Fred Inglis on The Cult of Celebrity

Tell me about your first book, Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz.

Clifford Geertz is a much travelled American, who is probably the greatest anthropologist of the last 60 or 70 years. Local Knowledge, as the title tells you, is based on the insistence that life is lived locally and that you find culture in action locally. Attempts to generalise right across the world are going to mislead you. In his book there are two or three essays which I had by me as my working intellectual tool kit when I was writing my book on celebrities. For example, there is one where he is talking about the use of charisma. Of course, when I was writing my book the notion of charisma is much evoked.

What I think Geertz brings out so vividly is that whatever charisma is it attaches itself not just to individuals but to people with a particular social position. In his book he quotes the saying about a duchess never being more than 100 yards from her carriage because you need a carriage in order to qualify as a duchess! He then turns from this to the study of kingship and the ways in which the great monarchs of former history established their rule by being intensely visible in a series of processions and displays.

He is good at distinguishing between the idea of celebrity and that of renown. People in pre-modern societies were renowned partly by virtue of their position – as the monarch was – and partly by virtue of their accomplishments. But celebrity is a different sort of creature when it comes along in the middle of the 18th century. Celebrities are no doubt connected with what they have done. They are also defined by the way in which they are seen and what they are made into by their audiences, and that distinction is one I analysed throughout my book.

Your next book leads on from that, and is The Pleasures of the Imagination by John Brewer.

Yes, if we hitch these two books together then you get some idea of why my own book starts off in the middle of the 18th century. One of the things that Geertz notes is that the people of renown he was looking at from eras like Elizabethan England and the pre-modern monarchs of the North African 18th century all act as from the sacred importance of the court and the glow it gives off.

What happens in England in the 18th century is that the first modern city is established – the City of London – and it replaces the court as the centre of social significance. One of its main new purposes was the organisation and industrialisation of leisure and the classification of fame. The celebrity as we begin to understand it turns up on the streets of London in the middle of the 18th century. And this is something that John Brewer’s book is very good at illustrating.

He talks about the great celebrities of the day like the painter Joshua Reynolds, who set out to become famous and threw enormous parties in his great house in Leicester Square precisely so that they would be talked about. So already you can see the parallels with today’s celebrities. But it was not just a matter of courting fame – these people were genuinely talented. And there were these new groups of people who, in terms of their accomplishments, formed little clubs and were known to be forming them because of their fame. For example, you have the writer Doctor Johnson’s club, and the people who attended that were themselves accomplished writers, scholars and intellectuals.

And of course one of the most famous people on the scene at the time was the Prince of Wales, the heir to the throne, and this is the point at which the royal family in Britain begins to become the subject of intense gossip. The Prince of Wales conducted a very conspicuous affair, and pretty much built Brighton Pavilion so he could do this a little way out of London!

Your next book is set in 19th-century Paris, T J Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life.

The second stage of my history of celebrity focuses on Paris at this time. A new kind of phenomenon is beginning to declare itself, which is the process whereby the fashion industry becomes industrialised and the whole novel notion of glamour attaches itself to people who are known and recognised. T J Clark wrote his wonderful book to study how the great painters of the day, people like Manet, Renoir and Redon, depicted the new, very appearance-conscious life of the city. The Impressionists took off at that time because people of the day aspired to public self-display and therefore, as we understand it, celebrity.

Some of Manet’s best paintings mark out the coincidence of the new fashion and the new self-displaying class. In his painting of the garden at Tuileries the people portrayed were almost all his friends and acquaintances. Manet himself is also in the picture and you can see that people are in the latest fashions. Clark’s wonderful book traces those processes through the paintings. And at the same time he follows up what Brewer was talking about in Pleasures of the Imagination, which is a new type of leisured life, especially in rather shady bars which hovered on the edge of ordinary drinking bars, dance halls and bordellos.

Manet’s famous picture of the girl at the bar of the Folies Bergère shows in the mirror behind the bar the whole scene in the theatre.