ABSTRACT

The ‘Josephine Machine’ – producing celebrity During the course of the nineteenth century, celebrity society was industrialized along with the rest of social life. Populations grew and urbanized enormously; in the United States, the population grew from 5 to 76 million between 1800 and 1900; in England, it went from 10 to 38 million. The growth was especially marked in the cities – Berlin, for example, doubled in size from one to two million between 1875 and 1905. As populations grew and towns and cities expanded, so too did audiences for all forms of entertainment – advances in stage technology and better costuming made theatre more spectacular, guided in Britain by a new generation of highly successful actor-managers including Stephen Kemble (1758-1822), Elizabeth Satchell (1763-1841), Eliza Vestris (1797-1856), Charles Kean (181168), Henry Irving (1838-1905) and Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917). The development of railways, steamships and the telegraph made the rapid transfer of information and news possible, and the demand for news was insatiable. Printing presses became faster and more productive to match the growing size of the readership. The Times was fi rst printed with steam-driven printing presses in 1814, and, in 1833, the rotary printing press was introduced in the United States, capable of printing millions of copies of newspapers per day. The growth of newspapers was spectacular: the New York Sun was founded in 1833 and sold 3000 copies that year; by 1838 it was selling 30,000.