Victorians Undone
Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum
A groundbreaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body.
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?
How did a working-class child called Fanny Adams disintegrate into pieces in 1867 before being reassembled into a popular saying – ‘Sweet FA’ – that we still use today but would stop, appalled, if we knew its origins?
Victorians Undone 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.
PRAISE FOR VICTORIANS UNDONE
A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR • A BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘A page-turner … brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages’
– Lucy Worsley, Sunday Express
‘Refreshingly unusual … brilliant’
– Sunday Times
‘Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while’
– Daily Mail
‘A dazzling experiment in life writing’
– Guardian
‘It is not often I read a book and think “Wow! Every historian of Victorian Britain should read this”. This is historical storytelling at its very best’
– BBC History Magazine
‘A work of formidable scholarship’
– Financial Times
– ‘History so alive you can smell its reek’
– Telegraph
‘No one remotely interested in books should miss it’
– Sunday Times
‘I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more’
– The Big Issue
‘It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page’
– Observer
‘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
‘Sometimes a book just bowls you over with how good it is… I sighed with pleasure as I turned the pages … a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.’
– Washington Post
‘Lively, iconoclastic and consistently riveting, this is popular history in the best sense.’
― Wall Street Journal