Bonus: This Week in Fandom History - Artifacts: Stories from the Emotional History of the InternetBonus: This Week in Fandom History - Artifacts: Stories from the Emotional History of the Internet
Podcaster Stories
A bonus clip from another podcast looks at Jenny Lind’s 1850 tour, early fandom culture, and outrageous concert auctions, framed by Danny Brown as playful between‑season content. It focuses on how people in the 19th century went to surprising lengths to be close to their musical idol.
12:36•2 Oct 2026
Lind Mania and the Price of Fandom: A Wild Trip to 1850
Episode Overview
- Highlights Jenny Lind’s 1850 tour as an early example of intense celebrity fandom.
- Explains how the term fan grew from sporting slang like "the fancy".
- Shows how public concerts helped turn music into a shared leisure activity.
- Illustrates extreme devotion through shocking meet‑and‑greet auction prices.
- Offers humorous, candid commentary on historical fandom using adult language.
“Her tour in 1850 was the fucking Eras tour of 1850 and also like blows the Eras tour out of the water.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of fandom taken to hilarious extremes. This bonus instalment of Podcaster Stories brings a special 10‑minute cut from "This Week in Fandom History", hand‑picked by host Danny Brown as a perfect match for his own audience. Instead of modern pop stars or viral memes, you'll be taken back to 1850 and introduced to opera singer Jenny Lind, whose American tour sparked "full‑blown Lind mania".
The guest show’s hosts paint a lively picture of how this tour became, as they put it, "the fucking Eras tour of 1850" – and somehow even bigger. You’ll hear them unpack the early roots of the word "fan", tracing it from "fanatic" and "the fancy" in boxing and pigeon racing, through to people who were, in their words, "part of the crowd" and "in the room where it happened".
It’s all about how communities form around shared passions, long before internet forums and social media. The story of P.T. Barnum’s marketing genius is a highlight: public concerts for the first time, auctions for what would now be called backstage passes, and staggering bids from everyday people desperate to meet Jenny Lind.
One particularly wild moment has a hatter winning a meet‑and‑greet ticket for $225 when most people earned under $7 a week, prompting the hosts to exclaim, "Are you fucking kidding me?" and compare it to tens of thousands of dollars today.
Danny frames the clip as "a little bit of bonus content" between his seasons and gives a clear heads‑up about adult language, making this feel like a relaxed, playful detour that still fits his focus on human stories and how obsessions shape lives.
If you’re curious about how fandom looked long before hashtags and stan culture, this quirky historical snapshot might be just the thing to make you smile and think about what people are willing to sacrifice for what they love.
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