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'Such weight': Obesity, life insurance, and masculinity in mid-Victorian culture
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'Such weight': Obesity, life insurance, and masculinity in mid-Victorian culture
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'Such Weight': Obesity, Life Insurance, and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Culture
James Michael Bennett
A dissertation presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy (ENGLISH)
University of Southern California
December 2017
2
3
Abstract
'Such Weight': Obesity, Life Insurance, and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Culture
James Michael Bennett
This is a project about the history of an idea. More specifically, it’s a project about the history
of what I see as a narrowing range of ideas that constellate around the word obesity and its cultural
signification in three enormously popular mid-Victorian novels. In this project, I argue that the
solidification of the term “obesity,” as a condition denoting a medically morbid state of jeopardized
health, is a uniquely Victorian event, one which opens a useful lens through which to reassess
representations of corpulence in the Victorian novel. Following the historical overview that serves as
the first chapter, the three subsequent chapters focus on Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, William
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. These texts, I contend, are rich
sources for exploration because they exhibit what I define as a form of literary excess, a capacity to
transcend their text of origin.
In each, I examine the role and consider the broader context of, in the case of Pickwick, a range
of fat male characters, Joseph Sedley, and Count Fosco, respectively. Throughout, I endeavor to
contextualize and marshal evidence from a variety of discursive sources and materials, but focus the
most on texts from the developing medical and insurance industries of the period. I raise the specter
of life insurance as part of my overall argument to illustrate one of the consequences of the
interventions produced by the statistical classification of the word “normal,” and to offer a reading of
each novel’s focal characters made possible by the work of this contextualization. Masculinity, as it
manifests in these novels, is explored in its relation to obesity and life insurance. Methodologically,
this project hews closest to a historical/cultural materialist analysis, which, spiritually, I conceive of as
a continuation of the work of Foucault, and an attempt to proffer a more multiply discursive analysis
to a familiar charge.
4
Table of Contents
1. Acknowledgments___________________________________________________5
2. List of Figures______________________________________________________8
3. Introduction________________________________________________________9
Making Meaning of the Objective World
4. Chapter 1__________________________________________________________19
“Culture’s Self-Representation and its Distribution of Power”
5. Chapter 2__________________________________________________________63
“So Much Healthy Mirth”: Untangling Pickwick
6. Chapter 3__________________________________________________________114
Vanity Fair’s Jos Sedley and Colonial Anxiety: “let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be
thankful therefor”
7. Chapter 4__________________________________________________________147
The Woman in White’s Freak Show and the Non-Normative Body
8. Works Cited________________________________________________________172
5
Many people helped me as I worked on this project over the last several years.
I would like to thank Timothy Campbell, Beth Helsinger, Mark Miller, Hillary Strang, and Joan
Wellman for their support and guidance while I found my initial bearings in the long nineteenth
century at the University of Chicago.
At USC, the first people I met left lasting impressions on my time in the program: Bill Handley,
David Lloyd, David Rollo, and Flora Ruiz made my transition, as well as the ensuing vicissitudes of
graduate school, all the easier to manage. I am especially thankful to two members of my cohort, Patti
Nelson and Devin Toohey, for the personal and professional examples they set and the friendships
they have provided me over the years. Outside of my cohort, Matthew Carrillo-Vincent, Alexis
Lothian, and Trisha Tucker, as senior graduate students, helped me work through the dissertation
process at different stages of composition.
As I was conceiving the project, Kate Flint, Hilary Schor, and Vanessa Schwartz helped to
shape the broad contours of my research inquiry, even if I was not aware of it at the time. Likewise, I
am grateful for a course offered by Jack Halberstam and Josh Kun on archives and subcultures that
helped me rethink the methodologies and disciplinary conventions active in my own scholarship.
Bruce Smith, along with Diana Arterian, Gray Fisher, and Megan Herrold generously gave
their time and advice to many versions of the project as it manifested in the prospectus writing
workshop.
John Carlos Rowe, whose door and mind were always open to me, deserves praise for agreeing
to sit on my qualifying committee and, prior to the exam, hear me babble on about a project that was
still very, very inchoate. He did once call me “baby,” however.
My knowledge and interest in Victoriana was nurtured and expanded by three auspicious trips
to the Dickens Universe, part of the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. Ray Crosby, Andrew
Elfenbein, Ryan Fong, Johnathan Grossman, John Jordan, LeDon Sweeney, Carolyn Williams, and
6
Susan Zieger were instrumental in my own work, and offered their input on various versions of the
chapters that comprise this project.
The English Department’s generosity and patience with my development cannot be
overstated. Specifically, a funded trip to The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell and a
subsequent summer funding award to travel to London to conduct archival research, both influenced
the direction and scope of my work.
An online course offered through Texas A&M introduced me to the software program “R”
and a set of tools useful for conducting digital scholarship within the humanities. In the second
chapter, on Pickwick, the charts and diagrams I use are the product of this training and were created
through R.
To the members of my nineteenth century writing group, Brianna Beehler, Becca Ehrhardt,
Gerald Maa, and Darby Walters, I am indebted, for their kindness, compassion, and untiring
encouragement of this project.
My committee chair, Joseph Boone, warrants exceptional commendation for his superhuman
patience and inspiration throughout this process. You never gave up on me or this project, and no
words can capture how crucial your influence has been on my development. Fortunately, patience and
inspiration abound within my committee, and Tania Modleski and Sarah Banet-Weiser have both
agreed to help me by serving on committees, as empathetic confidants, and as scholarly mentors. Even
at their busiest, they have consistently and unselfishly made time to support my work and success.
I’ve noticed that people often describe, in sections like these, an individual’s contributions as
without measure, somehow infinite. In this case I really do mean it, about all three members of my
committee. It was in my first semester of coursework, in Tania’s “Male Weepies” seminar, that I read
Mark Micale’s Hysterical Men, which encouraged me to think about gender’s historical contexts. The
next semester, Sarah’s “Feminist Theory and Communication” survey, significantly broadened my
7
understanding of the field as well as the field of objects upon which to consider, and her work on
popular media and culture presented an example (and an opportunity) for me to consider novels within
a broader frame. Joe’s “Novel as Genre” course gave me the foundation in theorizing the novel that
informed my field reading, prospectus, and this project today.
As teachers, all three provided their own lessons to that end: Tania’s seminar, despite the
nature of our discussions (and arguments), always felt warm and respectful; Sarah’s ability to propel a
discussion forward, regardless of the comment or insight under consideration, still amazes me; Joe’s
talent for rendering something visual out of text reminds me that what we visualize is just as important
as what we read.
Frankly, I do not know what this project would look like without their influences. What I do
know is that, though I may never truly comprehend the lengths that my committee members have
gone to support me in finishing this project, the debt is greater than anything I can repay with words.
Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family in Arizona for helping me when it meant
the most. To my most immediate family, Jessie, Molly and Bea—thank you for putting up with me.
To Jessie: thank you for both putting up with me and agreeing to help me with this project for the last
several years. More than that, thank you for your curiosity, intellectual acumen, and shrewd insights—
I cherish the dialogue we share. I know it hasn’t been easy, but home is when I’m alone with you.
8
List of Figures
Title Page
1. Fat Boy Postcard 9
2. Google NGram Viewer 22
3. Two Wonders of the World 38
4. Bone and Flesh 39
5. Lambert Poster 42
6. Lambert Game 43
7. Google NGram Viewer, Pickwick 73
8. Robert Seymour Etching of The Club 74
9. Phiz, “The Valentine” 75
10. Dispersion Plot of ‘fat’ in Pickwick 77
11. Compared Word Frequencies, Pickwick & Oliver Twist 79
12. Compared Word Frequencies, Pickwick and Major Dickens Works 79
13. Compared Word Frequencies, Pickwick and Contemporaneous Bestsellers 80
14. Phiz, “The Fat Boy Awake—On This Occasion Only” 82
15. Proportion of measurements x Chest Circumference (in.) 87
16. Pickwick at the Fleet 101
17. The Charles Dickens Museum at Grays Inn 106
18. The Pic Nic Papers (Vol. 2) 109
19. Mortality Table 120
20. “Causes of Death in Sixty Nine Corpulent Persons” 121
21. “Weights of Health in Several Proportions” 124
22. Shakarm Portrait 128
23. An Elephant for Sale 139
24. Mr. Joseph Entangled 141
25. Mr. Joseph in a State of Excitement 143
26. Cosmorama Rooms Poster (1846) 153
9
Introduction: Making Meaning of the Objective World
But if humanity gives meaning to the objective world, with different sets of meaning for different human groups, one must
still ask how this is done and by whom in any given historical instance. Where does the locus of meaning reside? For most
human beings most of the time, the meanings believed to inhere in things and in the relationship among things and acts
are not given, but, rather, are learned. Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long
ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention. To say this is not to deny individuality or the human capacity
to add, transform, and reject meanings, but it is to insist that the webs of signification that we as individuals spin are
exceedingly small and fine (and mostly trivial); for the most part they reside within other webs of immense scale, surpassing
single lives in time and space. (Mintz, Sweetness and Power 157-158)
Figure 1 - Fat Boy Postcard (Wellcome Collection, early 20C)
This is a project about the history of an idea. More specifically, it’s a project about the history
of a narrowing range of ideas that constellate around the word obesity and its cultural signification in
three enormously popular mid-Victorian novels. In this project, I argue that the solidification of the
term “obesity,” as a condition denoting a medically morbid state of jeopardized health, is a uniquely
Victorian event, one which opens a useful lens through which to reassess representations of
corpulence in the Victorian novel. Following the historical overview that serves as the first chapter,
the three subsequent chapters focus on Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, William Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. These texts, I contend, are rich sources for
exploration because they exhibit what I define as a form of literary excess, a capacity to transcend their
10
text of origin. To give but one example, the postcard above, dated to the early twentieth century,
references Dickens’s novel, and the unforgettable character Joe, decades after it first appeared to
readers in the 1830s. What history and context does it index—what webs of signification does it
specify?
In each novel considered, I examine the role and consider the broader context of, in the case
of Pickwick, a range of fat male characters, Joseph Sedley, and Count Fosco, respectively. Throughout,
I endeavor to contextualize and marshal evidence from a variety of discursive sources and materials,
but focus the most on texts from the developing medical and insurance industries of the period.
1
I
raise the specter of life insurance as part of my overall argument to illustrate one of the consequences
of the interventions produced by the statistical classification of the word “normal,” and to offer a
reading of each novel’s focal characters made possible by the work of this contextualization.
Masculinity, as it manifests in these novels, is explored in its relation to obesity and life insurance.
Methodologically, this project hews closest to a historical/cultural materialist analysis, which,
spiritually, I conceive of as a continuation of the work of Foucault, and an attempt to proffer a more
multiply discursive analysis to a familiar charge.
In the collection of lectures Foucault gave at the Collège De France, “Society Must Be Defended,”
he argues for a shift away from “power over the body in an individualizing mode,” and one “directed
not at man-as-body but at man-as-species” in the nineteenth century (242). In other words, for
Foucault, the transition between centuries coincides with the establishment of biopower, “addressed to
a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to
the extent that they form…a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth,
1
One notable exception is William Banting’s A Letter on Corpulence, published initially in 1863. Similar to George Cheyne’s An Essay on Health and Long
Life, Banting’s pamphlet is often held up as indicative of a greater emphasis placed on fat, which was, according to him, understood as a parasite on the
otherwise healthy body. Many critics have used Banting’s text as a central component of their work on body size in the period, notably Joyce Huff and
Lillian Craton. Though I do reference it, I do not include this text in this study for two reasons. First, its date of publication puts it a few years ahead of
the last novel I examine, The Woman in White, making it difficult, if not risky, to attempt historical contextualization. Second, as part of the multiply
discursive project undertaken, my aim is to offer new, but nevertheless complementary, discursive territory to consider the development of obesity in
the period.
11
death, production, illness, and so on” (242-3). It is this shift in scope, from individual to general, that
this project explores.
Describing the technology necessary to develop biopower, Foucault fastens upon the
development of demography and statistics.
2
And, as we will see, he was not the only one eager to have
access to such information. Information such as “the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity…together
with a whole series of related economic and political problems…become biopolitics’ first objects of
knowledge and the targets it seeks to control” (243). From this initial point of interest, Foucault goes
on to say that, over time, “much more subtle mechanisms that were much more economically rational”
obtained, including “insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures, and so on” (244).
Foucault, then, lays the groundwork for the broad historical parameters of this project.
But it would be incorrect to credit him with everything, of course. In Viviana Zelizer’s Morals
and Markets, she, too, though with more historical backing than Foucault, notes a strong connection
between the invention and proliferation of mortality tables “to the growth of life insurance in
England” (13). Indeed, England’s place as the origin of life insurance in the west, especially when the
rest of Europe was opposed to the industry at the time,
3
makes it an important location to study.
More explicitly, Margot Finn’s The Character of Credit and Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit
Economy each seek to understand why novelists of the day “were obsessed with debt and credit” and
how money becomes naturalized: “we no longer notice that money consists of various kinds or that
its function depends on writing…money has become so familiar that its writing has seemed to
disappear and it has seemed to lose its history as (various forms of) writing” (25; 85). If Foucault lays
the groundwork, texts such as these, then, help to plot the course of this project.
2
“Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological
problem and as power’s problem” (245).
3
“Morally condemned and often legally banned, life insurance did not develop in most countries until the mid-or late nineteenth century. During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most European nations considered life insurance ‘unfit and improper’ (33).”
12
Such a project would, quite literally, not be possible without essential insights and concepts
from gender studies—in particular, those that interrogate gender, and seek to understand what makes
a body mean something in a given time and place. Feminist studies have illuminated the cultural and
ideological strictures that have corseted female bodies, and, in an attempt to expand rather than
supplant that work, I claim a parallel but different story of male embodiment—its norms, exemptions,
and representability—emerges when we consider corpulence as a representational and
characterological element of masculinity in the Victorian novel.
Nevertheless, masculinity studies have not always existed harmoniously within feminist and
queer theories. In the collected volume of essays, Masculinity Studies & Feminist Theory, Judith Keegan
Gardiner surveys the history of the fields and, reflecting on that history, offers four points of
consensus. First, she argues, “masculinity, too, is a gender and therefore…men as well as women have
undergone historical and cultural processes of gender formation that distribute power and privilege
unevenly”; second, “masculinity is not monolithic,” despite “dominant or hegemonic forms of
masculinity [that] work constantly to maintain an appearance of permanence, stability, and
naturalness”; third, both fields “can and should cooperate both intellectually and politically”; and
fourth, that both fields, methodologically, “are skeptical about essentialist conceptions of gender and
sexuality” (11-12).
To be clear, however, the assumption of this project is not that men endured similar or
equivalent forms of power and control over their bodies as women. This is not an exercise in showing
how one form of gendered contingency compares to another, but, rather, to contextualize how the
male body underwent a series of changes that can best be understood within this historical context.
As a result, I turn to insights stemming from Lennard Davis and the growing field of work aligning
with disability studies to better historicize the influences and inflections inherent in recognizing body
difference.
13
Relative to current work in Victorian studies, this project owes much to and builds upon works
like Gwen Hyman’s Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by focusing
less on class-specific analysis and more on historically and materially specific concerns over
embodiment and Herbert Sussman’s Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early
Victorian Literature and Art by, following Hyman, emphasizing the popular novel and extending and
complicating those considerations later into the century.
Such a focus on character—as exceeding the confines of a novel would not be possible without
recent work complicating the discussion about its value to literary studies. Though the terms
“representation” and “character” are fraught, Deidre Lynch has shown how character “has no
autonomous history...what changes are the plural forces and rules that compose the field in which
reading and writing occur” (11). David Brewer helps to extend this line of thinking in The Afterlife of
Character by considering how characters proliferated through piracy before strict copyright regulations
were invented and instituted. With a particular focus on the burgeoning scientific interventions of
medicine, statistics and insurance, this project tracks the messy, unstable, confusing shifts and
consequences that attend the Victorian revaluation of the corpulent male body.
The slippage from obesity to corpulence is intentional. On one hand, it avoids deploying a
term that, presently, is overdetermined. On the other, as we will see, it animates one of the problems
of its “newness,” as it is often unclear what relationship it has to the variety of other terms, then as
now, we have for fatness.
That obesity is overdetermined should not be news to us, however. In our present cultural
moment, discussions around obesity and epidemics thereof are frequent.
A Sunday New York Times
article wrestles with the advantages and disadvantages to the recent decision by the American Medical
Association to classify obesity as a “multi-metabolic and hormonal disease state” in June of 2013. The
researchers conducted several studies on this development and their findings indicate that, on one
14
hand, “the obesity-as-disease message increased body satisfaction among obese individuals,” but on
the other, “suggesting that one’s weight is a fixed state — like a long-term disease — made attempts
at weight management seem futile.” They end their report by lamenting that the two goals of
minimizing “self-blame and stigma” while “promoting adaptive self-regulation and weight-loss” have
yet to be achieved.
This pair of aims offers a useful summary of the current state of affairs. In the former, there
is one group of scholars, researchers, and activists aligning their work and efforts with what has been
termed “fat studies,” an interdisciplinary endeavor with two fundamental premises: an
acknowledgement of “the simple fact of human weight diversity” and a focus instead on “what people
and societies make of this reality” (Wann x). In the latter, there is an opposing group of scholars,
researchers, and activists arguing for, as Lauren Berlant phrases it, a fundamentally “unheroizable case,
the so-called obesity or ‘globesity’ phenomenon that is said to be sweeping the U.S. and the
Westernizing globe” (Berlant 758).
But the existence of diametrically opposed arguments about obesity does not mean that actual
health issues aren’t at stake. According to Berlant, each group is guilty of perpetuating a discursive
impasse—an instance of which being the unanswered “dilemma” of the New York Times piece. For
example, she notes how it would be accurate and straightforward to describe globesity “as an
orchestrated surreality made to sell drugs, services, and newspapers and to justify particular new
governmental and medical oversight on the populations whose appetites are out of control” (763).
However, in a footnote to this sentence, she finds such positions lacking:
Oliver, Campos, and Klein fight the “cold facts” of the obesity epidemic with their own cold
facts, many of which are taken from “fat activists” who proffer their own antinormative
analyses of what should constitute definitions of health and sickness. Speaking a debunking
language in the register of scandal to drown out the register of crisis, they do not write with a
nuanced understanding of their participation in the discursive and always processual
construction of disease historically. (763)
The intervention Berlant makes avoids falling into the competing registers of crisis and scandal by
15
offering an interpretation of “the way the attrition of the subject of capital articulates survival as slow
death,” reading globesity as an example of “[i]mpassivity and other relations of alienation, coolness,
detachment, or distraction...affective forms of engagement with the environment of slow death” (779,
emphasis added). As a response, then, to the biopolitical framing of obesity and the prevalent camps
arguing for and against this framing, Berlant considers the idea of obesity as a type of slow death with
regard to its affective engagement with precarity, a project emphasized in her two most recent books,
The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008) and Cruel Optimism
(2011).
While I find the argument Berlant presents compelling, and an excellent model of how one
might overcome the discursive impasse she identifies, her footnote-level dismissal of some of the
contributors to the field of fat studies risks, in its own right, overlooking the “nuanced understanding”
other work in the field demonstrates.
4
The aim of this project is to, like Berlant, acknowledge the
ongoing seriousness of the debate on obesity while refraining from presenting an argument that can
easily be subsumed by the registers of crisis or scandal. Moreover, the project focuses expressly on the
“processual construction of disease historically” in turning to an historical moment when the
treatment of obesity attains a certain relevance in the same period as the novel achieves an
unprecedented level of popularity.
In focusing on works from Dickens, Thackeray, and Collins, this project seeks to better
understand the prevailing conceptions of male corpulence in some of the most popular novels of the
century. And while I readily align myself with a new historicist perspective that all texts of a given
4
Though the field has justifiably been criticized for promoting a clichéd identitarian argument in favor of “fat acceptance,” notably in Elspeth Probyn’s
“Silences Behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat,” Anne Ward’s recent review essay in American Quarterly, “The Future of Fat,” argues that the field
has changed considerably since its start in the 1970s. Where it was originally “borne from grassroots activism, online communities, and scholarship from
both inside and outside the parameters of traditional publishing,” work from “researchers with access, resources, and training in various academic and
professional disciplines” has helped elevate the field’s stature, and the titles reviewed, for Ward, represent a further advancement “in this direction” (938).
In fact, despite Paul Campos’s controversial claims and shaky methodology in The Obesity Myth (2004), a review of the book in the International Journal of
Epidemiology still emphasizes how he brings “attention to some of the complexities in overweight/obesity and health relationships and covert financial
interests involved in obesity research and related promotion activities” (60-61). To cite one example, Campos persuasively shows how “fat oppression
is a way to be racist and classist without appearing to target poor people of color directly” (Burgard et. al. 338).
16
period should be treated as equally important historically, I hasten to add that not all texts were
available to everyone equally. Thus, by focusing on these texts in this way, one is not only able to
better capture some of the “processual construction” of obesity, but also a better understanding of
how that construction existed in the popular imagination of the time.
For the purposes of this project, then, my interests are agnostic on this debate. Rather than
arguing for a straightforward valorization or celebration of the fat male body, or its opposite, I’m more
interested in understanding the basis of how the term and meaning developed within a fairly narrow
range of dates and discourses, from the mid 1830s to the early 1860s. In the second chapter, I will
recast this debate within literary studies, as an intractable impasse, and propose an alternative manner
of considering obesity.
If this project, metaphorically, seeks to put obesity under a microscope, I’m just as interested
in the forces acting on and around the slide as I am with what’s directly beneath the lens. This is due,
in part, to the above debate, but also because, put simply, fat is elusive. Physically, anyone experiencing
their subjectivity through a human body can relate to feeling fat or experiencing fatness, but in
literature, a fat body can mean myriad things. Indeed, if a necessary step in our prevailing literary
critical mode is close reading, then Sander Gilman’s shrewd observation that “fiction…lends itself to
infinite reinterpretations” should give anyone undertaking such a project pause (20). In an effort to
avoid such a pitfall, each of the three readings I give in the project is anchored by contemporaneous
support from, among other sources, medical, statistical, and insurance texts.
In the first chapter, I offer an expanded historical overview of the turn between centuries
Foucault underscores in his discussion of biopolitics. Beginning with the linguistic turn from the term
corpulence to obesity, I then look to work from George Cheyne and William Wadd to further illustrate
the changes inherent from an individuated account of excessive weight (Cheyne) to one addressed to
a broader, more nation-oriented audience. Throughout, I reference the life and legacy of Daniel
17
Lambert, perhaps the most famous obese man in London at the time, to contextualize the references
to him that arise in The Pickwick Papers and Vanity Fair, but also to emphasize the blurred line between
historical figure and character operating within these texts. I end the chapter by focusing on the work
of Adolphe Quetelet, the founder of what is now known as the Body Mass Index (BMI), and his
conception of the “average man,” and Foucault’s notion of the noso-political as a form of pre-biopolitical
consolidation.
In the second chapter, I bring these interventions to bear on The Pickwick Papers. I begin with
positioning the text relative to other novels of the time and to the rest of Dickens’s work to argue for
its fat singularity, so to speak. I then return to the debate above, but within the context of literary
studies, to show that an approach focusing on a single text, and no further context (historical or
otherwise), does not necessarily offer a stable or fixed understanding of fat as a characterological
attribute. As a result, I then consider the novel in relation to some of its many other artifacts, described
as Pickwickiana, to offer an alternative reading of the novel and its wider historical frame. At the close
of this chapter, I broach the topic and oblique references to life insurance in Pickwick.
Continuing the discussion, the next chapter focuses on Vanity Fair and Jos Sedley, the only
diegetic character actually covered by life insurance in this project. Drawing from a variety of texts
addressing colonial India and Bengal, specifically, I use this evidence to generate an argument that Jos
Sedley’s presence in the novel amounts to the incursion of the colonial other. Reading the collector
of Boogley-Wollah as occupying a liminal space between native and non-native, I argue that Sedley’s
obesity, implicitly, is not just a symptom of his overindulgence, but, more importantly, his comfort
with colonial interaction and habitation. His death (or murder, as the case may be) can then be
understood as a form of punishment for his colonial enterprising.
In the last chapter, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Count Fosco, take the stage. In
this chapter, I turn to the history and context of the Victorian Freak Show to supply an argument that
18
the novel’s attraction, in part, is due to its proliferation of a variety of “freaks,” with Fosco being the
primary iteration. Thinking of the novel in this way, and, importantly, as one that progresses by
eliminating or resolving the “freaks” we encounter, helps to explain the negative reception of the play
adaptation of Collins’s novel, but also asks us to reimagine the proper context for Fosco and his body.
