Description

Book Synopsis


Trade Review
Sometimes a book just bowls you over with how good it is. For instance, I can remember starting my review of A. S. Byatt's Possession with the sentence 'Sometimes a critic just wants to say Wow.' Still, I never expected to feel anything approaching Nabokovian bliss when reading five lengthy biographical essays about figures and incidents from 19th-century British history. But Kathryn Hughes's Victorians Undone is just amazing, and her 'Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum' are so various, so imaginatively structured, so delicately salacious and so deliciously written that I sighed with pleasure as I turned the pages and even felt those tiny prickles along the neck that A. E. Housman once claimed were the sign of true poetry . . . This is popularized history done right, done with panache. Hughes has infused new life into dry-as-dust facts to produce a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
The average biographer peers into a Great Man's mind. Kathryn Hughes's Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, in contrast, narrates the lives of five body parts.
—New York Times
The tales are entertaining, but Hughes's real achievement is historical—amounting to a new understanding of, as she puts it, 'what it meant to be a human animal in the nineteenth century.'
—The New Yorker
Lively, iconoclastic and consistently riveting, this is popular history in the best sense.
—The Wall Street Journal
The body parts in these Tales of the Flesh . . . illuminate the wider cultural world in which their owners participated.
—New York Review of Books
Victorians Undone is excellent at providing a sniff of the 19th century that other forms of life writing have discreetly ignored.
—Public Books
Intriguing, gleefully contentious and—appropriately enough—fizzing with life, Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while.
—The Daily Mail
A page-turner . . . brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages.
—Sunday Express
This lively study goes behind the frills and furbelows to explore aspects of the Victorians’ notoriously strange attitude to the body.
—The Guardian
Elegantly sidestepping the usual clichés of Victorian history, from foggy streets to whimpering urchins, each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect. It is writing that takes the raw materials of everyday life, starting with the body’s ‘bulges, dips, hollows, oozes and itches,’ and makes them live again. A dazzling experiment in life writing . . . Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries.
—The Guardian
It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page . . . Hughes is a thoroughly engaging writer: serious-minded but lively, careful yet passionate . . . Some of the encounters in its pages, whiffy and indelible, will stay with me for ever.
—The Observer
Victorians Undone is a work of formidable scholarship, but Hughes has a fluid, jaunty style that propels the reader from idea to idea. Reading it is like unraveling the bandages on a mummy to find the face of the past staring back in all its terrible and poignant humanity.
—Financial Times
History so alive you can smell its reek . . . With her love of bodily detail, Hughes does indeed put the carnal back into biography.
—The Telegraph
No one remotely interested in books should miss it.
—The Sunday Times
I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more.
—The Big Issue
Beautifully constructed, narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose.
—Mail on Sunday
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
Hughes regularly surprises us by showing just how much her subjects’ physical selves impinged on their contributions to our culture, and sometimes on the very course of history.
—The Times Literary Supplement
Deeply researched and wonderfully entertaining . . . Hughes undoes conventional representations of the Victorians and connects us with them anew, alert to the pastness of the past, but also to its continuities with the present.
—Victorian Studies

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Lady Flora's Belly
2. Charles Darwin's Beard
3. George Eliot's Hand
4. Fanny Cornforth's Mouth
5. Sweet Fanny Adams
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index

Victorians Undone

    Product form

    £17.95

    Includes FREE delivery

    RRP £19.95 – you save £2.00 (10%)

    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Wed 1 Jul 2026.

