Vile bodies: Obscure Facts About Famous Victorians

Vile Bodies: Obscure Facts About Famous Victorians

By C. A. Asbrey

It's hard to get a sense of the real life in the 19th century. We see the stiff, upright portraiture, but we rarely see them smile, slump after a picture has been taken, or even their normal gait. So often the moving pictures are speedier than real time, and the flickering screens add an air of unreality to their ghosts on the screen. We can't smell the body odour of people who mostly bathed once a week, if they were lucky, nor the heavy perfumes they used to cover them—not that the attempts were always successful. We can't smell their sewers, the burning gas, the oil in the lamps, their farts, their food, or the smoke from their fires, industries, and fetid pollution. 

They remain figures frozen in aspic, in old portraits and photographs, adopting the positions which they thought would reflect them in their best light for as long as anyone would look at them. But how much does that tell us about the real human beings? Do their flaws add humanity? Can we learn about their strengths from their weaknesses? Do we understand how similar, or different, they are to us in their coping mechanisms? I think it makes them all so much more fascinating, adding flesh to the bones, and makes them seem more alive—especially, when they are things they wanted to keep hidden. We all share those human frailties and vanities at some level, so I thought it would be interesting to look at a few minor details which may make you see them in a slightly different light.

For instance, were you aware that Jules Verne walked with a limp? His nephew shot him twice in a state of paranoia, but he was a kindly man, and paid the medical bills to keep the nephew in comfort for the rest of his life. That was hushed up, clearly a matter of family shame. It only makes him more endearing to me. Another thing hushed up were the antecedents of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Even though her husband called her 'my little Portuguese', her colouring and features didn't come from the Mediterranean. They came from her African ancestry—from her family plantations in Jamaica a mere two generations before—and she was proud of it. It informed her activism in anti-slavery movements, anti-child labour, and anti-forced prostitution. Once more, that's something hushed up outside her intimate circles at the time, but now more-widely known, and appreciated by future generations. William Wordsworth's poems on disability, and on the perfect woman take on a new light when you know that the reason he looked so different from the back to the front was down to his scoliosis. 

A beardless Charles Dickens 

Charles Dickens gave himself a number of nicknames, including ‘The Sparkler of Albion’, ‘The Inimitable’, ‘Revolver’, and ‘Resurrectionist’. Those make him sound like a supremely confident person, but that couldn't be further from the truth. He was extremely shy, when not hiding behind a persona, and was especially insecure about his weak chin. It's the reason he grew his beard, but that gave rise to a new insecurity, as he was unable to grow a full beard. The famous 'doorknocker beard' as a kind of prosthesis to disguise it. The style wasn't a matter of choice. He was amongst the many men who had patchy growth. And he wasn't the only one hiding behind the hair.

Charles Darwin was plagued by red, scaly, patches that were exacerbated by shaving - so the full beard for which he became famous was grown. In his own words, he was 'hideous.' 

Tennyson as a young man

Alfred Tennyson had been a very handsome young man, but he too retreated behind a curtain of hair to hide his deficiencies as he aged. Apart from suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, he was said to suffer from epilepsy, depression, and he lost all his teeth The tooth loss resulted in bone loss in the mouth, and a collapse in his features, something not corrected by the set of 'queer' false teeth he used from the age of 45. The full beard was a perfect camouflage. The American poet Longfellow had a more altruistic motive. He was horribly scarred rescuing his wife from a fire, and hid behind the hirsuteness of the age. It has to be said that many women of the age did not share their men's enthusiasm for the cultivation of anything they could grow. Emily Tennyson longed for him to "to shave off his malodorous attachment", while the wife of the Duke of Newcastle was known to observe that she could always tell how many courses he had consumed at dinner from looking at it.   

And hiding physical oddities wasn't just a male phenomenon. Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Elliot, had one hand larger than the other. This was a legacy of making butter on her family farm for years, at an average speed of forty revolutions a minute, building up the muscles in one hand. All fairly inconsequential you'd think, especially as she made it a feature of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede It was a way to indicate the character's humble beginnings, and a feature to be ashamed of and be hidden.

However, after her death in 1880, her family were dismayed to find her first unauthorised biography contained the story, and her descendants set about dismantling the rumours. For the next fifty years, everyone writing about her was compelled to say that both her hands were the same size.   

Many writers injured themselves with their excesses, mostly through overwork. Herman Melville's family almost staged an intervention before they were even invented, to prevent him from overworking. Giacomo Leopardi, the poet, blamed his hump on 'scholarly excess' when in fact it was scoliosis, but not helped by a lifetime hunched over a desk. Honoré de Balzac became so addicted to coffee he found that drinking copious amounts no longer cut it. He began eating raw coffee grounds on an empty stomach. I don't think many were surprised when he succumbed to a caffeine overdose at the age of 51.

The Tennyson/Dickens ring

And then there were the personality traits their descendants wanted to keep quiet. The nature of Queen Victoria's relationship with her Ghillie, John Brown, and servant, Mohammed Abdul Karim, was lost to the world forever when her family insisted that all diaries, letters, and paperwork related to them be burned on her death. H.G. Wells had one of the largest collections of porn in the country (no mean feat in England), including records of his own sexual shenanigans, in the country. Dickens was a fan of annoying pranks, with females especially centred-out for his attentions. He once dragged a random young woman to the waterside and threatened to kill her by throwing her in—claiming to be in love with her when people intervened. His famous name saved him from prosecution. And Dickens' bad behaviour brings us on to the love-children who were everywhere in the Victorian period. Not only was he said to have at least two children with Ellen Tiernan, but he was rumoured to have numerous others scattered around the country. In February 2009 a ring went up for sale by an anonymous seller. It was inscribed 'Alfred Tennyson to Charles Dickens 1854', and was indeed a gift to Dickens from Tennyson. The sellers say the ring was passed down from a Hector Dickens, an illegitimate child of an affair between the author and his sister-in-law. However, a DNA test showed that Hector Dickens was not a direct descendant, but was related to a cousin. This goes to show that family lore and rumour alone can't be trusted. But was his story true, but just ascribed to the wrong Dickens? These family whispers so often alter in the telling, so it's possible.