Afterwards, I end with a brief reflection on the preceding chapters and further implications.
19
Chapter 1: “Culture’s Self-Representation and its Distribution of Power”
It is somewhat mythical to suppose that Western medicine originated as a collective practice, endowed by magico-religious
institutions with its social character and gradually dismantled through the subsequent organisation of private clienteles.
But it is equally inadequate to posit the existence at the historical threshold of modern medicine of a singular, private,
individual medical relation, ‘clinical’ in its economic functioning and epistemological form, and to imagine that a series of
corrections, adjustments and constraints gradually came to socialise this relation, causing it to be to some degree taken
charge of by the collectivity. (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 166)
It is typically assumed that the modern anxiety over obesity is a relatively recent phenomenon, stretching back no more
than a century. In fact, this concern has a much longer history and the first medical discourses addressing the topic date
from the seventeenth century… (Albala 169)
1. At a Distance: From Corpulence to Obesity
The epigrams above are meant to render two distinct problems facing any historical inquiry:
nothing happens overnight and everything has a longer history than we may conventionally
understand. Laying the groundwork for the rest of this project, the aim of this chapter is to show how
“the location and organization of difference are crucial to a culture’s self-representation and its
distribution of power” (Poovey, Uneven Developments 199). In this initial section, I will carry out a single,
brief example of what Franco Morreti terms “distant reading,” the aggregating and analyzing of texts
using computational techniques to ground the primary research inquiry of this study.
5
From here, I
move on to compare a passage from an 1863 issue of the Illustrated London News to the life and legacy
of one of the most famous corpulent men at the turn of (and well into) the nineteenth century, Daniel
Lambert. Positioning Lambert and his corpulence as examples of “border cases,” I then trace two
crucial and overlapping medico-scientific concepts that developed during the period: biometric
normality and health.
6
In so doing, I engage with the historiographical project outlined by Michel
5
Though Moretti’s book of essays entitled Distant Reading was published recently, the concept is much older. Kathryn Schulz, writing for The New York
Times in 2011, put it this way: distant reading advocates for “understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing
massive amounts of data,” which has traditionally been the domain, but not the entirety, of digital humanities. My use of such techniques and strategies
seeks not to prioritize or characterize these methods as superior, but as complementary and supplementary to more traditional literary analysis, such as
close reading. Audrey Jaffe’s recent book, The Affective Life of the Average Man, takes issue with Moretti’s approach, particularly in the chapter “Distant
Reading.”
6
In Uneven Developments, Mary Poovey treats her case studies as such “because each of them had the potential to expose the artificiality of the binary logic
that governed the Victorian symbolic economy…I suggest that those issues that that are constituted as ‘problems’ at any given moment are particularly
important because they mark the limits of ideological certainty” (12). To reiterate a point from the introduction through Poovey, the object of my study
20
Foucault’s essay “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” which seeks to elucidate the key
socio-cultural shifts surrounding the “health” between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As
indebted to Foucault’s oeuvre as this project is, I argue that working through some of the oversights in
his work allows us to establish an oblique, but nevertheless different, understanding of his preliminary
stage of biopolitics, “noso-politics,” as it relates to obesity. Such an intervention is meant to open up
previously foreclosed spaces, those occupied by terms like biopolitics, governmentality, and power, to ask of
Foucault what he asked of his attendees during his lectures: to think of his work as less of a decree
and more of a proposal, to return to Foucault after we’ve had the time to reflect on the well-established
and by now, overdetermined, aspects of his thought.
In short, my tri-partite argument is as follows: 1) an explicit shift in conceptualizing obesity
occurred between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; 2) that shift is most clearly
distinguished by the development of biometric normality; and 3) Foucault’s theorizing of the noso-
political presents us with a unique alternative to the totalizing force of governmentality inherent in the
concept of the biopolitical. This alternative narrative, finally, requires both a different approach to a
study like this, and, perhaps more importantly, requires an evaluation of our own assumptions with
respect to the circulation of power as it manifests in and through Foucault’s work.
If, as I have suggested, the history of obesity is rooted in Victorian culture, then the history of
the term “obesity” seems an obvious place to start. According to the OED, the word’s first recorded
appearance dates to 1611 in a French-English dictionary. Subsequent usages recorded in 1620, 1707,
1729 (in a note to Pope’s Dunciad), and on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, looking
closer at the respective contexts in which the word appears, different conceptualizations of obesity
emerge. For example, the 1707 reference is from Floyer’s Physician’s Pulse-watch, “An essay to explain
“is neither the individual text (of whatever kind) nor literary history, but something extrapolated from texts and reconstructed as the conditions of
possibility for those texts…the internal structure of ideology” (15). For the sake of clarity, I use the term “biometric” to indicate how, between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, methods were developed to measure and understand the human body. A relative neologism, biometric essentially
means measuring and analyzing biological data about the human body.
21
the old art of feeling the pulse and to improve it by the help of a pulse-watch.” Here, obesity presents
itself as a symptom of the outside atmosphere: “By the dryness we describe the gracility or hardness;
and by the humidity the plumpness or obesity of the habit of the Body,” a condition quite different
from the popular concepts of obesity proffered by Banting and Harvey in the following century.
7
And,
as this chapter continues, there are many important distinctions to draw between eighteenth century
conceptions of obesity and Victorian understandings of the condition.
Even so, the three citations from the nineteenth century (1812, 1842, and 1876) deploy the
term metaphorically, or as Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker does, use the term within the context of animal
husbandry, or, tellingly late in the period, compare obesity’s self-destructive power on the body to
religion in decline.
8
Put differently, these usages do not necessarily index the kind of dramatic shift I
want to trace. Perhaps indicative of the very typicality Albala and I seek to interrogate, the first
occasion the OED provides that gets us closer to obesity as a medically morbid physical state, that is,
close to our more modern conceptualization, appears in a 1910 issue of The Daily Chronicle, and,
fittingly, advertises the merits of a tonic that can address this condition: “‘You didn't tell me’, said she,
‘that this splendid medicine is a tonic as well as an obesity cure.’” So, even if the OED cannot provide
clear and convincing evidence of the term’s rise to prominence, it does indicate, however elliptically,
that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obesity came to describe a physical condition—
and more specifically a disease—that individuals and society alike needed to address.
Beyond the OED, another good starting place is Google’s Ngram Viewer, an extension of the
company’s book digitization program that allows one to search for word frequencies in texts based on
7
In fact, reading closely, one can see a generalized version of the miasma theory of contagion in Floyer’s text, a concept that endured well into the
Victorian period. For an excellent overview, see Graham Benton, “‘And Dying Thus Around Us Every Day:’ Pathology, Ontology and the Discourse of
the Diseased Body. A study of illness and contagion in Bleak House.”
8
“Many writers have perished of literary obesity”; The cattle…eat themselves up…into obesity”; and “A religion as well as a man may perish through
obesity.” Though it is enormously tempting to want to project an easy, developmental narrative from the earliest instances of the term to later contexts,
tracking a narrowing of connotation, I hope to show how such a neatly teleological argument obscures the contested ground upon which the concept
was founded.
22
time period and language.
9
Within the OED’s definition of obesity, three synonyms appear: overweight,
stoutness, and corpulence. Using the Ngram Viewer, we can plot the relative frequency of these words
from, say, 1790-1890, as they appear in works written in English published during that period. By
broadening the search from the OED to this scale,
10
some clearer trends emerge:
Bearing in mind that the values on the vertical axis are relative percentages (the number of times a
given word appears in a group of texts divided by the sum total number of words contained within
that group), “obesity” occurs less than “corpulence” until the early 1830s, where it overtakes it as the
most frequent term (of those provided) on an upward trend through the century. Comparing “obesity”
with “stoutness,” with some variability between 1790-1820, demonstrates a similar trend.
“Overweight,” for the most part, remains relatively flat through this period. Thus, if the OED marks
an implicit shift in the use and meaning of “obesity,” the above data supplements that important
change by showing that, by the later 1880s, one might encounter “obesity” twice as frequently as
9
This example offers a necessarily incomplete picture of things, and, as a result, it’s better considered as, at best, a rough guide.
10
It should be noted, however, that a search like this is meant to be suggestive, rather than definitive. Google’s tool, while useful, is probably best
understood as one that provides some indication of trends, rather than facts or ironclad evidence.
Figure 2 - Google NGram Viewer
23
“stoutness” or “corpulence” and six times as frequently as “overweight” in texts written during the
period. Consequently, my use of the term “corpulence” in this project is meant to indicate a pre-
Victorian conception of obesity, and where I use the term “obesity,” I mean to suggest its usage within
a conceptualization of obesity’s medical morbidity. Moreover, as we will see, “corpulence,” once
“obesity” gains in popularity through the nineteenth century, will exist on an uneasy spectrum of
fatness, always threatening to somehow become obese. Indeed, at the core of the tension between a
possibly neutral (or at least non-negative) corpulence and the more alarming state of obesity is a growing
concern over which is which, and how one might come to such an understanding.
11
11
To be sure, such slippery denotation remained something of a problem for medical professionals throughout the century. Dr. F. Parkes Weber, in a
paper to The Life Assurance Medical Officer’s Association dating from 1901, explains why the title of his presentation is “Fatness, Overweight, and Life
Assurance” rather than “Obesity, Overweight, and Life Assurance”: “I hear employ the word Fatness instead of Obesity, because according to some
definitions, the latter term has a more restricted meaning than I am inclined to give it.” Curiously, Weber more or less dispenses with the former term in
the body of his text, settling on a definition of obesity that he prefers: “a state of the body characterised by an excessive amount of fatty tissue, chiefly in
situations where it is normally most abundant” (1).
24
2. Corpulence ≈ Obesity: Cheyne and Wadd
To better solidify the shifting perspectives and approaches to obesity sketched above, this
section will take a close look at two medical treatises from opposite ends of the turn of the century:
George Cheyne’s An Essay on Health and Long Life (originally published in 1724) and William Wadd’s
Cursory Remarks on Corpulence; or Obesity Considered as a Disease (1816). To provide some context for these
works, medical writings on corpulence in the late seventeenth century are composed from the
perspective of Galenic medicine, the theory that all ailments stem from an imbalance in the four
humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. According to Ken Albala, “the first major work to
discuss fat in the early modern period derives from a disputation held in 1580 in Heidelberg between
M. Michael Schenkius and the renowned physician (and Protestant Theologian) Thomas Erastus”
(Forth & Carden-Coyne, Albala, 171). Though there was some debate over the specifics of how a
body gets fat, the event merely confirmed a widely-held belief “that it is only those with phlegmatic
constitutions who become fat,” but, importantly, such a condition was “not considered a specific and
life-threatening” one (171-2). Indeed, for “all authors in the Galenic tradition, it appears that fat was
seen as a natural consequence of a complexion tending to the cold and moist,” one that merited action,
“but not considered an illness that demanded serious attention” (171-172). Despite the predominance
of Galenic approaches to medicine in the seventeenth century, there were those who and sought a
new way of understanding the phenomena.
Notable among these Galenic apostates is Santorio Santorio, an Italian physician who precedes
Quetelet and Huff’s Workhouse Inspector in being among the first to bring new methods of
measurement to quantify bodily energy and expenditure. His De Statica Medicina (c. 1611) is, arguably,
the first major study dedicated to identifying and understanding what is now known as metabolism.
Furthermore, his work marks a distinct shift from the more innocuous-sounding cases of corpulence
25
for Galenic physicians. For Santorio, health was understood to mean “the maintenance of body
weight,” and, using an early form of a scale, concluded that although one’s intake of food was related
to one’s various evacuations, he “insisted that the accumulation of fat was not a simple matter of
eating too much” (171-2, 173).
12
This new approach to thinking about corpulence led to Walter
Charleton’s 1659 work, Natural History of Nutrition, of Life, of Voluntary Motion, where Charleton sought
to identify the physiological differences (outside of Galenic medicine) between fat and thin bodies.
While the specifics of his theory are confusing at best, the more fundamental shift this work indexes
is the change from interpreting corpulence as indicative of a manageable, non-threatening humoral
imbalance to interpreting excess fat as a sign of ill health.
In fact, writing a century and a half later, James Mackenzie, a pioneering historian of nutrition,
goes so far as to celebrate Santorio as the father of nutritional science, with his “new understanding
of the physiology of the body as a machine” (171-2, 174). From this point in the middle of the
eighteenth century, the understanding that being overweight was simply a matter of one’s phlegmatic
lot began to give way to one suggestive of a failure on the part of body and spirit.
If Mackenzie’s claim about Santorio holds, then Cheyne’s legacy establishes him as a direct
descendant.
13
It is within this context that Cheyne’s treatise first appears in 1724. Personal, direct, and
clear in its recommendations, the work continued to be published in subsequent editions well after his
death in 1743.
14
At the start, he lays out two axioms informing his work: 1) “It is easier to preferve
than recover health, to prevent than cure difeafes” and 2) that “moderate and proper care of our
health” is essential to maintaining that state (xvii). Implicitly, then, “health” identifies a default state
of being, a status-quo free of impediments such as disease, a position of priority both in the sense of
12
Specifically, Santorio weighed his food before eating, then weighed his waste afterward. If the measurements didn’t match, he reasoned, it was because
“insensible perspiration” made up the difference: “If a healthy man, for example, consumed eight pounds of food in one day, a full five pounds would
be excreted through insensible means. Perspiration was a sign the body had properly refined and assimilated the nutritive matter of food and drink. An
excess of perspiration indicated that the body was beginning to waste away, too little was a sign that crude deposits were being left in the body” (173).
13
Based on the recommendations regarding diet in the treatise, Cheyne’s contributions place him as an early proponent of vegetarianism, continuing the
legacy of his continental forbear.
14
The edition examined in this project, a copy of a tenth printing, carries a publication date of 1768.
26
its importance and existence a priori. In other words, the treatise highlights a shift from reactive
treatment of the body to a proactive program of maintenance. Health, in this sense, is a bodily state we
should be conditioned to expect and strive for as a way to prevent ailments, rather than waiting until an
illness presents to seek help.
Specifically, Cheyne recommends “moderate and proper care of our health” by focusing on,
in successive chapters, the “neceffity of a careful choice of the air we are to live in,” calibrating “the
quantity and nature of our food, both Meat and Drink, [which] muft be proportioned to the ftrenth
of our digeftion,” “the ufe and neceffity of reft and fleep” to both animals and humans,
15
“Exercife
as neceffary to health now, as food itself,” the importance of healthy evacuations and minimizing
obstructions,
16
and, lastly, in a proto-psychological turn, a meditation on how the “paffions have a
great influence on health” (xvii, xviii, xxii, xxv, xxvii). The force of Cheyne’s recommendations, he
argues, comes not from his position of authority as a learned physician, philosopher, or mathematician,
although he was all of the above, but rather from his consistent claims that his advice is informed by
his own personal experience with excess weight.
In the tenth edition of the treatise, Cheyne appends a lengthy “Life of the Author,” where he
reiterates his family’s health (“I was born of healthy parents, in the prime of their days, but difpofed
to corpulence”), his relatively easy maintenance of his weight as a young adult, and then, in his early
30s, his move to London and the changes the move wrought upon his diet and health (184). In a
passage anticipating the good cheer of the members of the Pickwick Club,
17
Cheyne outlines his easy,
almost instantaneous descent into poor health: “my health was in a few years brought into great
15
Among other things, Cheyne frequently extrapolates from animal behavior and disposition to claims regarding how humans should act.
16
“the faeces in healthy people are of a moderate confiftence” (xxv).
17
“Upon my coming to London, I all of a fudden changed my whole manner of living; I found the bottle-companions, the younger gentry, and free-
livers, to be the moft eafy of accefs, and moft quickly fufceptible of friendship and acquaintance, nothing being neceffary for that purpofe, but to be
able to eat luftily, and fwallow down much liquor; and being naturally of a large fize, a cheerful temper, and tolerable lively imagination…by thefe
qualifications I foon became careffed by them, and grew daily in bulk, and in friendship with thefe gay gentlemen and their acquaintances” (184).
27
diftrefs, by fo fudden and violent a change. I grew exceffively fat, fhorth-breathed, lethargick and
liftlefs” (184).
Of the thirty-five pages in this section, Cheyne devotes twenty-nine of them to an exhaustive
narrative of the cures, treatments, physicians, and other learned figures he seeks counsel from to
address his weight and related ailments, covering a period of years. After travelling around the country,
to Bath to take the waters, to London, back to the county, and back to London again, Cheyne settles
upon a “milk and vegetable” diet that minimizes meat and alcohol consumption. Despite various
setbacks (fevers, rashes, melancholy) to his recovery, he ends the section celebrating his regimen and
insights into his own healthiness, and begs forgiveness for his personalized account, hoping that the
good it may provide one in a similar condition outweighs his use of “indecent and fhocking Egotism”
(216).
My regimen, at prefent, is milk, with tea, coffee, bread and butter, mild cheefe, falladin, and
feeds of all kinds, with tender roots (as potatoes, turnips, carrots) and, in fhort, every thing
that has not life, dreffed, or not, as I like it…I drink no wine, nor any fermented liquors, and
am rarely dry, moft of my food being liquid, moift, or juicy…The thinner my diet is, the eafier,
more cheerful and lightfome I find myself…I am heartily ashamed, and humbly beg pardon
of my polite ond [sic] delicate readers…for an author to make himfelf the fubject of his words
or works, efpecially in fo tedious and circumftanciated a detail: but fo various and
contradictory have been the reports of, and fneers on my regimen, cafe and fentiments, that I
thought thus much was due to truth, and neceffary for my own vindications; and perhaps it
may not not be quite ufelefs to fome low, defponding, valetudinary, over-grown perfon, whofe
cafe may have fome refeblance to mine…(215-6)
It is difficult to say whether the dietary and behavioral recommendations contained in the treatise
would have been as popular had Cheyne omitted his own personal struggle with excessive weight from
the text. Though he claims to not want his personal testimony, expanded upon in further detail in this
new biographical section, to be read by the gentler reader,
18
the fact is he covers similar personal
18
Parenthetically, after addressing his “polite” and “delicate” readers in his apology for his Egotism, Cheyne qualifies the address with “if any fuch fhould
deign to look into this low tattle, contrary to my intentions” (216).
28
territory in every edition since the first printing. So popular was this treatise, in fact, that Cheyne
became widely known as “Dr. Diet” from the late 1720s on (Dacome 186).
Dr. Diet’s treatise, by the way, does not contain the term “obesity” in the text, but a similar
work from William Wadd, Cursory Remarks on Corpulence; or, Obesity Considered as a Disease (1816),
introduces the term “obesity” in conjunction with “corpulence,” but, tellingly, does not claim to make
a distinction between the two terms. Despite this lack of clarity, what he does have to say about
excessive body weight, or obesity, as his title unequivocally avers, is suggestive. This text, a loose
combination of collected case studies, medical history, survey of past and current treatments,
19
and
proscriptive advice, certainly bears out the title’s adjective.
20
However scattered, his remarks certainly
contrast with Cheyne’s. The latter, it should be observed, also makes an explicit appearance as a case
study in this text,
21
but instead of a relatively straightforward prototypical self-help book, Wadd
characterizes obesity in ways both familiar—and not—to a modern audience (47).
If Cheyne hopes to offer compassionate solace to “fome low, defponding, valetudinary, over-
grown perfon,” Wadd’s address to this edition comes across as less sincere. Remarking on the great
“importance of the subject,” but also “the reception with which such a trifle has been honored,”
Wadd, imagining himself as Swift, can’t resist the pun when describing how he was “induced to submit
them again to the corpulent, good-humoured part of the community, in their present shape” (iv). But
the text moves quickly from cheeky slights to something more serious two pages later. In these
“modern times,” he opens, “the increase of wealth and the refinement…have tended to banish plagues
19
Included among these: “acids of various kinds,” “soap,” and, to the chagrin of those preoccupied with the pH of water, “aërated alkaline water” (20,
21, 26).
20
Curiously, however, Wadd includes a preface to the third edition admitting that the first two versions were published, but not signed, “a confession
that they had never been prepared for the public eye” (iii). One is tempted to speculate on why this may have been the case, and, roughly halfway into
the work, he again betrays some equally curious self-doubt about his claims regarding how fat manifests in the body and whether or not it circulates
within it: “I cannot conclude this account, without fearing my readers my suspect a hoax. Some of them may recollect the celebrated dissertation on a
broomstick, and associating the taste of its learned writer with this paper, may consider it a production of Swift” (65-6). If pushed to guess, I’d consider
whether Wadd felt confident in his presentation of such the topic, considering how relatively new he claims the epidemic to be. On a related note, it’s
rather comforting to learn that, nearly two hundred years ago, some dissertations could be “celebrated” in such a manner.
21
Implicitly, Cheyne’s influence, in particular his emphasis on diet low in meats and what we now call carbs and high in vegetables and minimally
processed foods, is confirmed as one of the few remedies to obesity worthy of the name.
29
and pestilence from our cities,” but with those changes “they have probably [also] introduced the
whole train of nervous disorders, and increased the frequency of corpulence” (3). If the problem is
recent, it’s also one unique to England, for, “It has been conjectured by some, that for one fat person
in France or Spain, there are an hundred in England” (5). Despite including American examples of
corpulent men (Benjamin Franklin, John Wesley), Wadd’s gesture toward the conjecture that there are
significantly many more such figures in England (such as John Arbuthnot, Boswell, Daniel
Lambert
22
and even, fictional though he was, Falstaff) clarifies the problem of obesity as acutely local.
Now that we know the topic is a matter of national importance, further clarifications come
into view. Despite exchanging pestilence and plague for nervousness and obesity, the condition,
according to Wadd, amounts to the same thing. Not only is it self-evident to “understand how the
corpulent grow dull, sleepy and indolent,” but that detached or inactive disposition comes with severe
consequences. “Excessive [weight] is not only burthensome,” it “becomes a disease, disposes others
to diseases, and to sudden death” (14-15). Here, importantly, marks a clear break from the
individualized approach Cheyne takes. Here, fat is not simply a shorthand for the slow, lethargic, lazy,
but a symptom of disease, one that carries with it the force of contagion, one that can kill you instantly.
And just who are the perpetrators of this malady? Men. Near the end of the text, Wadd, seemingly as
an afterthought, takes up the question of “the fair sex,” arguing that women “are not exempt from
this complaint” though “the instances, if less numerous, are equally remarkable” (113). Why these
instances are less numerous, we are not told, but, for the sake of perspective, Wadd spends a total of
three pages of the text focusing on a handful of female instances of obesity, compared to dozens upon
dozens of men.
23
But, in a moment perhaps anticipating work much later in the century from Galton,
a particular kind of man is identified as primary:
22
Explored in more detail later in this chapter.
23
It may come as no surprise that, at the end of the volume, an advertisement for two of Wadd’s previous publications is included, and both are just as,
if not more, focused on the male body: Cases of Diseased Bladder & Testicles; Illustrated by Twenty-one Etching by the Author and Observations on the Best Mode of
Curing Strictures in the Urethra; With Remarks on the Frequent Inefficacy, and Ill Effects of Caustic Applications.
30
Such a predisposition is often hereditary, and when accompanied, as it frequently is, with that
easy state of mind, denominated “good humour,” which, in the fair sex,
“teaches charms to last, / Still makes new conquests, and maintains the past.”
Or when in men, the temper is cast in that happy mould, which Mr. Hume so cheerfully
congratulates himself upon possessing… (16)
Thus, some twenty years before the first novel considered in this project, Wadd claims that obesity is
“often hereditary” and manifests in the more leisurely, philosophical members of the nation.
Reviewing these claims, then, obesity is 1) a disease equivalent to pestilence and plague, a “harbinger
of other diseases”
24
2) a matter of unique national concern, 3) concerned, mainly, with men of the
leisure class. Furthermore, as we will see with the example of Daniel Lambert, Wadd implicitly faults
those obese men who fail at reducing their size. Where Cheyne’s work served less to judge those who
have failed in this endeavor, and instead to compassionately offer further strategies, Wadd makes clear
that the onus is on the overstuffed shoulders of these men to change their predisposition; anything
else is, like the example set by Lambert, no more than “a prodigy of clogged machinery,” echoing
Huff’s argument from the introduction (Cursory Remarks 9).
In placing these two texts in conversation, I have attempted to buttress the claims made in the
first section of this chapter. To reiterate, the understanding and treatment of corpulence, per Cheyne,
underwent a shift from the eighteenth century to the next. Some elements, as noted above, remain
similar, but others, as I have shown, do not. For this project, there are three main overlapping
differences:
1) At the conceptual level, Quetelet’s interventions in the 1830s changed the way one understood
body size. Whereas in the previous century it had been largely based on individual expressions
of feeling larger or smaller in body compared to an earlier moment,
25
a new understanding of
one’s size relative to a theoretical average meant that the comparison was not between versions
24
Including, for fans of Bleak House, spontaneous combustion.
