A Day in the Life

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I’ve just finished reading Ruth Goodman’s How to be a Victorian (Norton 2013) and I found it so informative and delightful I thought I’d mention it here. Like some other period histories, Goodman’s book relies on periodicals, etiquette manuals, and advertisements to render a portrait of daily life in the British c19, but unlike other such works, she actually tries most of the methods herself. It is interesting to hear about the methods of bathing in a typical Victorian household. I’ve often seen the ceramic pitcher and bowl on dressing tables in paintings and illustrations from the period and wondered just how they were used. But it is quite another thing to hear a twenty-first century woman bathing herself according to the methods—say, for example, using no soap or water but merely scubbing the entire body with a linen cloth— and hearing her relate that her skin glowed thereafter and that it somehow kept body odor at bay. I loved hearing that her experiment in Victorian haircare methods—no shampooing, only a weekly rinse and otherwise regular brushing with natural bristles—was so successful that she’s adopted it as her own regimen.

Or again, we’ve all heard over and over the feminist canard that corsets were a tool of oppression and so tight as to render women’s lives a dull dream of constant pain. But here this Goodman tries one out—effectively shrinking her waist up to 4 inches at one point—and saying that she’s rarely felt more comfortable: that it turns out using one’s abs to hold oneself up all day (or slouching when they’re exhausted, as most of us moderns do) is the real pain, and having a little external support not only corrects one’s posture, but makes one feel more elegant almost immediately. She says she felt like she could sit and read all day when corseted: what a life! Granted, she does say that it was itchy, but that isn’t the usual complaint. Also—something I didn’t know and had never conceived of—men used to wear them too. Apparently, corseting was not a gendered activity, especially in the early part of the century.  

Anyway, it’s all wonderful, even when it is depressing. One hates hearing about the long work days for little pay, about the age at which boys were sent off to factory or farm work (often 6 years old) to begin 12 hour days that would not cease for them till death or injury, but even so, the pride they took even at that age in turning over their wages to their mothers is touching somehow, despite everything else. 

A sympathetic, well-researched, and enjoyable project, this.

The Spasmodics’ Social Anxiety Salve

I’m presenting a paper at the Fall 2016 gathering of the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) hosted by the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASU on the theme of “Social Victorians.”

I’m looking forward to it because, while I regularly present at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s (NASSR) conferences, and though I’ve presented on the Spasmodics before in other contexts, this will be my first NAVSA. Here’s my pitch, the full presentation of which will be given in Phoenix in November:

The reluctant founder of the so-called Spasmodics, Phillip James Bailey, trained as a barrister before turning to compose his enormous and enormously popular poem Festus (1839). For a book both long and difficult, full of grand abstractions and abstruse theological musings, Festus was a hit, to quote one early reviewer, “even among those who do not usually go in for poetry,” a popularity that began with its very first public reading, conducted by the mechanics working the printing presses and binderies on which it was produced. The book became a social object as soon as it became a book, and Bailey’s home became a social space, a place of pilgrimage almost immediately thereafter.

One such pilgrimage was made by Alexander Smith, inheritor of the Spasmodic mantel, whose first book A Life-Drama (1853) likewise blurred social barriers, this time, within the text. Poets and prostitutes blend therein with aristocrats and even goddesses in a drama not only of one person’s life, but of social life in Britain generally. Like Bailey’s, Smith popularity cut right across classes, the working-class writer a guest of nobility immediately following his book’s publication. Here too, the book became not only a social object, but a ticket for its author into new spheres of sociability.  

As Antony Harrison and Charles LaPorte have noted, the Spasmodics touched off a kind of Victorian culture war in criticism, but, this paper shows how their books also created radically new social–from their radically new artistic–forms.