You're Dead to Me - The History of Fandom, 1700-1900 (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Corin Throsby and Stuart Goldsmith to look at early cultural fandom in the 18th and 19th centuries. Although many consider Beatlemania to be the start of what is now considered fan culture, Greg and his guests consider some much earlier and often hilarious examples of the birth of fandom. This episode was recorded live at the 2022 Hay Festival.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Abi Paterson

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. In 1872, the Marie Celeste was found adrift in the Atlantic. Every person on board was gone, and none of them were ever seen again. Every Monday on Hidden History, Dr. Harini Bhatt takes an unexplained event from history, just like that one, reads the evidence like a case file, and tells you what she thinks happened. No hedging. Start with the Mary Celeste episode for a look. at one of history's most enduring maritime enigmas.

Follow Hidden History with Dr Harini Bhatt, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and today we're coming to you live from the Hay Literary Festival in Wales,

which means I get to say, hello audience. You're lost, aren't you? You're looking for the toilets. They're over there. Fine. Thank you so much for coming. we're hoping that by the end of this

we all have acquired more fans and that is very much what we're talking about today. Fandom is the crucial word because today we are jumping back three centuries to learn all about the history of cultural fandom. That's books, theatre, music, but not sport, because it's the Hay Festival

and Frankie, we're not doing sport here. Joining me and our lovely audience in this extremely glamorous tent are two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a writer, broadcaster, an academic who teaches at the University of Cambridge. That's one of the best ones. She's an expert in romantic literature and early celebrity culture.

She's a BBC New Generation thinker, and this is her fifth stint on the show. She's already tackled Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Gothic vampire literature and Mary Wollstonecraft. We're officially super fans. It's the Marvelous Doctor Corinne Thorosby. Welcome back, Corinne. Thank you so much. The restraining order's in the mail, Greg.

And in Comedy Corner, he is the sensational stand-up, podcast host. I am a full-on fanboy of his podcast, The Comedians Comedian, one of my absolute faves. He's been on Conan O'Brien's TV show? Yes. I mean, that was a phenomenal thing. He's gone viral recently on TikTok. Yes, horrifyingly so. And you'll remember him from our episodes on Blackbeard the Pirates, Jack Shepard, an ancient medicine. It's the marvelous Stu Goldsmith. Welcome to Stu. Thank you. Now, Stu, the word of warning here, normally I am just the mild manner tame host, but not today. Oh no. Today, you're in my house.

This is my subject. You are surrounded not only by a lovely, raucous phalanx of highbrow book lovers at the Hay Festival, but you're also surrounded by two historians who work on this. This is also something I've worked on. I've written a book about it. So are you prepared for the onslaught?

Yes, I am, but only because I know how nervous you are that it's a live show. Yes, damn it, all right. Like, you're doing great. Isn't he doing great? So, what do you know? Well, we begin as ever with the So What Do You Know? This is why I have a go at guessing what you are a lovely listener, plural,

knows about our subject, fandom. And I think you know what fandom is. You may know about fan communities. You definitely would have heard of Beatlemania. You may know about the modern ones, the mixes, the monsters, the Hoovians and Hooligans. And perhaps you're a fan. Perhaps we're all fans in this room.

But the question is, is this intense and all pervasive phenomenon, a modern thing? And we all know it's not, because that's how this show works, it's a very rigid format. No, we are going to find out more about it, and we're going to find out how did you buy your merch before the invention of eBay? Dr. Corrin, what do we mean when we say fandom? What is a fan?

A fan is someone who has an emotional connection to either a person or a cultural product. and right from the beginning it's had a bit of a bad rap we sort of think of that cliche of the screaming teenage girl and it's since the kind of 17th, 18th century

being associated with women and young people and therefore has been made fun of as an academic I can't really say that I'm a fan of something because that implies that I don't have a critical distance from it and that I can't judge it intellectually because of that emotional response. But hopefully a lot of the things that we talk about today

will show that fandom is a really creative way of engaging with cultural products. And Stu, the word fan, where do you think it comes from, etymologically speaking? Oh, what? It's fanatic. It's obviously a fanatic. I'm just looking at the audience going,

well, it's obviously fanatics to you. This is, hey, raise your game. Yes, surely it's short for fanatic, right? Isn't it like the word lunatic comes from the moon? It's like your, so is there an equivalent, but with fans? Just really love air conditioning, really into it. You're not that far off to you. So the word fan actually didn't appear until the late 19th century

and it was in America to refer to baseball fans. But the idea of a fan had been around for a lot longer. Like in 1812, Thomas Moore described the circle of people around Byron as a circle of stargazers. But the word, we think, is probably a shortening of fanatic, meaning someone with very intense religious fervour. Aha, gotcha. So what you're saying is I was right. I love being right on this show.