25
And from a practical standpoint, weighing one’s body on a capable scale, an invention that had been available since the sixteenth century, was not
widespread until the late eighteenth century (Appendix 1, Figures ~19 and ~20 [Source: Vigarello]).
31
of the same body, but of one’s body against the entirety of the data set. Furthermore, in
developing formulae to quantify body size (not to mention nutritional outtake and physical
expenditure), a new, numerically supported form of measurement was introduced. As Georges
Vigarello puts it in The Metamorphoses of Fat: A History of Obesity, “numbers change the way
people think” (111). Finally, the increasingly economic interpretation of the body as optimal
when operating with machine-like efficiency, as Huff suggests, was a displacement of an
earlier, predominant conceptualization of the body “within the Galenic tradition…a widely
shared image of a porous body whose health depended on the control of secretion and
discharges” (Dacome 187).
26
2) At the level of treatment, it is possible to observe a developing consensus that body weight is
best managed by attention to diet and exercise. Whereas treatments ranged in earlier periods
from baths to diuretics to tonics, the predominant medical and, with Banting, popular
treatments solidify these as the most important factors in weight management.
27
3) As a consequence of the previous two distinctions, one of the fundamental claims of this
project is that the solidification of the term “obesity” as a condition denoting a medically
morbid condition of jeopardized health, is a uniquely Victorian event. While the term has, in
our current moment, come to signify so much more than ill health, the nineteenth century
witnessed an increasing distance put between the corpulent (itself a vague and often general
label for the presumptively well-fed) and the obese.
28
26
Indeed, as I will discuss in the chapter breakdown, one can interpret the figures of Pickwick and Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers as representative of
(at least) two fundamentally different historical approaches to corpulence.
27
That is, until the advent of a whole range of slimming machines and unconventional weight loss treatments at the end of the nineteenth century
(Vigarello, Metamorphoses of Fat 134).
28
This is one way to more fully comprehend Sander Gilman’s claim that “the medical literature of the mid-nineteenth century had come to consider
obesity a problem of medical therapy” (Obesity 65).
32
Thus, with the advent of a new conceptualization of what constitutes the normal body, one carrying
with it the seemingly irrefutable legitimacy of mathematical and scientific fact, a new iteration of
physical health develops,
29
with ramifications and implications upon future-oriented concerns such as
inheritance, eugenics, and actuarial science, itself a direct result of the new science of statistics.
29
These avenues of inquiry into the meaning of physical health in Victorian Britain engage with a specific archive on health and its related concepts,
such as work, leisure, sexuality, and disease. Consequently, this intervention is imagined to more fully capture the emergent biopolitical power in the
period.
33
3. Two Men, About London
Yet, after all that, we seem to be no closer to a sense of how to understand the differences
between corpulence and obesity. And this vagueness will continue to be a point of confusion throughout
the nineteenth century. So how did one know if they were or were not obese? The answer, in one
example, is that sometimes one needed to be told they were. Early in Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon,
reference is made to a passage from the November 28, 1863 issue of the Illustrated London News (15).
Examining the city between 1855-1870, Nead focuses her tracing of modernity on “representations
of the street; the organisation of urban leisure; the poetics of the city at night; and debates on the
production and consumption of mass culture” (5). Modernity can be seen in this period, following
Poovey, as developing unevenly: “at any given time, modernity was a configuration of extremely
diverse and unresolved historical processes” (5). By the time Londoners picked up their copy of the
ILN that weekend in November, Nead argues, the concept of a social body had already taken hold.
“If the city was a body, it might also sicken or become aberrant,” and, in this case, the passage in
question demonstrates a perception of London that “had gorged itself and become obese” (15). To
be clear, the word “obesity,” as it appears in Nead’s text, is hers. Note how quickly the term stands
relatively synonymously in this instance, compressing the very history under scrutiny. Appearing in a
section entitled “Echoes of the Week,” the passage itself is embedded in a longer, dilatory discussion
of current events more or less related to the relocation of St. Thomas’s Hospital from Southwark to
Stangate.
The overgrowth of London may be compared with that of the occasional human body. Walk
round, and you see how it has spread. The active piece of humanity of some few years since
has become puffy, bloated: coated with a light swollen matter which has doubled the size of
his waist and cheeks. So London has got puffy with ‘new neighbourhoods’ all around her…she
is every day being told that she is becoming corpulent. Nobody likes to be told of a
superabundance of oleaginous matter. It is unpleasant, because nobody knows how far it really
has gone or to what it may or may not lead. For instance, the stout man, who looks the picture
of health, may be carried off in a moment of excitement, and the post mortem proves that he
suffered from fatty degeneration of the heart. The fact is, it is not always possible to become
34
fat without, without becoming fat within; and London is a case in point. Whilst the suburbs
are increasing…the new St. Thomas’s Hospital is to attack the vital organ by taking seven acres
from the path of the stream at Stangate. (550, emphasis mine)
I have quoted this excerpt at slightly longer length than Nead, who observes how “[m]otion and
circulation in the urban body are read as signs of health and morality” (16). For the purposes of Nead’s
argument regarding modernity, the shorter excerpt answers the need. But this passage, in longer form
and re-contextualized within the St. Thomas Hospital relocation, a pressing issue for the author, it
would seem, manages to convey much more than a particularly modernist understanding of Victorian
health.
On the surface, it’s worth noting the cozy personification of a male-gendered “humanity”
opposite the female-gendered city of London, growing uneasy at her own swelling dimensions.
London, innocent and victimized by the offending size of an aggregate male humanity, must beware:
what was once recently active has ballooned and slowed. Or, put another way, humanity, personified,
say, as Mr. Chadband, the oleaginous preacher in Bleak House, has “some few years since” let himself
go. The incursion of more and more members into London, each grown larger than before, is a threat
to the city. So much a threat, in fact, that the city is beset with reminders of her unchecked growth.
And while nobody likes to be told they’ve grown wider, the greater fear is the possibility that one may
die from fatness “from within.” In this example, the stout man (and—importantly—not the corpulent
man), may look healthy, but a fat heart, or, as the author admonishes, an interior fatness “within” can
still kill you. If, as Marilyn Wann has argued, “fat functions as a floating signifier, attaching to
individuals based on a power relationship, not a measurement,” then this passage provides an instance
of that signifier contracting, narrowing to one of two options, corpulence/obesity, but always carrying
with it the force of death if misunderstood.
Fatness threatens, the author suggests, and not always in the most obvious of ways. The utter
visuality of corpulence straddles the fence between a legible exterior and unknown interior, yet the
35
author offers a much more frightening scenario wherein, even when a third party observes one’s
“becoming corpulent,” “nobody knows how far it really has gone,” or, worse, “to what it may or may
not lead.” Moreover, the very fact that London must be told of her swelling size suggests, as I will
show in greater detail in The Pickwick Papers, a seeming incapacity of the individual to acknowledge to
themselves the changes in the most private, proximate, and phenomenologically stable object of their
existence, the body. One may be stout, or even corpulent, but the work of observing when that
corpulence becomes a threat is the project of a third party.
This third-party admonishment, I argue, becomes localized in medicine undergirded with what
amounts to the illusion of certitude through statistical and mathematical “laws”—a structure of
observation, to cite Crary, that grows increasingly more contracted, eventually culminating in the
doctor/patient relationship model of treatment and the generally negative cultural connotations of
obesity today. Finally, while this excerpt is indicative of the very instability of modernity that Nead
explores, the relocation of a hospital near the Thames stands as an offense, an “attack” on the “vital
organ” of the city—and a measure of another kind of instability rooted in Foucault’s concept of noso-
politics, which we will turn to shortly.
Comparing this scene from the Illustrated London News to the life and popularity of Daniel
Lambert presents us with two important, yet quite distinct, perspectives on obesity. Lambert was born
in Leicester “in 1770 to normally proportioned parents and athletically inclined in youth” and “began
to gain weight in his early twenties, burgeoning to an enormous girth,” somewhere beyond seven
hundred pounds (Youngquist 38). After working as an apprentice and then as a jail-keeper, Lambert
reasoned that his size might be used to his advantage,
30
and, in 1806, moved to London “to turn to
30
Details of his life are few, and, as his popularity grew, so does the folklore surrounding Lambert. Joyce Huff offers a different interpretation of this
decision: “It is said that as rumors of his marvelous exploits spread throughout the land, this normally shy and retiring man was called forth by the public
to exhibit himself. More creditable, however, is the story that Lambert became a freak because he experienced pressing financial need, due to the expense
of obtaining special accommodations in a culture adapted to meet the needs of much smaller men” (Victorian Freaks 43). In an ironic turn of Marxist
theory, Lambert’s body, then, commoditized as it was, possessed a use value that was precisely the result of its visibly legible overuse.
36
profit the fame for corpulence which had hitherto brought him merely annoyance” (38). This decision
ended up “a major success”:
31
Taking up residence at 53 Picadilly, he received company daily from three to five at a shilling
a head, quickly gaining celebrity as an astonishing prodigy of superhuman dimensions. He
made a living just by sitting in his parlor, offering his body to amazed gazes, at the ready in
repartee…That the spectacle of this massive man presents a challenge to the proper body is
part of what makes him so fascinating…Here’s a body irreducible to propriety in either
economic or moral terms…[Simultaneously,] Lambert’s huge body is remarkable for its very
normality…For all its troubling singularity, this particular monstrosity reinforces the cultural
norm of the proper body. Once you get to know him, Daniel Lambert is just like you, only
more so… (Youngquist 39)
For Paul Youngquist, Lambert’s success and reception offers a glimpse of what Lennard Davis’s work
in disability studies takes as axiomatic: the deviant body always already produces the “double work”
of interrogating and reinforcing our understanding of able-bodiedness (40). While Lambert’s time
entertaining in London was short, less than three years on an itinerant basis, his legacy only grew after
his death. In fact, so well-known was he that references appear in not only Dickens and Thackeray
but transatlantic contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charles F. M. Noland (Victorian Freaks
44). Outside of letters, “Lambert’s name and image were associated…with feasting and drink. Despite
the fact that Lambert himself had reportedly been a teetotaler who ate sparingly, ‘The Jolly Gaoler’
and ‘The Daniel Lambert’ became popular names for public houses, and his likeness was used to
decorate their signs” (44). Lambert’s likeness was also frequently used to represent John Bull, the
national personification of England, originally imagined by John Arbuthnot in the early eighteenth
century. In “Two Wonders of the World, or A Specimen of a New Troop of Leicestershire
Lighthorse,” the hulking Lambert/Bull is poised to demolish the overwhelmed Napoleon. In “Bone
and Flesh, or John Bull in Moderate Condition,” a slender Napoleon considers Lambert/Bull a
wonder, and is dwarfed by the physical power he exhibits. Answering a question about his lineage, the
31
Indeed, Joyce Huff argues that Lambert’s legacy conveys an individual who “defied all of the stereotypes normally associated with corpulence in the
nineteenth century: he was ‘very partial to the female sex,’ enjoyed ‘perfect and uninterrupted’ health, displayed uncommon intelligence and quick wit,
and showed a remarkable amount of temperance and restraint at meals. He also exhibited a ‘truly extraordinary’ degree of energy and activity, and as a
young man, he was ‘passionately fond’ of ‘sports of the field.’” (Victorian Freaks 41).
37
seated figure affirms his nationality: “I am a true born Englishman.” While there is certainly more to
be explored with regard to visual representations of John Bull, for the purposes of this section the
point I want to make is that Lambert’s popularity, and seemingly positive representation against his
French counterpart, stands in stark contrast to the male figure threatening London’s compromised
health. Both images date to 1806, and while there are clearly concerns with British consumption,
colonialism, and national identity, I want to place Daniel Lambert, the affable, charming figure, against
the unnamed, purely physical personification of humanity encountered in the ILN decades later.
32
32
Yet I would be remiss if I did not address another possible interpretation of the Lambert/Bull images. One might argue, following the
paranoid/reparative reading practices presented in Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, that, if my brief gloss serves as a reparative reading practice, then a
paranoid reading might suggest that Lambert’s body, despite its clear alignment with Bull and the Nation more symbolically, is represented as a sign of
overconsumption and ridicule. That is, as political cartoons, the subtext could very well be one of subversive criticism of Lambert as national figure: his
body visually lampoons the international position of England. Or, as Huff argues, we might interpret these images as symptomatic of a growing concern
over consumption. While I am certainly unable to argue against this point, I am less interested in discrete, affectively uniform modes of interpretation
in this instance and more fascinated by not just the multiplicity of meanings available but by the enduringly popular and generally positive reception
Lambert enjoyed during his lifetime and his posthumous legacy. For Huff, Lambert’s narrative follows a path of “dissemination, fragmentation, and
reinvention” that evinces the growing concerns over consumer anxiety, capitalist nostalgia, and national identity (37).
38
Figure 3 - Two Wonders of the World
39
Figure 4 - Bone and Flesh
40
If, as Youngquist argues, “Lambert’s lumbering body communicates an impossible delight by
materialising the negation of labor…[while it simultaneously] becomes the sight of ideological
overdetermination, reproducing the cultural norm of the proper body through that anxiety,” then it is
perhaps not surprising that, for William Wadd, Lambert represented this cultural norm by failing to
cure himself of a disease (40). Finding Lambert morally deficient, he wonders elegiacally at how much
longer he could have lived if he only tried harder, instead of expiring at a young age, forever cemented
in Wadd’s mind with—potentially sarcastically—“the jubilee year of 1809, [when] the fattest ox, and
the most corpulent man, ever heard of in the history of the world” were both produced.
33
Nevertheless, if we widen the scope of study to beyond Wadd and the 1809 jubilee, it is equally true
that Lambert’s legacy endured well beyond his life. In fact, soon after his death, a veritable commercial
empire of Lambert memorabilia arose immediately after his funeral:
Not long afterward, objects associated with Lambert began to circulate, particularly his clothes
and other items that—like his coffin—denoted the proportions of his body. Lambert’s
specially built coach and his clothing were auctioned, after which his tailor made additional
suits of clothes to Lambert’s dimensions for sale to collectors. Lithographs and prints were
made from the four portraits that had been taken of him during his life. Wax models of his
body were constructed, one of which was exhibited as far away as America and resided until
recently in the American Dime Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. There were even Lambert
collectibles, such as whisky crocks fashioned in his image. This interest in Lambert continued
well into the mid-century. (Victorian Freaks 42)
But that’s not even the half of it. Huff continues by documenting an excess of folklore, literary works
imagining his life, and a standing exhibit of his clothing in Stamford.
34
To consider the durability of
such a figure in popular Victorian culture risks missing its even longer cultural lifespan. Up until its
closing in 2011, the Lambert exhibit in Stamford was available to visitors curious to compare their
33
“It is clear, therefore, that he was a strong active man, and continued so after the disease had made great progress; and I think it may fairly be inferred,
that he would not have fallen a sacrifice so early in life, if he had, encouraged by the success of former cases, had fortitude enough to have met the evil,
and to have opposed it with determined perseverance” (46, emphasis added).
34
“As the century continued,” writes Huff, “images of Lambert, both pictorial and literary, proliferated as the legends were passed down in both oral
and written form. Lambert appeared not simply as an object of study and wonder in books and articles on scientific and medical curiosities, but also as
a carnivalesque Bacchus figure in a broadsheet ballad, a model in a Christian tract, and a British national icon, in the style of John Bull, in at least five
political cartoons. By the mid-nineteenth century, Lambert’s name had passed into slang discourse as a descriptor for a corpulent man and had become
a household word” (Victorian Freaks 43).
41
dimensions with “The King of All Fat Men,” or to view a set of clothes made to his dimensions, or
perhaps, to marvel at the longevity of Lambert as a border case: visually intimidating yet popularly
welcome (42). In other words, the idea of Daniel Lambert remained active in England long after his
body expired. Moreover, Lambert’s legacy parallels the kind of literary excess I described in the
introduction. Lambert, rendered a text with multiple meanings and instantiations, operates similarly
to figures the obese male figures in Pickwick, Vanity Fair, and The Woman in White. Comparable to a
literary character circulating and shifting outside of his text of origin, Lambert’s lived experience
became the stuff of legend and lore.
If Lambert’s cultural presence earned him the right to the title of King, then it may very well
be true that his reign was the last of its kind. Returning to the comparison offered in the llustrated
London News, with a nameless, insidious humanity threatening to continue the unchecked growth of
the city, what are the conditions of possibility that allowed for such a dramatic shifts in perceiving
male obesity?
42
Figure 5 - Lambert Poster
43
Figure 6 - Lambert Game
44
4. Solidifying Normality: Quetelet’s Reign
To help answer the question punctuating the preceding section, I will outline the invention
and development of “biometric normality” in this section, and, in the next, explore its correlative
effect on Victorian conceptions of health. By biometric normality, I mean to emphasize the concept
of human physical normality, based on the work of Belgian scientist Lambert Adolphe Jacques
Quetelet (1796-1894).
35
Quetelet furthered the work of Pierre-Simon Laplace, Friedrich Gauss, and
Georges-Louis Leclerc (among others) by carrying out “what has been considered the first cross-
sectional study of newborns and children based on height and weight, and extend[ing] it to the study
of adults” (Eknoyan 49). He published these findings in 1832, Recherches sur le poids de l’homme aux
différent âges (Research on the weight of man at different ages), marking the first time a scientific work connected
human height and weight with a bell-shaped curve,
36
a Gaussian—or normal—distribution: “If man
increased equally in all dimensions, his weight at different ages would be as the cube of his height”
(Quetelet, Treatise on Man 66). This formula, the Quetelet Index, only relatively recently underwent a
name change—in 1972. It is now known as the Body Mass Index, or BMI. Quetelet’s work would go
on to enjoy enormous popularity and influence, with translations in English appearing in 1835 and
1842.
37
While a less common a figure than Darwin or Galton in the period, Quetelet’s work and
influence is of crucial importance to understanding the development of what constituted “normal”
body size. In fact, his work has recently come under greater analysis within the subfield of disability
35
Here, in an attempt to remain faithful to my second epigram, one should note that Quetelet’s work, while individually influential, is not a work of
insight ex nihilo. Rüdiger Campe’s The Game of Probability provides a dense history of the necessary intellectual shifts requisite to producing what is
commonly understood as the probabilistic theory of statistics.
36
To avoid any confusion, Quetelet’s name for the curve was “the law of frequency of error,” or simply “error curve,” and would later be named a
normal distribution by none other than Galton (Enforcing Normalcy 32).
37
In a note to the 1842 edition in English, the publisher demonstrates the initially controversial nature of Quetelet’s work: “It will probably be admitted
by the majority of readers, that he has most ably defended his views and estimate of the physical, moral, and intellectual qualities of man, with their
results upon his position in society. He has refuted the objections brought against his mode of reasoning; and has cleared himself of the charge of being
either a materialist or a fatalist. He shows, also, that he is no theorist or system-maker, but simply wishes to arrive at truth by the only legitimate way,
namely, the examination of facts—incontrovertible facts furnished by statistical data.” This statement with the figure, in the following decade, of Mr.
Gradgrind, in Hard Times. This particular work of Quetelet’s will receive lengthier treatment in the next chapter.
45
studies,
38
and, to a lesser degree, those working in the long nineteenth century. In the now-classic
canon of disability studies, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, Lennard Davis presents
Quetelet as the person “who contributed the most to a generalized notion of the normal as an
imperative” (26). For Davis, “a socio-political process is always at work in relation to the body,” and,
tracing the history of the usage of the word “normal” (to indicate agreement with an established
standard) to 1840, Davis suggests that a pivotal shift in understanding our own bodies as existing in
comparison to an identifiable, quantifiable average begins to occur in the first decade of Victoria’s
tenure. In short, that shift occurs from the perception of an “ideal” body to a norm. Since the notion
of “normal,” as it is used in this context, has its own history, Davis posits a point in time when, absent
of any sense of normality in relation to an average,
one can nevertheless try to imagine a world in which the hegemony of normalcy does not
exist. Rather, we have the ideal body…a mytho-poetic body that is linked to that of the gods
(in traditions in which the god’s body is visualized). This divine body, then, this ideal body, is
not attainable by a human. The notion of an ideal implies that, in this case, the human body
as visualized in art or imagination must be composed from the ideal parts of living models.
These models individually can never be found in this world. When ideal human bodies occur,
they do so in mythology. (24-5)
Thus, Quetelet’s proffering of an “average man,” built out of biometric data, signals a major shift for
our own sense of relating to the average: “the average man becomes paradoxically a kind of ideal, a
position devoutly to be wished,” despite its inherent fallacy (27). That is, Davis sets up an opposition
between an ideal body and this newer sense of the “normal,” based on aggregate data and averages.
The fallacy in question, as Audrey Jaffe shrewdly puts it in her recent book The Affective Life of
the Average Man, has to do with “the effect Kant dubbed the mathematical sublime:”
the condition of being overwhelmed by the perception of an unassimilably large collection of
things. And one such collection, in an era of heightened social competition and mobility, might
well consist of the numerous members of a class or group whose representation, in an era that
38
To address a possible misunderstanding, “disability studies,” in its theoretically broadest sense, is concerned less with political activism and the securing
of rights for individuals labeled as disabled, and more with how “the body is not only – or even primarily – a physical object. It is in fact a way of
organizing through the realm of the senses the variations and modalities of physical existence as they are embodied into being through a larger
social/political matrix” (Enforcing Normalcy 14). I do not mean to minimize or oppose those political movements concerning the former conception of
the field, but rather to emphasize the fundamental importance of organizing difference to the project of disability studies.
46
emphasized the construction of identity as a function of social coordinates—details of class
status, income, and occupation—rendered them disturbingly similar to oneself. (25)
During a period of unprecedented population growth and urban dwelling, the staggering realization
that one is not necessarily Poe’s “man of the crowd” so much as a singular yet eerily similar man in
the crowd requires an answer to the overwhelming perception of infinity. A powerful and, to this day,
ever-satisfying anodyne to the anxiogenic plenitude of infinity, is the concept of the average individual,
“a statistical solution to a social problem” (Jaffe 10). Out of the chaos of the innumerable arises the
seemingly clear order of the average. Neither a singular individual nor a representation of an
impossibly larger whole, the figure stands as a mathematically precise (yet impossible because of its
artificiality) “‘mean’ who was ideal not because he exceeded the qualities of the average, but rather
because he embodied them…the imaginary being…the implicit subject of bourgeois societies, the
least common denominator in relation to whom these societies are constructed” (10). Thus, at the
very core of Quetelet’s theorization of the average man lies an aporia, one that mistakes the useful,
though limited, sense of the average as a legitimate, realistic ideal to which one may aspire.
39
And yet,
aspire they did, we do, and we will. Perhaps some larger truth exists in the phrase “lies, damn lies, and
statistics,” attributed, ever so conveniently, to Disraeli. For the average man is not only an example of
the power of numbers, but ‘he’ is composed of truth and fiction in equal parts: the ‘truth’ of empirical
data and the ‘fiction’ of isomorphic resemblance to an individual.
But the fallacy at the root of Quetelet’s average man is only part of the story of biometric
normality. Just as important is his belief in the social power his insights possessed.
40
In her history of
the Victorian freak show, Lillian Craton shows how Quetelet “saw statistics as a remarkable tool for
social organization, an idea that gained purchase in both Victorian social science and English popular
39
In a strange twist of academic fate, Campe’s book locates this aporia at a much earlier point, wherein the very concept of probability itself is, he argues,
founded upon a mistaken perception of probability as verisimilitude. The twist: mathematics and the literary experimentation of the novel in the
eighteenth century were necessary to do so.
40
Should there be, at this point, any skepticism of Quetelet’s influence, at least one historian of statistics credits him with founding more statistical
societies than any other single individual in the nineteenth century (Stigler 162).
