Pleasures of the Imagination

"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!"