The celebrity of anonymity and the anonymity of celebrity: picture identification and nineteenth-century British authorship

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the spaces between the words and images of various forms of picture identification (portraits, cartes de visite, and early cinema) navigated the space between anonymity and identification to construct British writers as celebrities during the long nineteenth century. Literary authors in that period did not become celebrities by words alone, but through intersemiotic relations between words and images. These relations varied across technologies and ideologies, sometimes collaborating, sometimes vying for dominance, and sometimes contradicting each other. These relations complicate and challenge late twentieth-century theories of authorship as well as illuminating nineteenth-century dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• authorship
• celebrity
• picture identification
• intersemiotic relations
• portraiture
• early cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ‘long nineteenth century’, as defined by the renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm, was the period between 1789 and 1914. See Hobsbawm (1962, 1975, 1987).

2. In 1788, the editors of the Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living also assessed that ‘The world is now better disposed to do justice to living merit’ (Anon 1788, p. iv; see Ives 2012, p. 1).

3. Each entry begins on a new page 1.

4. Intersemiotic refers to a translation or exchange between two different types of media (Banting 1995, p. 11).

5. Dickens only picture-identified himself within his fiction once: subsequently, he returned to convention, allowing frontispieces representing characters to face the title page.

6. See Blodgett (1979) for the technical specifications of cartes de visite.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kamilla Elliott

Kamilla Elliott is Professor of Literature and Media in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK. Her principal teaching and research interests lie in relations between British literature of the long nineteenth century and other media. Author of Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764–1835 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), she is currently working on sequels to both: Rethinking the Adaptation/Theorization Debate and British Literature and the Rise of Picture Identification, 1836–1918.