47
culture” (32). Indeed, Charles Babbage, quoted in Alfred Burt’s 1849 edition of An Historical and
Statistical Account of Life Assurance, helps to cement this claim by describing the attraction of so powerful
an idea thusly: “Nothing is more proverbially uncertain than the duration of human life, when the
maxim is applied to an individual; but there are few things less subject to fluctuation than the average
duration of life in a multitude of individuals” (22). In the preface to an 1842 edition of Recherches,
Quetelet describes how he conceives of “ordinary or natural” limits, or what we might think of today
as norms:
[natural] limits comprise within them the qualities which deviated more or less from the mean,
without attracting attention by excess on one side or the other. When the deviations become
greater, they constitute the extraordinary class, having itself its limits, on the outer verge of
which are things preternatural, or monstrosities…The consideration of limits, upon which I
insist, has convinced me more and more of the important part which they play in the social
order. One of the most interesting observations which I have had occasion to make, is, that
they narrow themselves through the influence of civilization, which affords, in my eyes, the
most convincing proof of human perfectibility. (x, emphases added)
Writing at a period early enough in the history of statistics to predate the standardization of standard
deviation,
41
Quetelet nevertheless offers an ordering and categorizing of not just individual items
(“everything from head circumference to age of marriage to criminal tendencies”), but a totalizing
scheme to measure and perfect humanity: “his project is cultural and ideological as well as scientific”
(32; 33). This intersection, among the cultural, ideological, and scientific, resonates with Poovey’s claim
that, in the first three decades of Victoria’s reign, the construction of the concept of the “social body,”
the very same notion informing the ILN passage quoted in Nead, amounted to a particular kind of
sanctioned knowledge, taken as fact. Within the context of the New Poor Law, she claims, one can
see an abstracted version of the kind of work Quetelet produced contemporaneously.
These “scientific” practices…centered on the use of “experts” to gather and analyze “facts”
from extensive empirical observations…This knowledge…claimed to be objective, in the
sense of being politically disinterested, and to derive its central abstractions from empirical
observations. In keeping with the scientific protocol, the knowledge produced…tended to
41
Which is not to say that such a concept of deviation did not exist, but rather competing formulas were used prior to the adoption of the standard
deviation as a uniform measurement in the late nineteenth century.
48
aggregate its object of analysis and to yield general “laws” about regularities rather than detailed
pictures of individual cases. (Poovey, Social Body 10-11)
Here, in what we might think of as a paranoid reading of the scientific method, Poovey shows how
the concept of scientific research and testing helped shape poor-law reform, among other key areas
of British social culture. If, as I argued in the preceding section, Daniel Lambert’s prominence
establishes him as “The King of All Fat Men,” it’s not a stretch to claim, in a similar fashion, that
Quetelet’s theory of the average man places him as “The King of the Average Man,” the disseminator
of a concept that inspired thinking and work in multiple contexts, for better or worse. In other words,
if the “average man,” at its most fundamental level, is fallacious, it’s also one of the most enduring
concepts used in virtually every field and discipline, at some point.
For the better, arguably, Davis observes how indispensable the concept is to another
abstracted thinker of human behavior, Karl Marx. Indeed, “Marx actually cites Quetelet’s notion of
the average man in a discussion of the labor theory of value…[which] in many ways is based on the
idea of the worker constructed as an average worker” (Enforcing Normalcy 28). Though Davis argues
that Marx’s thinking surely relies on the implicit assumption of an able-bodied laborer, the point I
want to make, following the logic of Davis, is that it is difficult to imagine Marx’s thinking on labor,
capital, and sociality without a ready-to-hand concept of what constitutes the average, no matter its
ultimate imperfections or limitations. Here, then, we can see how the concept was not itself always
already a type of Foucauldian “disciplinary individualism,” but, nevertheless, we can see how its
particular contextualization within a mode of thinking that easily analogized scientific research in the
natural sciences with what amounts to an early form of social science could go astray (Social Body 20).
But, for the worse, the project of human perfectibility Quetelet proposed was continued in
increasingly less ambivalent ways. Specifically, Sir Francis Galton was influenced enormously by
Quetelet’s formulation of statistical normality in “social physics,” the partial title of yet another version
of his 1832 text. Devoting most of his career to questions of inheritance, which, when combined with
49
his understanding of Darwinian evolutionary development, would secure his position (not to mention
infamy) as the father of both the term and theory of eugenics, Galton was steadfast in his adherence
to the normal distribution of human physical characteristics. In his “most influential book,” Natural
Inheritance (1889), he notes how “The large do not always beget the large, nor the small the small, and
yet the observed proportions between the large and the small in each degree of size and in every
quality, hardly varies from one generation to another” (Bulmer 176; Galton 2). This endorsement,
affirming the publisher’s note to the 1842 edition of Quetelet’s work, further indicates “the increasing
acceptance of statistical laws as valid scientific explanations” in the period (Bulmer 168). As Poovey
notes above, it was all too easy to slip from observable, empirical data, to pronouncements operating,
at least on a perceptual level, as strongly as the law of gravity.
Though he spends relatively little time on the measurement of human body weight in this
work, Galton does solicit and use these measurements in his findings. In 1884, to expand his data
pool, Galton offered prize money in exchange for information from “British Subjects resident in the
United Kingdom who shall furnish…the best Extracts from their own Family Records,” including
data like eye color, height, and weight (72). While the term “rank” in statistical data can mean a
particular order, Galton is quick to link rank with general success:
A knowledge of the distribution of any quality enables us to ascertain the Rank that each man
holds among his fellows, in respect to that quality. This is a valuable piece of knowledge in
this struggling and competitive world, where success is to the foremost, and failure to the
hindmost, irrespective of absolute efficiency. (36)
Darwin’s influence, evident here in the emphasis on struggle, competition, success, and failure, is
especially noteworthy. Put simply, after Darwin, discussions about inheritance and inheritable traits
proved difficult to detach from questions of extinction and survival. Implicitly, then, those bodies
ranking lower than others in a given “faculty” are subject to failure of some kind. At the end of this
study, Galton, in discussing data for hereditary diseases, points to a paucity of useful knowledge on
the value (or lack thereof) of those living unhealthily: “The knowledge of the officers of Insurance
50
Companies as to the average value of unsound lives is by the confession of many of them far from
being as exact as is desirable” (195-6). Thus, if the determined rank of a given physical trait strays from
the normal (which, in many cases, is the average), one outcome, however tentatively, is death. When
it comes to body weight, our attention is directed to the tails of the bell curve—designating those
persons dramatically under or over the established average weight. Or, to return to a previous point,
rank could be considered along a spectrum from emaciated to skinny to average to corpulent to obese.
While it should be noted that this reading of Galton’s Natural Inheritance is inductive at best,
his later use of statistics to support his own eugenic theories, crucial though it is for its propagation
of Quetelet’s work, is not the only example connecting normality with the biometric. Davis, in his
discussion of the influence of Quetelet on Galton, argues for an even stronger link between the two
fields. “Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the central insight of statistics is the idea that a
population can be normed,” a futile endeavor because “the inviolable rule of statistics is that all
phenomena will always conform to a bell curve” (Enforcing Normalcy 30). Putting the point differently,
by elevating the average man to the status of an ideal, Quetelet’s fallacy sustains itself by then
presenting the notion that such an ideal can be attained. Within the context of the Poor Laws, Huff
examines the work of the Poor Law Board in the 1860s, charged with establishing “dietary regimens
that…would meet the needs of inmates [in workhouses] without fulfilling their desires,” preserving
the punitive function of the 1834 New Poor Law (“Corporeal Economies” 34).
42
Drawing on the work
of physicians like Thomas King Chambers and contemporary critic Francis Bond, Huff argues that
“the discourse of nutrition was dominated by the need to develop efficient ways of maintaining bodies
in institutions, and this called for a science of nutrition that would insert the body into an overall
economic model” (“Corporeal Economies” 37). The result was a series of formulas quantifying ratios
42
Dickens, too, would take up the deplorable living conditions established by the New Poor Law in Oliver Twist.
51
of “bodily work to bodily waste,” ostensibly a “law” of nutrition focused on an “average” inmate’s
work to waste ratio (37).
In theory, these formulas should have addressed cases of the malnourished as well as corpulent
inmates, but malnourishment was part of the overall goal of the legislation. And, with the publication
of William Banting’s extraordinarily popular A Letter on Corpulence in 1863, a greater emphasis was
placed on fat,
43
which was, according to him, understood as a parasite on the otherwise healthy body:
“OF all the parasites that affect humanity I do not know of, nor can I imagine, any more distressing
than that of Obesity…” In effect, Huff argues, “to the utilitarian mind, fat on a workhouse inmate
represented an additional parasite attached to an already ‘parasitic’ member of [the] economic system”
(“Corporeal Economies” 45).
44
A key detail of Huff’s work is the concept of what an “otherwise
healthy body” meant during this period, for, as we will soon see, the term had competing
interpretations.
Huff goes on to suggest that it was not just medical officers and self-proclaimed diet experts
like Banting invested in, as she puts it, “giving the fantasy of knowledge about, and therefore control
over, the dynamic body’s tendency toward death”; insurance companies, as early as 1850, were, too
(“Corporeal Economies” 46). In fact, when Thomas King Chambers delivered a series of lectures on
diet and weight to the College of Physicians in that year, he was an employee of the Hand-In-Hand
Insurance Company (46).
This note in Huff’s work illustrates an as-yet-unexplored area of correlative consequences and
ramifications—one that this chapter’s fifth section will explore more explicitly. For the moment, what
can be said is that a year before Natural Inheritance was published, Charles Stillman’s The Life Insurance
43
Dickens, writing a year later in an unsigned article published on November 19, 1864 in All The Year Round, also addresses this disparity of emphasis
(not Quetelet’s influence): “Thin people, we have said, seldom exhibit on account of their thinness, though many have done so for their stoutness. It is
those who grow largely in excess, and not those who lag far behind the average of eleven stones, who claim for themselves a place in history” (353, emphasis
added).
44
Banting’s letter will is taken up in greater detail in the introduction section of this project.
52
Examiner, A Practical Treatise Upon Medical Examinations for Life Insurance, explicitly directs examiners to
learn as much as they can about any possible hereditary body weight issues. Quite early in the
handbook, under a section providing an overview of characteristics to examine in a prospective client’s
physique, examiners are to approach an underweight or overweight body this way:
If the applicant be over the standard weight, state whether it is caused by fat or by development
of bone and muscles, and whether the party is of an active or sedentary habit. If underweight,
it is important to know whether the tissues are firm and healthy, or otherwise. In either case,
find out if the peculiarity is or is not a family characteristic. (14, emphasis added)
In other words, if a potentially insured body deviates from an expected and predetermined standard,
then the next steps are to identify the cause or substance of the difference, the physical activity of the
body, and whether or not such a trait can be connected to the applicant’s family. In other words, even
if Galton only hints at the possibility of hereditary obesity, Stillman’s handbook assumes the possibility
and emphasizes the importance of such knowledge in the process of evaluation. Thus, recalling
Wadd’s 1816 assumption of obesity as a hereditary disposition, we have further evidence to suggest
that even if the science of eugenics doesn’t provide support for such an assumption, physicians and
medical officers operated under the assumption regardless.
53
4. Signifying Health: Foucault’s Noso-Politics
Banting’s Letter, which offers a personal account of how he found “the true road to health,”
introduces the second key term—health—of this project. It is certainly the case that works promoting
physical health (exemplified by Quetelet’s average man), like Banting’s, existed long before the
Victorian period. By emphasizing the term health, I mean to suggest not just our current, contemporary
understanding of it to suggest soundness of body and mind, but specifically to conjure the history of
the term’s solidification within discourse.
In “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” Foucault posits a distinction between
the nineteenth century’s rise of professional classes and institutions of medical practice with what he
describes as an “age...of a considered noso-politics” (Power/Knowledge 167). “Noso,” etymologically,
stems from the greek nosos, denoting disease, sickness, or malady. In short, Foucault offers his own
version of Poovian “uneven developments” by pointing to a less organized and less governmentally
centered system for managing health concerns within a given population. While this essay dates from
1976, around the same time Foucault began to conceptualize “bio-politics” in “Society Must Be
Defended,” his use of “noso” suggests a looser organization to state apparatuses concerned with
administering and supporting health. In particular, this section’s aim is to track the dominant shifts
and trends in medical practice and popular medical conceptions, as Foucault sees them, from the latter
half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of Victoria’s reign. Rather than simply recapitulating
his claims, following Foucault’s argument allows us to observe both his powerful historiographical
insights as well as the pitfalls produced by his tendency to totalize the schema he outlines.
According to Foucault, “there is no society which does not practice some kind of ‘noso-
politics’: the eighteenth century didn’t invent this” (167). It did, however, institute “new rules, and
above all transposed the practice on to an explicit, concerted level of analysis such as had been
54
previously unknown” (167). These new rules, of course, obtained unevenly, and, Foucault is quick to
note, not necessarily from a single or coherent authority.
The centre of initiative, organisation and control for this politics should not be located only
in the apparatuses of the State. In fact there were a number of distinct health policies, and
various different methods for taking charge of medical problems…those of religious
groups…those of charitable and benevolent associations…[and] those of the learned
societies…Health and sickness, as characteristics of a group, a population, are problematised
in the eighteenth century through the initiatives of multiple social instances, in relation to
which the State itself plays various different roles. (167)
This excerpt allows us to further unpack the underlying meaning in Foucault’s choice of the term
“noso” in the noso-political. Prior to the institution of state-sanctioned professional classes, Foucault
is suggesting, approaches to “health,” both of individuals as well as more abstract social bodies, were
rooted in responses to disease. These responses, then, were reactive, and by definition, not necessarily
part of a broader program of health management. “Thus… noso-politics does not correlate with a
uniform trend of State intervention in the practice of medicine, but rather with the emergence at a
multitude of sites in the social body of health and disease as problems requiring some form or other
of collective control measures” (Power/Knowledge 168). In this moment, Foucault collapses an
individual’s bodily health with the larger social body to which they belong, arguing for a slow and
messy formalization of this process that begins to make itself concrete in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, and, with the example of the ILN passage, culminating in the conceptualization
of a social body made unhealthy. The consequences of this approach to understanding and regulating
health begin to resemble an early form of bio-power:
Here it is not a matter of offering support to a particularly fragile, troubled and troublesome
margin of the population, but of how to raise the level of health of the social body as a whole.
Different power apparatuses are called upon to take charge of ‘bodies’, not simply so as to
exact blood service from them or levy dues, but to help and if necessary constrain them to
ensure their own good health. The imperative of health: at once the duty of each and the
objective of all. (170)
The factors contributing to this health imperative are various. First, Foucault notes the “displacement
of health problems relative to problems of assistance,” or, in other words, the shifting sites of public
55
assistance from “lay and religious organizations devoted to a number of ends,” including medical
assistance, to more single-issue, focused care (168). Through the course of the eighteenth century,
Foucault argues, we witness “the progressive dislocation of these mixed and polyvalent procedures of
assistance” (169). Of course, since this is Foucault, there’s a more sinister force at work, supplementing
this initial change, namely: “the emergence of the health and physical well-being of the population in
general as one of the essential objectives of political power” (169-170). This emergent noso-politics,
for Foucault, has as much to do with the growing industrial concern for “the preservation, upkeep
and conservation of the ‘labour force’” as it does with demography, “the economico-political effects
of the accumulation of men” (171). Perhaps the biggest consequence of Foucault’s thinking here is
how he understands the changes these developments have on our understanding of the body.
the ‘body’—the body of individuals and the body of populations—appears as the bearer of
new variables, not merely as between the scarce and the numerous…but also as between the
more or less utilisable, more or less amenable to profitable investment, those with greater or
lesser prospects of survival, death and illness, and with more or less capacity for being usefully
trained. The biological traits of a population become relevant factors for economic
management, and it becomes necessary to organise around them an apparatus which will
ensure not only their subjection but the constant increase in their utility. (172)
It’s hard to overlook how closely this process parallels Huff’s earlier work on how the Poor Law Board
was created as a need to “develop efficient ways of maintaining bodies in institutions.” But, crucially,
not just bodies within institutions, but, rather, a significant re-coding of the body, attributing new
“variables,” such as “normal” weight and size, that then become necessary to consider in light of
newer economic and demographic exigencies.
And, perhaps this marks the point where most readers of Foucault familiar enough with the
contours of his arguments nod knowingly and move on. But Foucault’s influence, as enormous as it
is for critics as Quetelet’s “average man” was for his followers, is not without its own drawbacks. More
precisely, in this essay a clear tension exists between the way things stood for Foucault, writing in
1976, and the murky, contested status of health and medicine at the turn of the nineteenth century. In
56
other words, Foucault’s privileged position of seeing for himself the ultimate ends to which noso-
politics would reach presents a challenge to his insistence that the development of the “imperative of
health[,] at once the duty of each and the objective of all” becomes the province of comparatively few
institutions as we progress through the century (170). In other words, Foucault’s work tells us why
things are as they are, but not necessarily how things came to be.
To anchor this claim with an example, it’s easy to miss on a first pass how quickly Foucault’s
concept of health develops from a loose, disease-focused sense of noso-politics to the above
imperative to a triangulation of “order, enrichment and health” somehow regulated “less through a
single apparatus than by an ensemble of multiple regulations and institutions which in the eighteenth-
century take the generic name of ‘police’” (170). But, as Catharine Gallagher’s brilliant reading of
Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population shows, at the same time Foucault claims an
“imperative of health,” the very idea of a healthy body, much like the invisible infiltration of “fat from
within” in the ILN passage, is contested: “By insisting that healthy [e.g. reproducing] bodies eventually
generate a feeble social organism, Malthus departed from nearly all his contemporaries” (Gallagher
83). Here, health is instantiated as the reproducing body, and the paradoxical undoing of the larger
social whole risks inverting the sense of individual health that body exhibits: “Malthus simultaneously
sees the unleashed power of population, the reproducing body, as that which will eventually destroy
the very prosperity that made it fecund, replacing health and innocence with misery and vice”
(Gallagher 84). As a result, Gallagher argues, the body, after Malthus’s challenge to what the healthy
body indicates, is rendered “absolutely problematic”:
The blooming body is only a body about to divide into two feebler bodies that are always on
the verge of becoming four starving bodies. Hence, no state of health can be socially
reassuring. Malthus’s argument ruptures the healthy body/healthy society homology.
Simultaneously, by making the body absolutely problematic, he helps place it in the very center
of social discourse. (Gallagher 85)
57
Based on Gallagher’s analysis, it’s hard to see just how quickly or clearly the signs of managed health,
according to Foucault (order, enrichment, and health), solidify. Moreover, Gallagher’s argument
demonstrates how health, without a clear “law” or structure to organize its meaning, requires
contextualization to effectively be understood.
Surely this example is not sufficient to shake our collective faith in Foucault’s broader ideas?
No, not quite, but the preceding example certainly demands of this history a finer, more granular
approach to the sketch of history Foucault provides.
45
More troublingly, his penchant for collapsing
duration and the appropriately noso-political diffusion of power and knowledge in the process of
explaining “things as they are” pushes his thinking to shakier ground. Note, for example, the use of
“the generic name of ‘police’” in the above excerpt. While Foucault takes the time to explain the
broader definition of the term, it seems likely that, by now, the term suggests a form of totalizing
control and consolidated power that even attempting to locate the term in a different register proves
difficult. And with respect to medicine, no one would argue that “[t]he sudden importance assumed
by medicine in the eighteenth century originates at the point of intersection of a new, ‘analytical’
economy of assistance with the emergence of a general ‘police’ of health,” but the specific history of
professionalization of medical practice, as Poovey shows, was not so sudden or unilateral
(Power/Knowledge 171):
The situation at midcentury, then, was that the majority of medical men, who carried out the
vast majority of medical work, had no representation in the organizations by which medicine
was officially governed, no access to research facilities, and no guaranteed income or social
rank. (Uneven Developments 42).
45
And, of course, Foucault’s right about quite a bit in this essay, too. Consider, for example, Foucault’s prescient observation that “a complete utilitarian
decomposition of poverty is marked out and the specific problem of sickness of the poor begins to figure in the relationship of the imperatives of labour
to the needs of production” in relationship to the works of Poovey and Huff (Power/Knowledge 169).
58
Thus, Foucault’s essay, in this instance, is best read as a history painted with a wide brush: broadly
legible but obfuscating important material realities that, at the very least, present a more complicated
picture of what constituted “health” than that which this essay provides.
***
59
In the preceding sections, I have attempted to show how, on the surface, “obesity” becomes
a term used to describe a jeopardized state of physical health in the nineteenth century. But, exercising
care not to mistake the teleological as always already in development, as Foucault’s essay risks, I have
also attempted to show, through Daniel Lambert, the multivalent and enduring legacy of male obesity
as he embodied it. Crucial to this narrative of the referent of obesity is the influence and effect
Quetelet’s notion of the “average man” exerted on scientists, legal reformers, and culture more
generally. By focusing on the comparatively contested and contradictory depictions of health, I have
put pressure on Foucault’s thinking to show how, as I mentioned earlier, the term’s meaning changes
according to context and discourse.
Claiming that the period in question presents us with a moment in history where the totalizing
control of the State in the bio-political project of maintaining its labor force has yet to fully develop
has further implications, of course, and ones that will continue to be seen in the following chapters.
In particular, if, as I have argued through Foucault, some aspects of his depiction come across as
insightful and accurate, others ask us to interrogate further, to pursue not just the transformations and
explanations provided, but to think more complexly about how and in what ways this history makes
sense. Countless projects have followed Foucault down the path of paranoid readings of doctors,
medicine, and related extensions of the State, and while I would not want to dismiss such work, I
would say that—given the complications that Poovey’s analysis in Uneven Developments presents to
Foucault’s thought—we should consider the idea that Foucault’s scheme has pointed critics in the
direction of such research in a manner that has privileged work focused on medical discourse at the
expense of a sense of social discourse. Such privileging has occluded, at the least, our understanding
of obesity’s confusing, diffuse, and multi-discursive history.
If we expect to improve on and further the historical project, then it’s time to consider how
other discourses, less obvious discourses, helped to shape the referent for obesity. And, perhaps most
60
importantly, it’s imperative, given the multiple sites of intervention inherent to the noso-political, that
we remain sensitive to the idea that no single discourse, no matter how specialized or apposite,
necessarily possesses the kind of hegemonic power we so frequently associate with medical, economic,
or political discourse. Crucial though they are to our understanding of a time and a place we can no
longer experience, they are merely a subset of many other kinds of discourse. In the next chapters, my
approach will be to come at the question of obesity through other discourses, less obvious sites, and,
ultimately, to carry out the historiographical project Foucault sets for us, by other means.
The other means, presently, require some explanation and justification. As mentioned in the
introduction, this project’s investment, with respect to alternative discourses, utilizes the work of
several texts from the nineteenth century focusing on assurance, or, in its more modern form,
insurance. Throughout this project, reference will be made to literal and metaphorical forms of
assurance in each novel considered. In addition to this textual through-line, the emphasis on this
discourse is co-incident with both the shift from corpulence to obesity, and I argue, an example of the
very kind of noso-politics Foucault describes.
The former parallel can be seen not only in the respect and high regard such writers had for
Quetelet’s work,
46
further evincing his legacy and legitimizing the discourse of assurance as a proximate
body of work germane to this study, but also the way in which this discourse works with but also
complicates his conceptions. For example, in Weber’s work,
47
as an experienced medical officer to the
North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, Quetelet’s formula is not sufficient to make a
determination about one’s health.
To estimate correctly the degree of obesity merely by the relation of weight to height is
obviously not, strictly speaking, practical, because the relation of the amount of fat to the size
of the muscles and bones is not thereby taken into consideration. Moreover, variations in the
proportion of weight to height, either in the direction of leanness or obesity, differ in regard
46
Early in Cornelius Walford’s Insurance Guide and Handbook, a list of “continental writers” deserving acknowledgment for their work furthering “the
development of the science of Life probabilities” includes Leibnitz, Bernouilli, Euler, and Laplace, among others, but singularly records, “by no means
least,” M. Quetelet, the only individual referred to with a title, “the Royal Astronomer of Belgium” (21-22).
47
See note 11, p. 23.
61
to their pathological significance probably not only according to age and sex, but also
according to race and family, and according to mode of life. (1)
Though Weber’s critique has traction, it raises the question of why, given such possible deficiencies,
the general framework Quetelet provides remains well entrenched in work then as (though it’s easy to
forget) now.
By way of bringing something new to Foucault, the history of life assurance, as documented
by several sources, owes a debt to one of its precursors, the Friendly Society. Though these groups
varied in size, organization, and advantages, their role, following Foucault’s essay, squares nicely with
the apparatuses beyond the state attempting to define and sustain a conception of health. From these
societies grows the modern form of the assurance business, and thus the example set by the discourse
of assurance follows, however broadly sketched the path, a noso-political form of development that,
per Foucault, culminates in the bodily discipline of the subject by the state, biopower. If, as my
discussion of Foucault’s essay shows, we require more discourses and more specific analysis of the
grains of history, the body of work supplied by the life assurance industry is most appropriate.
