The Diaries [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The diary of William Aliingham (Irish poet, born 1824, died 1889) is much more than a unique collection of notable moments in the company of Victorian celebrities, but it is never less than a humorous and humane noting of how the notables behave, what they say, how they walk, what they wear, what they do, what they are up to and how they get down to it. For the nineteenth century is the age of celebrities, not because there were no such figures before but because at last there was a word for them, accompanied by an urge for them. Celebrity had existed, but not a celebrity: ""concr. A person of celebrity; a celebrated person: a public character.' The Oxford English Dictionary^ within its first example, has the new term mounted within interrogative quotation marks: 1849 MISS MULOCK Did you see any of those'celebrities', as you call them? The next entry has Ralph Waldo Emerson (1856) quizzing English Traits and acknowledging 'one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion'. It is not an empty coincidence but a fiiU-fledged coinciding that both of those nineteenth-century users of 'celebrity', Miss Mulock and Mr Emerson, are alive within the pages of Allingham's diary. It was left to the early twentieth century (and then, in our day, to a comic strip in Private Eye) to cut celebrities down to size: '1913 Lincoln (Nebraska) Daily News-. "Dear Woodrow, you can have your job, / You're welcome to it, too; / I'm glad I'm just a common lob, /An' no celeb, like you".' Celebrities might seem to constitute the world—but it turns out to be only one of the worlds—of the observant Aliingham, who