"Poor Ralph ... rarely enjoyed the pleasure of buttonholing a celebrity; a state of things which appeared to Miss Stackpole to indicate a deplorable want of enterprise."
HJ, Portrait of a Lady.
Ah, so chasing celebrities is nothing new. I wonder what these Victorian celebrities did to acquire their status? Spent time in the Big Brother workhouse? Killed Zulus in a dashing manner? Played a nice tune on the grinding organ? And, without TV, how did anyone know they'd done it? Did they read about it in the newspapers? "Miss Aimless Airhead sang an enchanting sentimental ballad. She said it was her jream."
Any ideas?
FTSE100 | September 5, 2009 - 08:19
I bet Ewan is checking the publication date of Portrait of a Lady (1881) against the date of the Zulu wars (1879). ;) Even in the most frivolous of threads we can't dispense with accuracy. Unless we want to.
Lord Chelmsford was a good Essex lad, friend of Jamie Oliver Cromwell.
Ewan | September 5, 2009 - 08:22
Not today, fresh out of ideas.
Late Victorian? Maybe they were caricatured and lampooned in Punch. In the library at my school, we had bound editions of Punch by year, from 1890 to about 1936. I used to read them... clearly I'm damaged for all time.
Ewan | September 5, 2009 - 08:25
Nope, didn't check that at all.
You forget I was at skule a long time ago; that beastly Molesworth was my fag and I used to fill Flashman's pipe.
FTSE100 | September 5, 2009 - 08:29
I loved Punch too. Alan Coren was the last great editor, after that it went to the doggies. The later 'modernised' version missed the whole point of Punch, the amount of strange stuff you could find tucked away in odd corners where even the editors had forgotten they put it.
FTSE100 | September 14, 2009 - 14:30
And they had stalkers!
"Perhaps you don't know how he [Warburton] has been stalked."
Maybe they had Twitter too - sending hourly update telegrams to each other.