This review first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of 13 March 2017. The author has reformatted and illustrated it for the Victorian Web, adding page numbers, links and captions. Please click on the images to enlarge them, and for more information about them.
he more we live online in a disembodied present, the more fascinated we seem to be by the physical minutiae of the past. When not zipping through the ether, scholars are busy turning over the silt of centuries like latter-day mudlarks. Kathryn Hughes, for one, tells us in the introduction to Victorians Undone that she has been hard at work for a whole decade, if not in estuarial sediment, then, as she puts it, “in the richest parts of the archive, where material has gathered in the deepest drifts” (xvii). We can well believe it, since she has fished up a haul of extraordinarily intimate details about some of the most high profile Victorian figures.
Life-writing as a discipline owes much to family history, and Hughes’s main object is to lift our Victorian forebears off the page for us, particularly by reminding us that even the most highly placed or high-minded of them had solid presences – sometimes all too solid. Her dismissal of the prematurely aged Coleridge on her first page as a “dollop of slop” proves prophetic, not only of her sometimes startling style (ix), but of her iconoclasm. A twenty-first-century Lytton Strachey, she ignores politically correct strictures against Lookism, and instead employs it with relish. Queen Victoria is her first target. We all know that the monarch soon lost her youthful bloom and acquired “pouchy jowls, oyster eyes, and a chin that became a neck without you quite noticing how” (23). But Hughes adds the passing problems of a rash and a stye to this description; she reminds us, too, of the Queen’s gummy mouth and small teeth by referring to her “short upper lip . . . permanently hitched to reveal sharp little rodent points” (24). An insatiable Hanoverian appetite completed Victoria’s transition from a “merry little rosebud of a Princess” to a stout, sweaty caricature of her former self (24).
Left: Franz Xaver Winterhalter's young Queen Victoria in 1842.
Right: Thomas Benjamin Kennington's portrait of the Queen in 1898.
“This is nasty stuff, gleefully poisonous to no particular end” (185), says Hughes, of some particularly virulent contemporary descriptions of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. And yet her own portraits do have a purpose. We hardly need reminding that mind and body interact, but Hughes regularly surprises us by showing just how much her subjects’ physical selves impinged on their contributions to our culture, and sometimes on the very course of history.
The best example brings us back to Queen Victoria. Fully aware of her own aesthetic shortcomings, she became, according to Hughes, “obsessed with other women’s figures” (xiv), and eyed with mounting suspicion the swollen belly of her mother’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Flora Hastings. Hughes goes on to make a strong case for blaming the Queen and her confidante, Baroness Lehzen, for starting the scandalous and absurd rumour of Lady Flora’s pregnancy – a rumour that led to the woman’s brutal internal examination only a few months before she died of cancer. Hughes goes further, suggesting that the matter had consequences further down the line. Grateful to the incompetent physician Sir James Clark for having kept her name out of his account of Lady Flora’s treatment, the Queen retained his services; twenty years later he proved equally incompetent in tending to her ailing husband. The link is tentatively made, but, if we accept it, the Queen paid heavily for her earlier behaviour.
Charles Darwin, taking refuge behind his beard.
Hughes’s next subject, Charles Darwin, was no more favoured than his sovereign in the looks department. Sharing her “pouchy jowls”, he had a bulbous nose, blubbery lips and facial eczema, not to mention clod-hopping feet knobbled with bunions. No wonder he was terminally self-conscious, and driven to take refuge behind an extravagant beard. The reactions of the South American natives he encountered on his Beagle voyage are telling: to the Fuegians, beards were dirty, and they lambasted one of the returning Anglicized Fuegians in the party for his whiskery chin; at another anchorage, a missionary left behind for a few days was traumatized by having his whiskers forcibly plucked, one by one, by mussel-shell “tweezers.” Darwin was left to ponder the line between savagery and civilization. It was, in fact, his barber – a dog-breeder on the side, who experimented with crossing pure-breeds and mongrels – who helped to crystallize his thoughts on evolution. This just goes to show the importance of personal grooming to our whole world picture. Hughes also examines, at some length, the follicular ventures of Darwin’s fellow Victorians, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, all of whom had their own reasons for sporting a badge of manliness or simply masking their features.