    A Paperback / softback by Kathryn Hughes


      View other formats and editions of Victorians Undone by Kathryn Hughes

      Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
      Publication Date: 30/04/2019
      ISBN13: 9781421429007, 978-1421429007
      ISBN10: 1421429004
      Also in:
      Biography: historical, political and military Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 Cultural studies

      Description

      Book Synopsis


      Trade Review
      Sometimes a book just bowls you over with how good it is. For instance, I can remember starting my review of A. S. Byatt's Possession with the sentence 'Sometimes a critic just wants to say Wow.' Still, I never expected to feel anything approaching Nabokovian bliss when reading five lengthy biographical essays about figures and incidents from 19th-century British history. But Kathryn Hughes's Victorians Undone is just amazing, and her 'Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum' are so various, so imaginatively structured, so delicately salacious and so deliciously written that I sighed with pleasure as I turned the pages and even felt those tiny prickles along the neck that A. E. Housman once claimed were the sign of true poetry . . . This is popularized history done right, done with panache. Hughes has infused new life into dry-as-dust facts to produce a learned work that is brazenly, impudently vivacious.
      —Michael Dirda, Washington Post
      The average biographer peers into a Great Man's mind. Kathryn Hughes's Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum, in contrast, narrates the lives of five body parts.
      —New York Times
      The tales are entertaining, but Hughes's real achievement is historical—amounting to a new understanding of, as she puts it, 'what it meant to be a human animal in the nineteenth century.'
      —The New Yorker
      Lively, iconoclastic and consistently riveting, this is popular history in the best sense.
      —The Wall Street Journal
      The body parts in these Tales of the Flesh . . . illuminate the wider cultural world in which their owners participated.
      —New York Review of Books
      Victorians Undone is excellent at providing a sniff of the 19th century that other forms of life writing have discreetly ignored.
      —Public Books
      Intriguing, gleefully contentious and—appropriately enough—fizzing with life, Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while.
      —The Daily Mail
      A page-turner . . . brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages.
      —Sunday Express
      This lively study goes behind the frills and furbelows to explore aspects of the Victorians’ notoriously strange attitude to the body.
      —The Guardian
      Elegantly sidestepping the usual clichés of Victorian history, from foggy streets to whimpering urchins, each page becomes a window on to a world that is far stranger than we might expect. It is writing that takes the raw materials of everyday life, starting with the body’s ‘bulges, dips, hollows, oozes and itches,’ and makes them live again. A dazzling experiment in life writing . . . Every page fizzes with the excitement of fresh discoveries.
      —The Guardian
      It is rich and scholarly, something fascinating to be discovered on every page . . . Hughes is a thoroughly engaging writer: serious-minded but lively, careful yet passionate . . . Some of the encounters in its pages, whiffy and indelible, will stay with me for ever.
      —The Observer
      Victorians Undone is a work of formidable scholarship, but Hughes has a fluid, jaunty style that propels the reader from idea to idea. Reading it is like unraveling the bandages on a mummy to find the face of the past staring back in all its terrible and poignant humanity.
      —Financial Times
      History so alive you can smell its reek . . . With her love of bodily detail, Hughes does indeed put the carnal back into biography.
      —The Telegraph
      No one remotely interested in books should miss it.
      —The Sunday Times
      I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more.
      —The Big Issue
      Beautifully constructed, narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose.
      —Mail on Sunday
      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
      Hughes regularly surprises us by showing just how much her subjects’ physical selves impinged on their contributions to our culture, and sometimes on the very course of history.
      —The Times Literary Supplement
      Deeply researched and wonderfully entertaining . . . Hughes undoes conventional representations of the Victorians and connects us with them anew, alert to the pastness of the past, but also to its continuities with the present.
      —Victorian Studies

      Table of Contents

      Introduction
      1. Lady Flora's Belly
      2. Charles Darwin's Beard
      3. George Eliot's Hand
      4. Fanny Cornforth's Mouth
      5. Sweet Fanny Adams
      Acknowledgements
      List of Illustrations
      Notes
      Index

      Recently viewed products

      © 2026 Book Curl

        • American Express
        • Apple Pay
        • Diners Club
        • Discover
        • Google Pay
        • Maestro
        • Mastercard
        • PayPal
        • Shop Pay
        • Union Pay
        • Visa

        Login

        Forgot your password?

        Don't have an account yet?
        Create account