Reviews

"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."

"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."

"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.'"

"Lively, iconoclastic and consistently riveting, this is popular history in the best sense."

"The body parts in these Tales of the Flesh... illuminate the wider cultural world in which their owners participated."

"Victorians Undone is excellent at providing a sniff of the 19th century that other forms of life writing have discreetly ignored."

"Intriguing, gleefully contentious and—appropriately enough—fizzing with life, Victorians Undone is the most original history book I have read in a long while."

"A page-turner... brilliant all the way through. One of the best books I’ve read in ages."

"This lively study goes behind the frills and furbelows to explore aspects of the Victorians’ notoriously strange attitude to the body."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"History so alive you can smell its reek... With her love of bodily detail, Hughes does indeed put the carnal back into biography."

"No one remotely interested in books should miss it."

"I can’t think of a recent social history I’ve enjoyed more."

"Beautifully constructed, narrated not only with wit and gusto, but a clear sense of purpose."

"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."

"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."

"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."