The secret behind Darwin’s bushy beard
“Tennyson grew an extravagant moustache and beard to disguise the collapse of his facial architecture”
Our great-grandparents didn’t talk much about their bodies – not through prissiness, says Kathryn Hughes, but because they were over-exposed to them. Here, she presents three case studies that illustrate Victorian attitudes to their physical selves
The story about Victorians wrapping little trousers around their indecent piano legs is apocryphal, or at the very least a weak joke. Yet the idea endures that our great-grandparents muffled their bodies in heavy fabric and silence. It’s an idea we picked up from the early 20th century, and then, because it was flattering to imagine ourselves as so different from our buttoned-up ancestors, we refused to let it go. Yet you only have to take a quick imaginative tour of the conditions in which the Victorians lived to realise that a state of chilly physical self-sufficiency would have been beyond them. From the end of the 18th century, Britons piled into the expanding cities from the countryside. Strangers who had never previously set eyes on one another found themselves in an involuntary embrace at the factory bench, railway station, lodging house, park, or on the top deck of an omnibus. Other people’s sneezes, bums, elbows, snores, farts and breathy whistles were, quite literally, in your face.
To the brute proximity of other people’s bodies you would have to add the tyranny of living in your own. In an age without antibiotics or much effective doctoring, discomforts that we moderns can magic away in less than a week – constipation, an aching tooth, or a swollen toe – became chronic conditions to be endured over decades. In the process, a body might become permanently marked with the tokens of its earthly passage – an osteoporotic hump, smallpox scars, a missing finger – that it carried with it to the grave.
So if the Victorians have a reputation for denying or concealing their bodies, it is only because they were obliged to live with them so intensely. And that reticence slipped naturally into the way that they wrote, or rather didn’t, about their physical selves. Most biographers in the 19th century behaved as if their subjects had taken leave of the body, or had never possessed such a thing in the first place. If flesh and blood registered at all, it was in the broadest generalities – a manly stride here, the sweetest smile there. Mostly, though, there was a hole in the text where arms, legs, breasts and bellies should have been. I set out to track the bodies of a clutch of famous Victorians, in the hope of getting closer than before to the physical experiences of 150 years ago.
Charles Darwin’s beard In April 1866 Charles Darwin made a rare appearance at a Royal Society soirée in Burlington House, Piccadilly. It quickly became apparent that few among the company recognised the tall, stooped man in the brushed-down evening dress. The scientific superstar was left having to sidle up to old friends and introduce himself, an ordeal for such a shy man, and a mortification for those who realised too late that they had spent the evening snubbing the most distinguished person in the room. The last time anyone had seen Darwin in public had been four years earlier,
when he had been clean-shaven, give or take some gingery mutton chop whiskers. Now here he was, quite transformed, sporting a forest of grey facial hair that made him appear at least a decade older than his 57 years.
It was his wife, Emma, who had suggested Darwin grow a beard, as a way of dealing with his severe eczema. Since adolescence he had been subject to breakouts of a skin complaint that swelled his lips and turned his pleasantly pudgy features red, so that he periodically appeared like an angry cherub. Ceasing to shave would eliminate the irritation that came with the daily scraping of skin with steel, and allow Darwin to conceal the scaly redness that had been the source of much embarrassment. Indeed, disappearing behind a thick curtain of facial hair was a relief for a man who had long been convinced that he was, to use his own sad selfaccusation, “hideous”.
Darwin was not alone in using the new fashion for facial hair to bind up private psychic wounds. For the previous 15 years, men of every class had been growing out their early-victorian mutton chops and “Piccadilly weepers” into spectacularly bushy beards. Alfred Tennyson had started his poetic career as a clean-shaven young man with a jaw that could only be described as “lantern”. But by the age of 45 his facial architecture had begun to collapse, thanks to a “queer” set of false teeth. Growing an extravagant moustache and beard not only allowed the poet laureate to hide his caved-in mouth, but also enabled him to fashion himself as a timeless sage. Dickens, meanwhile, was so self-conscious about his weak chin, especially now that he was besieged by requests to sit for portraits, that he grew his trademark door knocker as a kind of prosthesis (a full beard was beyond him).
In his The Descent of Man, Darwin wrestled with the problem of what the beard is for. Is it there to attract a female mate, like the peacock’s bright tail feathers, or a lion’s handsome mane? Or is it something to do with male competition: the man with the hairiest jaw gets to dominate his smoother friends? But, in that case, why was it that in Tierra del Fuego, which Darwin had visited as a young naturalist aboard the Beagle, indigenous men, who might be assumed to be “closer to nature”, had such light beard growth? And why did the Fuegians appear to regard the bristly chins of the Beagle crew with all the horror of home counties aunts? Did the answer lie in culture, biology, or both? Darwin never came to a conclusion, and it is a puzzlement that scientists share to this day. What is apparent, though, is that Victorian women tended not to share their men’s enthusiasm for a bristly chin. Emily Tennyson longed for her “Ally” to shave off his malodorous attachment (personal hygiene was not the poet’s strong point), while Mary Butler, with whom Darwin struck up a friendship, declared, “I
“The Victorians lived in brute proximity with other people’s bodies – their sneezes, bums, elbows, farts and breathy whistles”
don’t like the idea of your long beard”, and never wrote to him again.
George Eliot’s hand One day in the 1840s, a young woman in her mid-20s was talking to her neighbour in a genteel villa on the outskirts of Coventry. At some point in the conversation, Mary Ann Evans stretched out her right hand “with some pride” to demonstrate how much bigger it was than her left. It was the legacy, she explained, of having spent her teenage years making butter and cheese on her family’s farm, eight miles outside the city. All that vigorous turning of the churn at 40 repetitions a minute, not to mention the squeezing of the curds to expel the watery whey, had built up the muscles in her right hand. Even now, several years on, her right hand was broader than her left, making her permanently lopsided.