Over the course of the next three chapters, then, each text under study will feature, borrowing
the concept from Sedgwick,
48
a triangulation of discourses: the text and reception of the novel itself,
life assurance, and, in succession, consumer culture, colonial anxieties, and theatrical adaptation. The
aim, to reiterate, of such an endeavor is to better understand how the shift from corpulence to obesity,
as I have illustrated by Cheyne and Wadd, occurred, the ways in which it became attached to nation,
class, and gender, and the resulting impact such changes had on conceptions of masculinity. Along
the way, the hope is that by better situating these texts within these contexts, we can come away with
a fuller sense of these novels as they were seen in their time, and by virtue the status of corpulent men
within Victorian culture. The next chapter, focusing on Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, explores the
48
Who, of course, borrows and modifies the concept from Girard.
62
popular legacy of the novel as well as surveys a subset of the many subsequent works his novel
inspired, captured by the term Pickwickiana. To preview my argument, I make a case for a type of
critical interpretive inertia, something I describe as “intractable fat studies,” operating within the novel.
As a result of this inertia, I further claim that to better understand the reception of the novel, we need
to look beyond the text to develop a sense of thick description.
63
Chapter Two: “So Much Healthy Mirth”: Untangling Pickwick
Nineteenth-century British social and medical authorities were obsessed with bodily proportion. They developed
numerous new technologies for measuring bodies as well as standards for ranking them. Body fat becomes the locus of a
discursive and material struggle to consolidate the identity of “the average body” and limit the amount of space a body
should occupy and the resources it should consume. (Huff, Conspicuous Consumptions vi)
No prose work of fiction of this or any other age has been read and read again by so many people, none has raised so
much healthy mirth, none has called forth so large a bibliography of history, commentary and illustration and none is so
freely quoted, consciously or unconsciously in the literature and conversation of today. (Hall, Mr Pickwick’s Kent)
1. “On the strange mutability of human affairs.”
49
In the previous chapter, I traced some of the primary historical and cultural elements of the
eighteenth century surrounding male corpulence for several reasons. First, that tracing helps to ground
this project within a much longer, varied history of discursive attitudes regarding body weight across
the genders. Borrowing a term from anthropologist Mark Graham, “lipoliteracy,” or the perception
of discerning “fat for what we believe it tells us about a person,” hasn’t always been so contracted or
definite (Kulick and Meneley 178). While I do claim that many of the discursive shifts witnessed in
the Victorian period are indeed unique, they are not without their crucial precursors. Second, and
more abstractly, the previous chapter evinces an already existing fascination with male corpulence.
From physicians as geographically and conceptually diverse as Santorio Santorio, George Cheyne and
William Wadd to Anglophone literary celebrities like Ben Franklin, James Boswell, and John
Arbuthnot to London’s famous and celebrated Daniel Lambert, the subject was anything but
unexpressed. Finally, if the preceding chapter offered a broad historical frame to begin an analysis of
obesity in Victorian Britain, it also meant to suggest the presence of the powerful and enduring figure
of the corpulent male in the popular imagination, perhaps most notably in the ubiquitous depictions
49
(Pickwick 9).
64
of John Bull. This chapter will focus on a much narrower historical period: the late 1830s, where two
events, one literary and one scientific, served to shift the vocabulary and valence of corpulence.
In this section, I examine the extraordinary success of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837)
alongside the theories concerning human body weight developed by Lambert Adolphe Jacques
Quetelet, a Belgian scientist whose contributions span the fields of astronomy, mathematics,
sociology, and, most importantly for this discussion, statistics. Having placed the novel alongside
Quetelet’s work, I will then move into a review of more recent criticism of Quetelet’s “average man”
as well as important critical engagements with Pickwick as it pertains to corpulence, using this review
as an illustration of what I phrase as “intractable fat studies,” a critical interpretive moment where
fatness signifies, simultaneously, everything and nothing.
Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to carry out the promise punctuating the preceding
one: to generate a deeper, more fully historically contextualized approach to understanding male
obesity, its representations and its discursive variants, in the period. The latter portions of this chapter
explore a few of the numerous Pickwick-inspired texts, performances, and images complementing my
reading of the novel itself.
50
Throughout, the novel is positioned in relation to contemporaneous work
from both medical and assurance discourses. Afterward, I turn back to Dickens’s novel and focus on
its conclusion with Tony Weller’s financial management, a topic receiving further study, with respect
to Jos Sedley, in the next chapter.
However, to argue that these new ways of rethinking body size and health reframed their
meaning is not to suggest that a shift occurred instantly or unilaterally. As Lillian Craton notes, “fat is
too supple to conform to a single rigid interpretation” (294). Turning from the above scientific
considerations to contemporaneous literary works and questions of embodiment demonstrates, at the
50
Such items were so plentiful that, by the end of the century, they even produced the neologism Pickwickiana, to succinctly name them all at once; the
OED puts the date of the term’s first use in print at 1899, with the publication of Joseph Grego’s compendium Pictorial Pickwickiana.
65
very least, a complex relationship among these discourses, one made potentially more complex when
we consider not simply the idea that “characters in broadly successful texts were treated as if they were
both fundamentally incomplete and the common property of all,” but also how real, as well as
imagined, historical figures, with their identifying corpulence, attained a level of literary and cultural
prominence and flexibility (Brewer 2). In other words, it is not just that “characters become treated as
historical figures,” but also that corpulent historical figures, like Lambert, undergo a literal afterlife of
appropriation and shifting valences through the period (Anderson 937).
As if showing itself to be the most expansive and absorbent, corpulence—as it is manifested
in literary representations—has been marshaled to support arguments addressing, to give a sampling,
from queer sexuality and the culture of sophistication (Litvak), to Butlerian performativity (Huff,
“Fosco’s Fat Drag”), to arguably more straightforward work like Nicole King’s article “‘The Fattest
Clubman in London’: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’ and the Culture of Reducing in
England at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” D. A. Miller and Eve Sedgwick, who each engaged
with the subject of fat embodiment in pieces from 1990, help to illustrate this range.
In his article “The Late Jane Austen,” Miller focuses on a moment in Chapter VIII of the first
volume of Persuasion to meditate upon the author’s “untypical distraction” in response to “the
semantically uncooperative body” of the “substantial” Mrs. Musgrove (Miller 3; Austen 59). I quote
the passage in full:
[Anne and Frederick] were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily
made room for him;—they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier
indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of comfortable substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to
express good cheer and good humor than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations
of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened,
Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he
attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son whom alive nobody had cared for.
Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure
has as good a right to be in deep affliction as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But
fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain,—
which taste cannot tolerate,—which ridicule will seize. (59)
66
Miller reads Austen’s comment, which identifies “unbecoming conjunctions” between body size and
cultural connotation, as a moment of “auctorial violence” against Musgrove’s body for its
nonconformity (5). The moment “no doubt betrays how important a rectitude of the body is to that
instruction in good conduct which makes so large a part of the project of the so-called novel of
manners” (5). He then shifts the discussion to bodies that do cooperate with Austen’s novelistic
scheme: “the body can only enter Austen’s fiction when it has a voice of its own, or provides the basis
for an alternative semiosis—and so, as it were, justifies getting hit with meaning by talking back” (6).
In other words, for Miller, Austen’s inclusion of the body in her fiction depends on the body
communicating something outside of its diegetic presence; it must go beyond simply existing as a neutral
object.
Arguing for the hypochondriac as the body most “dependent on language,” Miller devotes the
rest of the piece to examining what he reads as a “vulgar construction of hypochondria” in Austen’s
work that is indicative of a “general absence of serious illness from [her] oeuvre” (6-7). He finally
concludes by tracing the presence of morbidity culture
51
through Sanditon, suggesting a parallel
between this particular perversion and “Austen’s distinctive contribution to ideology…the
unprecedented concentration of romantic feeling in which she imbues [the conventional marriage]
plot, whose outcome becomes not simply inevitable, but also supremely desirable, to readers as well
as characters” (14). Thus, Miller points at a self-reflective moment in Austen’s fiction as a preamble
to his discussion of ideology. Mrs. Musgrove’s “fat body matters, so to speak, but it doesn’t signify; it
matters because it doesn’t signify, and vice versa” (4). The character, sitting between Anne and
Frederick, remains ambiguously frozen in both Persuasion and Miller’s essay. Though Miller needs Mrs.
Musgrove’s body, and Austen’s textual meditation upon it, in order to make a convenient distinction
51
Where “health-care exceeds an order of utility to become a practice of perversion, ‘the exercise of a desire which serves no purpose,’ Roland Barthes
reminds us, like ‘the exercise of the body which gives itself up to love with no intention of procreation’” (9).
67
and a set of larger claims between the cooperative and uncooperative body in her work, this chiasmus
is not the only way to interpret this passage. Indeed, one might more generously understand Austen
to by slyly pointing out the problems inherent in assuming a static correspondence between bodily
surface and interior. That is, Austen’s interjection could serve to both identify and ironically challenge
the nonconformity Miller takes at superficial value. Such opposed readings supply an example of what,
earlier, I referred to as “intractable fat studies,” the proverbial rabbit hole of making meaning of fat
bodies, where the suppleness of fat gives way to an excess of potential meaning, signifying everything
(my reading of the Austen passage), and, as a result, nothing (Miller).
Writing at nearly the same time, Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon collaborate on thinking
through body difference in “Divinity: A Dossier A Performance Piece A Little-Understood Emotion,”
later published in Tendencies. Their conversation helps to extend this topic and narrows the focus to
the fat body, as a particular example of body difference. Sedgwick and Moon engage in a dialogue
about their own experiences of feeling other and internalizing a sense of otherness. They explore a
range of cultural objects that constellate around, as Moon says, “the fat, beaming figure of the
diva...[and] its representational magnetism...as an anachronistic ideal, formed in early nineteenth-
century Europe, of the social dignity of corpulence” (212). In a passage that attests to the “almost
coterminous” work she was producing in Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick describes the similarities
between gay persons coming out of the “glass” closet and the public nature of fatness (x):
52
Nonsensically, fat people now live under the same divisive dispensation; incredibly, in this
society everyone who sees a fat woman feels they know something about her that she doesn’t
herself know. If what they think they know is something as simple as that she eats a lot, it is
medicine that lends this notionally self-evident (though, as recent research demonstrates,
usually erroneous) reflection the excitement of inside information; it is medicine that, as with
homosexuality, transforming difference into etiology, confers on this rudimentary behavioral
52
And the coming out processes in each case, she argues, are not dissimilar: “there is such a process as coming out as a fat woman. Like the other, more
materially dangerous kind of coming out, it involves the risk—here, a certainty—of uttering bathetically as a brave declaration that truth which can
scarcely in this instance ever have been less than self-evident. Also like the other kind of coming out, however, denomination of oneself as a fat woman
is a way in the first place of making clear to the people around one that their cultural meanings will be, and will be heard as, assaultive and diminishing
to the degree that they are not fat-affirmative. In the second place and far more importantly, it is a way of staking one’s claim to insist on, and participate
actively in, a renegotiation of the representational contract between one’s body and one’s world” (225).
68
hypothesis the prestige of a privileged narrative understanding of her will (she’s addicted), her
history (she’s frustrated), her perception (she can’t see herself as she really looks), her prognosis
(she’s killing herself). (224)
This selection concisely offers a cross section of many of the current concerns, myths, and projects
active within “fat studies,” the conventional phrase for the subfield. As a proleptic archive of problems
to address, the excerpt identifies medicalization, the pathologization of obesity that presumes a
behavioral structure before the fat subject is given a chance to speak. And even if one does listen to the
fat subject, initial assumptions tend to prevail.
53
This, of course, results in a “self-evident” deduction
that something obvious must be wrong with this person.
54
Moreover, Sedgwick’s description
complicates Moon’s formulation of the “anachronistic ideal” by articulating the similarly (and
retrospectively) self-evident point that “there is no such thing in any culture as a simple reversal of
meaning” (228).
55
Despite medicalization, she argues, a reversal of the meaning of corpulence was not
and has not been achieved. What it produced, instead, is “a palimpsest of fragmentary meanings,
inscribed in a biologistic narrative that can only take itself for the most direct commonsense, but
whose actual gaps, overlays, and semi-erasures spell out a much less enabling rebus: a pattern of
discreditation and impossibility for the female body of any class and face and of any size” (228).
Sedgwick’s point about this cultural shift understood as a palimpsest, we will see, applies to both
Dickens’s text as well as to its place within literary history.
Importantly, it is easy to miss how the above passage begins with the general claim about “fat
people” only to go on in the second clause of the first sentence to exclusively describe fat women.
Such a gendered slippage might preclude attention to the corpulent male body, but that does not mean
53
“Anti-fat attitudes are rigged to be impervious. Anti-fat attitudes increase when weight is explained by overeating and lack of exercise, but do not
decrease with a genetic explanation. Stories of weight discrimination…reduce anti-fat attitudes only in people who are fat (Teachman, Gapinski, Brownell,
Rawlings, & Jeyaram, 2003)” (Wann xxi).
54
Wann puts it succinctly: “If fat people need to be cured, there must be something wrong with them. Cures should work; if they do not, it is the fat
person’s fault and a license not to employ, date, educate, rent to, sell clothes to, give a medical exam to, see on television, respect, or welcome such fat
people in society” (Wann xiii).
55
Similarly, Elspeth Probyn begins her essay with a discussion of what the phrase “fat is a feminist issue” has come to mean, calling for “[a] feminist
counter-critique of the dominant discourse on fat [which] needs to be critical of the moralizing tone that defines both feminist and so-called progressive
accounts of food, eating, and fat” (401-2). Recapitulating Sedgwick, she urges critics to be aware that “[t]he idea that politics can be served by
methodologically simply effecting a semiotic reversal has been deeply critiqued by many…” (401-2).
69
that an analogous (and no doubt similarly shaky) historical record is therefore unavailable or unsuitable
for analysis. Indeed, though both Miller and Sedgwick are only tangentially related to the growing field
of fat studies, within the context of the above texts, recent study suggests that such a slippage (from
“people” to “women”) is illustrative of both the insidious hyper-focus on female bodies and
simultaneous erasure of fat men.
In their 2007 article “Feminism and the Invisible Fat Man,” Kristen Bell and Darlene
McNaughton contend that “the complex ways in which gender and fatness are intertwined,
understood and experienced have not been fully examined in the extant literature, particularly in so
far as they relate to men” (108). To be clear, this is not to undermine or marginalize the important
work of feminist scholars such as Susie Orbach, Kim Chernin, or Susan Bordo, as the authors consider
in their analysis, among others, but rather to clarify what may in fact be part of the explanation for
this oversight.
Active in much of the feminist scholarship from the 1970s and through the ensuing decades,
they argue, is “an underlying assumption…that the fear of fatness is something only women
experience,” implying a monolithic patriarchy is to blame for “women’s fat oppression, and the
tyranny of beauty ideals that focus on slimness and youthfulness” (110). Citing work that counters this
assumption from Hillel Schwartz to Peter Stearns and Sander Gilman, Bell and McNaughton show
how “the broader historical context of current cultural preoccupations with fat reveals that dieting
and concerns with fatness have long been with us,” and, perhaps surprisingly, “early prominent
supporters of dieting (such as William Banting, Henry Lindlahr and Bernarr MacFadden were generally
male—as were many of their followers” (113). If, as these counter-histories suggest, “men and women
were seen to be equally culpable for their fatness,” such equivalence does not translate to similar lived
experiences. Even as fashion, medicine, and economic developments contributed to a growing
concern over body weight, such demands certainly did not affect men in the same ways as women.
70
There are other historiographical speedbumps as well: “men left fewer diaries than women did, so we
have less direct evidence of how widely they internalized the new injunctions” (Stearns (1997) 74).
But, we do know, with the examples of Cheyne, Lambert, and Wadd that there were in fact anxieties
expressed by men about their body weight.
56
And, as the example of Dr. John Bretton in Villette shows,
such anxieties did manifest themselves in literature of the time.
57
Returning to our previous interlocutors, with respect to what corpulence means, Miller and
Sedgwick offer opposing analytic extremes. For Miller, Mrs. Musgrove’s body, in its unwillingness to
signify, means too much for Austen, prompting her to comment uncharacteristically upon a
characterological predicament.
58
For Sedgwick, before the “divisive dispensation” solidifies at some
point between the early nineteenth-century and the present, the narrative risks betraying a far less
coherent development, one that might mean, potentially, too little.
56
Stearns, focusing on American culture and obesity in the twentieth century, insists that “men carried their concerns about fat distinctively. They joined
weight control organizations far less commonly. They almost certainly talked less about their anxieties. They may have minimized open expressions of
concern…” (102).
57
Bell and McNaughton conclude their study by observing how, presently, “in this era of the alleged global ‘obesity epidemic’…so widely is the net of
deviance and its attendant gaze being cast, that it is impossible to continue to deny or downplay the impact of the war on fat on both women and men”
(126).
58
“The fat body…figures a body whose materiality is most clearly irreducible to whatever it may be made to mean…” (4, emphasis added).
71
2. “An Observer of Human Nature.”
59
Toward the end of Stephen Jarvis’s 2015 novel, Death and Mr. Pickwick, the furor surrounding
Dickens’s second major work amounts to a sort of “cultural knowing” or identification of the titular
character.
60
Though a fictional retelling of the history of the novel, Jarvis incorporates much of the
legitimate history of reception and celebration it met with in the nineteenth century,
61
and, as we will
see toward the end of this chapter in the work of Percy Fitzgerald, it was not uncommon for readers
and fans alike to imagine a real person existing outside of the weekly’s pages.
Mr Pickwick was there, in front of everyone, like a real person, not as a hazy mist of head-
hidden words: every man, woman and child had exactly the same image of Mr Pickwick in his
or her consciousness. When a dustman talked of Mr Pickwick, a lord could know exactly who
was meant because of the pictures. Your Mr Pickwick was my Mr Pickwick, was a universal Mr
Pickwick – a being of fiction, a man-created man, was suddenly recognised by all. This was
unprecedented in human affairs. It was as though Mr Pickwick actually walked the streets, that
you might see him trotting along in his tights and gaiters, walking past railings, pausing at a
shop window, or entering a public house… Yet everyone knew Mr Pickwick. The character
existed almost as a solid form, and the solitary act of reading was a shared experience. (600-
01)
Jarvis’s description of the sudden and “unprecedented” recognition of Pickwick in popular culture
exposes a paradox: how can a single literary character, with no previous existence before 1836, seem
to gain instant and somehow universal acknowledgement?
62
How can we account for the difference
implicit in this excerpt between reading about a character and knowing that character? Put another way,
what are the conditions of possibility that would allow for such an occurrence?
In what follows in this section, I explore answers to these questions by focusing on the history
of the novel, critical approaches to it, and close reading of specific passages that, I argue, demonstrate
59
(Pickwick 9).
60
To characterize The Pickwick Papers as a novel, is, according to G. K. Chesterton and John Bruns, questionable. See Bruns’s article “Get Out of Gaol
Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot” and Steven Marcus’s Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey wherein he argues that Pickwick “reveals itself as being at some
deep structural level about the act of its own coming into existence” (20).
61
Though it’s a more substantial theme than this example alone, Jarvis includes the real-life suicide of Pickwick’s first illustrator, Robert Seymour, into
the narrative. Hence, the “death” in the title.
62
James Kinsley, in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the novel, locates this tension between the early “theatrical” presentation
of the text with its later “naturalistic qualities” (x-xi).
72
a growing concern over male body size and corpulence. As I move through the text, I also consider
the rise of the “average man” as configured by Quetelet’s work in the 1830s. In brief, I argue that an
analysis of Pickwick with respect to male corpulence can only be achieved by reviewing the extra-
textual artifacts that remain; the text, considered alone, leads to an instance of intractable fat studies.
The next section focuses on what I have previously described as the textual excess of the novel: the
merchandising, publishing, and related cultural enterprises that attend the rise of Pickwick and the
proliferation of the figure of his namesake.
For Victorianists, it might seem strange to begin a project with Dickens’s first, though certainly
not most fully realized, novel. Published in monthly parts from March 1836 to October 1837, the
book, an experiment for the twenty-four year old Dickens, enjoyed enormous popularity in its own
time and for decades afterward, even if, as Google’s Ngram viewer helps to illustrate more recent
discussions of the novel have waned (Figure 1).
63
With its publication corresponding to the end of the
short reign of William IV (1830-1837) and the inaugural year of Queen Victoria, Pickwick, to readers
of both 18
th
and 19
th
Century British literature, can feel like an odd hybrid, one evincing the influence
of its precursors in form and content while also previewing the distinctive prose style and realism of
Dickens’s later work.
63
Though it is worth noting that the novel and its history still provide present-day fiction writers with plenty of inspiration—Stephen Jarvis’s forthcoming
Death and Mr. Pickwick has received critical attention and praise.
73
Figure 7 - Google NGram Viewer, Pickwick
Like its predecessors from Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771), the novel is a comic picaresque, “one of the last English novels of the open road in the
eighteenth-century tradition,” notes Kinsley (vii).
64
Set about a decade earlier, spanning the years 1827
to 1831, the text’s “editors” focus on collecting the “papers” documenting the travels and events of
the titular Samuel Pickwick and his three close friends and followers: the fumbling romantic Tracy
Tupman, the dubiously qualified sportsman Nathaniel Winkle, and the most unpoetic of poets,
Augustus Snodgrass (Figure 2—Tupman, Pickwick, Snodgrass and Winkle, clockwise from top).
64
Not to mention Cervantes’s ultimate exemplar, Don Quixote (1605, 1615).
74
Figure 8 - Robert Seymour Etching of The Club
59
Robert
Seymour.
"
MR. PICKWICK ADDRESSES THE CLUB."
The first
etching
for "The Posthumous
Papers
of the Pickwick Club.'
Part I. Issued 31st
March,
1836.
75
As the novel progresses, this core group encounters a multitude of characters, notably Mr. Wardle and
his family, along with his young servant, the excessively large and somnolent “fat boy,”
65
Joe as well
as the uniquely aphoristic Sam Weller and his father, Tony (Figure 9).
Figure 9 – Phiz, “The Valentine”
65
Joe, along with one of his famous phrases, is depicted in a postcard at the beginning of the introduction (Figure 1).
Hablot
Knight
Browne.
Facsimile of the
original drawing by
"
PHIZ."
"
THE VALF.NTINE."
Chap.
XXXIII. (Part XII).
The second
etching produced
after this
design
follows for
purposes
of
comparison
with
the first
sketch,
as showing
the modifications introduced by
the artist in
executing
the
engraving.
76
“Multitude of characters,” however, might not do the novel due justice. Based on the determinations
of Percy Fitzgerald, a late Victorian literary historian of Pickwick, the work features “some three
hundred and sixty characters” and “nearly three-score episodes” (Fitzgerald, History, 273; 275).
66
But
Pickwick’s affiliations with some of the previous century’s literary works go beyond the more obvious
categories of content and form. Like, for example, Richardson’s Pamela, Pickwick’s endurance was
sustained by an impressive array of marketed goods. Joseph Mersand, introducing a Washington
Square edition of the novel, puts it this way:
No instance in our own time can be found of the powerful influence of a book upon its readers
who, in Dickens’ day, were not merely content with knowing the book but went further and
created Pickwick chintzes, Pickwick cigars, Pickwick hats, Pickwick canes with tassels,
Pickwick coats, Weller corduroys and Boz cabs. (vii-viii)
In short, Pickwick’s popularity far exceeds the events chronicled within the novel’s pages. In
introducing the main characters of the novel, I have reproduced images from the original text to
emphasize what Jonathan Crary argues as the instantiation of “the problematic phenomenon of the
observer” (5).
67
For Crary, how we see changed dramatically in the early nineteenth century, and the
perspective of the outside observer, like the chastening voice from the ILN, obtained.
It is this broader cultural presence and influence that distinguishes Pickwick (and the other
central texts of this project) from other novels of the day. The term I use to describe this trait is literary
excess, the capacity by which a given text manifests in areas of popular culture and consumption, non-
literary and literary alike.
Before moving into the text and surveying some examples of the most apposite criticism,
however, there is another type of excess active within the novel. Lest I be accused of cherry-picking
my objects, a charge to which any work of literary criticism following the case-study model is ultimately
66
Ian Watt takes this a step further by cataloguing “a total of thirty-five breakfasts, thirty-two dinners, ten luncheons, ten teas, eight suppers and two
hundred forty-nine drinks” (Huff 152).
67
“[t]he problem of the observer is the field on which vision in history can be said to materialize, to become itself visible. Vision and its effects are always
inseparable from the possibilities of an observing subject who is both the historical product and the site of certain practices, techniques, institutions, and
procedures of subjectification” (5).
77
vulnerable, please allow a few more charts that, I hope, provide, at the very least, superficial persuasive
support for my choice. Of course, Dickens was not the only author to use fat characterologically, but,
in the case of Pickwick, his deployment of the term was most emphatic.
