Who’s hiding in Trollope’s bushy beard?
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Anthony Trollope is to be marked with a special set of stamps. This is entirely appropriate: not only did Trollope write countless highly enjoyable novels, but in his day job at the Post Office he introduced the post box to Britain.
The designer of the commemorative stamps has chosen a familiar picture of Trollope in middle-age, wearing little spectacles, with a bald pate and a great big bushy beard.
But where does Trollope end and his beard begin? Whenever my late father-in-law, a great Trollope fan, saw his photograph, he e would point to the extravagant beard and complain: ‘We’ll never know what he really looked like!’
Beards are, in their way, the male equivalent of a niqab, veiling most of the face below the nose. The fashion for voluminous beards in the latter half of the 19th century means that we will never know what many of the great figures off that time — Darwin, Marx, Dickens, Lear, Trollope — r eallyy looked like.
Trol l o pe ( a bovee right) himself grew a beard in 1857, when he was aged 42. Up to that time, beards had been considered rather foreign and eccentric, and never to be sported in smart society: two years earlier, another author had been blackballed from the Garrick Club because he insisted on having one.
But after soldiers came back f ull ybearded f rom the Crimean War i n 1856,856 beardsb d became fashionable. As a consequence, a whole generation began to walk around as if in disguise and, 150 years on, we have no idea, or only half an idea, of what they actually looked like.
Sadly, Trollope was never photographed pre-beard, so the contours of his naked face remain a mystery. Of course, you could argue that the beard is all part-and-parcel of the face, and that fussing about what Trollope would have looked like without his beard is as irrelevant as wondering what he would have looked like without his nose, or with an Afro hair-do.
Nevertheless, it would be nice to have some idea of where his chin (or chins) started and finished, or how jowly he was. The same goes for Lear, Marx, Dickens, Darwin and the rest of them. Small wonder that, in our own age, a widespread argument against people with beards is that they are sinister: do they have something to hide?
every now and then, this prejudice proves justified: if you are clean- shaven, and you want to avoid detection, then the obvious solution is to grow a beard. When Saddam hussein was finally pulled out of his hole in t he ground, his moustache had morphed, as if by magic, into the bushiest of beards.
The same goes f or Radovan Karadzic, whose Santa Claus-style snowy white beard allowed him to pass unrecognised for ten years, even trading as a homeopathic doctor and giving public lectures.
Perhaps as a result of these bad apples, beardism is on the increase. When the man-hug became popular a few years ago, the playwright Simon Gray spoke of his aversion to embracing bearded men. ‘I don’t really like it, really rat rather hate it... they’re rou rough on my skin, and pr probably full of food ana nd insects, a nd th they’re smelly, but I se see no way of repelling th them unless I take to dr dribbling into them or bl blowing my nose over th them, and word gets ro round that I’m to be avoided.’
P People who would no normally hate to be th thought of as homophphobic or racist are perfectly content to be beardist. In his d di s mal au t o bi o - graphy, Dr George Carey, the f ormer Archbishop of Canterbury, even took a pop at his fellow cleric, theh Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, for having w what he described as ‘f ‘flowing robes and a m menacing beard’.
On reflection, Carey might have been better off gr gr o wi ng a beard hi himself: his unfortuna nate potato-face has th the curious quality of lol ooking as though it i is some howh lacking an essential feature.
It is, in fact, a face that would have been given much-needed authority, ‘menacing’ or otherwise, thro ugh the addition of a bushy beard.
ODDLy enough, I have long suspected Carey of being the prototype for the blank face in the Sixties children’s game Woolly Willy, in which you move iron filings around with a magnetic pencil to create hair, beard, moustache, eyebrows and so forth.
Might t he Post Office now consider producing a special Woolly Willy stamp of Anthony Trollope, but in reverse, with his facial hair made to disappear? Or does his mystique reside in his beard? My only worry is that a clean-shaven Trollope would look like the late comedian Terry Scott, or the put-upon George, played by Brian Murphy, in the Seventies sitcom, George & Mildred.