And Dickens tale isn't the only one. Catherine Donovan was born in 1866, and received a generous allowance from Disraeli all her life. Her family say she was urged to go to Australia, and then New Zealand, when Disraeli became Prime Minister, and bore a striking likeness to Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister. Nobody knows if he was her father, as rumoured.

None of these revelations need to be seen as prurient. They are intended as being a glimpse at the real humans behind the promoted images, and to show the difference between their society and ours. Today these celebrities would be on the front pages selling a tell-all story about almost everything itemised above. In their day, the struggle with their demons was something they were happy to tamp down. The dichotomies in their society were seen as a good thing, where we see them as unhealthy. People often knew the truth, but went along with the vision of a confirmed bachelor, a child suddenly being adopted in the family after a female relative took a discrete leave of absence, the woman who showed zero interest in marriage, and the soldiers who arrived home with the a child of a 'friend' who desperately needed to be adopted—they just kept their mouths shut and got on with it. Only occasional whispers might carry down the generations, but the secrecy often altered them slightly in the repeated tellings, until they are no longer the truth. With the rich and famous we generally have better records to find the truth.

Catherine Donovan and Bejamin Disraeli at about the same age 

In a world where a groom might celebrate his marriage with a visit to a prostitute, and where a doctor routinely lied to the wife about the venereal disease she contracted from her new husband, manners were easier to maintain than morals. Especially when the rules were so unevenly applied in a stratified society. The Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen once said, "Nothing changes more than what is shocking."

I think that almost everything I've noted here about the famous of the 19th century would be something we'd either celebrate or empathise with their struggles. They'd be on television being interviewed about their illnesses, bloodline, struggle from a life of poverty, and mental health. It's notable that in their day, these were things to hide, and even a matter of shame. The excesses that the powerful men walked away from are different. They were tolerated for far too long, and only now have we started tugging that long thread to remove it from our part of the tapestry.  

I'm not saying for a moment that we are better, or even nicer. I'm just saying that we're different. To us, the 'flaws' and secrets are humanising. To the average Victorian they meant loss of face. And anyone who has ever investigated their own family tree will find their own version of the secrets laid out above. Psychologists say that a quick trick to connect with someone in a conversation is to confide in the other person. Finding the secrets in your own family works in a similar way and forges a bond with your own ancestors—especially when we have the exactly same foibles today.          

     

Excerpt

Almost everyone woke simultaneously, jolted by the sound of the brakes grinding, and the engine puffing and huffing in protest at an unscheduled stop. Jake’s hand reached for his gun even before he was fully conscious.

“No!” The cry came from Jeffrey, the younger steward, who staggered into the aisle in shock.

Nat strode out of the curtained area, fastening his trousers. “What’s wrong?”

“Mrs. Hunter,” Jeffrey stammered. “She’s dead.”

Nat dragged the curtain aside, revealing the tiny-framed woman lying in a pool of blood. He kneeled and scrutinized her. “Bring a lamp.” He reached out and touched her face. “She’s alive. She’s warm. Fetch Philpot. He’s a doctor.”

The Englishman wandered groggily forward. “I’m not a doctor. I’m a—”

“We don’t care what you are, Philpot,” Jake growled. “You’re the nearest thing we’ve got. You’ve got medical training. Get in there.”

Mrs. Hunter’s eyes flickered weakly open. “My moonstone. Miss Davies—she took it.” She fell back into insensibility.

Jake frowned and his keen blue eyes looked up and down the railway car at the passengers crowded in the aisle in various stages of undress. “Where is Miss Davies? Have you seen her, Abi? You’re bunkin’ with her.”

“No, she isn’t here.” Abigail frowned. “I haven’t seen her for ages. She wasn’t even in her bunk when I changed Ava.”

Malachi padded briskly up to the group, pushing various butlers out of his way as they milled around. “Oh, my goodness! The poor woman.”

Jake nodded. “Yeah, Philpot’s seein’ to her. She’s still alive. Why’ve we stopped? We ain’t at a station.”

Malachi quickly fastened a stray button. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I have been informed that a rock fall has blocked the tracks. We will dig it out and be on our way as soon as possible.”

“A rock fall? So, how far to a station?” Nat asked. “We’re high in the mountains, miles from anywhere.”

There was another ominous rumble somewhere above them and the carriage shook. The roof thundered with the thumps and clattering of stones and gravel pounding the roof. Worried glances rose upward while Abigail hunched protectively over her baby. The noise gradually stopped, but for an occasional patter of settling gravel and stones shifting above them.

The head steward’s brow crinkled into a myriad of furrows. “I’d best go and check that out.”

Nat’s brows knotted into a frown. “We’re miles from anywhere? So where has Maud Davies gone?” 

“With the moonstone?” Jake strode over to the door and looked out at the huge feathery flakes drifting down from the heavy skies onto an expansive mountainous vista. “There’s nowhere to go.”