So, Stu, how far back do you think we can go to find evidence of fandom as a construct? I enjoy the circus, right? I'm a fan of circus tricks and stuff. It's a fantastic circus recently with my family. And I know that you can, there are hieroglyphs of people juggling. There's like a recognisable three-ball cascade, like a three-ball juggle in Egyptian hieroglyphs. So probably back then, if there were people doing tricks for money, then there were people going back and seeing them every day.

So I'm going to go 5,000 years. That's my other gambit. That's a bold gambit. I mean, it's difficult. to know when fans began. You were letting me down enough. No, no. It's possible.

I mean, there's a thing that, just because there is an evidence for it, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. But... Now you're speaking my language. Wild conjecture. But there is a sense that there probably was

some kind of fan culture possibly in the ancient world. Like certainly charioteers and gladiators were big stars in their day we think and that there's some evidence that maybe there were kind of riots when people's favourite charioteer

didn't win or but it's difficult to know. Certainly there seems to be some fan activity but we're not really focusing on the ancient world today because I mean Corrine you're a specialist on the 18th 19th century and that feels like where we're going to focus today. Fandum as we know it couldn't exist without mass

media and in 1702 you get the first daily newspaper. And with that came the sense of a public sphere. And then through the 18th and 19th century, there was huge developments in printing technology. And so suddenly there was this vast quantity of printed material. And in this time, we really see people start to long for a connection that in this mass audience, people are searching for some connection to the author that they're reading. And that's really when we see fan communities start to form. And I think we should probably talk about,

well, actually, we never usually do this, but we broke our own rule on this show. We normally, we just dump our comedian in and they sort of have to swim. But this time round, we sent you some homework. Yes. Well, you asked me some questions and I can't remember any of my answers.

Excellent. That's what we like to hear. Yeah, we asked you, what do you think of when you think of fandom? One of the things you mentioned was fan mail. Yeah. And have you ever written a fan letter? I did have a fan encounter

when I was about 16 at the Edinburgh Festival because obviously I'm obsessed with comedy so a lot of my comedy heroes I'm fans of. I met Harry Hill in the Pleasant's courtyard in Edinburgh and I was all 16 and green as grass and I kind of excitedly met him and I said can I have your autograph and I still have it somewhere he wrote me an autograph that said dear Stu

glad to finally meet you Harry Hill and I was like oh what a gent what a wonderful little secret joke that I've just blown wide open but apologies of anyone listening had also received that joke But what a lovely thing. That's adorable. Good in it.

Oh, good for Harry. Today we're looking at the 18th and 19th centuries. And we've already done an episode on a major celebrity with Lord Byron. He got loads of fan letters. Yeah. So the question is, was he the first? He wasn't the first. Someone who Byron was a mega fan of, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was a writer and philosopher.

He also received thousands of fan letters after the publication of his novel, Julie or the new Eloise in 1761. And yeah, he was inundated with male from people who, when they read this sentimental novel, felt their emotion stirred and felt like they knew him through his work. And so they address him as Ami Jean-Jacques, you know, my friend Jean-Jacques. We really see this happening again with Byron. People felt like they knew him and therefore wanted to make that connection. to let him know how much they loved his work.

And if he was the first guy that was happening to, that must have been so weird from his perspective because he wouldn't have had anyone else with whom to go, they're getting a bit close. You just need one other person to go, yeah, I know, right, they're all nuts. I mean, it's weird because we, fan mail is just something that we accept

as being a normal thing that someone might do. And loads of the letter writers say, this is completely mad that I am writing to an abyss. absolute stranger, but I feel compelled to tell you how much your work is meant to me. Wow. That shows admirable kind of self-analysis on their part that they weren't all writing going, I bet no one else is writing to you. I'm the only, I'm your biggest fan. Jean-Cha Rousseau is getting people going, I love you, you're my friend. It's Byron getting, let's meet down by the Bins. I'm learning so much about Byron. Bins guy.

