Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum

Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum - Kathryn Hughes

This book collects case studies about specific body parts of five Victorians: Lady Flora Hastings, Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Fanny Cornforth and Fanny Adams. This book, the famous biographer explains, is “an experiment to see what new stories emerge when you use biography .... to put mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth century” by introducing “a certain lumpiness to canonical life narratives that have previously been rendered as smooth, symmetrical, and as strangely unconvincing as a death mask. For it is in lop-sidedness and open-endedness, in bulges, dips, hollows, oozes and itches, that we come closest to a sense of what it feels like to live in the solitude of a single body, both then and now.”

Lady Flora Hastings probably had liver cancer and its tumor made her belly swell. The Queen was still very young so her prefrontal lobe may not had have yet developed a nuanced moral sense: disliking Lady Flora for spying on the behalf of Vic’s difficult mother, Vic spread the rumor at court that Lady Flora was in a family way. A horrified Lady Flora underwent a humiliating medical examination by two doctors, one cruel and one kind. The bad doctor, oddly enough, was the one that misdiagnosed Prince Albert’s case of typhoid 20 years later. So even Queens can’t escape the sting of nature’s irony. 

Charles Darwin grew his archetypal beard rather late in life, because he wanted to compete with the facial hair of his nephew. He became so unrecognizable that when he attended scientific conferences, eminent men snubbed him, not knowing they were high-hatting the most famous scientist in the world. Interesting if a little long is Hughes’ examination of Victorian perceptions of masculinity and the cultural history of the beard and reasons it became fashionable again in the 1850s.

The two pieces about George Eliot and Fanny Cornforth are more about biography and biographers than eminent Victorians. Hughes explores the sensitivities of Evans’ family about the claim in early biographies that the right hand of the author of Middlemarch was bigger than her left. The family was nervous that people would be judgy if it were generally known that their famous relative had once been a diary worker. At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th milkmaids were dogged by the stereotype that they were all cheeky, disagreeable girls who were too free with their charms.

Hughes also details how Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s literary executors excised model Fanny Cornforth from the painter’s life and work. It seems that when Rossetti painted her sensuous mouth, people were shocked and scandalized that the painting brought to mind the sex act that was so forbidden in the Victorian era that even the most shameful pornography of the time didn’t depict it. The story of Fanny Cornforth is a warning to readers of biographies to be clear as to who is carrying water for the subject. The section about Rossetti’s downward spiral after his testicles were removed made me re-evaluate my previous dim view of the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The last section covers the gruesome murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams one late summer afternoon in 1867. Like writer of high-class true crime William Roughhead, Hughes examines rural violence and mores through the lens of forensic pathology. Nowadays the expression “Sweet Fanny Adams” means “nothing” or “very little” in British English and is used by people who would never say “bugger all” for “worthless” or “disappointing.”  That’s the appeal of the book, too, the Britishisms like “skivvy” for “a menial” and “mimsy/missish” for “prim.”

Highly recommended, a good vacation read.