Book contents
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- 3 Spectacular Objects
- 4 After Criminality
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
3 - Spectacular Objects
Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School
from Part II - Demotic Celebrities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- 3 Spectacular Objects
- 4 After Criminality
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023