Emperor Norton, A Metaphor in His Own Time
Surely, one sign that a person has achieved the level of “cultural saturation” that we sometimes call “fame” is when when independent sources start using that person’s name as a shorthand to characterize other people.
Here are three stories of people not Emperor Norton who — during Emperor Norton’s lifetime — were labelled in the California press as various kinds of "Emperor Norton":
an “Epistolary Emperor Norton” in 1867;
“the Emperor Norton of the News” in 1869; and
the “Healdsburg Emperor Norton” in 1878.