Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, by Kathryn Hughes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum by Kathryn Hughes Hilary Fraser (bio) Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, by Kathryn Hughes; pp. xviii + 414. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, $29.95, $19.95 paper. Kathryn Hughes opens her deeply researched and wonderfully entertaining new study, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, with the vividly realized scene of Thomas Carlyle's first encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Her dual focus on the imagined contrasting physiques, features, and demeanors of these two eminent writers of different generations—the "spare, springy" young Carlyle, hewn from his native granite and birch, confronting the "damp, spongy apparition" of the drug-addled Coleridge—and on the insistent, sometimes unsparing corporeality of Carlyle's historiographic method (not least in his representations of Coleridge), neatly introduces her own distinctive methodology (ix). Carlyle's ambition to conjure a past inhabited by people "with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men" is brilliantly brought to life in Hughes's own animated account of the Victorians' obsessive and often tortured relationship with their bodies (Carlyle qtd. in Hughes x). The close-up physicality of the newly urbanized nineteenth century, when "other people's sneezes, bums, elbows, smells, snores, farts and breathy whistles were, quite literally, in your face," she argues, sharpened awareness of the body's unruliness and caprice (xi). As a way of managing a subject that could itself become unruly, Hughes structures her discussion around a selection of body parts suffered or enjoyed by their owners that seem peculiarly eloquent of broader Victorian preoccupations. Chapters on, for example, Charles Darwin's astonishingly rampant beard, George Eliot's over-developed hand, and Fanny Cornforth's plumply kissable mouth, bring focus and specificity to a wide-ranging discussion of attitudes toward sexuality, class, gender, race, and generally what it felt like to be human in the nineteenth century. Always running alongside the theme of the embodied Victorians, though, is her attention to the ways in which their physical lives have been represented and misrepresented by subsequent historians, as Coleridge's was by Carlyle. This is a book that is as interested in the historical and critical afterlives of Darwin's beard and Cornforth's mouth as it is in the material existence of their ungovernable originals. The resonances of the book's title beautifully encapsulate its intelligence and range. Victorians Undone conjures the buttoned-up Victorians even as it undoes the myths of [End Page 539] their legendary prudishness. It conveys the ways in which they were at once uptight and undone, discombobulated by their bodies. They are dissected into body parts and reassembled into fully rounded inhabitants of an age of which we now only have fugitive material traces that help us distinguish the myths from the historically true: hairs collected from Darwin's unpruned beard; paintings and photographs of Cornforth's mouth at different stages of her colorful life; and the glove that once fitted Eliot's contested right hand and (spoiler alert) reveals that it was not, as she and others after her claimed, enlarged by her early work in the family dairy. Hughes undoes conventional representations of the Victorians and connects us with them anew, alert to the pastness of the past, but also to its continuities with the present. The book ends with a chapter on the murdered girl who was the eponymous source of our modern phrase "sweet Fanny Adams" (287). Her name is now truncated to "sweet F. A.," cut down in a way that calls to mind her decapitated head and dismembered and unremembered body (365). Hughes wears her learning lightly. The book is often very funny, drawing on anecdote and gossip, quoting from private letters and journals, recounting scandals, but it is always for a serious purpose. She goes deep into the archives to piece together what actually happened, and she thinks about how and why myths develop. The explanation for some of these frankly odd stories sometimes has to do with the gate-keepers, usually family, who want to eradicate anything disreputable...