Tom Mole, ed. Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ISBN: 9780521884778. Price: US$98.00

Mole’s edited volume joins a number of recent monographs in addressing the conjunction of British Romanticism and celebrity, including Mole’s own Byron’s Romantic Celebrity (Palgrave, 2007), Ghislaine McDayter’s Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture (SUNY Press, 2009), David Higgins’s Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity, Politics (Routledge, 2005), Claire Brock’s The Feminization of Fame, 1750-1830 (Palgrave, 2006) and my own Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Literary Celebrity (Palgrave, 2009). Celebrity owes its current rising visibility as a topic of Romantic studies in part to several developments in the field over the past few decades: the interest in a public or social Romanticism; the interest in the material forms of print culture; the interest in affect and emotion as social and public forms; and the renewed vigor of reception studies. The essays in this volume contribute usefully to each of these domains, attending variously to the marketing and “branding” of names and personalities; to the formation of audiences and the consumption of culture; to the celebration and commemoration of famous persons and events; and to the often politicized, gender- and class-inflected public discourse of fame itself. The basic thesis organizing the volume is that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witness the emergence of a modern celebrity culture through what Mole describes as a “slow, diffuse, but significant shift in the nature of fame” (2). Modern celebrity culture emerges, on this account, sometime over the period 1750-1850, as apparently ephemeral, commercialized, sensationalized, and mass-mediated forms of distinction monopolize public attention. Though Mole is wise to avoid trying to locate a single key turning point for this shift (like the “Byromania” of McDayter’s argument), the introduction and many of the essays would benefit from a clearer delineation of just what distinguishes celebrity from other forms of fame, or just what distinguishes the celebrity culture of earlier periods—say, that of the early eighteenth century—from Romantic-era celebrity. Particularly welcome is the volume’s stated emphasis on celebrity as a “multimedia phenomenon whose cultural pervasiveness — in literature and the theatre, music and visual culture, fashion and boxing — overflows modern disciplinary boundaries and requires scholars with different areas of expertise to collaborate” (2). Together and individually, these essays nicely track the exchanges among distinct cultural locations, with especially rewarding explanations of the interaction of live performance and printed accounts in the marketing and consumption of names, personalities, and artistic works. A standout in this regard is Walton’s witty and marvelously detailed essay on Gioachino Rossini’s 1824 visit to England. The popularity of Rossini’s music, combined with sensationalistic advance press and the persistent ideal of expressive “genius,” led English audiences to expect a far more seductive and energetic personality than the “short fat figure” dragged on stage (in the London Magazine’s report) at the composer’s first London appearance (87). Walton’s essay traces the ways in which, across a series of benefit concerts and command performances that year, Rossini and his audiences negotiate expectations about “how a celebrity composer ought to look and behave”—expectations that involve the competing self-regard of audience and composer, and a complex of anxieties about class, culture, money, and nationality (87). Taking the stage as a singer, Rossini seems to play up a role as celebrity entertainer that his reviewers contrast to the already “classical” status of Mozart. Persuasively reconstructing the complex play of looking and listening shaping the encounters between Rossini and his English publics, Walton’s essay contributes not only to our understanding of the canonization of musical styles but also to the cultural history of musical performance and reception more generally. Power struggles between celebrities and audiences …