“Celebrity” meaning being famous may have been invented by the 14th century poet Chaucer in his translation of a late Latin poem. It wouldn’t surprise me because he chose the same work to invent the word “twitter”.
Fame lasts until you are forgotten. Celebrity is more ephemeral and a bit too popular, summed up well in Matthew Arnold’s 1861 observation that while Spinoza’s successors may have had “celebrity”, Spinoza had “fame”.
“Celebrity” did not become a person until the 19th century. The OED gives an early use by a literary journal in 1831 of “mayors, and notaries, and village celebrities”. Like Arnold 30 years later, a bit of a sneer.
The point at which a famous person became a “celebrity” instead of, say, a “fame”, is not clear.
On 10 November 1871, the Daily Spy from Worcester, Massachussets was in old mode, referring to “Mr Samuel L Clemens, the ‘Mark Twain’ of celebrity as a humorous writer”.
Twain was the exemplar of the celebrity circuit. In an age before film and satellite, infotainment was sold in halls and theatres and Twain had the magic combination of product and spiel.
Also on 10 November 1871, a future famous author was born. Indeed, in the 1890s he would make his name with a novel with the title and main character “The Celebrity”. His name was Winston Churchill.
The difficulty was that there was another celebrity Winston Churchill, a mere three years younger and at least half-American. He had made his own name as a war correspondent and had just been elected an English member of parliament. Needing money, he joined the US circuit.
The two Churchills famously met in 1900 in Boston, in the Englishman’s rooms in the recently built Hotel Touraine. The Englishman complained about getting his mail while in the States, and the American shared his same experience when he had stayed at Brown’s Hotel in London.
The American Churchill would become interested in progressive politics and became friends with Theodore Roosevelt, who had also been a guest of Brown’s Hotel while in London.
The English Churchill’s experience was very different. He had dined with Roosevelt in New York a fortnight before he met the American Churchill, and Roosevelt took against the upstart immediately. Why he did has been a matter of some speculation but for current purposes we can conjecture that Roosevelt later recognised a need to make sure he was talking about the right Churchill. He wrote a couple of years later “I saw the Englishman, Winston Churchill here, and although he is not an attractive fellow, I was interested in some of the things he said.”
When the English Churchill met the American Churchill, his own novel – and his only novel – had just had its US publication. In another of the many articles on the two Churchills, the Meriden Daily Journal remarked:
… [he] ought to be admirably equipped to write the great war novel of the future, if too much fighting does not dull his imagination.
He was, he did, it didn’t. Just as well he got on better with Teddy’s cousin.
