Sandowing and Other Resolutions

I’ve spent the last three years writing about the origins of bodybuilding as a middle-class pursuit. The project has been a pleasure: I’ve been able to splosh about in seas of Victorian ephemera, most of which did not turn out to be immediately germane, but which were still well worth the wade. As we head [...]

Read Full Post »

Victorians in The New Yorker

I’m a little behind on my New Yorker reading these days, which is too bad because there have been a huge number of Victorian-related articles lately. (I’m counting one on H.G. Wells from the October 17th issue as Victorian, never mind that he published most in the 20th century.) Henry James was a through-line in [...]

Read Full Post »

Modern Times, Nervous Men

I’m testing out some ideas about neurasthenia, my favourite nineteenth-century nervous complaint. Mark Micale and Elaine Showalter have argued quite convincingly that neurasthenia was polite metonym for male hysteria. I, however, am interested in the ways that it differs from hysteria – the particulars that made it non-feminizing. The following are some of my musings [...]

Read Full Post »

Scientific Boxing: Gentlemen in the Ring

I’ve been working through the various models of masculinity on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. One of the Exposition’s most popular entertainments (alongside the first Ferris wheel, Buffalo Bill’s Rough Riders, and movable sidewalks) was a daily boxing demonstration by heavyweight champion James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. Corbett used multiple venues [...]

Read Full Post »

Form, Function, and Facial Fur

I’ve spent the last week mulling over how mark-up languages’ form and function encode knowledge into a text – but have been sidetracked by an amusing site devoted to nineteenth-century mustaches. Drawn from the University of Kentucky archives, these are almost exclusively American mustaches. I’ve been trying to divine each sitter’s nationality by reading his [...]

Read Full Post »

Re-reading Tom Brown

I recently re-read Tom Brown’s Schooldays to revise my book chapter on muscular Christianity and disability.  Now, I know as a good historicist reader I’m supposed to get totally into the mindset of the mid-Victorians and never judge, but there was one thing that really had me going. Has anyone else noticed how often the boys taunt working-class men [...]

Read Full Post »

Reflections on Adam Bede. Part I.

I am reading Eliot’s Adam Bede for the first time since I read it in graduate school, in a class that focused on Victorian representations of masculinity and the male body. And it certainly is a novel that seems to revel in describing the body of its hero, Adam. Eliot’s narrator begins the novel in [...]

Read Full Post »

Dr Marigold and Mr Chops: Dickens Reprised

Two years before his death, in 1868, Charles Dickens famously toured the United States, giving public readings of his work. Mark Twain was in the audience in New York and admitted to being “a great deal disappointed” at Dickens’s performance. He records, “what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them [...]

Read Full Post »

The Mystery of Life and the Science of Heredity in The Heavenly Twins

“Now don’t say a word if you’ve read it… I owe everyone a grudge who tells me the plot of a story that I’m interested in” (The Heavenly Twins 1893, 527) While making my way through New Woman novels this year, I’ve been musing on the New Woman and the problem of heredity. I’ll save [...]

Read Full Post »

the dandiacal body

The extent to which nineteenth-century women’s dress impeded mobility is almost a cliché—dresses that weighed in excess of twenty pounds, hoop skirts, balloon sleeves larger than door-frames.  But I was surprised to discover just how inhibiting men’s dress could be as well. 

Read Full Post »