Figure 10
0 50000 100000 150000 200000 250000 300000
Dispersion Plot of 'fat' in Pickwick
Novel Word Count
fat
78
Figure 10 shows how frequently one word, “fat,” appears in the novel as a function of narrative “time,”
or word count. As we will see through Jim Kincaid’s criticism, it’s not simply that Dickens populates
the novel with almost exclusively fat men (he does), but that he continues to emphasize their size
throughout. And, as any reader of Dickens’s novels can attest, he never stopped using such a
descriptive. Joyce Huff notes in her dissertation, “Conspicuous Consumptions: Representations of
Corpulence in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel:”
The sheer number of corpulent characters in Dickens’ works suggests almost an obsession
with body fat. Dickens’s use of corpulence as a literary trope has been noted in much of the
scholarship on Dickensian appetite, from Barbara Hardy’s account of the Dickensian
grotesque to Ian Watt’s psychoanalytic study of orality in Dickens to more recent work by
Gail Turley Houston and James Marlow. (148)
But, compared to his other novels, the emphasis remains marked. Consider how frequently the word
appears in Pickwick compared to Oliver Twist, a novel Dickens was composing, in part, simultaneously
with Pickwick (Figure 11).
79
Figure 11
Or, for that matter, consider its frequency in Pickwick compared to a number of Dickens’s major works
(Figure 12):
Figure 12
pw.v ot.v
Compared Word Frequencies
Pickwick and Oliver Twist
0e+00 2e−04 4e−04
sbb.v pw.v ot.v nn.v ocs.v mc.v ds.v dc.v bh.v ht.v ld.v ttc.v ge.v omf.v
Compared Word Frequencies
Pickwick and Major Dickens Works
0e+00 1e−04 2e−04 3e−04 4e−04 5e−04
80
Finally, according to the list of notable and bestselling books for the year 1837,
68
here is how Pickwick,
in this single respect, compares to Bulwer Lytton’s Ernest Maltravers, Thackeray’s Yellowplush Papers, and
Maryat’s Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (Figure 13):
69
Figure 13
68
Discussions surrounding what exactly constitutes “popularity” when it comes to novels can be thorny. In this case, I have used entries established by
Phillip V. Allingham, a contributing editor for the Victorian Web; the full list, “Significant and Best-Selling Victorian Novels, 1837-1861, by Year of
Volume Publication,” can be accessed here: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva90.html.
69
Ernest Maltravers, “a fair example of the English romantic and Sentimental novel of the thirties,” chronicles the moral development of the titular
character’s true love, Alice; Yellowplush Papers, originally published in Fraser’s magazine, are the humorous sketches and observations of Charles J.
Yellowplush, a London footman, delivered in a cockney accent (more on this title and Thackeray’s body of work in the next chapter); Snarleyyow, an
adventure novel, “is a strange exercise, nautical but centred on a dog whom the ship’s crew think to be a fiend” (Warner 282-3, Sutherland 413).
pw.v lem.v typ.v ms.v
Compared Word Frequencies
Pickwick and Contemporaneous Bestsellers
0e+00 2e−04 4e−04
81
It would be one thing to select Pickwick on the basis of its treatment of fat men in the novel, but, as
this chapter progresses, there are crucial historical exigencies to further support its study.
Now, to excess. Apart from its bestseller status, Pickwick was among one of the first works of
fiction published for the visually impaired, under a new system developed by a French teenager, Louis
Braille (Fitzgerald, Manners & Customs 44). And though there are dozens of memorable Dickens
characters to choose from, Fat Joe, Wardle’s boy servant, was the basis for the medical diagnosis
“Pickwickian syndrome,” used to describe symptoms relating to sleep apnea in the obese in the mid-
twentieth century (Figure 14). But that influence has a much longer history.
According to Sander Gilman, it’s not that Fat Joe manages to signify any one comorbid
syndrome or pathology, but rather “the history of obesity and its variants can be read in the tale
of...Dickens’ character...and his legacy” (1). Gilman traces a number of competing ideas regarding
obesity (from contemporaries of Dickens to more recent theorists) who all utilize the character in their
work.
82
Figure 14 – Phiz, “The Fat Boy Awake—On This Occasion Only”
163
Hablot
Knight
Browne.
Facsimile of the
original drawing by
"
PHIZ."
"
THE FAT BOY AWAKE ON THIS OCCASION ONLY."
(Chap. VIII.)
This
design,
which did not
appear
in the
original
issue in
monthly numbers,
was a
later commission to
"
PHIZ
"
from the
publishers
to
replace
the
etching
of the same
subject by
R. W. Buss, which
appeared
in No. III. of the
monthly parts,
and was subse-
quently
omitted. The
"
PHIZ
"
etching,
after this
design,
was substituted in the first
"
collected
edition,"
and in all later issues.
(See
the Buss
etching, page 113).
83
For example, Gilman argues that Fat Joe is referenced in colonial medical literature as a way
to affirm an essential otherness (“In 1859, the British colonial surgeon W. G. Don, reporting from
India, presented the case of a twelve year ‘Hindoo boy, known in the streets of Bombay under the
soubriquet of the ‘Fat Boy’ [11]), as confirmation of Edward Jukes’s theories from On Indigestion and
Costiveness that it reflected an inherent aspect of the individual (“Jukes noted in 1833...in the case of
the fat boy, ‘a peculiarity of constitution predisposing [him] to this state’” [12]), and, as a case study
of narcolepsy (“In 1893 The Lancet...reports on a ‘case of narcolepsy’...The author of the note
concluded: ‘We have sometimes wondered whether Dickens had any knowledge of this as a distinct
pathological condition when he described his immortal Fat Boy in ‘Pickwick’” [13]). Curiously, though
Gilman acknowledges the pitfalls of his timeline, it’s worth noting that with respect to the Jukes
reference, he actually locates a possible precursor to Fat Joe’s prominence in the surgeon’s work, rather
than a reference to the character in it. A small correction, perhaps, but one indicative of the kind of
historical granularity this topic requires.
After moving forward chronologically with other examples, Gilman admits that “retrospective
diagnosis using fictional characters as one’s case study provides a very high degree of certainty, since
fiction (as we have seen) lends itself to infinite reinterpretations” (20). Though he rightly concedes
this weakness of his analysis, the aim of my project is not to retrospectively diagnose anything, but,
introducing a figure lurking in the background throughout, to remain dedicated to Foucault’s call in
The Archaeology of Knowledge to “be ready to receive every moment of discourse in its sudden irruption,
in that punctuality which it appears” (25). One relatively straightforward way of adhering to Foucault
in this regard would be to locate and assimilate what other discourses had to say about fat in the
period. And, to be clear that I’m not the first person to endeavor upon this kind of work, Huff and
Gilman, among many others, have done so.
84
Gilman, for his part, locates the theories of correct diet and treatment overseen by a physician
(in England) firmly in the mid19th Century. “The first of the modern exponents of a ‘scientific’ diet
rather than a moral or psychological treatment for obesity was William Banting, (17961878), an
English undertaker” (61). His popular 1869 “Letter on Corpulence” puts a spotlight on William
Harvey, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons,
70
who essentially recommended he follow a low
carb and low sugar diet, quite similar to Cheyne. Harvey, himself motivated by Banting’s bestselling
pamphlet (Gilman cites others but claims this was one of the most predominant), wrote “On
Corpulence in Relation to Disease With Some Remarks On Diet” in 1872 which “stressed that new
scientific advances in ‘physiology and animal chemistry’ have meant that one could treat obesity as a
disease” (66). Though Gilman is quick to point out opponents of Banting and Harvey, notably “the
Scots physician William E. Aytoun,” they “redefined obesity as a physiological disease rather than as
a fashion or a moral failing” (667).
And while these are no doubt important texts to engage with in any discussion of 19
th
Century
medical science and obesity, there is a danger, here in Gilman’s work and to a lesser extent in Huff’s,
of a too-flexible historiographical frame, what Andrew Miller, writing in 2003, worried was becoming
characteristic of the discipline: “Victorian literature seems…to remain confidently immured within an
orthodox, loosely new-historical set of historiographical assumptions, devoted to understanding and
judging individual texts by appeal to historical contexts sometimes richly-but often poorly-conceived.”
Put differently, there is risk in treating texts appearing within a few decades of one another as a
barometer of growing discursive shift; three decades of thematically related texts does not a history
make, at least not necessarily.
70
Though the text did have a released edition in this year, the first printing came in 1863. As a testament to its own long afterlife, it was in print until
2007 (!).
85
Complicating Gilman’s characterization of this history, in addition to the works of Cheyne
and Wadd, is M. Venel’s 1816 pamphlet “Addressed to The Gay, The Dissipated, The Intemperate,
and the Sedentary of all Classes,” despite being titled Observations on the Diseases of People of Fashion.
Given the chronological leap one would need to make in an effort to point to Banting’s influence, it
seems a more apposite document in which to consider the corpulence/obesity couple. Though Venel’s
observations are shorter and less focused on body weight, the element of moral failing due to excessive
indulgences, just as George Cheyne personally experienced, remains alive and well:
Man is the only animal who gratifies his appetites in inordinate excess; and every act of excess
is derogatory to his reason; and prejudicial to his health. Excessive eating, excessive drinking,
excessive indolence, excessive study, excessive joy, excessive grief, excessive anger, excessive
love, excessive hatred, excessive indulgence in any sensual or corporeal pleasure, deranges the
animal functions, impairs the intellectual faculties, injures the health, and lays the foundation
of many formidable diseases: and how degrading to human nature is it to reflect, that the
inferior animals manifest, in this respect, a degree of moderation and discretion superior to
that portion of the creation, which controls the universe, and for whose use and convenience
all other animals appear to have been created! (6)
Given this excoriation of virtually all things, Venel’s strident voice strikes a particular chord since The
Pickwick Papers, as one might surmise by now, delights in excessive eating, drinking, indolence, study
joy, love, indulgence, and on. Twenty years after this short document is printed, it’s as if Dickens’s
novel runs through the list of the most enjoyable forms of overindulgence, and, like Fat Joe tucking
in to a feast, overstuffs itself on the very things we are commanded to abstain from. Again, here, it
should be noted that though “health” comes across as something to be preserved and maintained,
Venel makes no explicit attempt to define what he means by the term.
Moving closer to the publication of the novel, in addition to the medical texts above, one
sphere of discursive influence comes from the work of Adolphe Quetelet (17961894), the Belgian
scientist credited with discovering what was known as the Quetelet Index, but was renamed the Body
Mass Index (BMI) in 1972. Quetelet was elected to the Royal Academy of Sciences in 1820, served as
President between 1832 and 1834, and from then on served as permanent secretary until his death.
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His discovery of the index was first published in English in 1835 as A Treatise on Man and the Development
of His Aptitudes, two years before Pickwick, and was an influential work for Florence Nightingale, who
called him “the founder of the most important science in the world,” social science. Essentially an
edited collection of his previously published work, Quetelet defines the index, in a section entitled
“Of the development of weight, and of its relation to the development of the height of the body,” as
follows:
If man increased equally in all dimensions, his weight at different ages would be as the cube
of his height. Now, this is not what we really observe. The increase of weight is slower, except
during the first year after birth; then the proportion we have just pointed out is pretty regularly
observed. But after this period, and until the age of puberty, weight increases nearly as the
square of the height. The development of weight again becomes very rapid at puberty, and
almost stops after the twenty-fifth year. In general, we do not err much when we assume that
during development the squares of the weight at different ages are as the fifth powers of the
height; which naturally leads to this conclusion, in supporting the specific gravity constant,
that the transverse growth of man is less than the vertical. (17 [NDTQ 3])
In this excerpt, we can see Quetelet attempting to produce a reasonably clear functional model that
would mathematically confirm the values of his data, concluding that, although not perfect, the square
of one’s weight is proportional to the fifth power of one’s height during periods of development, or
!
"
= %
&
. Reflecting on his work in the previous decade, Quetelet, in a preface to an 1842 edition
of his Treatise on Man and the Development of His Aptitudes, describes his ambition as “the analysis of
normal man through his actions and of intellectual man through his productions” (17 [NDTQ 3]).
This emphasis on “normal man” is key, for, among other achievements, Quetelet was one of the first
scientists to model statistical normality with a Gaussian, or bell-shaped curve (Figure 15).
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Figure 15
88
This is not to suggest, however, that the concept of a mathematically supported, scientific
normality originating in Quetelet’s work can be easily discerned in Pickwick. To be sure, the word
“normal” doesn’t even appear in the novel’s 308,850 words. However, even if the novel’s text omits
the concept along with the word, other discourses (at roughly the same moment) point to its seeming
necessity. If, as I argued at the end of the previous chapter, the proximity and influence of Quetelet’s
work as it relates to the newly developing business of life assurance substantiates its legitimacy as a
valid discourse to include in this study, then George Farren’s Observations on the Laws of Mortality and
Disease, and on the Principles of Life Assurance, published in 1829, all but begs for the intervention Quetelet
provides. Farren, Resident Director of the Asylum Foreign and Domestic Life Assurance Company,
in what I would call a “noso-political” moment, castigates his “Government” for what he sees as an
unforgivable oversight in knowledge.
The importance of ascertaining within narrow limits the expectation of human existence seems
to have been duly appreciated by the Romans…A total disregard of so excellent an example
will serve as just cause for lasting reproach to the modern Governments, which whilst they
vainly arrogate to themselves superior wisdom, merely because they possess superior means
of becoming wise, foolishly neglect a subject of the deepest interest to the philosopher, and
of great practical utility to the political economist…Nay, there is not in any part of the globe
any system of taxation or of contribution to the charges of a State, which must not necessarily
be affected by the rates or laws of mortality among the natives, denisens, or visitors of the
particular state exacting such contributions. Yet with all these inducements, and with the most
simple but effective means of providing, by wise legislation, the most ample data for deducing
the laws of mortality in every country, and amongst every people in the world, the government
of England has suffered itself to become the victim of ignorance or knavery at the hands of
those whose attainments would fully enable them to acquire, if their interest would permit
them to communicate, the most perfect information on this important branch of knowledge. (7-9,
emphasis added)
The good news, for Farren, is that mortality data soon became a standard metric by which to measure
the life expectancy based on region, occupation, age, and many other variables. While, in this excerpt,
Farren aggressively lobbies for governmental oversight of these data, he also expresses a wish for
“perfect information,” replete with the strength of law. Mathematics and social statistics “become
evidence for the reality” of the cultural representations they produce (Jaffe 5). Now, Farren is not
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pleading for a rule relating weight to height, explicitly, but the conviction of his beliefs, and the failure
of the governing institutions to gather that information, speaks to the seriousness of the issue for him.
The man needs this information, and, as a member of a business that sells life insurance, it makes sense
to expect mortality data to help run the enterprise. However, to assume that it’s only in his interest
misses the greater benefit to philosophers and political economists alike—knowing more about human
life and behavior, through quantification, is a benefit to the world.
Farren’s work, on another note, is noteworthy for its appendix, wherein he surveys the
detrimental conditions of mania, melancholia, craziness, and demonomania through, to the delight
and potential confusion of new historicists,
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Shakespeare’s Lear, Hamlet, Ophelia, and Edgar. I raise
this point to better illustrate the fluid relationship among fiction, supposed fact, and the practical
application of the two in the text in the period. Just as in the works of Lynch and Brewer, discussed
in the introduction, the excerpt evinces both a powerful desire for reliable laws governing human life
and death (and by implication laws governing human behavior towards life, elusively coded as
“health”) but also, to modern literary critical sensibilities, the strange plane of equivalence insinuated
in such a maneuver—treating fictional characters as valid patients to diagnose, recalling Gilman’s claim
of reinterpretability.
If, then, returning to the topic of normality, Farren’s appendix demonstrates the
transposability of people and fictional characters, we might reconsider Moreover, according to Jim
Kincaid’s psychoanalytic reading of the text, “Fattening Up on Pickwick,” the only sort of normality
to be found is how commonly the novel is held in high regard and pleasure in the experience of reading
it, as the epigram from Hall expresses. For Kincaid, Pickwick “is a fat book for fat lovers,” one that
allows readers to sublimate “our fascination with weight loss” into a joyous romp of limitless
fulfillment: “[t]he reader of Pickwick is the erotic reader gliding blissfully backwards into full childhood
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Freud, we can imagine, would perhaps be less puzzled by this interchangeability.
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sexuality. We are represented most fully by The Fat Boy, that genderless image of engulfing,
cannibalistic self-indulgence, the satisfaction of every desire worth having” (236-237). Simultaneously
playful, yet shrewdly insightful (not unlike the mixture of faux-scientism and observed human
behavior evident in Pickwick), Kincaid’s piece centers on Joe, who is, early in the novel, referred to as
an “infant Lambert” (PW 55, again on 58-59).
There really is nothing but The Fat Boy, in different disguises and sometimes crossed-dressed
but always in the same form underneath. It is His novel; the novel is Him. He promises to
make our flesh creep, and he does, makes it creep and tingle sensuously by reaching out to
caress it. (236)
And Kincaid’s essay, no matter how tongue-in-cheek the tone, is persuasive, but it’s not entirely
convincing. Setting aside, at the moment, his claim of the ultimate collapsibility of all characters as
differently ornamented Joes, Kincaid’s reading of Fat Joe’s enduring creepiness is forceful; interpreting
his timely interruption of Tupman’s romantic scenes and his general oddity as our collective id made
human, it goes a long way in explaining that particular character’s enduring quality. That
notwithstanding, to claim that the novel invites readers to enact a return to a childlike world without
limits deserves some scrutiny.
In a different, but related context, Eve Sedgwick, in Between Men, addresses a thorny ideological
issue that, for her project, simply isn’t viable for inclusion: “distinguishing between the construction
and the critique of ideological narrative is not always even a theoretical possibility, even with relatively
flat texts; with the fat rich texts we are taking for examples in this project, no such attempt will be
made” (15). And such a claim, at the level of character, is appropriate here, too. Simply put (and I
acknowledge the pun): meandering and more frequently comic than not, Pickwick is a very dense novel.
In that density, one can, in fact, discover not only limits to, but suggestions of abnormality of, and
anxiety about, male corpulence. Observe, for example, a passage Kincaid addresses directly to show
“that even clothes in Pickwick do not so much hide as point to the ample body beneath” (241).
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The eloquent Pickwick, with one hand gracefully concealed behind his coat tails, and the other
waving in air to assist his glowing declamation: his elevated position revealing those tights and
gaiters, which, had they clothed an ordinary man, might have passed without observation, but
which, when Pickwick clothed them—if we may use the expression—inspired involuntary awe
and respect… (4)
Kincaid reads the inversion “where Pickwick clothed them,” as an indication of the novel’s emphasis
and pleasure in bodies: “This is a highly proper novel, of course, one which would hardly bring a blush
to the cheek of a young person, but it is one in which all the characters are, as it were, presented nude”
(241). Nudity, however, is but one interpretation and, just a few lines further down the page, we are
provided with a description of Tupman’s dress:
Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become
more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from
within the range of Tupman’s vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon
the borders of the white cravat, but the soul of Tupman had known no change—admiration
of the fair sex was still its ruling passion. (4)
Contrasting these two passages, notice how Pickwick’s attire, rendered subordinate to his body and
his aura, buttresses the protagonist’s prestige, whereas Tupman’s body risks consuming the limits of
his coat, watch, and cravat. Whereas Pickwick’s body size, rotund as it is in the images above, is
accepted and subordinated to his demeanor, Tupman’s weight is chalked up to “time and feeding”
rather than romantic longing. In fact, Tupman’s dress and body are presented and treated differently
from Pickwick, so much so that one might miss the overt inspection of his size and clothing ten pages
later, in the very next number, while dining with a stranger (Alfred Jingle) and discussing going to a
charity ball. Having just met the stranger, Tupman graciously offers his own clothing for the evening
so that the stranger may attend, too.
“I should be very happy to lend you a change of apparel for the purpose,” said Mr.
Tracy Tupman, “but you are rather slim, and I am—
“Rather fat—grown up Bacchus—cut the leaves—dismounted from the tub, and
adopted kersey, eh?—not double distilled, but double milled—ha! ha!—pass the wine.” (PW
13)
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After some brief surprise and consternation, Tupman eventually lets the topic and his guest’s response
go and the stranger “reverted to the subject of the ball,” and, later, wears one of Winkle’s suits to the
event. This scene, early in the text’s pages, foreshadows a later conflict between Tupman and Pickwick,
and, again, Tupman is subject to the critical eye of the observer. In the fifteenth number, Pickwick
fancies attending a costume party, and his loyal fellow asserts his wish to attend the party as a bandit.
Pickwick’s response, extending beyond the initial encounter with the stranger, manages to strain
matters between the two.
“What!” said Mr. Pickwick, with a sudden start.
“As a bandit,” repeated Mr. Tupman, mildly.
“You don’t mean to say,” said Mr. Pickwick, gazing with solemn sternness at his friend, “You
don’t mean to say, Mr. Tupman, that it is your intention to put yourself into a green velvet jacket, with
a two-inch tail?”
“Such is my intention, Sir,” replied Mr. Tupman warmly. “And why not, Sir?”
“Because Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, considerably excited— “Because you are too old, Sir.”
“Too old!” exclaimed Mr. Tupman. “And if any further ground of objection be wanting,”
continued Mr. Pickwick, “you are too fat, Sir.”
“Sir,” said Mr. Tupman, his face suffussed with a crimson glow, “this is an insult.”
“Sir,” replied Mr. Pickwick in the same tone, “It is not half the insult to you, that your
appearance in my presence in a green velvet jacket, with a two-inch tail, would be to me.”
“Sir,” said Mr Tupman, “you’re a fellow.” “Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, “you’re another!” Mr.
Tupman advanced a step or two, and glared at Mr. Pickwick.
Mr. Pickwick returned the glare, concentrated into a focus by means of his spectacles, and
breathed a bold defiance. Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Winkle, looked on, petrified at beholding such a
scene between two such men.
“Sir,” said Mr. Tupman, after a short pause, speaking in a low, deep voice, “you have called
me old.”
“I have,” said Mr. Pickwick.
“And fat.”
“I reiterate the charge.”
“And a fellow.”
“So you are!”
There was a fearful pause. (PW 126-7)
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After they each calm down and return to conversing, Pickwick apologizes to Tupman for his outburst
and all is made better. The point, however, of focusing on these two scenes of insulting and shaming
Tupman, is to demonstrate that, though Pickwick’s figure and reputation are celebrated within and
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As an example of unintentional fat-shaming, one digital edition of the novel has Pickwick, a few paragraphs later, mistakenly calling Tupman “Tubman.”
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without the text, the same treatment does not apply to all equally. Which, in turn, puts pressure on
Kincaid’s analysis—if, unlike Pickwick (who we may assume is within the bounds of corpulence to
not merit outside criticism) Tupman is subject to ridicule for his size, then conceiving of the novel as
populated with differently clothed Fat Joe’s seems like an odd way to account for this difference in
observation.
The fact that each of the above scenes from the first third or so of the novel address clothing
and sizing is also not coincidental. In her landmark study on the history of the modern suit, Sex and
Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress, Anne Hollander identifies a shift at around 1800 between the style
and fashion of menswear between the centuries.
it was under the influence of a new radical shift in visual style that the collective eye for the
figure was abruptly retrained. Ever since, in contrast to the early versions we have so far
described, all modern suits have been cut to suggest a male body that tapers from broad
shoulders and a muscular chest, has a flat stomach and small waist, lean flanks and long legs.
Modern developments of the elegant coat, waistcoat, shirt and pants since 1800 required not
only new materials, but a new anatomical foundation. The one offering itself at the time, then
present on the esthetic scene with fresh power, was the heroic male nude of Classical antiquity.
(1416, emphasis added)
According to Hollander, then, the dress on display in the images from the novel show that the
members of the Pickwick Club are, like their literary kin in Don Quixote, wearing the last century’s
hottest styles.
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Moreover, this shift from baggier articles to a more streamlined ensemble, made for
some discomfort on certain bodies: “The new fashion was…undeniably hard on the truly fat.
Caricatures appeared showing the humpty-dumpty effect of the high waist and minimal coat-tails on
men with unquenchably big bellies” (1482). Thus, in light of newer sartorial trends, the size of one’s
body, previously concealed by roomier material and with less inspiration from the Classical male nude,
is now considered in subordination to that nude model, rather than, as Kincaid would have it, with
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Indeed, all three figures in this project (Pickwick, Sedley, and Fosco) are known for their loud sartorial choices.
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the “ample body” of Samuel Pickwick.
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Coinciding with Quetelet’s “average man,” then, is a marked
change in how one’s body would fit into its clothes—a change felt more acutely by larger men.
