Sensations of Celebrity:Jack Sheppardand the Mass Audience

Abstract

Literary scholarship has recently begun to recognize the intimate relations between melodrama and modernity. Almost negligent critical dismissal of melodrama, a commonplace of literary scholarship of the last two centuries, has been replaced in recent decades by a strong consensus that this most dominant and ubiquitous form of nineteenthcentury drama played a significant role in shaping, articulating, and contesting changes in social and political relations, as well as in reshaping popular consciousness on the individual level. Most recently, melodramatic form has been interrogated for its formative contribution to modernity’s unique modes of perceptual apprehension: sensations of suspense and of continual change, the thrill—and the threat—of shock, and the more complex formations of urban spectatorship and the cinematic gaze have all been productively linked to melodramatic pre-formations. In the recent work of Tom Gunning, Elaine Hadley, Vanessa Schwartz, Ben Singer, and other scholars, melodrama, as much as the feuilleton or the detective story, has emerged as an exemplary literary mode of Benjaminian modernity. However, a closer look at much of this work reveals two very different, and in fact discontinuous, constructions of melodrama. On the one hand, a strong body of recent scholarship has explored early melodrama’s relationship to what might be described as political modernity. Focusing primarily upon the century’s opening three decades, such work investigates the manner in which melodrama articulates the anxieties and emergent class relations of the postrevolutionary world. Derived largely from Peter Brooks’s foundational study of the “melodramatic imagination,” such scholarship conceives of modernity in terms of the historical relation—articulated in the decades after 1789—between radical institutional upheavals (such as