VICTORIANS' SECRET
Victorians Undone Kathryn Hughes Fourth Estate €28 ★★★★★ What Darwin hid under his bushy beard. Why George Eliot looked like a ‘Judy’ puppet. And the gruesome truth about sweet Fanny Adams... the Victorians as you’ve never imagined them
We tend to think of great Victorian men as having big bushy beards, almost from the moment they were born. Put Wilkie Collins, Lord Tennyson and Edward Lear into jeans and dark glasses and they might as well be auditioning for the early ZZ Top.
But this idea is not wholly accurate. Beards were only widespread in the second half of the Victorian age, when they came to be seen as a sign of health and manliness. Before then, most men, great or otherwise, may have sported sideburns but were otherwise clean-shaven.
Britain’s Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, would have looked seriously out-of-place in the 1840s House of Commons, where there was just one solitary MP with a beard.
Fifteen years later, the fashion had changed, and most men were, as Kathryn Hughes puts it, ‘buried under bristling facial hair’.
My father-in-law used to complain that the fashion for bushy beards in the 19th century meant that he had no idea what some of his heroes – Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin – really looked like. But this great treasure trove of a book contains marvellous before-and-after photographs, first showing them young and fresh-faced, then old and bearded. Indeed, some of them are so exceedingly bearded that they look as though they are popping their heads through a hedge. ‘It is a matter of wonder,’ writes Hughes, ‘that Tennyson ever managed to find his mouth.’
Yet Tennyson only grew his beard in middle age, in the late 1850s, primarily to disguise the way his rotting gums and absent teeth had made the rest of his face collapse in on itself. Others, like Edward Lear and Anthony Trollope, simply took advantage of the prevailing fashion, though I wonder whether Lear’s epilepsy – he sometimes suffered several fits a day – had something to do with it. In the days before the safety-razor was invented, he could be forgiven for growing a beard.
Though he sometimes sported a fledgling growth on his youthful voyages abroad, Charles Darwin grew a permanent beard only in 1862, at the age of 53. It was an easy way of covering up his terrible eczema, which caused his face to bubble and his lips to swell. Alas, this was far from his only malady. He was also, reveals Hughes, ‘a martyr to wind, so severe that he was always obliged to leave dinner early in order to belch and fart his way to comfort’. Victorians Undone – subtitled Tales Of The Flesh In The Age Of Decorum – seeks to reverse the peculiar pretence, common among other historians, that our Victorian ancestors existed primarily as disembodied minds. ‘In today’s biographies,’ writesHughes,‘the body barely makes an appearance at all.’ Yet the great Victorian move from country to city meant that most people were now living hugger-mugger, their bodies more evident than ever. ‘Other people’s sneezes, bums, elbows, smells, snores, farts and breath whistles were, quite literally, in your face… so if your great-great-grandparents have a reputation for denying or concealing the body, it is only because they were obliged to live with it so intensely.’ To redress this imbalance, Hughes has chosen to focus on the bodies of five famous Victorians, dealing with each of them in a beautifully constructed essay narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose. In Charles Darwin’s Beard, for instance, she reveals how the great naturalist’s chats with his Soho hairdresser, who was a keen breeder of dogs, helped shape his theory of evolution. She also shows how he turned intellectual cartwheels over the question of why men have facial hair and women don’t.
Two of her essays – George Eliot’s Hand and Fanny Cornforth’s Mouth – have unexpected twists, both of which bring the Victorian age bouncing, alive and kicking, straight into our own. The great novelist George Eliot, or, as she was less well known, Marian Evans, was famously plain: one unkind journalist said she was more like a horse than anyone he had ever met. She had bad teeth, a big jaw and a very large nose. ‘The effect was rather like a “Judy” glove puppet,’ observes Hughes.
After her death, the idea was planted that her right hand was bigger than her left, as a result of the time she had spent as a child on her family farm churning butter and crushing cheese. A biographical war broke out between those who believed this to be true and those who thought it false. By and large, the former group wanted to remember her as a simple country girl, and the latter (including her family) preferred to remember her as a delicate intellectual.
Hughes presents a delightfully nimble essay on the various tugs and tussles over unknown details that face every biographer. Right at the end, she reveals that, in the middle of 2015, a woman called Lynda Swindells wrote to George Eliot scholars explaining that she had for years been housekeeper to a single man, who had died in 2005. A decade later, sorting through some old magazines and postcards she had saved from the skip, she had come across an old envelope containing a righthanded glove, and with it a note saying that this was the glove of George Eliot.
This glove, it emerged, had been handed down from generation to generation of the same family, and had, without doubt, once belonged to George Eliot. Examining it, Kathryn Hughes discovered a stamp on the inside of the wrist that showed it to be a six-anda-half, one of the smallest sizes available in Victorian England. So we now know that, for all her physical shortcomings, George Eliot was blessed with two delicate little hands.
The other tale to have been furnished with an ending only a few years ago is that of Fanny Cornforth’s mouth. In her heyday, Fanny had been Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s lover and model, the subject of his controversial painting Bocca Baciata, which translates as ‘the kissed mouth’, a reference to the sultan’s daughter in The Decameron who slept with eight different men.
Rossetti’s priggish fellow painter William Holman Hunt said the painting of the mouth revealed ‘gross sensuality of a revolting kind’.
A contemporary remembered Rossetti tracing Fanny’s mouth with his fingers, and enthusing: ‘Her lips, you see… are just the red a woman’s lips always should be – not really red at all, but with the bluish pink bloom that you find in a rose petal.’ To which the lower-class Fanny, squirming
‘The woman with the most kissable lips of the 19th century had a furred tongue’
with embarrassment, had blurted: ‘Oh go along Rissetty!’
For reasons of propriety – Rossetti was, incidentally, Clintonian in his sexual preferences – Fanny Cornforth had been airbrushed from history by Rossetti’s family, and the painting had been retitled Marigolds before being put up for sale. What had become of her? Nobody knew. ‘There was something about Fanny, her utter vulgarity, which made her inadmissible to the official annals of Rossetti’s life and art,’ writes Hughes.
But then, in 2012, Fanny’s final two years were traced to a mental asylum on the outskirts of Colchester. In 1907, at the age of 73, she had been admitted to Graylingwell with dementia. A doctor’s casebook notes that she had varicose veins and bunions. Her famous mouth now had poor-fitting dentures and, says Hughes, ‘the woman with the most kissable lips of the 19th century had a furred tongue’.
Hughes’s two remaining tales of Victorian bodies are every bit as fascinating, and told with the same beady relish. One concerns Lady Flora Hastings, who was wrongly accused by the vindictive young Queen Victoria of being pregnant outside marriage, only to die of a stomachexpanding tumour. The other is the awful story of Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old girl murdered in 1867 by a respectable young psychopath in the fields outside Alton in Hampshire. The murderer then cut up her body parts and scattered them around the countryside.
Her name, too, has transcended its era. When we blurt ‘Sweet FA’ today, we might think of it as a euphemism for a swear word, but it is in fact something infinitely more awful. Mindful of the story of the little victim’s body parts, sailors at Deptford, south-east London, used to call the revolting tinned mutton they were served ‘Fanny Adams’. If they were served nothing at all, then it would be Sweet Fanny Adams – or Sweet FA.