The Original Celebrity Death-Match? Hmmm...we'll see.

So, going back to week 5, a week which I failed to blog on, I am staying within the vein of sociology for this week’s blog...sociology in a more cultural-studies area...and cultural studies in the area of celebrity studies. And with that said, I would like to share that I am currently at the point in my research where it is looking like OTHER literary figures besides Mark Twain maybe were modern-style celebrities before him...namely the British poet Lord Byron, a.k.a George Gordon Byron a.k.a. the 6th baron of Rochdale, a.k.a the original British Heartthrob.

...this project may pan out to be the original celebrity death-match of Lord Byron v. Mark Twain. We’ll shall see.

So my main question right now is...What defines a modern celebrity? Of which I have checked out 6 books from the library on and intend to study over the weekend. But this week I looked at the...

Similarities between the careers of Twain and Byron! Here are some of my findings.

The poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which was Based on Byron’s world travels, was what launched him into fame. This is much like how Mark Twain’s travelogue/novel The Innocents Abroad greatly broadened his fame.

Also the self portraiture in their work is similar. Twain and Byron basically wrote themselves into their stories and poems (not always completely non-fictionally)––and once readers fell in love with them as characters, they fell in love with them as authors and real people. Ghislane McDayter in his book (at I think it would be “his”––“Ghislane” is a male name, right? OR am I just a sexist for assuming so?) Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, he writes that “Byron “survives in the valley of his saying” precisely because of his reluctance to create a recognizable divide between his life in history and his life in art.” This is almost EXACTLY how Twain operated––so much so that his literary executioner, Albert Bigelow Paine, claimed that when Twain was nearing death, his dictation of his life for his autobiography was completely in anecdotal form, and Twain himself could not (or would not) discern between what actually happened and what made great stories.

The argument/goal of the book makes it seem like a very worthwhile resource for me: “What this book will argue is not that Byron created celebrity but rather that his fame provides an ideal test case for examining the complex matrix of forces of what lead to what we now think of as celebrity.”...which is kind of how I would like to phrase what I’m doing in the case of Twain.

Both Twain and Byron have been named the “literary lion” or just the “lion” of their day by fans.

Both Twain and Byron had work (well, in Twain’s case it was more like quotations) that was attributed to them, but was not actually made by them...which could constitute as the early makings of celebrity gossip, couldn’t it?

Their work came out during the 19th century, with Byron near the beginning and Twain near the end, when the world was undergoing colossal political and industrial changes––much of which was driven by the evolution/modernization of printing. They used the technology to their benefit. Books became a commodity of the masses.

More on Byron:

Byron’s readers and fans went too far in admiring him when they took to making false books and poems (essentially, the first documented case of fan-fiction) and then published and sold them under his name. Copyright law at the time (which first was established about a century before) by the Statute of Anne in 1710) . And this, as one could imagine, ruined Byron’s already questionable reputation.

My friend, Ghislaine, makes the point that the same republican tendency that started the French revolution was the same that created the democratization of readership, and hence the literary mob/cult following of Byron. In his forming of a never-before-seen huge democratic readership, Byron eventually was overthrown by his fans.


MORE TO COME THIS WEEKEND! YAY.