Victorians Undone
is no ordinary history book. If you have
ever felt dissatisfied by a sterile biography, wondering if its subject actually
possessed bodily functions, look no further.
Here, British historian Kathryn Hughes undoes centuries of sheltering
the reader from the unseemly by putting it on full display. While the very term “Victorian” evokes an image
of propriety, it was also a time of population displacement from the country to
cities where “other people’s sneezes, bums, elbows, smells, snores, farts and
breathy whistles were, quite literally, in your face” (p. xi). The author seeks to rectify the
imbalance by creating a history that puts
“mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth
century“ (p. xiv), which she hopes will “add something to our understanding of
what it meant to be a human animal“ (p. xv) during the Victorian Era.
The book consists of five essays, each following a part of
the body of an historical figure. In the first, entitled “Lady Flora’s Belly,” we
learn about the tragic saga of Queen Victoria’s lady-in-waiting. Did Flora’s protuberant abdomen conceal a
tumor or a baby? It was harder to find
out than one might think. Most women
went through their lives without ever exposing their private parts to anyone
but their husband. Medical consultation
when unavoidable might be conducted discretely, by post.
Other essays focus on George Eliot’s hands, Fanny
Cornforth’s (the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter) sensual mouth, and the beard that Charles Darwin’s grew to hide his eczema. The book concludes with the
gruesome tale of the dismemberment of Fanny Adams, an early case study in
forensic pathology. The term "Fanny Adams" soon came, in navy slang, to mean unpleasant meat rations.
