VICTORIANS UNDONE

by Kathryn Hughes

(4th Estate £9.99) BRITISH historian Kathryn Hughes is the biographer of George Eliot and Mrs Beeton.

But in her latest book, she attempts to show what long-dead historical figures were actually like: ‘Did they lean in close and whisper, or stand at a distance and shout?

‘Did they smell (probably, most people did) — but of what exactly?’

Hughes takes five subjects: Lady Flora Hastings, spitefully bullied by Queen Victoria, who believed that she had become pregnant while unmarried; Charles Darwin; George Eliot; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s voluptuous model Fanny Cornforth; and a murdered child, Fanny Adams, whose name lives on in the slang expression ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’.

Beginning with a single physical attribute — Eliot’s hand, Darwin’s beard — she explores what it really meant to be human in the 19th century.