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3 - Spectacular Objects

Criminal Celebrity and the Newgate School

from Part II - Demotic Celebrities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

Lauren Gillingham
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa
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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 Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Spectacular Objects
  • Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa
  • Book: Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.006
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  • Spectacular Objects
  • Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa
  • Book: Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.006
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Spectacular Objects
  • Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa
  • Book: Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009296540.006
Available formats
×