ABSTRACT
The now ubiquitous celebrity interview first emerged in Britain in the 1870s as a recognizable form, having been first developed in America, then popularized by Edmund Yates in Britain in a series called “Celebrities at Home” (1877-79) which appeared in his weekly newspaper the World (Salmon 166). Called by one late nineteenth-century reviewer “a characteristic product of the present era,” the celebrity interview, and in particular the author interview, exists as one of the manifestations of the New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s (Rev. of Notable 545). Begun initially as a feature in newspapers and magazines aimed at general readers, by the early 1890s author interviews appear in most, if not all, periodicals, including those with a literary focus such as the Bookman, the Idler, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Strand, and Tinsley’s Magazine (later, the Novel Review).1 Richard Salmon identifies the celebrity interview of the late nineteenth century as a specific hermeneutic practice, “a medium through which both the journalist and the reader might hope to discover the authentic ‘nature’ of famous individuals” (162). But this “fantasy of power” was an illusion, not only between the relative roles of the interviewer and the interviewee, but also within the larger cultural constructions of Victorian celebrity, gender, and authorship. The interview, despite the intentions or methods of the journalists who practiced it, was never a neutral or objective activity.
