Collecting 19th Century Celebrities

I think it is fair to say that we tend to think that things are different today.

And it’s true that technology has changed a lot of things.

But the cult of celebrity is not as new as you think.

Photography took off quickly in the second half of the nineteenth century.

How quickly?

Well by the early 1860s, around 400 million photographic cards of celebrities were sold every year in Britain alone. The population of Britain in 1860 was around 20 million. So that’s 20 photo cards for every man, woman, and child in the country.

And that was just thirty five years after photography was invented.