18th Century Dead People Were Our 1st Celebrities

So states Robin Lloyd in a piece on Live Science. The story discusses how obituary reading gave rise to our modern celebrity fixation.

From the piece...

The modern obsession with celebrity started in 18th-century Britain with obituaries of unusual people published in what served as the gossip sheets of the era, an English literature scholar says.

Some researchers think the phenomenon of celebrity was born with the 19th-century Romantic movement in art, music and literature (think of works by Chopin (his grave is pictured above), J.M.W. Turner and Edgar Allen Poe). Instead, Elizabeth Barry of the University of Warwick in England claims the modern public fascination with celebrities can be traced back to the rise of newspapers and magazines and the popularity of the obituaries in the 18th century.

"Different kinds of deaths came to be commemorated and you didn't have to be something like a military hero or be a political player or be some sort of high person in society to get public commemoration on your death," Barry told LiveScience. "I was interested in looking at that process."

Obituaries were one of the most-read sections of newspapers and magazines of the 1700s. They were intended to provide an account of the life of someone who had recently died as a way of illustrating how the life you led would be rewarded or punished in death.