But, one might argue, even if such a change occurred in the period, The Pickwick Papers is set
ten years prior to its publication date, so surely that must have some bearing on how we interpret the
fashion of dress in the text? The answer is yes and no. Yes, the fact that the novel is set in 1827 would
suggest that our historical record of fashion should be sensitive to the changes that were occurring
without claiming that these changes were definitively responsible for these scenes of outside shaming.
On the other hand, the novel’s popularity and sustained presence in the nineteenth century suggests
that we pay attention to the contemporaneous shifts documented during the 1830s. And, as Crary
cautions his readers, “what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep
structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of
disparate parts on a single social surface” (6). If we can take The Pickwick Papers as a text that qualifies
as a single social surface, then the above scenes of Tupman’s being too fat serve as but one example
of the collective assemblage at work.
And, if we bracket Fat Joe and Tony Weller from the discussion for a moment, we encounter
something truly fascinating about Dickens’s novel: it is populated by numerous fat characters and
scenes of consumption, but more than that, there is a hermeneutic richness to these fat figures. By
that I mean that there are likely too many fat characters to effectively address without inevitably leaving
someone out. Indeed, the text even has examples of singularly fat-identified characters that remain
anonymously fat: in the sixth number, an argument erupts over local land politics, and several men,
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To be clear, the previous century’s articles of dress would most surely have complemented the various pear-shaped figures in the novel. As Hollander
notes,
Art of all kinds shows that throughout the period from 1650 to 1780 men’s shoulders ideally looked very narrow and sloping and their chests somewhat
sunken, and that even on slim figures the stomach swelled out prominently between the open coat-fronts and above the low waist of the breeches. This
dome-like shape for the midsection was emphasized by the descending row of waistcoat buttons that marched down its center, echoed by the coat
buttons and buttonholes on either side. Coat-skirts, often stiffened or wired, swung outward at hip level, both sideways and behind. Under the coat, the
breeches were full around the hips and then buckled in at the knee, and stockings and medium-heeled shoes finished the ensemble below that, if boots
were not worn. The entire effect tended to emphasize a man’s hips, belly, and thighs, shrink his chest and shoulders, lengthen his torso and shorten his
legs. Richly embroidered or plain, all male figures were thus rendered slightly squat and infantine… (1408-1415)
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all of them fat or corpulent, chime in.
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The scene continues for several pages, with the argument
punctuated by short outbursts from various men. At other points, reference is made to one getting fat
(Tupman in his initial introduction)—and, surprisingly, the previously unassailable Pickwick is chided
for being too fat by both Wellers. Helping his son to push the slightly inebriated Pickwick up onto a
coach, the elder Weller chides, “You was a lighter weight when you was a boy, Sir” (PW 191). Later,
when Pickwick and Sam help Winkle woo Arabella Allen, Pickwick, “by exertions almost supernatural
in a gentleman of his years and weight, contrived to get upon Sam’s back,” and after some time
conversing over a wall with Arabella, the younger Weller politely asks him to limit the amount of time
spent in such a position, for “[y]ou’re rayther heavy” (353).
If Dickens’s novel contains a hermeneutic richness of fat characters, it does not necessarily
include an ideology to the various forms of fatness encountered. Like Sedgwick’s disclaimer about
locating ideology in fiction, The Pickwick Papers biggest conundrum is that it has a lot to say and do
with and about fat characters, primarily men,
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but does not necessarily develop any broader
conceptualization than that. Thus, it’s not surprising that Juliet McMaster, in her classic study Dickens
the Designer, attempted to offer a typology of fatness in Dickens’s imaginary. In her scheme, two main
types of fatness manifest in Dickens’s work: fat-cheery and fat-bloated. One might assume that
Pickwick, our celebrated figure, is fat-cheery while Tony Weller, another body grown fatter than the
dimensions of his clothing, is fat-bloated.
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McMaster, though widely recognized for this intervention,
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“There ain’t a better spot o’ ground in all Kent,” said the hard-headed man again, after a pause.
“’Cept Mullins’ Meadows,” observed the fat man, solemnly.
“Mullins’ Meadows!” ejaculated the other, with profound contempt.
“Ah, Mullins’ Meadows,” repeated the fat man.
“Reg’lar good land that,” interposed another fat man.
“And so it is, sure-ly,” said a third fat man.
“Everybody knows that,” said the corpulent host. (45)
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Though they’re harder to notice, there are a few examples of fat women; Mrs. Sanders, a friend of Ms. Bardell, is perhaps the most noticeable and
noticeably fat example (PW 228-231).
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And speaking of bloated, notice here a more extended description of his dress, vis a vis Tupman:
It is very possible that at some earlier period of his career, Mr. Weller’s profile might have presented a bold, and determined outline. His face, however,
had expanded under the influence of good living, and a disposition remarkable for resignation; and its bold fleshly curves had so far extended beyond
the limits originally assigned them, that unless you took a full view of his countenance in front, it was difficult to distinguish more than the extreme tip
of a very rubicund nose. His chin, from the same cause, had acquired the grave and imposing form which is generally described by prefixing the word
“double” to that expressive feature, and his complexion exhibited that peculiarly mottled combination of colours which is only to be seen in gentlemen
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is not the first to offer some kind of typology of fat. Recalling the work of Weber, in Fatness, Overweight
and Life Assurance, he notes that “Constant anxiety, grief and worry tend usually to leanness, whilst
equanimity and a habitual ‘comfortable’ frame of mind are more likely to be associated with obesity”
(2). To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that either Weber or Dickens shared any specific line of
influence, but rather to demonstrate how such an attempt at categorizing fat based on some kind of
essential type, has been a strategy for some time. But what of the anonymous fat we see periodically
in the novel? And how static are these categories? Can one be both at the same time or shift from one
type to another? Moreover, McMaster’s work, along with Barbara Hardy’s, takes as its primary object
of study the totality of Dickens’s prose, rather than focusing on any individual text.
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Pointing to such limitations in Pickwick criticism is not meant to undermine or render marginal
the work cited above, but it does bring us back to another instance of “intractable fat studies,” where
a new typology or way of reading a text brings us to new and usually competing interpretations of
what the novel provides us in the way of fat characters and fat topics. Though I have saved the
discussion of Fat Joe and Tony Weller for last, their inclusion, especially in the second half of the
novel, offer some direction out of such an impasse.
If we take Tillotson seriously, the novel’s first half can be broadly classified as “theatrical”
while the second half, as J. Hillis Miller and Garrett Stewart, among others, have observed, drifts into
realism with the case of Bardell v. Pickwick and his subsequent incarceration at the Fleet (referenced
in Bruns 30). Noting the genre change, roughly midway through the novel, means that the way
characters are treated in the second half, in the realist portion, means something potentially different.
of his profession, and underdone roast beef. Round his neck he wore a crimson travelling shawl, which merged into his chin by such imperceptible
gradations, that it was difficult to distinguish the folds of the one, from the folds of the other. Over this, he mounted a long waistcoat of a broad pink-
striped pattern, and over that again, a wide-skirted green coat, ornamented with large brass buttons, whereof the two which garnished the waist, were so
far apart, that no man had ever beheld them both, at the same time. His hair, which was short, sleek, and black, was just visible beneath the capacious
brim of a low-crowned brown hat. His legs were encased in knee-cord breeches, and painted top-boots: and a copper watch-chain terminating in one
seal, and a key of the same material, dangled loosely from his capacious waist-band. (199)
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A recent piece, Natalie McKnight’s essay “Dickens and Masculinity: The Necessity of the Nurturing Male,” addresses the topic in the same manner of
an expanded view of all the author’s fiction (Mallett 51-66).
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If, as Kincaid argues above, Fat Joe is the most representative reader or audience surrogate, he is most
certainly not an appealing figure for Sam Weller. Shortly after the trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, Joe,
reappearing in the employ of the Wardles and, “fatter than ever,” meets Sam. In this scene, Sam
speculates on the child’s excess weight:
“Vell, young twenty stun,” said Sam, “you’re a nice specimen of a prize boy, you are.”
“Thankee,” said the fat boy.
“You ain’t got nothin’ on your mind, as makes you fret yourself, have you?” inquired Sam.
“Not as I knows on,” replied the boy.
“I should rayther ha’ thought, to look at you, that you was a labourin’ under an unrequited
attachment to some young ’ooman,” said Sam.
The fat boy shook his head.
“Vell,” said Sam, “I’m glad to hear it. Do you ever drink anythin’?”
“I likes eating, better,” replied the boy.
“Ah,” said Sam, “I should ha’ s’posed that; but what I mean is, should you like a drop of
anythin’ as’d warm you? but I s’pose you never was cold, with all them elastic fixtures, was you?”
“Sometimes,” replied the boy; “and I likes a drop of something, when it’s good.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” said Sam, “come this vay, then.” (PW 241)
Sam, before being introduced to Fat Joe, refers to him as “young twenty stun,” a weight equivalent to
280 pounds, and, reminiscent of work on the Victorian freak show, deems him “a nice specimen of a
prize boy.” Weller’s phrasing recalls an earlier moment in the novel when Pickwick notices a strange
looking person on the street, “a strange specimen of the human race,” and when asked about this
interest, he academically replies that he is simply “an observer of human nature.” Then a series of
questions follow—exhibiting Weller’s interest in the cause of the boy’s condition. Recalling Tupman’s
introduction at the beginning of the novel, Sam wonders if his fatness has been caused by unrequited
love. When Fat Joe shakes his head, the next item of common interest turns to food and drink. Weller
offers the boy a drink, but sticks in a jape about how Fat Joe has likely never had to rely on alcohol to
warm himself because of his “elastic fixtures,” the rolls of fat on his body.
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As Sam, Pickwick and the rest of the Wardles prepare for a Christmas Eve feast, a newly
awakened Fat Joe rejoins the group. Sam, compelled to offer some advice. Referring to him as “young
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A few pages later, Sam will also refer to Fat Joe as “young opium eater,” perhaps as an acknowledgement of his heavy drowsiness (244).
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boa constructer,” Sam exhorts, “if you don’t sleep a little less, and exercise a little more, ven you comes
to be a man you’ll lay yourself open to the same sort o’ personal inconwenience as was inflicted on
the old gen’l’m’n as wore the pig-tail” (PW 248). Curious, but “in a faltering voice,” Fat Joe asks what
became of the gentleman. Sam, in an example of the several nested narratives in the novel, proceeds
to tell him the story. Once, there was a very fat gentlemen, “he was one o’ the largest patterns
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as was
ever turned out—reg’lar fat man, as hadn’t caught a glimpse of his own shoes for five-and-forty years,”
who made it a habit of walking to work with a very expensive, similarly proportioned gold pocket
watch (“a large, heavy, round manafacter, as stout for a watch, as he was for a man, and with a big
face in proportion”) on display. Warned about attracting too much attention to his timepiece, the
gentleman nevertheless remains confident that no one can steal the watch from such a secure and
expensive chain. After several attempts have been made, he still has his watch. And then one day,
the old gen’l’m’n was a rollin’ along, and he sees a pickpocket as he know’d by sight, a-comin’
up, arm in arm vith a little boy vith a wery large head. ‘Here’s a game,’ sr s the old gen’l’m’n to
himself, ‘they’re a-goin’ to have another try, but it won’t do.’ So he begins a chucklin’ wery
hearty, ven, all of a sudden, the little boy leaves hold of the pickpocket’s arm, and rushes
headforemost straight into the old gen’l’m’n’s stomach, and for a moment doubles him right
up vith the pain. ‘Murder!’ says the old gen’l’m’n. ‘All right, Sir,’ says the pickpocket, a
whisperin’ in his ear. And ven he come straight agin’, the watch and chain was gone, and what’s
worse than that, the old gen’l’m’n’s digestion was all wrong ever artervards, to the wery last
day of his life; so just you look about you, young feller, and take care you don’t get too fat.”
As Mr. Weller concluded this moral tale, with which the fat boy appeared much affected, they
all three wended their way to the large kitchen, in which the family were by this time assembled,
according to annual custom on Christmas eve, observed by old Wardle’s forefathers from time
immemorial. (PW 248-9)
Here, in something of an extended Wellerism, Sam offers a tale putatively about the ill effects of
getting “too fat,” but the context of the tale has as much to say about pride and disregarding the advice
of your peers as it does about letting oneself go. Additionally, the force of a morality tale cautioning
against overindulgence is undercut by the very next paragraph, describing the caravan into the kitchen
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Curiously, Sam uses the term “pattern,” suggestive of a decoration or print one might use for clothing, an oblique reference, perhaps, to the changes
in men’s clothing in the period.
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to commence the holiday feast. Sam, full of advice for Fat Joe but unable to help promote any of it,
returns to drink and feasting, respectively, as conclusions to his interactions with the boy. Here, in a
moment of synchronicity with Kincaid, if Joe is in fact the figure we readers most closely align with,
then the address of causes of his fatness and prompt dismissal of it, as well as the general advice to be
more active and eat less, followed by the tale of the unfortunate gentlemen, as isolated but key
moments, all could very well amount to a kind of halfhearted attempt at policing his (our) body. Yet,
the ideological ambivalence remains in the context of the novel—it’s hard to tell who or what side we
are asked to join, even if the figure of the outsider, in Sam Weller, has already made his assessment.
If, in the first half of the novel we are treated to comic picaresque standbys like slapstick, physical, fat-
bodied comedy, and the occasional moment of fat shame, here, in this example, the humor lands with
less pointedness.
Indeed, when the novel gets to the time Pickwick spends at Fleet Prison, the tone and its
themes becomes much more serious. In a twist, Sam attends Pickwick initially as he begins his stay at
the prison, and both men seem to occupy a position of superiority relative to the other prisoners.
Early in their tenure at Fleet, Pickwick remarks that “imprisonment for debt is scarcely any
punishment at all,” to which Sam extends the thought by suggesting that it benefits certain kinds of
people while it harms others: “them as is alvays a idlin’ in public houses it don’t damage at all, and
them as is always a vorkin’ ven they can, it damages too much. ‘It’s unekal,’ as my father used to say
ven his grog worn’t made half-and-half” (PW 365). Pickwick then spends his first night in the Fleet
contemplating “what possible temptation could have induced a dingy-looking fly that was crawling
over his pantaloons, to come into a close prison, when he had the choice of so many airy situations”
(PW 367). Pickwick’s interest in the prison, at least at the beginning, is consumed with his
observational position as a student of human nature. As time goes on, however, Pickwick slowly
manages to ingratiate himself to some of his fellow debtors, and, in a moment of authorial stridency,
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Dickens reminds his readers that, although cruel customs such as the debtors box have since been
abolished, conditions for the poor in prison are not necessarily better.
Although this custom has been abolished, and the cage is now boarded up, the miserable and
destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains the same. We no longer suffer them to
appeal at the prison gates to the charity and compassion of the passers by; but we still leave
unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding
ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed,
and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.
Not a week passes over our heads but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some of these
men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their
fellow-prisoners. (377)
Boldly claiming for his readers that this moment “is no fiction,” Dickens is at pains to emphasize the
reality of scarcity and inhumane treatment experienced everyday by real people in the prison.
Compared to the image accompanying this section, the surprise that Jingle is in the Fleet, it’s hard not
to notice Pickwick’s stomach and shape contrasting with the more emaciated figures in the image
(Figure 10).
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Figure 16 – Pickwick at the Fleet
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If, previously, the ideological substance with regard to the fat male body of the novel was nonexistent,
here it seems overwrought, forceful in a way the rest of the novel’s approach hasn’t been. And, once
Pickwick leaves the Fleet, having made friends and won over the population, his notable weight loss
appears as a physical change in his body. Though such a change is characterized as poor health as a
result of the litigation and endless bureaucracy, such weight loss also coincides with his time in the
Fleet.
In all, then, my reading of the novel has been undertaken to show, first, that well-established
readings of the novel fail to account for the diversity of fatness one encounters. Second, I meant to
establish clear moments of fat identification, anonymity, and shame (primarily through Tracy Tupman)
to complicate previous thinking about how fat men function in the novel. Finally, by examining key
moments with respect to Fat Joe, Sam, and Pickwick that all take place in the second half of the novel,
my point was to show how the novel’s tonal shift from theater to realism hints at clearer scenes of fat
observation and discipline, but still do not quite amount to a simple or clear message about how we
are expected to understand these characters. If, as I have suggested, Dickens’s novel presents readers
with a hermeneutic richness of fat men, it does so without offering a through-line or ideologically
compact logic. Indeed, one could bore into the novel to find moments of resistance and transgression,
but doing so does not necessarily bring us closer to understanding the status of Pickwick, and the fat
male body, during the nineteenth-century.
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3. Excavating Excess
Given that critical impasse, how are we to understand the status of Pickwick and the fat male
body? My suggestion, at the start of this chapter, was to look to the varieties of Pickwickiana from the
period to further situate and contextualize Dickens’s novel. In this section, I review the advertising
material that accompanied the serialized version of the novel to place it within a larger enterprise of
merchandising, briefly describing the varieties of items included in the textual excess.
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I then survey
the three-volume anthology, The Pic-Nic Papers (1841) to generate a more complex sense of the text’s
meaning in the period.
With regard to the serialized version of the novel, Andy Williams has recently shown how the
text was always already intermingled with a consistent and proximate companion text, “The Pickwick
Advertiser.” In his article, Williams explores the relationship between the serialized text and its
counterpart (one third of the novel was devoted to advertising material), noting the slippery and often
unclear connection between Dickens’s fiction and the techniques used to sell sundry products in the
same publication.
Just as advertising draws on fiction, the intertextual relations that constitute the novel make
sure that advertising (the textual manifestation of nineteenth-century commodity culture) is
one of the key elements of which The Pickwick Papers is composed. Even in sections of the
novel that do not explicitly mention advertising, it is still possible to trace the influence of the
commodity culture from which it was formed (and of which it was a constituent part). (326)
A precursor to “targeted marketing,” the process of curating online advertisements to better match
the search and browsing history of a given user, Williams cleverly shows how these extra-textual
offerings were positioned to resonate with specific content from the text. For example, an ad for
“Minter’s patented self-adjusting reclining and elevating chairs” appears in the number that includes
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And, if this was a project approaching the length of Pickwick, one would be obligated to explore the many other, non-textual items in the vast array of
materials. To give a sampling, Brian Maidment’s “Pickwick on Pots—Transfer Printed Ceramics And Dickens’s Early Illustrated Fiction” explores a set
of cups that, contrary to prevailing opinion, “suggests that not all tableware sought to be delicate or genteel, and that there were mugs produced to
celebrate raucous sociability rather than domestic quietude” (114-115).
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Chapter XIV. This chapter, featuring the interpolated tale “The Bagman’s Story,” is about a chair that
becomes sentient to offer advice to a romantically challenged suitor, Tom Smart (ibid). In another
instance, a lengthy, four-page narrative ad for Rowland’s Macassar Oil, “The Auto-Biography of an
Oil Bottle,” bears references to Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Richardson’s Pamela. Beyond the intertextual
quality of the Advertiser, it is also not clear which piece of text is Dickens’s fiction and which is not.
as soon as readers finished the last page of the monthly number, they encountered the start of
this story on the opposite page. Apart from a short space at the end of the text, there is no
marker that states Pickwick has ended for the month and the advertising messages have begun.
“The Auto-Biography of an Oil Bottle”…is a disruptive textual presence that occupies a
liminal space in the novel. Its narrative allies it with the interpolated tales, and its advertising
content displays its kinship with the paratextual supplement. It is neither wholly part of the
novel, nor completely exterior to it. (327)
Williams is at pains to show how his analysis amounts to less of an undermining of, as John Sutherland
notes, “the most important single novel of the Victorian Era,” but rather to demonstrate the extent
of commodity culture’s influence on the fiction of the day (506).
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From the start, “the advertising
signifier was woven into the realist textual fabric of The Pickwick Papers,” a fact which simultaneously
helps to explain the proliferation of Pickwickiana and also complicates the universality of Pickwick—
for, if a subset of famous works from the previous century is fair use in advertising, to what ends
might Dickens creation be put (331)?
Of course, advertising is but one factor to consider when evaluating these papers, a title
suggestive of the loose, free floating narrative it contains. Adam Abraham’s “Plagiarizing Pickwick:
Imitations of Immortality” argues for the legitimacy of the variety of works that followed, not as
original works, to be sure, but as contemporaneous responses to the original.
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Describing the large
body of Pickwick-adjacent writing that followed the novel, suggestively, as “‘prostheses’—artificial
extensions to the Pickwick corpus, Abraham divides them into two broad categories (6).
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The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction.
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“Without exonerating their malfeasance (which may be real), I want to argue that early imitations of The Pickwick Papers can be illuminating—and
strange. Anonymous, hackneyed and cheap publications such as Posthumous Papers of the Cadgers Club and Pickwick in America will each offer a reading of
Dickens’s text” (5).
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Pickwick prostheses make available aspects of the original that are omitted, muted, implied,
curtailed, forgotten, repressed, or secreted to distant corners. They interpret and interpenetrate
with The Pickwick Papers and stand, alongside reviews and newspaper extracts, among the
earliest and most vivid responses to Dickens’s text. Two categories emerge: works that retain
the Pickwickian innocence and those that draw on darker, hidden energies and discover
instances of anti-Semitism, racism and sexual desire. (6)
In readings of The Penny Pickwick, published by the unimaginative “Bos,” the extensive work of Percy
Fitzgerald,
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George W. M. Reynold’s Pickwick Abroad, among several other examples, Abraham
demonstrates how these works “uncover the Pickwick that they want to read or need to believe or
desire” (18). But that explanation can be more precise. Remarking how “strangely atemporal” the
original novel and titular figure seem to be, a way of paraphrasing my earlier claim of fatness’s
intractability, these additions to the growing Pickwick body each signal “an intervention, a coming-to-
terms with that which Dickens had wrought” (8).
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But the interventions, in many cases, mark the
return, by omission, of the repressed social history of the time.
I would argue that, within the examples he provides, Abraham’s work helps us to see the
effects of history in a way that the instigating novel does not. For example, on the subject of race, the
1837 play Sam Weller; or, The Pickwickians included the song “‘Jim Crow,’ not to advance the narrative,
but simply because the number was a specialty of the role’s performer” (14; Figure 17).
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84
“The indefatigable” figure, Abraham notes, being “the author or editor of The History of Pickwick, Pickwickian Manner and Customs, Pickwickian Studies,
The Pickwickian Dictionary and Cyclopaedia, Bardell v. Pickwick, Pickwick Riddles and Perplexities, as well as the anthology Pickwickian Wit and Humour” (9).
85
Here Abraham is not alone in this observation; he cites both Steven Marcus (“Pickwick is a man without a history, created, as it were, entirely in the
present”) and W. H. Auden (“In our minds Mr. Pickwick is born in middle age with independent means”).
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On this piece of Pickwickiana, another area to explore is the relative size of “Sam Weller” compared to “The Pickwickians” on the playbill.
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Figure 17, The Charles Dickens Museum at Grays Inn
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But it was only a specialty of the performer because of the overt racism granting such a song popular
status. In Pickwick in America, Kincaid’s lovable centerpiece, Joe, “finds a fat facsimile of himself in an
African-American waiter named Maximilian Jupiter,” and, quoting the text, Abraham notes a pun
mixing race and typesetting: “he was in fact, a second edition, (black letter edition,) of that ponderous
and somniferous juvenile!” (14). More extremely, in the same prosthetic, Tupman’s love is directed to
a woman of color where “we find him ‘in the very act of forcibly purloining from her chocolate
phisiognomy [sic] a delicious kiss,” which generates “questions of miscegenation, rape, and possible
cannibalism” (17). In these last two examples, Abraham fails to mention how fatness helps to
contribute to the explicit racism. In the former, Joe’s fat copy shares not just size but disposition,
approaching a prevailing stereotype in and of itself. In the latter, Tupman’s formerly unrequited love
and longing, never resolved in Dickens’s version, is rendered monstrous and violent, where, but for
the reader’s interruption in media res, the outcome may be imagined differently.
On the subject of fat imaginings, it is helpful to examine the three-volume Pic Nic Papers (1841),
in part because it is one of the only auxiliary texts, or prostheses, within Pickwikiana edited and
approved by Dickens. Composed of miscellaneous writings from a wide variety of authors (some
identified, though many more are not), the set of tomes does exhibit, in specific sections, substantial
commentary on fat men.
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In the second volume’s “The Fleshy One,” we find a morality tale closer
to the mark than the example, previously described, of Sam Weller to Fat Joe.
