Brushes with fame: Thackeray and the work of celebrity

A characteristic moment within the novels and sketches of William Makepeace Thackeray--a sudden collision with a famous individual--points us to Thack eray's place within the gradual formation in mid-Victorian society of the c ategory of the celebrity, a category unmoored from the political or aristoc ratic underpinnings of older forms of public notoriety, and increasingly de pendent upon mechanisms of journalistic publicity. This more indiscriminate category is visible in the way that characters from Pendennis (1848-50). T he Newcomer (1853-1855) and a number of Thackeray's sketches intersect with an absolute form of fame, one capable of bridging the narrower notability of different social worlds into a totalizing recognizability. Thackeray's r uminations upon this new figure betray the characteristic dynamics of celeb rity culture: his journalistic knowingness, adept at puncturing the aura of various celebrities, is matched with his dismay at invasion of heretofore private spheres. The private sphere, however, metamorphoses in Thackeray's writings into a mass consciousness in which pivotal moments of private biog raphy can only be recalled and contextualized through their coalescence wit h public facts about the famous; for this mass consciousness, memory itself is increasingly susceptible to shaping by a public realm of publicity, and fictional 'reality' itself increasingly relies upon the coloration of cele brity to achieve its intended referential effects.