack the Rippers – ultimately both heroes and villains were equally shovelled into the steam furnace, to keep society chugging ever forward. It turns out that celebrity and notoriety burn at the same temperature. Serial killers played their public part as much as military generals, while highwaymen and pirates were strangely elevated alongside the more obvious heroines in hospitals and lifeboats.
All of these people had their fame thrust upon them, making them quasars who lacked control of their image, but because their reputations were matters of life and death, or crime and transgression, it’s perhaps tempting to think of them as being different from mere gossip fodder like Brenda Frazier. After all, what did she even do, other than look glamorous and sad? Actually, Frazier may not have battled cholera, won a naval battle, embarked on a crime spree, or slaughtered innocent women, but her existence was significant in helping to define ideas of beauty, health, gender, youth, aspiration, the importance of marriage, the impact of divorce on children, and whether buying stuff could make you happy.
So even the ‘famous for being famous’ have a useful role to play. But hang on a second. I keep using celebrity, and assuming you know what I mean by it, but it took me eight months of head-scratching before I could settle on a definition, and I’ve only given you the briefest of summaries in the introduction. Right, then, hold onto your hats, this is where it gets really tricky, but really interesting …
* Not to be confused with the goofy but handsome actor Brendan Fraser.
* Real name Maury Henry Biddle Paul; he was definitely right to use a pseudonym.
* If so, this would have been statutory rape of a minor under the laws of the time.
* In the space of just two weeks, while I was editing this book in September 2019, the popstars Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Jesy Nelson (Little Mix), Lily Allen, and Paul Cattermole (formerly of S Club 7) all revealed the ways in which being famous had caused them pain, confusion, and financial pressure.
* Parthenope was the ancient Greek name for Naples, Italy, where she was born. Lucky she wasn’t born in Slough, I guess.
* Verney was such an admirer he’d tried to marry Florence first, and was jokingly referred to in Parliament as the ‘Member for Florence Nightingale’.
* No official paperwork corroborates this claim, so it’s a real bone of contention among historians, but the argument usually offered is that Seacole wasn’t selected by the recruiters because of her race. She thought so too, alluding to her ‘yellow’ complexion as a possible reason.
* Its most famous advocates were the Marxist intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.
* Spend a few hours on Twitter during a Saturday afternoon, and you’ll see football fans defending their team’s players against accusations of cheating or dangerous tackles, only to then make identical charges, for identical transgressions, against another team. See also: Politics.
* The term for biographies of Christian saints that turned them into spotless martyrs.
* Probably … the evidence isn’t conclusive, but most historians think so.
* He besieged Charleston probably in the hope of acquiring medicinal mercury to treat the crew’s venereal disease. It would’ve been injected up the urethra with a terrifyingly large syringe. If that wasn’t bad enough, mercury is dangerously toxic.
* We have very little evidence for famous highwaywomen in the 1700s, but they were sometimes written about in folk ballads and fictional pamphlets.
* Some historians get quite tetchy over whether this was ever a thing. I’m ringing the doorbell, leaving it on your doorstep, but running away.
* Dr Bob Nicholson runs a Twitter account sharing Victorian jokes. You can read them at https://twitter.com/DigiVictorian.