ABSTRACT
According to Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Eliott, the baronet in Persuasion (1818) whose favorite pastime is looking himself up in the book of minor blue bloods, the early nineteenth-century equivalent of Googling oneself, “a Mr. (save, perhaps, some half dozen in the nation) always needs a note of explanation” (26). The line speaks to the ways emergent plebian modes of high regard trade on the incredibility of and incredibility with older, aristocratic forms. Clearly, the irony is that it’s the baronet who needs the note of explanation. He’s already a relic in his own time. Not only is this is true because “common” names are already circulating with reputations preceding them but also because his sense of aristocrat renown is hollowed out, requiring literary support by recourse to reference books.1 By the close of the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of being known for known-ness (to cite Boorstin’s phrase yet again) is vast, and today, in the early twenty-first century, on this very day the signs are everywhere that celebrity is-not a but-the ubiquitous marker of cultural value.
