Abstract
This article analyses Dinah Mulock Craik's acute, early appreciation of celebrity culture and articulates how Craik manages her literary persona via a mediated intimacy with her admirers. Credited with first using the word in our modern understanding of the term, Craik's thematic use of celebrity in her novel The Ogilvies (1849) highlights the need for nineteenth-century literary stars to market themselves and not just their work in order to become famous. Herself constructing a persona out of fiction, this essay also excavates Craik's reputation as it develops through her association with her most famous novel, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). It explores how the author successfully creates an identity palatable to middle-class Victorian readers but an identity that does not withstand ideological changes at the fin de siècle, posthumously leaving Craik open to personal critique for the same reasons that she was first so popular.
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