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    Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
    Unavailable
    Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
    Unavailable
    Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
    Audiobook13 hours

    Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum

    Written by Kathryn Hughes

    Narrated by Jenny Funnell

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

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    About this audiobook

    ‘Intriguing, gleefully contentious and – appropriately enough – fizzing with life, Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while’ Daily Mail

    A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

    A groundbreaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from one of our best historians.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJan 26, 2017
    ISBN9780008181871
    Unavailable
    Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
    Author

    Kathryn Hughes

    Kathryn Hughes is the prize-winning author of four previous books on Victorian social history, including a biography of Mrs Beeton which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and adapted for the BBC. She regularly writers for the Guardian, the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Kathryn is currently Professor Emerita at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of both the Royal Literary Society and the Royal Historical Society.

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    Reviews for Victorians Undone

    4/5

    52 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I had high hopes for this book but unfortunately it’s mostly padding. The first chapter is about the the wicked rumours surrounding the swollen belly of one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting and was good, because Hughes had a lot of documentary evidence to work with. Things go downhill right away, with the second chapter, “Darwin’s Beard”. Hughes has almost nothing to say about Darwin’s beard. Instead she talks about his voyage on the Beagle, his father, then talks about beards in the 19th C in general, and goes into great detail about many beards of prominent men of the age. Hughes prefaces the books by saying that she wrote the book because she found books left out the “warts and all” parts about famous historical figures, which were the bits she found most fascinating. But they’re not in her book either. It’s false advertising!
    • 4/5
      A tour of the Victorian era through body parts. The first four sections were excellent. The last, detailing the investigation and trail of a young man accused of a child’s death and dismemberment, is decidedly de trop, regardless of what insights are to be had about mental illness or the court system in the time. Aside from that caveat, the book is very written and very interesting. My advice: skip the last bit.
    • 4/5
      Victorians Behaving Badly

      Can you write a credible history of an era by focusing on parts of the body; or, more correctly regarding Victorians Undone, by using body parts as launch vehicles into interesting aspects of Victorian mores, style, medicine, law, social life, and more? Kathryn Hughes demonstrates that you can do a pretty good job of it as you entertain your readers with a wicked wit. At least the subjects of her history a long gone and thus saved from blushes.

      The subjects here are “Lady Flora’s Belly,” morals, medicine, young Queen Victoria, and wild rumor; “Charles Darwin’s Beard,” beards out of control, and Darwin’s earthquaking theory; “George Eliot’s Hand,” rural life in real Middlemarch, dairymaid reputations, illicit love, and family squabbles; “Fanny Cornforth’s Mouth,” Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelites, their models, the meaning and gradations of prostitution, and art; “Sweet Fanny Adams,” murder, status of children, plight of female children, English jurisprudence, insanity, and salty English seaman slang.

      Hughes, with these body parts as starting points, manages to paint an illuminating landscape of 19th century England, some of which contradicts, at least anecdotally, perceptions that have come down to us in the literature of the day. For instance, in exploring the murder of “sweet Fanny Adams,” the real sweet here, not the slang pejorative, Hughes finds life in a law office quite the opposite of Bob Cratchit’s dismally hunched existence; clerks seem to come and go as they please throughout the day.

      She makes her observations with considerable wit in a way Edwardian Mary Poppins would certainly approve. From the text on Darwin’s beard discussing the separation of genders in the context of societal roles, “ …the middle-class body had never appeared more gendered. Women’s crinolines, comprising a metal ‘cage’ over which a full skirt was displayed to braggardly effect, became so wide as to render physical activity both inside and outside the home tricky, if not quite as dangerous as satirical magazines liked to suggest. Husbands and brothers, meanwhile, adopted conspicuously long beards as a reminder that, no matter how many evenings they might spend in the drawing room listening to someone mangle Chopin, there was a warrior hiding under all that fur, just waiting to spring out and defend his territory. Stretched in different directions, horizontal and vertical, the two sexes could never be mistaken for one another.” As for pertinence, the latter on men might be something to ponder in the presence of 21 century facial fur.

      This thoroughly enjoyable, well told romp through Victorian life will engage readers curious about the not-so decorous past. Readers should be aware, however, that the subtitle promises more than the book delivers. These readers attracted by the flesh might find the literary porn of era contained in the classic The Pearl.
    • 2/5
      What a disappointment! I was looking forward to this book but nearly cried when I realised how bad it was. By that time I was already and long way in and it was too late to go back. I plodded on hoping against all hope that it would really start but no, it just petered along.

      Why was I so disappointed? It was so bland! How many paragraphs about a moustache? it felt like a whole book about a moustache! It was like gossip!

