introduce a certain lumpiness to canonical life narratives that have previously been rendered as smooth, symmetrical, and as strangely unconvincing as a death mask. For it is in lopsidedness and open-endedness, in bulges, dips, hollows, oozes and itches, that we come closest to a sense of what it feels like to live in the solitude of a single body, both then and now.
What follows are five corporeal conundrums that have emerged over twenty-five years of reading and writing about the Victorians, tangles of flesh and bone that have snagged in my mind long after the Life is supposed to be over. 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, a good five years after his contemporaries had all retired their razors? 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’s lips so beautifully while simultaneously treating them as a dirty joke? Finally, how did a working-class child called Fanny Adams disintegrate into pieces in 1867 before being reassembled into a popular saying, one we still use today, but would stop, appalled, if we knew its origins?
I have chosen to use body parts as opposed to whole forms because they are biography’s precision tool. While an entire body may pull in several different directions at once – the right ear has this story to tell, the big toe quite another – a single part offers something both finer and more penetrating. We can follow a thickened index finger or a deep baritone voice into the realms of social history, medical discourse, aesthetic practice and religious observance. In the process, a whole nexus of cultural power is laid bare. And while this is a power predicated on those old faceless monoliths of class, race and gender, it expresses itself not in tables and charts or theoretical jargon, but in beauty, gracefulness, symmetry and vulgarity, roughness and dirt. Its language is one of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, an implacably turned back.
By locating these five body parts at the moment they created crises in individual lives, I hope to add something to our understanding of what it meant to be a human animal in the nineteenth century. What I can’t do is say anything systematising about the ‘Victorian body’. At best, these case histories are panes of glass through which to catch a partial glimpse of a huge, teeming landscape of thought and feeling that may, in fact, never become fully comprehensible to us. That’s because the body, no matter how we might like to imagine it as a safe haven from the messy contingency of history, is deeply implicated in it. Put simply, a broken wrist in 1866 does not mean, and may not even feel, the same as it would today. It’s not just a question of whether the Victorians had codeine and splints to make things better, but the far less easily settled matter of how they regarded their wrists – as part of their essential core, or as a peripheral wing? And then what about the middle-aged woman who in 1857 sends a letter congratulating her niece on looking so ‘fat’? We gasp at Aunty’s insult, and it takes a while to realise that what is being offered is actually a loving, relieved compliment, a celebration of blooming good health in an age where slenderness is death’s calling card. Only if we come prepared to check our impulse to map our own bodily experiences directly on to the nineteenth century will we begin to understand what is really going on.
Yet although my starting point is the pastness of the past, a resistance to reading the Victorians as if they were just like us, except smaller and dressed in funny clothes, I can’t ignore the striking continuities either. For although the Victorians inherited an Enlightenment ideal of the human form as coherent and transcendent, their experience of their actual physical selves was remarkably similar to ours, which is to say confused and mostly improvised. Cloning may not have been possible in the nineteenth century, nor organ transplant nor gender reassignment surgery, but there was still a blurring of the boundaries designed to keep one body (and, by extension one class, one sex and one race) distinct from another. The Great Exhibition of 1851 showcased technological advances in prosthetic legs and glass eyes, while wearing someone else’s hair had become a universal salve for anyone who was unhappy with what Nature had provided. Meanwhile, industrial workers, from coalminers to glass-blowers, found that the raw materials of their trades slipped under the skin to lodge in their lungs and livers, so that they became effectively walking alloys. Karl Marx warned that these men and women were already well on their way to being replaced by the very machines they now operated. The robots were on their way.
Meanwhile, far away from the centres of technological innovation, even the most docile of Victorian bodies lived in a state of constant perturbation. Behaviours that started as learned gestures – the correct way to pour from a teapot or lift a seven-pound hammer – were repeated until they became part of a repertoire of automatic movements. Under the skin, yet-to-be-identified hormones and neurons fizzed away, producing moment-by-moment synaptic snaps that resulted, over time, in permanent changes to the body’s architecture. Much physical activity, indeed, took place beneath the level of consciousness altogether – defensively crossed arms, a blush, a stammer. In short, the Victorian body was porous, plural, always in the process of making itself, and far harder to pin down than those butterfly corpses that mild country clergymen spent their evenings crucifying on cork.
Those anonymous clergymen are not the subject of this book, and nor are their Brimstones and Painted Ladies. Instead I have followed Carlyle’s lead in writing about famous people. This is not because I agree with him that they matter more, but because they are the ones who tend to leave a paper trail of what historians call ‘ego documents’ – letters, diaries, memoirs – together with newspaper reports and, yes, biographies. It is hard to find sources for the sort of fleeting, fine-grained intimacies I’m after – a receding hairline, constipation, a poke in the eye, cold sores, menopausal flush, arms that refuse to squeeze themselves into new-fangled leg o’ mutton sleeves – and you really need to dig in the richest parts of the archive, where material has gathered in the deepest drifts.
And now, a final caveat. Strachey made up the bit about Arnold’s legs being too short for his body: when challenged, the Bloomsburyite drawled that ‘If they weren’t, they ought to have been.’ Meanwhile, Carlyle’s thundering instruction to remember that men in the past came with rosy cheeks and definite taste in trousers was actually part of an encomium to Sir Walter Scott, a writer of historical imagination rather than documentary fact. Scott’s men and women may indeed be three-dimensional, but what Carlyle fails to mention is that they are also made up. I, by contrast, have confined myself to the factual record: nothing that follows is imagined or guessed, faked or fudged. It is, rather, the result of a decade spent in archives (no amount of digitalisation has yet circumvented the need to haul one’s body around the world and sit in silence with boxes of unsorted paper). And as for the criticism that the exceptional people I deal with here can hardly be accounted typical, the answer must be this: genius has good-hair days like everyone else, while royalty also worries about its paunch.
1
I
It is the last week of June 1839, and a young woman lies dying in Buckingham Palace. Outside, in the grand mansions of Mayfair and the long, sweltering sweep of Piccadilly, the Season is winding down, and anyone who is anyone is getting ready to leave London in search of stiff sea breezes and creamy country air. But thirty-three-year-old Lady Flora Hastings is adamant that she will not make the long trip home to the Scottish Lowlands for what will surely be her last few days on earth. It is important that she dies here, in central London, in view of the gawping public and the equally ravenous press. Lady Flora ‘remains much in the same state’, the Standard assures its anxious readers. Lady Flora ‘is still in extreme and undiminished danger’, explains the Morning Post, which has come to feel a proprietorial claim on this whole terrible business. ‘This unfortunate lady is, we
