How did the Victorians feel about their bodies, compared with how we feel about ours? It is a subtle question, and it takes an imaginative critic even to formulate it, as Kathryn Hughes does in this observant, original book. How to answer it is another matter. A systematic treatment would be vast, covering everything from law and religion to cosmetics and surgery. Hughes sidesteps this, and also steers clear of constructing any general thesis. Instead she tells five separate, self-contained stories. They are, she emphasises, factual, gleaned from years of research in 19th-century archives. Each lights up a different facet of her subject, each features a famous Victorian, and they are all, in a sense, detective stories, picking up clues other scholars have missed.
The Victorian who emerges as the least likeable, physically and morally, is Victoria herself, not in her familiar guise as the much-loved widow of Windsor, but aged 20, two years after ascending the throne. Observers note the young queen’s “stumpy” legs, “oyster” eyes and sharp little rodent teeth. They record that she eats with her mouth open, even when it is full of food, and imbibes prodigious amounts of alcohol at meals. Her neglect of personal hygiene impels Lord Melbourne, her prime minister, to advise her to change her clothes more often and take a daily bath.
She is capable of almost murderous spite. In 1837, a lady-in-waiting whom she hated, Lady Flora Hastings, developed an abdominal swelling. Victoria, with malicious glee, spread the rumour that Lady Flora was pregnant, and wrote a letter banishing her from the court unless she underwent a medical examination. Lady Flora submitted, and the two male doctors who examined her pronounced her a virgin. The affair was leaked to the press, though, and a scandal ensued. Victoria was hissed when she appeared in public; Lady Flora was cheered. Five months later, Lady Flora died, and was found to have been suffering from a liver tumour. But the papers insisted that she had died of shame, and Hughes seems inclined to concur, describing what she was forced to endure as “humiliating medical torture”.
The aura of shame with which the Victorians surrounded a respectable woman’s body might perhaps connect the Lady Flora affair with another of Hughes’s case histories, although it is wildly different. It centres on an eight-year–old called Fanny Adams, a bricklayer’s daughter, who was out for a walk with friends in the Hampshire countryside one August day when they met a 29-year-old lawyer’s clerk, Frederick Baker. He carried Fanny off despite her struggles, and her body was later found, chopped to pieces and the eyes cut out.
The term “paedophilia” did not enter the language until 1896, but the condition was well known before that, as Baker’s crime (for which he was hanged) made horribly apparent. Further, the attraction of prepubescent girls for adult males was recognised and, to a degree, condoned by Victorian society. Hughes cites not only the cases of Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin, but less familiar ones such as Edward Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who, at 24, proposed to his 12-year-old cousin, submitting her to caresses that she was afraid to tell her mother about.
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Freud was later to argue that many Victorian males resorted to prostitutes because they were incapable of sexual arousal with women of their own class, who were set apart by the fearsome dictates of shame and modesty. Maybe the Bakers and Bensons of the Victorian age were drawn to childhood innocence for similar reasons. Meanwhile, poor Fanny became a byword, because two years after her murder, a new type of canned mutton was introduced into Royal Navy rations and the tars, recalling her hacked body, disparagingly christened it sweet Fanny Adams (sweet FA for short).
“Victorian males seemed liable to ignite at a mere glimpse of bare flesh
Since the Victorian culture of shame concealed women’s bodies beneath swathes of clothing, Victorian males seem to have been liable to ignite at the merest glimpse of bare flesh. One of Hughes’s five stories is about Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portrait of his mistress Fanny Cornforth, entitled Bocca Baciata (the kissed mouth). Victorian critics denounced its “gross sensuality”, and Hughes apparently agrees, likening it to “the kind of dirty picture you had to travel to Paris to find”. This seems incredible. Bocca Baciata (now in Boston, but easily viewable online) depicts a fully clothed woman with a lot of frizzy hair. That it can ever have been used as pornography, even by a sex-starved Victorian male, beggars belief.
In a bid to make the painting’s scandalous contemporary reputation more explicable, Hughes goes on to claim that it is really about oral sex, which she believes Rossetti and Cornforth secretly indulged in. However, this idea is, unusually for her, borrowed from the speculations of another critic, and is unsupported by any evidence.
She likes to startle, and does so with skill. One of her tactics is to begin with some musty archival fragment, seemingly of no interest, and gradually unwrap it to reveal vistas of social history concealed inside. Why, she asks, were George Eliot’s Warwickshire kinsfolk so touchy about the rumour that her right hand was larger than her left? Why did Charles Darwin grow a beard when the fashion for beards was waning?
The first question sparks an investigation into manual labour and social status in the upwardly mobile middle class, and casts light on several of Eliot’s novels. The second broadens into a survey of beards and their meanings in Victorian society. Women, it seems, were less keen on them than men. Darwin theorised in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, that their evolutionary purpose was “to charm and excite the opposite sex”, but his wife begged him to have his dirty, smelly facial excrescence shaved off. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s beard was notoriously unwholesome, and Edward Lear’s rhyme about the old man with a beard who finds birds nesting in it might allude to the remnants of food and other debris that lodged in the laureate’s bushy whiskers. That is a typical Hughes conjecture, and Victorians Undone swarms with similarly disruptive brainwaves. No one remotely interested in books should miss it.
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Fourth Estate £20 pp432
