It has been a while since I have read such an entertaining book review! I'm not sure if I'm more curious about the book reviewed or those written by the reviewer…. Enjoy!
A Mile in Her Corset
Review by Judith Newman (published in The New York Times, 28 December 2014)
of
How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman
What’s
the sexiest era? The Roaring Twenties? Hardly. The late-20th-century free-love
movement? Not even close. The Victorian era is, unquestionably, the sexiest.
What’s hotter than anxiety and repression? Or more titillating than the chasm
between public and private behavior, between the pedestal-placing of the
wife/mother and the enormous rise in prostitution? It’s no coincidence that one
of the most erotic characters in literature, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, appeared in
1897, toward the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. (Remember: He had to leave
Transylvania and come to England to feast upon pure blood, and open all those
untouched . . . necks.) Even the thought of the armorlike clothing of the times
coupled with the frilly nothings underneath makes me swoon. There’s a reason
the most ubiquitous lingerie shop in America is called Victoria’s Secret and
not, say, Richard Nixon’s Secret.
Living
as we do in a culture so vulgar and permissive that a reality series entitled
“Dating Naked” engenders a collective yawn, it’s perhaps not surprising we
glamorize the Victorians as the epitome of both passion and restraint. (Ooh,
restraint.) Yet this romantic perception is almost nowhere to be found in Ruth
Goodman’s informative and quite startling “How to Be a Victorian.”
Goodman
calls herself a “domestic historian,” and has participated in the kinds of
British re-enactment-of-history series that have made her a celebrity. On shows
with names like “Victorian Pharmacy” and “Tudor Monastery Farm,” she has spent
months working, dressing, eating, bathing — and more important, not bathing —
like her 19th-century ancestors. She is, she says, interested not in the kings
and princes and politicians, “who honestly bore me a little,” but in the
ordinary Victorian — “you and me.” This book is over 400 pages of you and me.
If you want to understand how Victorians thought, you read Walter E. Houghton’s
classic “The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870.” But if you want to know how
they looked, sounded, felt and smelled, there is no better guide than this one.
Goodman likes to get down in the muck — and there’s plenty of it in
19th-century Britain.
What’s
most striking is the amount of effort it took just to stay warm, clean and fed.
If Charles Dickens’s hearth scenes were indescribably delicious, that may be
because he and his fellow Victorians spent so much time being so damn cold —
the poor out of economy, the wealthy out of the belief that without a constant
stream of cold fresh air the body is essentially poisoned. (It’s a cultural
notion that’s still a little hard to shake. My 80-year-old husband is from
Northumberland, and as a consequence I might as well live in a meat locker.)
Here
are the things you don’t think about when you’re watching something like “The
Forsyte Saga.” The choking air pollution from all the coal fires. The atrophy
of a woman’s stomach and chest muscles from years of relying on a corset for
shape and posture. The fact that a country that saw its population almost
triple within a few decades had no real sewage system, which meant that by
1858, the Thames was overflowing with human waste. And then, of course, the
potato blight meant that huge numbers of English citizens were also starving.
Goodman notes that the poor were markedly shorter than the wealthy, and several
inches shorter than the average Londoner today. “It takes a lot of hunger to do
that to people,” she adds. But even when money wasn’t an issue, self-abnegation
was. In many homes children were sent to bed without dinner not as a
punishment, but because “the self-control and self-denial induced by hunger
were thought to teach enduring habits of self-sacrifice and to aid in
fashioning a more moral individual,” Goodman writes. (Our era is clearly not
the first to connect slimness and moral superiority.)
There
is enough detail here on the social significance of everything from bread to
laundering to hair fixatives to satisfy the most ardent history-obsessive. As a
hypochondriac, I was particularly drawn to the sections on Victorian medicine.
Before antibiotics, and with the new crowding and population explosion brought
on by the Industrial Revolution, cholera, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough,
tuberculosis and typhoid were looming threats. And with no regulation of the
advertising industry, manufacturers could claim pretty much anything. Which is
how the ingredients in Tuberculozyne, which purported to cure tuberculosis,
could be potassium bromide, glycerin, almond flavoring, water and caramel
coloring.
But
drugs that did nothing might have been preferable to the “tonics” that did
work, which often contained laudanum or mercury. It was speculated that as much
as a third of the infant mortality rate in Manchester had to do not with
disease but with drugging children. Popular tonics like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing
Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness did indeed stop children from being pesky,
as they were filled with opiates. Unfortunately they also stopped children from
wanting to eat, and many an infant “slipped quietly away.”
Oddly,
the details of Victorian life we’re most familiar with, or think we’re familiar
with — the attitudes about sex and women as chattel to their husbands — are
treated almost as afterthoughts. Maybe that’s because Goodman felt these
subjects were well-covered territory already. Nevertheless, I did learn that
women were supposed to enjoy sex — in the context of marriage, of course — and
masturbation was considered a far more dangerous activity for men than women.
Of course, that may be because so very, very few women indulged, as we all
know. . . .
Goodman’s
unique selling proposition as a historian is that she walks the walk of her
time period, even when that walk involves hard labor in a corset and a hoop
skirt. The book is peppered with her wonderful, and often wonderfully dotty,
social experiments. For months on end she brushed her teeth with soot, wore the
era’s recyclable sanitary towels (“an unusual idea to adjust to,” she says, in
a moment of supreme understatement), set fire to herself cooking on a Victorian
range and cleaned herself only with a linen towel, thus replicating the
Victorian aversion to water, which was thought to possibly open the pores to
infection. (PS, Goodman insists the dry-rubbing method works just fine.)
But
even Goodman has her limits. She tried to make condoms in the Victorian style,
“but the handwork required is remarkably precise and complex. The sheep’s gut
has to be thoroughly cleaned, soaked in an alkali solution and stripped of all
its adjoining tissue to leave only the gut wall.” One of the great pleasures of
“How to Be a Victorian”? There’s a shudder on almost every page.
I had my own Ruth
Goodman moment recently. After a trip to see his family in Britain, my
venerable husband brought back some vintage cotton nightgowns from the 1880s
for me. The cotton was superb, crisp, blindingly white and thick, like nothing
we have today. They also stretched from my chin to my ankle. He wanted me to
model them. I realized that somehow, to him, these were better than anything
Victoria’s Secret had to offer. I tried to get in the spirit. But after I read
Goodman, the romance and naughtiness dimmed, and the harshness of the Victorian
life shone bright. I could think of this garment only for its warmth, and
perhaps for a certain Miss Havisham-ishness. I do plan to model the nightgowns
— in my coffin.