      This WAS NOT in the book:
      Lytton Strachey, a decade before his hatchet job on the Victorians, walked into the drawing room and pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress. “Semen?” he inquired. “With that one word,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … It was, I think, a great advance in civilisation.”
    • 4/5
      This is a magnificent volume of Victorian history. Victorians were people, just like us, and had physical likes and dislikes, performed bodily functions, had fads and fashions, and generally saw the world as much through their perceptions of each other as through news or views or knowledge. This is Kathryn Hughes’ thesis and she presents us with five examples of how this approach is reflected in Victorian life.Hughes has carefully selected episodes from the Victorian world that allow us to see how that physicality was seen by them. These episodes range from an apparent pregnancy that almost brought down the monarchy to the male fashion for bushy beards to the way people were judged for an apparent minor deformity to the life of a major model for Victorian art and finishing with a a most brutal crime.Hughes writes with erudition and wit (this is a funny book) and a deep understanding of the history. This is excellent.
    • 4/5
      While non-fiction books can take a while to work through, this is intensely interesting , readable and well-researched. Plus the author has, at times, a truly entertaining turn of phrase.I'm not 100% sure about the premise for the book: getting to understand the Victorians through the consideration of five famous body parts. Ms Hughes drags in a lot of extraneous material, which perhaps muddies the point of the account - but it sure is fascinating!-The account of unfortunate Lady-in-Waiting, Flora Hastings, calumnied for apparently being pregnant and unwed (whereas in fact she had some kind of internal growth.) What seems like mere 19th century prudishness is complicated, though, by Queen Victoria's relationship to her (a favourite of her mother and her despised 'friend' John Conroy, employed to spy on Victoria. And thus hated by Victoria's companion, Baroness Lehzen - eager to dream up scandal to remove a potential rival.)-Hughes then turns to the fascinating subject of male facial hair, and the outstanding configurations worn - I now know the definitions of a 'Newgate Frill', 'Piccadilly Weepers' and 'Dundrearies.' Focussing particularly on Charles Darwin, she considers how the addoption of the style (permitted, initially, as he was at sea) helped disguise his eczema and facial features, as well as transforming himself into a being akin to a Greek philosopher.-George Eliot's right hand: was it (as mooted) larger than the left through girlhood years spent dairying?-Frances Cornforth's lips- a blowzy lovely taken up by Dante Gabriel Rossetti..And lastly the tragic tale of little Fanny Adams, murdered and dismembered...and the court case that followed.Highly interesting read.
    • 4/5
      In the introduction, the author lays out the idea of wanting to know what the Victorians were really like and then explores five in-depth stories of the era that dig into the fleshy details of Victorian life. Each one provides details that often don't emerge in the more "official" histories of this era and I enjoyed learning things about the debate over George Eliot's hand and the trends that dictated how men styled their beards. This is a great book for rounded out the Victorian period with scenes of how life was lived, but also how we inherited the stories we have about this era.
    • 5/5
      An essay that is entertaining, well written and witty.
      It is one of the most entertaining history book I read in a long time.
      Recommended.
    • 4/5
      A well-researched, generally engrossing book; as much to do with how the Victorians thought and felt as about the famous Victorians themselves. The final chapter on Fanny Adams makes for fascinating reading.
    • 4/5
      While the title sounds risqué, the book itself is not. While the book goes off on many tangents, the main focus is on five people- and, more specifically, specific parts of their bodies. We start with Lady Flora’s belly. Lady Flora was a lady in waiting to Queen Victoria’s mother. Victoria and her mother were *not* close; the Duchess of Kent thought she and her ‘friend’, Sir John Conroy, should reign as regents for five years, even though Victoria had reached 18, the age of majority. Victoria would have none of that, and she pushed her mother away hard. When the unmarried Lady Flora’s belly begin to swell, it was another wedge between the two royal women. Flora swore she was a virgin, and, yet, her belly got even larger as she lost weight on the rest of her body. Flora was forced to undergo intimate examinations by physicians, who swore she was still a virgin. More than nine months passed. In any other situation, people would have accepted that Flora was desperately ill rather than pregnant, but this was the Victorian era and Victoria hated Flora. After her death, her family had an autopsy done, with numerous doctors present, to prove there was no child inside flora and that there never had been. Why was everyone so obsessed with this? I guess because they had no soap operas back then. After that we have Charles Darwin’s beard (which wanders through how human females go about selecting acceptable mates), George Eliot’s hand (supposedly her right hand was significantly larger than her left, due to manual labor as a child in the family dairy), Fanny Cornforth’s mouth (a model for Dante Gabriel Rosseti as well as being his mistress-a role she played with many other men, too) that goes over prostitution in the Victorian era, and the tragic murder of little Fanny Adams, a child who was cut into pieces which were found strewn about a park. It’s mostly a very interesting book- it’s full of information about the Victorian era, mostly focusing on how they thought about the fact that humans are animals with bodies that ached, pained, belched, farted, and could show what their lives were like. The author goes off on many tangents and most of them are fascinating (although some were less fascinating; hugely so). Some things still leave me puzzled; why did Eliot’s fans and family want to hide the fact that she had done manual labor as a young woman? (and, as it turns out, she hadn’t) It’s a book for the lovers of historical trivia.