Category: 19th Century

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Celebrity Death Hoaxes

Have a drink with: Tom Petty
Into the great wide open…

Ask him about: Not backing down.

Skeleton hand: celebrity death hoaxes

Tom Petty recently achieved the feat, as far as the press was concerned, of dying twice in a single day.

On Monday, October 2, news outlets began reporting in the afternoon that Petty had died following a cardiac incident at his California home, following a CBS News breaking news item declaring the singer dead. Only a few hours later, amidst a social media explosion of remorse and YouTube videos, did the news squeak out that announcements of Petty’s death may, in fact, have been premature. The Los Angeles Police Department, which had been CBS’ source in breaking the news, shortly clarified that it could not in fact confirm Mr. Petty’s death, noting on Twitter: “The LAPD has no investigative role in this matter. We apologize for any inconvenience in this reporting.”

It isn’t the first time death has seemed less than final in the realm of celebrity.

Modern media culture is full of conspiracy-laden, media friendly death theories: Babe Ruth and Frank Sinatra died on the same day in 1945! Why do you think Paul McCartney’s barefoot on the Abbey Road cover? Elvis faked his death and is living under witness protection! Abe Vigoda didn’t just miss a wrap party during the 1980s, he opted out ENTIRELY. (Sorry, that’s during the 90s.) (Oughts?) (Check the website.)

Are celebrity death hoaxes an unpleasant, if inevitable, modern consequence of the Internet’s viral credibility problem?

Nope. The gleeful anticipation of celebrity deaths as mass mourning events is a particularly tawdry offshoot of modern mass media culture. But the phenomenon isn’t new. Since the 1800s, death hoaxes and premature obituaries have punctuated American history (and yes, American – we seem to specialize in both death obsession and gullibility).

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19th Century

Daniel Sickles

Have a drink with: Daniel Sickles
Once I was the King of Spain…

Ask him about: What’s the name of his other leg?

Daniel Sickles

Daniel Sickles sat weeping in a Washington, D.C. jail in 1859. The young, charismatic New York Congressman was an up-and-coming star in American politics – a favorite of President James Buchanan, in fact – and he was sitting in a dirty jail cell, heartbroken and awaiting trial for murdering his wife’s lover.

But before you feel too sorry for him, consider this: Daniel Sickles was a tool. How much of a tool?

He robbed the mail to take a political adversary’s advertisements out of circulation.

He was indicted for various financial schemes, including selling fake news subscriptions so he could drink the $1,000 profit at an upscale bar.

He took campaign contributions from his favorite prostitute, whom he also brought along as his companion and introduced to Queen Victoria while on assignment as James Buchanan’s secretary in London. While his pregnant wife was at home.

Whom he’d seduced, knocked up and married when she was sixteen.

After sleeping with her mother.

So his jailhouse blubbering is really a matter of the pot calling the kettle slutty, but you can thank Sickles for creating something we still use today: temporary insanity.

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19th Century

Abdul Karim

Have a drink with: Abdul Karim
The jewel in the Crown

Ask him about: Royal language lessons

Abdul Karim and Victoria

The movie Victoria and Abdul portrays the relationship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, a young Indian man assigned to her service in the late 1880s. Karim, originally a clerk from Agra, India, came to Victoria’s service during her Golden Jubilee in 1887. He became a favorite friend and confidante, acting as the Queen’s Urdu language teacher and Indian secretary, much to the frustrated jealousy of the royal household.

Victoria had a complicated relationship with India: on the one hand, she was fascinated with and fetishized all things Indian – learning Urdu, bringing curries onto the regular dining rotation at the palace, and decorating an entire lavish chamber at her Osborne House with Indian arts and architecture (including a lavish portrait of Karim himself, alongside paintings of Indian craftspeople). On the other hand, the allure doesn’t change the fact that she was the ruler of a forcibly and uncomfortably subdued nation of people whose welfare wasn’t permitted to muddle the interior decorating. It’s hard to know for sure whether Abdul Karim was a proxy for Victoria’s general fascination with exotic India; a genuine friend who provided the added benefit of making her stiff-necked family crazy; a subservient target for the Queen’s romantic or maternal impulses; or something else entirely.

Nor is the movie the first time Western voices have been the ones to comment on Abdul Karim’s story, or his status as what writer Bilal Qureshi called “Manic Pixie Dream Brownie.” Karim was no stranger to news media at the time, and American papers particularly covered the fact of his employment with condescending, starchy amusement – like, look at the Queen learning the funny Eastern language! She has an Indian tutor! Just a few of the winning clippings:

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19th Century

Madame Tussaud

Have a drink with: Marie Tussaud
Utility, amusement, severed heads.

Ask her about: working motherhood

Looking forward to Halloween, I’m at Atlas Obscura today writing about Madame Marie Tussaud, the 19th century entertainer and artist who got her start making death masks of decapitated French revolutionaries. Marie left France at forty years old, with her toddler and a bag of wax heads in tow, ready to bet on a new life (one that did not include her husband, who she’d as soon have smacked with a two-by-four). She knew that the public loved two things – royal tabloid news and bloody Victorian crime – and she gladly obliged with newer and better attractions every year, parading a collection of wax notables around England and Scotland for twenty years before settling in a sprawling London gallery. She died in 1850 with credit for Britain’s most popular tourist attraction, an institution that in intervening years has given rise to a collection of two dozen global wax museums.

