Victorians behind closed doors (smelling salts not included)
Sometimes a book just bowls you over with how good it is. For instance, I can remember starting my review of A.S. Byatt’s “Possession” with the sentence “Sometimes a critic just wants to say ‘Wow.’” Still, I never expected to feel anything approaching Nabokovian bliss when reading five lengthy biographical essays about figures and incidents from 19th-century British history.
But Kathryn Hughes’ “Victorians Undone” is just amazing, and her “Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum” are so various, so imaginatively structured, so delicately salacious and so deliciously written that I sighed with pleasure as I turned the pages and even felt those tiny prickles along the neck that A.E. Housman once claimed were the sign of true poetry.
In her introduction, Hughes declares that her book is “an experiment to see what new stories emerge when you use biography — which, after all, is embodied history — to put mouths, bellies and beards back into the nineteenth century.”
While Hughes largely avoids the overtly personal, she does stress that her fugue-like essays build on 25 years of burrowing through libraries and archives. Her topics are original.
“Why did the young Queen Victoria become obsessed with other women’s figures in the spring of 1839, and exactly what made Charles Darwin grow that iconic beard in 1862 ... ? Why was the great philosophical novelist George Eliot so conscious that her right hand was larger than her left, and how did the poet-artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti manage to paint his mistress’ lips so beautifully while simultaneously treating them as a dirty joke?” In her fifth and last chapter Hughes relates, with the pacing of a truecrime writer, the 1867 murder of an 8-year-old girl and the trial that followed.
Most of these stories are structured like mini-mysteries. For instance, was the unmarried Lady Flora Fraser pregnant, as the teenage Queen Victoria suspected? Hughes tracks the case from suspicion of hanky-panky to rumor and royal outrage, to brutal gynecological examination, to widening public and private consequences. The Fraser case, she writes, had “absolutely everything the British press liked best: young aristocratic women, lascivious doctors, slippery foreigners and, above all, several stripes of illicit sex.”
In the chapter about Darwin we learn about his eczema, flatulence and sensitive stomach: The young naturalist threw up nonstop during his first seven weeks while sailing on the Beagle. Hughes’ essay touches on the cultural perception of sexual differences, the rise of muscular Christianity, the Crimean War and Julia Margaret Cameron’s propensity for photographing writers as sages or prophets.
While some readers may find “Victorian Undone” gossipy or even sensational in a negative rather than positive sense, I’m not one of them. This is popularized history done right, done with panache. Hughes has infused new life into dry-as-dust facts to produce a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.