Yeah, I mean, there's sort of long been this. sexist assumption that female fans are groupies. Byron's fans were called menads, who are the menads, who are the female followers of Dionysus, who used to do kind of ecstatic dances at orgies and things like that. There is, you know, I can't deny that in a lot of these letters that I've looked at, there is an erotic element. Sure. But so often fans are sort of seen as this mass, a kind of hysterical mass.

And actually these are individuals who are feeling this individual connection. And so each letter is different. They're often kind of outpourings of their own life. So often saying, you know, I've read your thing and it just reminded me so much of this thing in my life, which is totally different from the thing that is written about in this book, but I felt this connection. Occasionally, it's about wanting to have sex with the person that you're writing to.

But more often than not, it's... Harry Hill. But more often than not, it's a self-exploration. It's like, you know, lots of led writers in the 19th century literally describe it as a type of therapy and say that they've felt so much better having poured their heart out in this way. I totally know how they feel.

I had a wee next to Kerr mode earlier on. I'm just, I'm walking on air. And then we also got, I mean, we've got Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who's a renowned poet, and she has primarily women writing to her. What were her female fans? saying to her? There's a reason why young people particularly write fan mail. I think that it's a way of exploring your own identity and emulating someone who you can follow. And Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a

perfect example of that because she herself was a massive fan. She called herself a hero worshipper. And she was a huge fan of Wordsworth. And in fact, she said that if she would happily grasp a if Wordsworth's feet had trampled it. And she adored him. The scholar Eric Eisner has made a case that her fandom allowed her to believe in herself as an author through emulation of him. And I think that women in this time didn't have a lot of creative outlet in the same way as men did. And fan letters were one way of expressing themselves and through fandom kind of seeing,

hey, that could possibly be me and imagining them. himself in that position. Pilgrimages. Going to a place to sort of enjoy the physical experience of being somewhere special related to your fanfave. And this is a big, big deal. Yeah, Shakespeare gets it. Water, Scott. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of quite a big deal. And the other one, I suppose, is the Bronte parsonage. That's in Yorkshire, of course, it's Howarth. And the Brontes are a huge brand after they die. And there's an American collector called Charles Hale, who buys the wood and the glass from Charlotte's bedroom. Do you know what he does with this, Stu?

He brings it back to America. Wood and glass. Does he build... I don't know. I was going to say, does he build a kite? That doesn't make any sense. A glass kite. From the weird, does he rebuild the window looking at a different...

Does he put the window in his house? That's not bad. So he can look out through the window through which they looked. Hey, I mean, you're not far off at all. He does exactly that, but smaller. He makes picture frames. So he can look at his photographs. through the same glass that Charlotte looked through. I'd have preferred a kite.

If a glass kite came down in your head, you're in serious trouble. Was this the Brontade? And then the other one we probably should mention is David Garrick and his big Shakespeare Jubilee pageant. You know it well, do you? Oh, sure. Yeah, it combines my two favourite things.

Which are? Walking around and not knowing what I'm talking about. 1769 in the Bard's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avham We have BardCon 69, that's what I'm calling it No way! So a long time ago. Yeah. Did they do cosplay? Did they?

Yes. People like Darth Vader and stuff about that, great. Darth Vader the famed Shakespeare character. Yeah, no, people dressed up as Shakespeare's characters. They were going to have a parade, but it obviously got rained out. People bought like souvenirs made out of the wood from the mulberry tree that Shakespeare had planted out the front of his house Yeah the only thing that didn't happen was any performance of an actual Shakespeare play And because they're not there for the content, they're there for the fandom, right?

Exactly, this is what defenders of the Jubilee have said. You know, this is the same at conventions today. knows the original text. It's about creating new experiences and new material around it. But it got a lot of criticism at the time as being a kind of, just all about the consumption of Shakespeare rather than a real appreciation of his work. And in fact, a poet at the time said, they know Shakespeare's name and have heard of his fame, though his merit their shallow conception escapes. And there's sort of this sense with so many fans, again, that They have this true intellectual connection

and they're kind of above other fans. You know, other fans are just doing this frenzied consumerism, whereas that one guy in the Chewbacher costume feels that he alone has that real. Yeah, but it comes from both ends, isn't it? So is that what you're saying? The elite kind of look at it and go, oh, I can't believe you're dressing up for Shakespeare, how pathetic. I'm a true fan.

And the person who's dressed as false staff is like, well, come on, mate, I'm living it. You know, we've often talked about fandom. We're talking about the emotional intimacy here. We're talking about what it means to people. But as a historian of celebrity, I'm going to say, yes, but celebrity culture is about money. It's about cash.

