Embarrassing Victorian bodies

The fetishisation of the Victorians shows no sign of abating. Over the past 16 years, since the centenary of the passing of the Victorian age, we have been treated to a never-ending stream of books about the monarch herself, the houses her subjects lived in, the railways they built and travelled on, their sexual peccadillos, the sensational murders that seized the headlines, and so on ad infinitum.

Now we have a study devoted to that ultimate fetishistic object: the human body. According to Kathryn Hughes, biographical writing about the Victorians has been indifferent to their vital signs of life, movement, smell, touch and taste, behaving as if our ancestors were abstractions rather than men and women full of puff and fat who probably stank to high heaven. Shouldn’t we be more concerned with what people in the 19th century were actually physically like? Does knowing, for instance, that that pair of love-struck poets, the Brownings, had dark complexions and large mouths as a result of their shared Jamaican heritage, or that Gladstone’s left forefinger was missing as a result of a shooting accident, contribute to our understanding of them? (In the case of the former, the answer is a resounding yes; when it comes to the latter less affirmatively so.)