Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
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A groundbreaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from one of our best historians, author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot: The Last Victorian.Why did the great philosophical novelist George Eliot feel so self-conscious that her right hand was larger than her left?Exactly what made Darwin grow that iconic beard in 1862, a good five years after his contemporaries had all retired their razors?Who knew Queen Victoria had a personal hygiene problem as a young woman and the crisis that followed led to a hurried commitment to marry Albert?What did John Sell Cotman, a handsome drawing room operator who painted some of the most exquisite watercolours the world has ever seen, feel about marrying a woman whose big nose made smart people snigger?How did a working-class child called Fanny Adams disintegrate into pieces in 1867 before being reassembled into a popular joke, one we still reference today, but would stop, appalled, if we knew its origins?Kathryn Hughes follows a thickened index finger or deep baritone voice into the realms of social history, medical discourse, aesthetic practise and religious observance – its language is one of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, an implacably turned back. The result is an eye-opening, deeply intelligent, groundbreaking account that brings the Victorians back to life and helps us understand how they lived their lives.
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Anne and John Hughes
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But by the following afternoon, and having prayed for guidance, Flora Hastings had made the decision to submit to an examination as the ‘most instantaneous mode of refuting the calumny’. Her decision was prompted by the fact that a doctor whom she knew and trusted, Sir Charles Clarke, happened to be in the palace. Sir Charles was not only a specialist in female reproduction, he was physician to the weepy-skinned, red-eyed Dowager Queen Adelaide, whose touch-and-go obstetric history had propelled Victoria from obscure Princess to reigning monarch. Flora wanted Clarke to be present at the examination not simply because he was a friendly face, but because without him as a witness she knew that she would be vulnerable to Sir James Clark’s (no relation) need to prove himself correct in his diagnosis. With the Duchess of Kent still wailing about how cruel and unnecessary it all was, the lady of the bedchamber summoned the two doctors to her room.
It is at this point that the protagonists’ narratives start to veer wildly, so that what we are left with is a babble of jabbering voices, angry, scared, wheedling, desperate to save their own skins. In the account he published several months later, Sir James does his best to hand off the role of unfeeling, brutish physician to Sir Charles. According to Clark, Sir Charles gave Lady Flora one last chance to confess her pregnancy, since after the examination it would be ‘too late’. Refusing to do so, Lady Flora then requested that Lady Portman, whom she referred to as ‘my accuser’, should be called as a witness. On Lady Portman’s arrival, Lady Flora retired to her bedchamber with Caroline Reichenbach, her Swiss maid. At this point Sir James breaks off his story abruptly, as if he can’t quite bring himself to describe what happened during the forty-five minutes that followed. The next thing we hear is: ‘After Sir Charles Clarke had made an examination, he returned with me to the sitting room, and stated as the result that there could be no pregnancy; but at the same time he expressed a wish that I also should make an examination. This I first declined, stating it to be unnecessary; but, on his earnestly urging me to do so, I felt that a further refusal might be construed into a desire to shrink from a share of the responsibility and I accordingly yielded.’
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