It's about commercialism. It's about, you know, this industry. And we see it rising in the 1700s and 1800s. Celebrits have their own micro economies. They are trendsetters. Their fans are eager to copy them. There's cash to be made in that kind of marketplace. The Marbury Tree was a big merch producer.

I mean, that thing got chopped down decades before the Jubilee. And at the Jubilee, they were selling Marbury Tree toothpicks, Marbury Tree Walking Sticks. It produced so much merch. There's a long history of marketing stuff

that has been associated. And there was also a whole world of prints. Like when print culture became a thing, we then see what is pretty much the early pin-up which were these print shops that would sell, you know, David Garrick was great at sort of utilising the print to kind of spread his fame and his image. Yeah, engravings, prints, I mean, they're bestsellers,

also ceramic statue, your little statues of your favourite celebrity. You could own those, pit badges and all sorts. Byron neckties were very big. Byron neckties. These days, the conversation about what merch to have as a comic is largely informed by weight and how much room it's going to take up in your house if you don't sell it all.

My friend brewed his own beer to advertise his comic character that he was doing. And then he kept it at home and any time anyone would come around and he'd go, hey, do you want one of my beers? And then he gradually drank his way through like 400 beers and sold none of them. So, yeah, so tea towels are a good item.

Yes. For comics at the Edinburgh Festival, knocking out a tea. Not just a generic tea. Not as like three for a pound, red and white check tea towel. But if you can put something on it, then yeah, pin badges and stuff like that.

that they're really good and actually in the 19th century one of the biggest sort of celebrity merch crazes was there was a whole thing called cartomania it was with the advent of photography you could now have these little images of stars and politicians and all sorts of people and people started collecting them and there were like hundreds of millions of these were sold in the 1860s you know you can sort of get your little album and stick them they were like the pinini football cards of their day yeah a lot of the kind of the merch transaction i find is to do with meeting the people afterwards. Like often, if it's like, you know, people at Edinburgh,

you might, like, sell a rubber duck or that you've signed or something, you know, a brilliant Paul Curry used to do that. People really, they'd like it signed, that's nice. But what they want is just a couple of seconds of just you and me, hey, look, you get me, right? But we should talk just a little bit about some of the darker side of fame and fandom.

So when we emailed you to do, one of the words you mentioned was stalking. Yes. That brings us to the psychological term, parasocial intimacy. I don't know if any of, some nodding. going on in the room. Oh, that's the clingy fan who thinks they've got more of a relationship with you than they have. Yeah, it doesn't have to be that intense, but yeah, it's the idea that

it's a sort of one-way relationship. The fan knows a lot about the famous person. The famous person doesn't know anything of the fan. Yeah. So that does sometimes go a little bit too far. One case study is Francis Maria Kelly, which she was an actress, very famous in the 1816. And her fan goes a bit far. Yeah, she was at a performance. I mean, she'd been receiving letters from, a fan who felt that they should get married. And she performed a lot of her roles in britches, so in men's clothing. He really did not approve of this and let her know

and kind of felt like they were in this relationship, which she was oblivious to. And then in a performance, he bought a ticket, came in, stood up and shot her. Shot at her. Shot at her. And luckily no one was hurt, and he was sort of wrestled to the ground.

But, yeah, I mean, it's not a, great way of getting someone to accept a marriage proposal. But yeah, and it's a sort of, he was declared mentally ill, and there is a thing, you know, we know with figures like John Lennon, and it's a sort of common fan story that fans can become violent, but it's far and away, I mean, most fans, peace loving. Yeah, yeah. It's extremely rare, but we thought we'd give you one case study just to say that, you know, it can happen.

I mean, I, too, can't honestly say I like britches on a woman. I'm just going to put it out there. What was her name? Francis Maria Kelly. But let's move away from that, because we don't want to dwell on the negatives. Because as we say, fan culture gets a lot of a bad rep, and that's not fair. So let's talk about the positives. Let's talk about collaborative fan communities, Corin.

Yeah, it's a huge part of fandom. And, you know, the fan club has been around for quite a while. Dickens is a really great example. When Charles Dickens was writing the Pickwick Papers, he was doing it in installments. and in this novel there is a kind of jovial gentleman's club and fans became really inspired by this and started creating their own clubs. Pickwick clubs became this huge thing

and they were established all over the world and Louisa May Alcott formed a women's pickwick club in Massachusetts in America and for anyone who's read Little Women the March sisters form a pickwick club and give themselves all names from the novel So there was this lovely kind of meta-fandom because then loads of women started pickwick clubs because they were fans of little women and not actually the original. So it was sort of this lovely chain of fandom.

