of what had gone before. Thirteen years after that Highgate encounter he was exhorting his readers to remember that ‘the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men … Not abstractions were they, not diagrams and theorems, but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach, and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men.’ It was precisely these ‘vitalities’ that Carlyle worked so hard to bring to his own written accounts of the Past, a past which, according to his famous formulation, was best read by setting the biographies of Great Men end to end. Dante, Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great all crashed through Carlyle’s books so vividly that it seemed as if at any moment they might bound out of the pages, take the reader by the hand and explain just what it felt like to write Hamlet or win the Battle of Naseby. ‘The figures of most historians seem like dolls stuffed with bran,’ wrote the Victorian critic James Russell Lowell, ‘but Carlyle’s are so real in comparison, that, if you prick them, they bleed.’
From the beginning of the nineteenth century British men and women had been piling into the cities from the countryside, exactly as Carlyle himself had done in 1809 when he left his native village of Ecclefechan to study at Edinburgh University. Strangers who would never previously have set eyes on one another increasingly found themselves in an involuntarily intimate embrace at the factory bench, the railway station, the lodging house, the beach or on the top deck of an omnibus. Other people’s sneezes, bums, elbows, smells, snores, farts and breathy whistles were, quite literally, in your face. Privacy, in the form of screens, locks, water closets, first-class carriages and single beds, was available only to a privileged few. For everyone else it was a question of raising thresholds of embarrassment and shame to protect against sensory overload. Of course, you could always turn to a physiognomy guide, or an etiquette book, or even the Bible, to tell you how to sort this untidy spill of corporeality into categories that made sense of it all – the clean and the dirty, the pure and the wicked, the rough and the genteel. But even here there were ambiguities, contradictions, collisions of meaning and sense.
So if our 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. And this reticence slipped naturally into the way that they wrote, or rather didn’t, about their physical selves. For while Carlyle made a point of describing Frederick the Great’s ‘negligent plenty’ of fine auburn hair and Mirabeau’s ‘seamed, carbuncled face’, most biographers of the time 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 in Victorian life stories at all, it was in the broadest, airiest generalities – a manly stride here, the sweetest smile there. Mostly, though, there was a hole in the biographical text where arms, legs, breasts and bellies should have been.
It was this jarring absence that Lytton Strachey seized upon in Eminent Victorians (1918), his iconoclastic takedown of three notable men and one woman of the nineteenth century. In scalpel prose the Bloomsbury Group stalwart revealed that his quartet of Victorian eminences were not only vain, petty and self-deceiving, they were physically faintly ridiculous too. Dr Thomas Arnold, the pious headmaster of Rugby, had legs that were too short for his body, while saintly Florence Nightingale had a ‘peevish’ mouth and descended into a fat, cushiony old age. The bulging forehead of Cardinal Henry Manning reminded cowed colleagues of a swooping eagle, while General Gordon’s ‘brick-red complexion’ was probably as much the result of brandy as it was of Khartoum’s relentless noonday sun. And that’s not forgetting Eminent Victorians’ cast of supporting characters, including Lord Panmure, whose ‘bulky mass’ reminded his friends of a bison, and Sidney Herbert, who was as sprightly as a stag.
Lytton Strachey’s insistence on exposing the moral and psychological frailties of his Victorian subjects has carried bracingly over into our own times. Indeed, we are all Stracheyites now, alert for humbug and self-deception in the stories that people in the past liked to tell about themselves. Yet when it comes to the attention that Eminent Victorians paid to physical form, little trace remains. In fact, in today’s biographies the body barely makes an appearance at all. It might be there, in its cradle, in Chapter 2 (Chapter 1 is for the forefathers and the Condition of England), at which point it gets a quick once-over and is assigned its father’s brown eyes or its mother’s long, loose limbs. From that point on we hear little about the biographical subject’s physical passage through the world until the penultimate chapter, at which point he or she develops a nasty cough, or a niggling stomach pain, and someone calls the doctor. If the subject of the book is a woman there may be a bit of blood in the childbirth chapter, but there won’t be any mention of menstruation, hiccups, a headache or any of those fluxy realities that we all know about from our own bodily lives. Finally, in the closing pages, the subject takes to their bed, mutters a few last words and is committed to the grave, whereupon they duly crumble into dust.
As a result even the most attentive reader may finish a biography of a Victorian, eminent or otherwise, feeling that they’d be hard-pressed to pick them out in an identity parade. (Biographies typically contain visual likenesses, to be sure, but those quarter-page black-and-white images don’t show the body in motion, can’t give you much idea of its habitual off-duty slouch, let alone its sound or smell.) So while a Life of Charlotte Brontë might supply chapter and verse on the novelist’s rich childhood imagination, it won’t prepare you for the fact that when she opens her mouth a Northern Irish accent comes out (you were expecting genteel Yorkshire). Likewise, having devoured a joint biography of the poets Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, you may feel that you have experienced all the exhilaration of their elopement to Italy, not to mention the intricacies of the lyric form. Yet, what a shock on encountering the happy couple in person to realise that both are partly African, with dark complexions, large mouths and, in the case of Barrett, a flat nose. What you’re seeing is the physical trace of their shared Jamaican heritage, a heritage that includes a moment two generations previously when a plantation-owner glanced at one of his female slaves and felt a tickle of entitlement.
The next stop is the Lake District, where you find yourself discreetly circling Coleridge’s erstwhile friend William Wordsworth, trying to work out why the shape of his body looks so different from the front than from the back. Is it some trick of the northern light? Finally, you bump into William Gladstone, the esteemed Liberal Prime Minister, and are taken aback to notice that his left forefinger is missing. He lost it in a shooting accident as a young man, but good manners mean that his contemporaries never mentioned it, portraitists ignored it, and even the caricaturists tactfully covered it up. You, however, can’t stop staring at that flaccid black finger-stall where the missing digit used to be.
‘You’, of course, means ‘me’. For I am the reader who feels chronically short-changed by the lack of physical detail in biography. What, I long to know, were people in the nineteenth century actually ‘like’ – a word that has a long and distinguished heritage in the English language, one that tells of deep presence and profound affinity. Tell me about these people’s books and their battles, their big love affairs and their little meannesses by all means – but how did it feel to catch sight of them across a crowded room, or to find yourself sitting next to them at dinner? Did they lean in close and whisper, or stand at a distance and shout? Did they smell (probably, most people did) – but of what exactly? Were they natty or slobbish, a lip-licker or a nose-picker?
Victorians Undone is an attempt to reverse the situation whereby biography, which parses as ‘the writing of a life’, has become indifferent to the vital signs of that life – to breath, movement, touch and taste. Dressed in its Sunday Best, the book might be described as participating in the ‘material turn’ in the Humanities, part of the new wave of interest amongst historians and literary scholars in objects that they can feel and hold, rather than simply chase through text after text towards an ever-receding horizon. In its more workaday incarnation Victorians Undone 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. I have been careful to avoid both Carlyle’s hectoring hagiography and
