"In the Present Famine of Anything Substantial": Fraser's "Portraits" and the Construction of Literary Celebrity; or, "Personality, Personality Is the Appetite of the Age"

From June of 1830 to July of 1838, Fraser's Magazine published nearmonthly portraits of editors, authors, politicians, scientists, explorers, and figures of note, in a series entitled "Fraser's Gallery of Illustrious Literary Characters." Each portrait was a page of text, usually by William Maginn, accompanied by a facing page engraving, usually by Daniel Maclise. The overt purpose of the Gallery was, as Miriam Thrall has noted, to assist "Oliver Yorke," the fictitious editor of Fraser's and Maginn's alter-ego, "in unifying the strangely assorted contents of his magazine."² The new magazine was a departure from the more sedate literary and political reviews and stood out from contemporary periodicals such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Westminster Review, and the Quarterly Review by its engravings and its rowdy satire, if not its politics.³ The Gallery became a focal point for the variegated publication as well as a selling point when people began to anticipate each month's portrait. Since the text always referred to and incorporated the image into its description of the subject, the combined informal, chatty tone of the narration and the elegant line drawings established a characteristic Fraserian voice, not only in tone but also in stance: whom Fraser's chose to describe, adulate, or satirize indicated the magazine's alignments in the political and literary world.

The number of portraits – 81 over eight years – makes it impossible to do justice to them in one article. Moreover, as the appendix shows, the variety of characters makes it difficult to organize the Gallery into one interpretive whole.⁴ My purpose here, therefore, is first to give a general idea of the background and overall breadth of coverage with some examples of patterns of representation, then to focus on Fraser's self-defined role as literary evaluator in a self-perceived literary vacuum of the 1830s in relation to the magazine's Tory politics and its constructions of gender. The 1830s was a particularly volatile time for the interrelation between gender and class because, as critics such as James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman have argued, this "Reform" decade was poised between an aristocratic Regency past and a Victorian middle-class future, rendering gender typing and class markings indeterminate.⁵ Dror Wahrman makes a convincing case that the middle class, at least into the 1830s, was "a powerful construction, politically defined, conditional and malleable, and forwarded to bolster a particular agenda."⁶ Arguably, during this period no static group of people could be defined by appearance, behavior, or values as the middle class. In 1830, Maginn defined the middle classes of society as distinct from the upper (the aristocracy) and lower (the "gipsy") in being subject to the law.⁷ His description of these classes, however, was deliberately vague because they existed to serve as his counter to Bulwer's aristocratic pretensions, not to describe a pre-existing, autonomous group. These middle classes Maginn deemed "heroic" because their voluntary submission to the law "generates the very first of virtues . . . that of self denial" in contrast to the second-generation Byronic dandies, such as Edward Lytton Bulwer.⁸ Bulwer claimed that the novel was an "intellectual libertine," not subject to law, and Maginn used Bulwer's own work to demonstrate that art as well as the civic individual only flourished within the bounds of law and self-imposed limits.⁹ This idea of self-disci-pline as embodied in the personality characterized, in its presence or absence, the Gallery's depiction of appropriate or inappropriate professionalism, and it was a key to Fraser's concept of both the burgeoning profession of writer and a non-Byronic, proto-Victorian celebritydom. An analysis of two groups, the "dandies...