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A review by mylogicisfuzzy
Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum by Kathryn Hughes
2.0
I am leaving Hughes's book without reading the final chapter because I don't see the point of finishing. While this is a book about Victorians, they are not 'Undone' and neither does the book contain 'Tales of the Flesh'. The four chapters I have read are ostensibly about: 'Lady Flora's Belly', 'Charles Darwin's Beard', 'George Eliot's Hand' and 'Fanny Cornforth's Mouth'. In reality, they are not about any of those body parts, instead we get gossip and envy at Queen Victoria's court, squabbles between George Eliot's biographers and so on. How stupid of me to expect - from the title, that this book would be about Victorian society's attitudes to the human body and perhaps a bit about Victorian medicine. How stupid of me to expect, once the chapters have been titled after very specific people and their very specific body parts, to expect there to be much about those specific people and those specific body parts.
In the chapter about George Eliot, for example, with its proposition that Eliot's right hand was bigger than her left, due to Eliot making cheese and churning butter at her family home, Hughes doesn't examine whether or not this could have been possible or not. At one point she mentions that Eliot was a housekeeper and a dairymaid for about 15 years. But a little later she says that Eliot was at a boarding school until 16. So, for how long was she actually keeping house? Hughes doesn't say - but Wikipedia does - five years. Would that really be enough time for such a big physical change? Finding out doesn't seem to have been Hughes's priority and it is this - lack of detail in one hand and abundance of unnecessary detail in the other, that really bothered me.
I got this book because it had a good review in Sunday Times Culture, sadly, it is not the first time in recent years that ST recommendations turned out to be duds.
In the chapter about George Eliot, for example, with its proposition that Eliot's right hand was bigger than her left, due to Eliot making cheese and churning butter at her family home, Hughes doesn't examine whether or not this could have been possible or not. At one point she mentions that Eliot was a housekeeper and a dairymaid for about 15 years. But a little later she says that Eliot was at a boarding school until 16. So, for how long was she actually keeping house? Hughes doesn't say - but Wikipedia does - five years. Would that really be enough time for such a big physical change? Finding out doesn't seem to have been Hughes's priority and it is this - lack of detail in one hand and abundance of unnecessary detail in the other, that really bothered me.
I got this book because it had a good review in Sunday Times Culture, sadly, it is not the first time in recent years that ST recommendations turned out to be duds.