3 - Spectacular Objects

Summary

Chapter 3 contends that the crime novels of the Newgate school stage the emergence of novelty, spectacle, and celebrity in the everyday lives of the low-born and ordinary. Newgate novels of the 1830s and 1840s examine how, in an emergent mass media culture, notorious figures and extraordinary actions reverberate through the collective consciousness. I argue that Newgate novelists develop a notion of demotic celebrity, showing how the criminal’s talents and achievements might capture the public’s imagination and bring celebrity within reach of insignificant individuals. Reading W. H. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) in relation to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–38), the chapter shows that the criminal in these novels is a figure aware of his own visibility and conscious of how best to present himself to an audience. The Newgate novels interest in the production of celebrity reflects the permeation of fashion’s logics of contingency and spectacle into quotidian experience across the social spectrum.