Click over to Atlas Obscura to read the whole story. Meanwhile…

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19th Century

Gilbert Stuart

Have a drink with: Gilbert Stuart
“The one dollar bill.”

Ask him about: Chinese knockoffs

In August of this year, news outlets reported that the White House opened the door for the United States Trade Representative (an executive agency that advises on global trade policy) to conduct an investigation of potential Chinese intellectual property abuses. Citing the possibility of significant harm to American interests in the research-intensive technology sector, the President’s memorandum requested examination of laws, policies or practices that may be unreasonable or discriminatory and that may be harming American intellectual property rights, innovation, or technology development.”

China has long been regarded as particularly flexible in the intellectual property space, with one commentator calling local law and practice a “decades-long assault on the intellectual property of the United States and its allies.”

Nor is this a recent development, only relevant to modern topics like copycats, trade secret theft and brand piracy – Gilbert Stuart, who painted the iconic dollar-bill likeness of George Washington we spend every day (making him the most-reproduced artist ever) was the subject of something a lot of modern artists would find disappointingly familiar: unauthorized foreign knockoffs of his work. In 1802 Stuart, frustrated with an opportunist dealer shipping his works off to China for reproduction, went to Pennsylvania court to claim his copyright and seek an injunction.

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19th Century

James Barry

Have a drink with: Dr. James Barry
Poodle enthusiast, dandy, ace physician

Ask them about: trans soldiers

James Barry MD

On July 26, President Trump announced a ban on transgender military service, citing the unsubstantiated likelihood that trans soldiers would subject the military to increased medical costs and an unacceptable degree of “disruption.” LGBT rights groups have since filed suit.

For proof that military accomplishment and gender fluidity readily walk hand in hand, we can look to James Barry, a 19th century military surgeon in the British Army who, unbeknownst to nearly everyone in his life, had been born Margaret Ann Bulkeley.

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19th Century

The Astor Place Riot

Have a drink with: Edwin Forrest & William Charles Macready
The play’s the thing…

Ask them about: Dead sheep as theater criticism

Astor Place Riot

The New York Public Theater’s recent production of Julius Casear, in which the emperor bears a striking and not unintentional resemblance to Donald Trump, was hounded by controversy throughout its run. On June 16th, the performance was interrupted by protestors after Caesar’s assassination scene, with a right-wing activist climbing onstage to call attention to the “political violence” of the production.

This is not the first time American theater – or American Shakespeare performance, for that matter – has been a forum for bitter fighting over contemporary politics. When actors rallied near Manhattan’s Astor Place in support of the Public Theater shortly after the contested performance, it was no doubt with some specific history in mind: namely, the Astor Place Riot of 1849, in which a nasty feud between Shakespearean actors led to an actual battle between New York’s elite and a burgeoning nativist movement.

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19th Century

Tom Thumb Weddings

Have a drink with: General & Mrs. Tom Thumb
Tiny wedding of the century!

Ask them about: Will there be ice cream?

Tom Thumb Weddings

I’m over at Atlas Obscura today writing about the Tom Thumb wedding, an American dramatic tradition in which kids put on elaborate, supremely awkward mock weddings for paying audiences. These plays began in the 19th century as a wink and a nod to the “Fairy Wedding” of celebrity little people Charles Stratton (aka “General Tom Thumb”) and Lavinia Warren, and have been undertaken through history as a fundraiser, a crash course in etiquette and promises, or presumably simply so adults could enjoy their children’s embarrassment over cocktails. Click over to Atlas Obscura for more.

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19th Century

The Zoo Hoax

Have a drink at: The Central Park Zoo
Gordon Bennett!

Ask about: Does the gift shop sell firearms?

Highly partisan news engineered to manipulate media and line the owners’ pockets has become particularly virulent in current politics – and, thanks to the wackadoo likes of Alex Jones, highly visible as well – but it is not the first time this has happened. Manufacturing news whole cloth – for personal gain, sensationalism, manipulation or pure amusement – is nothing new. The New York Herald, under the 19th century management of James Gordon Bennett, Jr., was a regular exercise in information manipulation and partisan journalism. And if you think the gay frogs were a bad trip, just consider the rhinoceros that wrecked Manhattan.

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19th Century

James Marsh

Have a drink with: James Marsh
Maybe pass on the coffee, though…

Ask him about: Arsenic and old cases

The Marsh Test & arsenic poisoning

In case you missed, it, I recently wrote at Atlas Obscura about 19th century efforts to take the threat and mystery out of arsenic poisoning, until then one of the most frequent and stealthy means of getting rid of that one person in your life who really can’t take a friggin’ hint. The development of the Marsh Test in the early 1800s meant that suddenly there was a precise, scientific means of figuring out whether someone had been knocked off with history’s own real-life version of iocane powder. Read on:

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