Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
‘Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while’ Daily Mail
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR • A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE 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.
”'A page-turner … brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages” - Lucy Worsley, Sunday Express
”'A dazzling experiment in life writing … Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries … Each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect” - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Guardian
”'It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page … Hughes is a thoroughly engaging writer: serious-minded but lively, careful yet passionate… Some of the encounters in its pages, whiffy and indelible, will stay with me for ever” - Rachel Cooke, Observer
”'It is not often I read a book and think 'Wow! Every historian of Victorian Britain should read this'. It is a lyrical reflection on the corporeal bodies of Victorian men and women, as well as on the way their fleshiness has become invisible to historians … This is historical storytelling at its very best” - Joanna Bourke, BBC History Magazine
”'A work of formidable scholarship … Reading it is like unravelling the bandages on a mummy to find the face of the past staring back in all its terrible and poignant humanity” - Lucy Lethbridge, Financial Times
”'History so alive you can smell its reek … With her love of bodily detail, Hughes does indeed put the carnal back into biography” - Lisa Appignanesi, Telegraph
”'No one remotely interested in books should miss it” - John Carey, Sunday Times
”'I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more” - The Big Issue
”'Beautifully constructed, narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose” - Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
”'Sex certainly rears its many heads, but so does every other aspect of Victorian life, from farming techniques to court etiquette, dentistry to oil painting” - The Times, Book of The Week
”'Refreshingly unusual … brilliant” - Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year
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