Fifteen years after that Coventry conversation, Evans entered public consciousness with a flourish as “George Eliot”. In Adam Bede, her first full-length novel, Eliot tells the story of Hetty Sorrel, a pretty dairymaid who frets at the way her hands have been coarsened by “butter-making, and other work that ladies never did”. Dismayed at the way that her body blabs its social origins, Hetty relishes the tokens that she believes will erase the marks of her lowly status – fancy earrings, a pretty neckerchief. It is this desire for a different kind of body that, ironically, leads Hetty to that folkloric fate – seduction by the young squire, resulting in pregnancy.
When Eliot died, in 1880, you might have expected the guardians of her posthumous reputation – widower, brother, nephew – to be delighted for the public to hear this charming story about how the great novelist’s body carried a permanent memento of her early years in rural Warwickshire. Not a bit of it. When the first, unauthorised, biography came out just 28 months after her death, these professional men – a banker, a clergyman and a gentleman farmer – were appalled to discover the Coventry neighbour had passed on the anecdote about Mary Ann Evans’ broad right hand.
There was nothing for it but to embark on an energetic campaign of disinformation. Over the next 50 years, Eliot’s increasingly genteel descendants issued stern denials about the great novelist’s labours in the dairy. Any would-be biographer who wanted access to Evans family documents was required to include in their text a strongly worded rebuttal of the ridiculous story about how the great novelist George Eliot, author of the incomparable Middlemarch, had spent her youth doing sweaty, back-breaking manual labour. There was, maintained Eliot’s heirs, nothing remotely odd about her right hand: it had done nothing more taxing than practising the piano and taking tea.
Fanny Cornforth’s mouth In 1859, Dante Gabriel Rossetti unveiled his latest painting to a select group of friends and supporters. It depicts the head and torso of a luscious young woman in a brocade costume that falls open to reveal her thick pillar of a neck and deep, creamy chest. A tumble of red-gold hair adds to the sense of undoneness. And then there is her mouth. “Mulatto mouths”, carped the critics, would become a signature of Rossetti’s work over the decades to come. This, though, is the first one that really matters: thick, quilted, and so ripe that on this occasion it is unable to hold itself decently shut. Rossetti titled the painting Bocca Baciata, which translates as “the kissed mouth”.
Fanny Cornforth’s mouth marks a moment of radical departure in Rossetti’s art. His earlier works had been sharp of outline, bright of colour and pure of thought – in line with the Pre-raphaelite manifesto that aimed to inject English painting with the artistic and moral astringencies of the Italian quattrocento. Frequently using his mistress Lizzie Siddal and sister Christina as his models, Rossetti’s early female figures are angular and spare. Above all, they keep their thin lips firmly clamped together. This latest painting, though, was something quite different. If it can be said to have a subject at all, it is pleasure – not just the pleasure of Cornforth’s luscious features, butxof the material quality of the paint, here laid on in loose oily swipes so different from Rossetti’s earlier dense stippling. This, critics have suggested, is the moment when British painting turned away from its obligation to represent the exterior world and grew concerned with the practice of its own making. Or, to put it another way, what we are looking at is the first sighting of artistic modernism.
Cornforth was not simply Rossetti’s favourite model of the early 1860s. She was also his on-off domestic partner for a quarter of a century. Her mouth – not so much its shape but what she did with it – marks her difference from the other two, far more celebrated, mistress/models in Rossetti’s life. These were Siddal (to whom Rossetti was briefly married) and Jane Morris (the wife of his friend William Morris). Like Siddal and Morris, Cornforth came from a working-class background. Unlike them, though, she never bothered to change the way she spoke in order to fit with the Pre-raphaelites’ middle-class mores. Cornforth chattered 19 to the dozen in her rural mid-sussex burr. “I know I don’t say it right,” she shrugged when Rossetti’s friends sniggered at her tendency to mangle aspirates, past participles and even plurals.
Then there was the question of food, or rather appetite. Siddal and Morris kept themselves rigorously thin, to the point where they might today be described as anorexic. Disciplining your flesh was necessary to have a hope of fitting into the “aesthetic” dress that the Pre-raphaelite Brotherhood preferred their women to wear – loose, floating gowns with minimal underpinnings that looked as though they belonged in a medieval fresco. Cornforth, by contrast, loved food, preferred the cheerful vulgarity of contemporary fashion, and relied on a corset and cage crinoline to squeeze herself into the required shape. Rossetti nicknamed her “Elephant” – a play on her name (ELEFANT) and her bulky shape.
The moment Rossetti died in 1882, at the age of 53, Cornforth was cast out of what remained of the Pre-raphaelite circle and all but excised from its biographical records. She ended her days in the county asylum in her native Sussex, where the medical casebook records that, now an old lady, she is “incoherent and talks incessantly”, but also loves her food. And as for the mouth that was once described as “so awfully lovely”, the asylum authorities say that it is now devoid of teeth apart from a few decaying stumps over which upper and lower dentures are insecurely hooked. What’s more, the authorities note in a final terse observation before rearing back in disgust, Cornforth’s tongue is furred and her breath foul. Sad perhaps, but irrelevant surely not. For it is here, in the smells, blots and gurgles of the body’s physical life that some of the most revealing biographical stories about the Victorians turn out to reside.
A longer version of this article first appeared in The Guardian. Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes is published by 4th Estate at £20 © Guardian News and Media Limited 2017.