Londoners flocked to see the bearded Mexican dancer Julia Pastrana in the 1850s, but, in general, facial hair was not an option for women with over-sized features. This was unfortunate for Hughes’s next subject, George Eliot, who took after her father’s side of the family, and was clueless about improving her appearance in other ways – she had no dress sense, says Hughes, and her hairstyle and hats did nothing for her. The journalist Robert Leighton, later the literary editor of the Daily Mail, seems to have spoken for many when he said she looked “more like a horse than anyone he ever met” (qtd. in Hughes 181). Hughes might have explained that the remark came to us at second hand, when Vera Brittain reported it more than forty years later, but the point is clear: Eliot’s plainness was both legendary and incontestable.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) — an etching by Stephen Alonzo Schoff of 1879.
More contentious is the size of Eliot’s right hand. Was it or was it not enlarged as a result of having helped in the dairy of Griff House, her childhood home? This question looms even larger here than her prominent nose and long incisors, and leads to a lengthy discussion of the processes involved in making butter and cheese. Whether or not the womenfolk would have used “an upright plunger or a more modern barrel churn” (192), it was hard, sweaty, smelly work, and those who did it came in for some sly smut. Hetty Sorrel, the ill-fated milkmaid in Adam Bede who worries about coarsening her wrists through churning, is only the most obvious example of how such matters filtered through into Eliot’s novels. Of equal interest is the wrangling among the novelist’s biographers over how to present or gloss over their subject’s early life. Hughes must be the first to ask bluntly what sort of dairymaid Eliot was: “a good one, almost certainly,” she decides (195). In view of this verdict, it is noble of her to report the recent discovery of one of Eliot’s perfectly small, ladylike gloves. It is not at all what might have been expected from someone who had once agitated the cream and pounded the curds. Instead, it reminds us of the hand that wrote Middlemarch, animating it with the same spirit that redeemed her unprepossessing face.
Fanny Cornforth, as seen in The Blue Bower of 1865.
Hughes is a biographer we can trust, then – one who admits that the facts do not always fit, and who refuses to force them to by guesswork or invention. Moving from the dairy to the studio, the author turns to the Pre-Raphaelites. She is not the first to show who else besides Dante Gabriel Rossetti shared the juicy lips featured in his Bocca Baciata (The Kissed Mouth), or even to suggest what service they performed for him. Nor is she the first to follow the model herself, Fanny Cornforth, through the sad phases of her later life to a workhouse and, finally, a mental asylum in Chichester (Fanny’s biographer, Kirsty Stonell Walker, deserves more than an endnote here). But Hughes reliably fills in some intervening blanks, giving due credit to Fanny as Rossetti’s long-time muse, and providing a rare and poignant portrait of a woman whose career veered towards that of the oldest profession, and swung between its heights and depths. Here, as elsewhere, it might seem that Hughes infers too much from her findings: Rossetti’s depictions of Fanny were not the only factor in loosening the bonds tying art to morality and realism. But the artist’s last important portrait of her, The Blue Bower (1865), with its emphasis on colour and its Eastern and symbolic touches, is indeed widely acknowledged to have opened the door to aestheticism.
Having focused on discrete body parts in her earlier chapters, Hughes serves up a grisly dish of them as her finale. Perhaps it is best not to give the whole story away, but her book’s last chapter involves an apparently respectable solicitor’s clerk called Frederick Baker and a notorious murder trial of 1867. The victim’s name has come down to us in a most curious way, but what really brings the case to life is the accumulated detail. This ranges from what children wore (a colourful underskirt was perfectly common, we are told, and not a sign of precociousness), to how the police and the law operated then. As usual, there are side-stories as well as backstories, one of which traces the life of the Chief Magistrate at the local hearings, who was none other than Jane Austen’s nephew, Edward Knight of Chawton House. After following this bizarre and disturbing case, we might sit back and ponder the whys and wherefores, probably not realizing how much we have learned through witnessing this real-life Victorian drama – which rather usefully sums up the experience of reading Victorians Undone.
Links to Related Material
- The Beard and Moustache Movement
- Victorian Men's Fashion: Hair
- Scrooge's Significant Hands
- Review of Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, ed. Peter J. Capuano & Sue Zemka
- Three Studies of Hands by Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919)
- Crime in Victorian England (sitemap)
Bibliography
[Book under review] Hughes, Kathryn. Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. London: 4th Estate, 2017. Paperback. xviii + 414 pp. ISBN 978-0007548361. £31.99
Created 30 July 2024