Kathryn Hughes makes some big claims for Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum. Her new book is, she writes in an enticing introduction, an attempt to reverse the situation whereby biography, the writing of life, has become indifferent to the “vital signs” of that life – to breath and movement, to touch, taste and smell. One can’t help but sense in this a certain weariness. Who can blame Hughes, the author of major books about George Eliot and Isabella Beeton, for wanting to try out a different kind of narrative, one both more visceral and less gargantuan? (Victorians Undone comprises a collection of five essays, each a study of a different subject.) Nevertheless, she has a point. How many times have you ploughed right to the end of a long biography only to find yourself asking: yes, but what was she really like?
The Victorians, moreover, remain as stubbornly unfathomable as their more elaborate underwear. The sensible resist the idea that they were just like us. One of the frustrations of ITV’s soapy Victoria – a series Hughes inadvertently picks to pieces in her book – was its absolute refusal to deal with the intense weirdness of the Queen and her court, with their devotion to beliefs and proprieties which, though well known to us by now, remain difficult to comprehend, much less to sympathise with. And yet they were only flesh and blood, after all. At the mercy of their hormones and their genes, they worried about their teeth and hair, just as we do; their aches and pains, vastly less treatable than our own, affected their moods as ours. Pondering this, who doesn’t wonder about their menopausal flushes and their middle-aged impotence? As Hughes notes, they were not bloodless insects, to be pinned for posterity to an inky piece of velvet, but farting, belching, squashy creatures with varicose veins, acid reflux and, in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a testicle so swollen his walk was lop-sided.
The trouble is, the details of such “fleeting, fine-grained intimacies” are deeply buried. While they probably can be found somewhere in the archives, you need the biographical equivalent of a nit comb to get at them. Group biographies, in addition, are extremely labour-intensive: the writer must read as if she were writing a single life, only to discard most of her research, a process she then has to repeat multiple times. Victorians Undone has taken Hughes, whose biography of Beeton came out in 2005, a long time to put together, nit comb (and, perhaps, smelling salts) in hand, and it shows. It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page. But it is also digressive, meandering. Her stated theme – how did the men and women whose tales she tells feel about their physical selves? – comes in and out of focus. Each essay works beautifully alone. Hughes is a thoroughly engaging writer: serious-minded but lively, careful yet passionate. In its entirety, though, it feels strained, uncertain of itself. The pieces do not quite fit together.
The first essay tells the story of Lady Flora Hastings, who arrived at Kensington Palace in 1834, a new member of the court-in-waiting whose first role was to spy for the then Princess Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent. A victim of court intrigue, when her stomach began to swell, it was said she’d fallen pregnant by her mistress’s scheming comptroller, Sir John Conroy. In fact, still a virgin, she was dying. Her bulging belly was the result of a tumour. The second tracks the development and shifting meaning of the luxuriant whiskers without which, now, it is impossible to picture Charles Darwin; and the third is about George Eliot’s right hand, supposedly larger than her left thanks to the years she spent working as a dairymaid for her father. Fanny Cornforth’s Mouth stars Rossetti’s longest-serving mistress and the model for Bocca Baciata, his sensuously knowing portrait of 1859. Finally, Hughes concludes with an account of the murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams, whose body parts were found scattered across a Hampshire hopfield in 1867 (it’s to this dead child that, courtesy of some old naval slang, the expression “Sweet Fanny Adams” refers).
What do these essays have in common? The answer is: not a great deal. Hughes’s excellent account of the Hastings affair is vividly shocking, being so unsparing not only in the matter of Victoria’s spiteful role in the drama – on the July day in 1839 when Flora finally died, the relieved young Queen felt a wild desire to “roll in the grass” – but in the humiliations the young woman had to suffer in trying to lay the gossip to rest. Only by submitting to an internal examination by a doctor could Lady Flora prove that she was not with child, and yet this in itself turned her into the very thing she was accused of being: a whore. The essay about Darwin, too, is lively, and rather pertinent, in this, the age of the hipster beard. Whiskers in his day, just as now, spoke volumes. They told the world, among other things, whether a man was high or low church; post-Crimea, they were also a symbol of masculinity in a realm in which the middle classes led lapdog lives.
But the essays concerning Cornforth and Eliot seem to have more to do with the murky business of biography itself – beware the class-conscious keepers of the flame! – than with the bodies of their subjects. And with the tale of Sweet Fanny Adams, we are in essence reading a penny dreadful. It’s a ghastly, chilling story – Hughes writes of Fanny’s eyes “cooling and viscous” in her killer’s pockets – but it’s too exceptional to be put to service as a way of understanding, say, Victorian attitudes to the sexuality of children.
None of this is to say that I didn’t enjoy Victorians Undone. Some of the encounters in its pages, whiffy and indelible, will stay with me for ever. Did Darwin really grow his immense beard because he felt competitive with his 23-year-old nephew, Alfred? How did Queen Victoria cope with the prolapse of the uterus from which she suffered, and why did she not bathe more often? (Lord Melbourne, her favourite prime minister, seems to have found her rather stinky.) How might lusty Dante Gabriel Rossetti have felt about the operation to remove his ill-fated testicle? Such questions, even when only partially answered, bring us so close to the Victorians, they might almost be upstairs, fussing and occasionally panicking behind a locked bathroom door.
• Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes is published by Fourth Estate (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