That's beautiful. I love how inception that is. Should we start a little women club now? The nuance window! Well, we've had a lovely old chat, but I think it's time for the classic end of the show, which is the nuance window. I'm going to get my stopwatch shop. And without much further ado, Dr. Corrin, the nuance window, please. It's easy to think that creating your social profile is a peculiarity of the internet age.

But commonplace books, which are really one of my favourite forms of fan activity, were the social media of their day. They were bound blank notebooks kept since the 15th century, initially mostly by male scholars who would copy down favourite passages of what they were reading. And so in that way, they were a kind of tool, like a record for reading. And in this time, books were so expensive that this was a way of cheaply having the literature that you were reading. And in the late 1700s, the books started to become popular with the ever-growing number

of female readers. And at this time, there was a real shift in the way commonplace books worked. They started to be shared between people. so you would be able to show off the stuff that you were reading and show that you were kind of had the latest your reading like whatever the latest popular work was and there were a way of constructing your social identity really this was a time when what you liked became kind of who you were

it's like this is me this is my commonplace book this is what I'm reading and they started to be signed by your social circle If a visitor came to the house or a friend came over, then they might write in your commonplace book. And then everyone who then came would see who had written. So it was also, much like social media, an advertisement of your social circle. It was what you're reading and who you were friends with.

The interesting thing I find about these books is that although they were widely shared like this, there was this weird pretense that they were private. Lots of them had locks on them like they were a private diary. So it was like you were getting access to the person's innermost thoughts. This was a private space that you were able to access. And so it was really this kind of way of building your social identity. And like all good fan culture, commonplace books were eventually commercialized.

They were replaced with Victorian pre-printed albums where the poetry was all kind of pre-printed in the back and then you cut it out a bit like a scrapbook. But commonplace books, for me, were really in their kind of heyday an example of fan culture at its very best. This is a creative, social form of self-expression

that offered a sense of connection in an increasingly mediated world. Beautifully done. Stu, any thoughts on that? Any comeback on the Commonplace Book? I'd never heard of them before. So it's like a journal and a scrapbook of ideas

that you then leave lying around the house. Don't look at my Commonplace book. You'll find out about all the cool stuff. I like. Exactly. And it was, they were sort of everywhere in the 19th century. Everyone had them and it would be really cool if you could get someone famous to sign your commonplace books. So Byron wrote in a lot of commonplace books and he kept one himself. Leave me alone, yeah. I don't know you. Okay. And listener, if you are fan-golling over stew or fan-boying over stew, one more 18th century stars than check out our episode on Bad Boy Jack Shepherd. Yes. He's my fate. If you're crazed for Corin, scurry over to our episode of our episode of our Lord Byron or all the other things we've talked about,

but there's a big old back catalogue available on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to you're dead to me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But it's time now for me to say a huge thank you. In History Corner, we had the incomparable

Dr Corinne Throsbury from University of Cambridge. Thank you, Corinne. I'm off to look for thistles that might have been trampled by Stephen Fry. And in Comedy Corner, we had the inventor of the glass kite, the man himself, the stupendous, Stu Goldsmith. Thank you to you.

It's an absolutely workable idea, I'll get back to you. Patent pending, yeah, absolutely. And we also had the wonderful audience here at Hay, so give yourself a round of applause. Thank you so much. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we pen another chapter of historical fanfic on a totally different topic.

But for now, I'm off to go and fill my aftershave bottle with Harry Kane's sweat. Bye! Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making WhatsApp docs.

You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and well-being,

equipping ourselves and our listeners. with the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even. And we're not stopping, aren't we, Chris? We're most certainly not, son. We have a lot of new topics coming up. From tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility, we are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way,

and you can find all of our previous episodes of WhatsApp docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes. In 1872, the Marie Celeste was found adrift in the Atlantic. Every person on board was gone, and none of them were ever seen again. Every Monday on Hidden History, Dr. Harini Bhatt takes an unexplained event from history, just like that one, reads the evidence like a case file, and tells you what she thinks happened. No hedging.

Start with the Mary Celeste episode for a look at one of History, history's most enduring maritime enigmas. Follow Hidden History with Dr Harini Bhatt, wherever you get your podcasts.