Posts

One of the many joys of delving into the nineteenth century is meeting the numerous vibrant characters who inhabited it. I first encountered ‘Lord’ George Sanger when researching the Hyde Park celebrations that marked Queen Victoria’s accession. Over nine days in June 1838, Sanger and his circus family thrilled the crowds with learned pigs and clairvoyant ponies. Their remarkable troupe also included ‘Living Curiosities’: the pig-faced woman, the living skeleton, the world’s tallest woman, and cannibal pygmies. Something for everyone, I’m sure you’ll agree. ...

Although George Eliot declared biography to be “a disease of English literature,” it hasn’t yet been eradicated, and there have been almost 20 attempts to tell the story of her life and career. The number of Victorian women writers who enjoyed both critical and commercial success can be counted on the fingers of one hand, so Eliot is certainly worthy of all this biographical attention. Of course, George Eliot is just as famous for her unconventional private life as for her novels. Well, I say “private life,” but the details of her adulterous relationship with G H Lewes and subsequent short-lived marriage to John Cross have been the subject of much lurid speculation. There isn’t much new information in Hughes’ book, but her account is lively, insightful, and unashamedly feminist in approach. ...

Although Queen Victoria was supposedly prudish, she popped out nine tiny Saxe-Coburgs and the population more than doubled during her reign. We might think of the Victorians as sexually repressed, but they were clearly at it like stoats. In The Victorian Guide to Sex, Fern Riddell synthesises a wealth of material from marriage guides, newspapers, and the archives to bring us a more sophisticated and composite view of our ancestors. ...

Anyone who saw the recent BBC documentary Hidden Killers of the Victorian Home knows that arsenic was everywhere in the late nineteenth century. It was used as a beauty product, as a medicine, and also to achieve a vibrant green colour in wallpaper. This ubiquity made it devilishly difficult to prove cases of deliberate poisoning and many murderers probably got away scot-free. When a case did make it to court, the nation was transfixed. Kate Colquhoun’s engrossing book recounts the 1889 trial of Florence Maybrick, a young American woman accused of poisoning her respectable English husband, James. This cause célèbre dominated the press and divided opinion and Did She Kill Him? evokes the febrile atmosphere of the courtroom. ...

If someone had thought to ask Queen Victoria what sort of daughter she didn’t want, she might have described Princess Louise: a smoker, a cyclist, and a strong-minded feminist who consorted with the likes of Josephine Butler and George Eliot. It is this tense mother-daughter relationship that dominates Lucinda Hawksley’s lively and enjoyable biography of an intriguing royal whose attitude to sex was distinctly unvictorian. ...

I’ve always been slightly chary of Will Warbuton (1905), having been warned that it features a happy ending. Anyone familiar with Gissing’s novels will know that he is relentlessly bleak, and anything else would be plain wrong. Much to my relief, misery still abounds in this story, and Gissing’s characteristic obsession with money, sex, and class is evident throughout. Will Warburton is an essentially cheery soul whose financial security is destroyed by the recklessness of an unreliable friend. Having only a few hundred pounds in the bank and a widowed mother and a sister to support, the middle-class Warburton resolves to buy a grocery business in South London. Although resigned to this twist of fate, he struggles with the “sickening weariness of routine” and the humiliation of serving behind a counter. Emasculated by his ill-fortune and class relegation, he is easy prey to a dishonest landlady, who exploits his meagre and hard-won income. Indeed, Warburton epitomises Gissing’s ubiquitous trope, that of the man whose iniquitous social position is determined by his financial situation. ...

This is a preprint of a review published in Britain and the World, Volume 6, pp. 298-300. The title of this book is slightly misleading, as the reader learns little of Alice Liddell, the girl who famously inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Instead, in this slim volume, Simon Winchester focuses his attention on Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and his adventures in photography. We learn about Dodgson’s experiences as an awkward youth and his circumscribed life following admission to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he took holy orders and, therefore, a vow of celibacy. ...

If anything is guaranteed to get my feminist dander up, it’s the idea of wifely perfection, and this enthralling book had me seething from start to finish. On a summer’s day in 1769, wealthy (but unprepossessing) bachelor Thomas Day visited the orphan hospital in Shrewsbury to choose himself a wife. This was not the way a gentleman usually embarked upon courtship, even in the eighteenth century, but at the grand age of twenty-one, Day had already decided that his womanly ideal did not exist: therefore, he would have to create her. He required someone “completely subservient to his needs and whims and utterly in thrall to his ideas and beliefs”. ...

To be decadent in an age of utility was unforgivable, as Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton were to find out in a trial that scandalised London in 1870. Better known as Fanny and Stella, the two young clerks were arrested and charged with outraging public decency by dressing as women and “conspiring to incite others to commit unnatural offences”. As there were no specific laws against cross-dressing and “unnatural offences” (i.e. buggery) were difficult to prove, the court case was as oblique as it was sensational. In this enthralling account, Neil McKenna chronicles the arrest and cross-examination of Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park by using court transcriptions and letters between the accused and their circle. Where there are gaps, McKenna uses his imagination, inhabiting their world seamlessly and appropriating the colourful language of fin-de-siècle London. ...

The trouble with reading a lot of Victorian potboilers is that they start to seem like reality. The madwoman in the attic is a pervasive image throughout nineteenth-century culture, from Bertha Mason, through to Laura Fairlie and Lady Audley. In this gripping and insightful study, Sarah Wise reveals that it was actually husbands who were most at risk of being detained against their will. It makes sense when you think about it: men were the main inheritors of wealth, also assuming their wife’s property upon marriage. Consequently, there was a “high bar” set for men to prove themselves fit to control that wealth, and every incentive for their enemies to demonstrate otherwise. ...