Epigrammatically recalling Daniel Lambert’s representation in cartoons with Napoleon, the
short story begins by telling us that “‘Twas fat, not fate, by which Napoleon fell” (130). Importantly,
for the reader’s peace of mind, this is a story about “a little man in a sister city,” certainly not about
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There are less obvious but compelling examples here, too. In the first volume, in an elegy for Dryden, his body, near death, is described with “Enough
of bulk and corpulence remained to shew what the shattering of his frame had been” (57). In Ainsworth’s fragment, “The Old London Merchant,”
Christmas meats are characterized, in a breathless, four-page run-on sentence, with sensual, almost erotic energy (295-298). In the second volume, “Peter
Brush” details the strange wandering of the title character, seeking a “fat post” in some form of government, where he moves with the grace of “a Daniel
Lambert at his toilet,” but to no avail; he is denied the fat that he seeks (184; 178). Finally, in the third installment, the novella “Count Ludwig,” too
expansive to be fully explored here, chronicles the vicissitudes of the Count’s fat wife and their unstable marriage.
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anyone in our own environs (ibid). This little man, “a peculiar little man—a fat little man,” is “a person
of about five feet—five feet high and very nearly five feet thick, bearing much resemblance to a large
New England pumpkin stuck upon a pair of beets” (ibid). Due to this prominent rotundness, the
author estimates that it would be difficult to determine if he was prone or upright while sleeping, and
that it may be better for him to descend stairs by rolling on his side rather than attempting to keep his
top-heavy bulk straight in the process. After this description, we are then given his name: “Berry
Huckel, or Huckel Berry, as he is sometimes called, because of his roundness” (130). Here, the joke
seems to be that, by virtue of his pumpkin-like shape, his name, like the just offered image of his
rotating body going down stairs, can be read backwards or forward. Readers of this volume, wanting
for a clearer picture to go with the opening paragraph, get it from George Cruikshank (Figure 18).
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Figure 2, The Pic Nic Papers (Vol. 2)
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After such a humorous entrance, a sober moment of reflection follows, where, for the sake of
“biographical accuracy, and a desire that future generations may not be misled as to those important facts
which make up the aggregate history, render it necessary to avow that these fleshy attributes worry Mr.
Berry Huckel” (131, emphasis added). Indeed, we are far from the terse reply from Joe to Sam that he
simply “likes eating, better.” In this case, Berry cannot but help to lament what he believes to be his
fate, implicitly acknowledging a sense of obesity as an inherited trait, anticipating Galton and
reiterating Wadd, and as we will see in the next chapter, the biases of assurance officers.
He cannot look upon the slender longitude of a beanpole, he cannot observe the attenuated
extent of a hop-stick, or regard the military dandyism of a greyhound’s waist, without
experiencing emotions of envy, and wishing that he had himself been born to the same
lankiness of figure, the same emaciation of contour. He rejoices not in his dimensions, and,
contrary to all rules in physical science, believes that what he gains in weight he loses in
importance. (131-132)
And it’s not just envy and an irrational loss of importance (which is never given more detail), he feels
at his short, squat, lot. “Berry is addicted to literature,” but as his dimensions have grown to an
unwieldy form, such an interest is no longer possible, for “His body is too large, and his arms too
short, for such an achievement” (132). In addition, he struggles to clothe himself, “cannot wear shoes”
without assistance, but, paradoxically, and to the reader’s surprise, the author alleges a certain vanity
in Huckel (ibid). Claiming that “the mind of man in general accommodates itself to circumstances,”
we “find vanity flourishing most luxuriantly in those who have least cause to entertain the feeling”
(132-133).
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Though we might expect some further elaboration as to the nature of this vanity, here the
author’s track digresses, “like a runaway steed,” to speculate as to why this is the case, going so far as
to conjecture “that the masculine gender are much more liable to the delusions of conceit than the
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The same can be said for Tracy Tupman, Jos Sedley, and Count Fosco.
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softer sex,” extrapolating from the individual example to broadly characterize an entire category (134;
133). But, as if realizing this extraordinary leap, the author returns to Berry. What was his sin of vanity?
Much like the variety of figures we encounter in Pickwick, Berry’s first offense is self-love, clarifying a
possible assumption that it was due to his choice of dress. Furthermore, echoing the yearning of Tracy
Tupman, Berry desires to be loved: “‘The blind bow-boy’s butt shaft’ never had a better mark”:
even Berry might not have troubled himself on the score of the circumstantial and substantial
fat by which he is enveloped, had it not been that in addition to an affection for himself, he
had a desire that he should be equally esteemed by another. In short, Berry discovered…that
his sensibilities were expansie as well as his figure—that it was not all-sufficient to happiness
to love one’s self, and that his heart was more than a sulky, being sufficient to carry two. (134-
135)
Galvanized by this discovery, he sets off to find love, “and if he could not fall in love, he certainly
contrived to roll himself into it” (137). One day, during a walk where he attempts to “dance and skip
over the impediments” along the way to convince “himself he was a light and active figure,” he gets
too cavalier, and as he twirls his “little stick,—a big one would have looked as if he needed support,”
he aims to jump over a puddle (137). Unfortunately, his expectation is countered by the reality, and
the maneuver “was not so skilfully achieved as it would have been by any one of competent muscle
who carried less weight” (137). He lands in the puddle, and, to his chagrin, manages to get mud on
passersby, including Miss Celestina Scraggs, “a very tall lady” with a figure “the very antipodes of his
own” (137).
Attempting to rectify the situation, Berry tries to help her with the mud on her dress, but is
only met with anger and derision. Dumbstruck, he remains frozen in the middle of the path, the target
of new objections from person attempting to pass. After a short time, he resolves to follow Scraggs,
but, too far behind and too fat to move quickly, he loses sight of her. Eventually, the author passing
over the immediate events, Berry secures “an introduction according to etiquette,” but Scraggs
continues “scornfully rejecting his addresses…because, although having no objection to a moderate
degree of plumpness, his figure was much too round to square with her ideas of manly beauty and
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gentility of person” (140). Afterward, Berry sees a physician, attempts various forms of physical
exercise, including dancing, re-connects with Scraggs and is rejected yet again (this scene is depicted
in the Cruickshank illustration, Figure 18), curses his fate and, in the abrupt ending’s final sentence,
the author lets us know that he “still grows fatter” (148).
To summarize, “The Fleshy One,” if we are following Abraham’s distinctions, certainly serves
as a response to the free-floating fatness of Pickwick. Suggesting an inherited trait, the short story
sounds a clear and direct warning to all its readers of the dangers of being “too fat,” as Pickwick
admonishes Tupman. More than that, we can observe both the influence of medical treatments for
obesity as well as the sense of compromised masculinity in an excessively overweight male. Like his
spiritual brother, Tracy Tupman, Berry Huckel remains alone and unrequited in his desire, saddled
with the excess weight that the text speculates contributes to his body of problems.
***
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Returning, then, to Dickens’s text with this reading from The Pic Nic Papers, one can see how,
despite the revelry so often discussed in criticism of The Pickwick Papers, the second half of the novel
contains moments of a larger reality’s effects on the world of the club. One can see the injection of
more serious social commentary in the scenes at the Fleet and the case between Pickwick and Bardell.
And, as I mentioned earlier, we can think of this prime-mover of novels as a gleeful foray into the
world forbidden by Venel—a nostalgic celebration of a masculinity, let alone a way of life, no longer
fashionable, and, importantly the necessity to secure one’s future against that reality. “The Fleshly
One,” expressing a desire to avoid misleading future generations, a morality tale clearer and more
compelling than anything the originary novel offers.
And it is this protean sense of Edelman’s well-established notion of reproductive futurity that
is key to my reading of Pickwick. By the end of the novel, Pickwick having aided Winkle by discoursing
with his father, helps to set up Tony Weller by offering to help manage the money inherited by the
death of Susan Weller. Initially described as generous (“philanthropy was his insurance office”), one
might argue that, in this instance, Pickwick essentially becomes a de-facto insurance officer, living with
Sam’s family, unmarried and somewhat incongruous with the resolutions via marriage visited upon
Winkle and Sam (4-5). And, if such a claim is a stretch, it might help to note that The Pic Nic Papers, at
the start, was published to assist the surviving members of fellow publisher John Macrone’s family (he
died unexpectedly in 1837). Thus, even if the references are oblique and the language unclear, we can
discern, at several levels, an increasing concern with financial stability and insuring one’s life against
financial hardship. As we will see in the next chapter, focusing on Vanity Fair and Joseph Sedley, these
less concrete references are rendered solid in Thackeray’s novel.
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Chapter 3: Vanity Fair’s Jos Sedley and Colonial Anxiety: “let us eat our fill of the vain thing, and be
thankful therefor”
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Our office has a branch in India and about one life that was rejected at the London office a letter was written from the
Indian medical officer suggesting that the lives of natives of India exhibiting obesity with glycosuria should be considered
on entirely different lines to the lives of Englishmen in the same case, on account of the absence of alcohol, the vegetarian
diet, and the fact that nearly all those cases can be regarded as so-called dietetic glycosuria. He said we must consider those
due to the excessive carbo-hydrates, and those due to the same associated with excessive fat. But the fact of obesity existing
seems to me to suggest that it is impossible to regard an obese person in any condition of diet as being more insurable
than any other person. (Weber 24)
It has been too much the fashion to charge upon Providence the evils, which the follies or vices of men have brought
upon themselves. The license of enjoyment, which strews the path of life with the snares of death, is not to be attributed
solely to the difference of climate. The lives of men are more in their own keeping, and, with a heavier responsibility, than
they are willing to admit, and when they have availed themselves, without success, of the aids which their own common
prudence or the advancement of science can suggest to remedy the evils which beset them, it be time to complain of the
neglect of government or the decrees of unavoidable fate. (Brown, Mortality in India, 55)
1. Before the Curtain
Visitors to London, should they be so inclined, have the opportunity to visit Grays Inn, home
of the Charles Dickens Museum, and, for a time, the author’s residence before moving to the more
well-known Gads Hill. There, in the formal dining room, one can find a framed print of Samuel
Pickwick addressing the club, along with playbills for performances the work inspired. At the dining
table, place settings for Dickens and his contemporaries are prepared, as if awaiting the immediate
return of the dining party. Dickens, seated at the head of the table, is placed directly across from
Thackeray. Though not as close as Wilkie Collins and Dickens, Thackeray and he were, at the least,
close associates. The connection between the two, however, is more pronounced when we consider,
in light of the argument presented in the previous chapter, the topics of obesity, masculinity, and life
insurance, from Pickwick to Vanity Fair.
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89
Vanity Fair, 634.
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Indeed, the closing chapter to Pickwick informs us that Tony Weller continues to drive a coach for another year before gout forces him to retire (508).
As both novels are set in the Regency, we might think of the “large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a
three-cornered hat and wig” that pulls up to Miss Pinkerton’s academy at the very start of Vanity Fair as an oblique reference to Dickens’s elder Weller
(3). Should that seem like a stretch, Thackeray’s narrator makes a direct reference to Tony Weller later, asking if “old Weller is alive or dead” (86).
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If, in the previous chapter, a shift from theater to realism captures the generic tone of Pickwick,
a similar focus is paid to the shifts that occur within the narrative of Vanity Fair with respect to Jos
Sedley.
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If, in the previous chapter, we observe a crucial moment of fat shame for Tracy Tupman,
that shame is transformed in Vanity Fair, and specifically visited upon Jos Sedley’s body, in the form
of, I argue, a projected colonial anxiety. In the three sections comprising this chapter, I begin by
introducing the novel and the first appearance of Jos Sedley, situating Thackeray’s novel as a viable
text through which to consider questions of empire; I then turn to contemporaneous medical and
colonial texts focused on India to further contextualize Thackeray’s character; finally, I conclude this
chapter by examining three substantial scenes in Vanity Fair that, I contend, demonstrate a consistent
narrative projection of colonial otherness onto Jos Sedley’s “superabundant fat” (28). Specifically, I
examine Jos’s corporeal valences in Vauxhall, at Waterloo, and his reconnection and death in Germany
with Becky. In short, though Jos struggles with his weight (and the associated liver condition he
contracts from Bengal) and attempts to “cover” his body through a variety of costumes, he fails to
mask the superficiality of his actions and, more to the point, like Tony Weller, the exterior presentation
does little to hide the body beneath. What’s more, Jos’s inveterate appetite marks him as distinctly
non-British, despite his attempts at curating his own self-image.
Published from January 1847 to July 1848, Thackeray’s social satire is set in the immediate
years before and after Waterloo, from 1811 to 1820. Following the lives and families of Amelia Sedley
and Rebecca Sharp, friends from Miss Pinkerton’s academy on Chiswick Mall, the sprawling text
focuses on the world of social mobility and wealth, given that Amelia is from a family with money and
Becky, an orphan, is not. Amelia’s brother, Joseph Sedley, first introduced to us at the start of the
third chapter, enters the narrative seated at the family’s home in Russell Square. Amelia and Rebecca
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Likewise, in the next chapter, I will return to the same notion to consider how Collins’s novel, as a whole, enacts a process of normalization through
its diegetic unfolding.
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have just returned to Russell Square having completed their studies (more or less). As they enter, they
startle him considerably.
A VERY stout, puffy man, in buckskins and hessian boots, with several immense neckcloths,
that rose almost to his nose, with a red striped waistcoat and an apple-green coat with steel
buttons almost as large as crown pieces (it was the morning costume of a dandy or blood of
those days), was reading the paper by the fire when the two girls entered, and bounced off his
arm-chair, and blushed excessively, and hid his entire face almost in his neckcloths at this
apparition… (24)
John Sutherland’s note, appended to the word “apparition” in this passage, explains that Joseph’s
dress and deportment are modeled after Beau Brummell, the famous English man of fashion and
figure for dandyism in the period (929). If this description seems familiar, it also might be due to its
similarity to the account of Tony Weller in Pickwick. Whereas, in the above description, Jos’s comically
obscene number of neckcloths and rather bold choices receive the focus of the narrator’s attention,
Dickens presents a similar image but with a distinct focus on the body underneath,
His chin…had acquired the grave and imposing form which is generally described by prefixing
the word “double” to that expressive feature, and his complexion exhibited that peculiarly
mottled combination of colours which is only to be seen in gentlemen of his profession, and
underdone roast beef. Round his neck he wore a crimson travelling shawl, which merged into
his chin by such imperceptible gradations, that it was difficult to distinguish the folds of the
one, from the folds of the other. Over this, he mounted a long waistcoat of a broad pink-
striped pattern, and over that again, a wide-skirted green coat, ornamented with large brass
buttons, whereof the two which garnished the waist, were so far apart, that no man had ever
beheld them both, at the same time. (Pickwick Papers, 199)
Comparing the two descriptions, one might reinterpret Thackeray’s example as slyly avoiding making
fun of Sedley’s size, as if the joke’s primary humor lies in his sartorial panache, but Dickens spells out
that the dress, as determined, in part, by the wearer’s dimensions, is visually symptomatic of the body
beneath the surface.
As the chapter continues, we learn that Amelia’s brother, twelve years older, has been
employed by the East India Company’s Civil Service in the Bengal division, as the collector of Boggley
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Wollah.
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While this post has been lucrative, affording him a lifestyle of fashion and taste, dining at
taverns, going to theaters and the opera, always “laboriously attired in tights and cocked hat,” it comes
at the high cost of living in isolation and without the modish accoutrements of his London life (27).
Sandy Morey Norton observes, in “The Ex-Collector of Boggley-Wollah: Colonialism in the Empire
of Vanity Fair,” how the novel “reveals an underlying ambivalence toward domestic and global
domination,” and, exemplifying that ambiguity, cites the single example of the novel’s treatment of
India, where “[o]nly Jos Sedley is actually imagined in the reality of his colonial past” (125; 127). The
relevant passage comes early in the novel, just after the above description of Jos:
Boggley Wollah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly district, famous for snipe-shooting,
and where not unfrequently you may flush a tiger. Ramgunge, where there is a magistrate, is
only forty miles off, and there is a cavalry station about thirty miles farther; so Joseph wrote
home to his parents, when he took possession of his collectorship. He had lived for about
eight years of his life, quite alone, at this charming place, scarcely seeing a Christian face except
twice a year, when the detachment arrived to carry off the revenues which he had collected,
to Calcutta. (27)
Norton argues that the passage conveys an ambivalence to the newly generated effects of colonization,
helping to support her larger claim that critics of the novel have overlooked the possibility of reading
it “as an attack on British imperialism and domination” (124). Her article set off something of a debate,
primarily with J. Russell Perkin, over whether or not, as responsible readers of Victorian literature, her
analysis went too far in the direction of an unfounded reparative reading, as I paraphrase it. Perkin, in
his response, baldly states that “Thackeray embodies the unthinking racism of an imperial age…the
only way to deal with this fact is to face it, to recognize that the Victorians were in some ways different
from us, and different in ways that we cannot always approve” (161). His rejoinder is then met with
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According to Sugata Bose, writing in The New Cambridge History of India, the historical context for Jos’s position makes plausible sense.
During the years between 1770 and 1813, commonly referred to as a period of mercantilism, the Bengal countryside principally placed fine artisanal
products, especially textiles, at the disposal of the English East India Company for sale on the world market. This was a phase of 'plunder' by the state
because political ascendancy had obviated the need to import silver and made it possible to plough back revenues into 'investment' in export goods. (43)
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one of Norton’s own, which persuasively argues for the legitimacy of her reading, and indicts Perkin
for supporting what amounts to an “Imperialism of Theory.”
In this skirmish between Norton and Perkin, hopefully confined to the pages of Narrative, we
can see a distinct problem with Vanity Fair: though, in his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics
edition, Sutherland claims, voting in favor of Norton, that the novel “is an historical novel,” it is
complicated by a “historical fabric [in which] there are gaping, but evidently placed, holes” (xv). He
elaborates further that the “sense of historical period and the passage of world-shaking events around
the characters is conveyed obliquely” (xvii). In this chapter, I will help to fill some of the holes
Sutherland draws our attention to, specifically by examining two texts that help to illuminate the status
of India, as a colony, but more importantly, as a site where the discussion of obesity takes on nationalist
and xenophobic inflections. If the initial description of Jos Sedley motivates us to consider his sartorial
inclinations, I argue, we should also be attentive to other aspects of his character, as it manifests in
the novel, beneath the surface of his “costume” elsewhere. And costume seems an apt description for
Jos’s actions throughout the novel: performing, via superficial means, a variety of “roles” in the
narrative.
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And such phrasing is commensurate with Thackeray’s frequent use of the theater and stage as thematic elements of the novel, as my epigram to this
section references.
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2. The License of Enjoyment
As the first epigram to this chapter helps to illustrate, conceptions and treatments of obesity
varied not only within Victorian England, but across the Continent and through colonial holdings, as
well. In this epigram, the doctor from India claims that the obese condition of the applicant should
be treated differently, given the George Cheyne-like diet he has observed in the patient. This is met
with an outright rejection, the matter-of-fact avowal “that it is impossible to regard an obese person
in any condition of diet as being more insurable than any other person.” In the second epigram, we
can note a reiteration of the assumption of moral failing on the individual for compromised health,
paralleling the work of Venel and Wadd. Though that excerpt does not necessarily identify obesity in
its discussion of “the follies and vices of men,” other texts do. Moreover, that publication, entitled A
Few Thoughts on Commission, Divisions of Profit, Selection of Lives, The Mortality in India, indexes the
intervention of data and knowledge that George Farren petitioned for—data on mortality. Here, then,
we can see the continued influence of Quetelet; if an average man exists, then certainly an average
death must, also. Sources differ as to the exact moment of their creation, but most agree that rates of
mortality, and their attendant tables, were incorporated into the assurance industry in the late
eighteenth century (Figure 19).
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Figure 19 - Mortality Table
What is surprising, however, is that as far back as 1850, just after Vanity Fair became the national
obsession for readers of Punch magazine, Dr. Thomas King Chambers, the very same personage from
my introductory chapter, was researching mortality data of the obese (Table 2). What’s more, it is
evident from the citation in the figure that such data were being collected, at least in this case, nearly
a decade before, in 1841.
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Figure 20 - "Causes of Death in Sixty Nine Corpulent Persons"
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Chambers’s Corpulence; or, Excess of Fat in the Human Body, serves as a corrective to two
previously discussed works. First, reproaching Wadd’s earlier work for having “treated this subject
with what appears to me most ill-judged levity,” Chambers expresses his compassion for the corpulent
or obese individual (again, as we have seen before, he uses those terms interchangeably) (2). Describing
the data and anecdotes included in his text, he is clear to emphasize the details he deems important.
All description of the individuals, of their habits, their diseases, the causes of their death, is
omitted; and even the stature, by which alone can obesity be judged of, is not recorded. I
confess I cannot understand how any human infirmity which involves pain and discomfort
can ever be a fit object of ridicule, or how that which certainly shortens the term of life can be
considered of trivial importance. I shall not be deterred by these precedents from making
Corpulence or Obesity a matter of serious attention. (3)
It is regrettable that the same level of compassion does not extend to Thackeray’s John Sedley, father
to Amelia and Jos. Early in the novel, his ridicule of his son is extreme enough for our narrator to
concede that Jos “felt inclined to become a parricide almost” (35). In fact, for most of the first two
numbers of Vanity Fair, John Sedley is the source of Jos’s anger, so much so that even his wife “took
her husband to task for his cruel conduct to poor Joe” (35). In these opening chapters, John Sedley’s
concerns about Jos stem from two places: 1) Jos’s “dandified modesty” produces a level of self-
involvement that he finds unseemly (and makes Jos easy prey: “the first woman who fishes for him,
hooks him”); and 2) Jos’s post in Bengal suggests the possibility of his marrying a non-white, non-
English woman (“It’s a mercy he did not bring over a black daughter-in-law”)
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(35). Second, later in
the text Chambers offers a corrective to Quetelet, but immediately qualifies the assertion:
It is impossible…to fix any absolute standard of weight, and it is incorrect to look upon the
average weight of healthy individuals in proportion to their height…Still, there are certain limits
on each side of the average, the transgression of which shows a predisposition to disease, or
even itself constitutes infirmity. (66, emphasis added)
Chambers trumpets the impossibility of using Quetelet’s formula to make a determination of one’s
health, but in the very next sentence reiterates the core assumption of it: deviations from the average,
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The elder Sedley goes on a few lines later, telling his wife that Becky’s “a white face at any rate” (36).
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if substantial enough, are grounds for suspecting compromised health. Furthermore, the work devoted
to amend Quetelet is quickly undercut by what Chambers conceives of as the average. Later, he offers
a table of “Weights of Health in Several Proportions,” but, curiously, uses as his ideal figures,
seemingly without any reflection, the heights and weights of famous statues in the British Museum.
Surely they must have weighed more than their human counterparts, considering the materials used.
Of course, concedes Chambers, which is why he simply guesses at their weight, were they to be suddenly
rendered human (Figure 21).
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Figure 21 – “Weights of Health in Several Proportions”
Reviewing this brief lineage between Quetelet and Chambers, though humorous and, to some
degree, puzzling, might seem like an isolated event. But, as the variety of works on obesity we have
already examined suggest, such arbitrary and imaginative (though impractical) thinking in Chambers’s
work, at least when it comes to obesity, may resemble the rule more than the exception. For example,
and to illustrate how sustained such an approach to obesity has been, I offer a more modern instance.
In Roxane Gay’s recently published memoir, Hunger, she notes that
in 1998, medical professionals, under the direction of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood
Institute, lowered the BMI threshold for “normal” bodies to below 25 and, in doing so,
doubled the number of obese Americans. One of their reasons for lowering the cutoff: “A
round number like 25 would be easy for people to remember.” (149-152)
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Such whimsical shifts, in other contexts, perhaps, might come across as innocuous, if not necessarily
justifiable.
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Chambers’s fanciful construction, however, is not simply a version of “good enough for
x purpose,” whether that purpose is assessing one’s fitness for insurance or measuring the quality of
one’s health. This is because, like the way a hammer is technically sufficient to open a locked door, it
suits the purpose, but a more precise instrument for doing so (like a key) might leave less damage in
its wake. Indeed, Gay considers the terms currently in use to describe the most acute cases of
overweight, “morbid obesity,” as extending far beyond anything literal or shallowly on the surface.
“Obese” is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten until fat,” which
is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word “obese,” they aren’t merely
being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical
doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The
modifier “morbidly” makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term
“morbid obesity” frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical
establishment treats us accordingly. (152-156)
Gay’s point, that for a vocation that assents to doing no harm, it certainly uses some harmful terms to
describe the condition, was not exactly the case two centuries ago. This interpretation, as we have seen
earlier, resonates with Sedgwick and Moon, and has also been considered within a culture of precarity
and self-conscious “destruction towards survival,” as Lauren Berlant has argued (779). Which, to
readers today, is unlikely to shock. But, returning to the moment of shame when Pickwick denies
Tupman’s wish to dress as a bandit because, somehow, in a literary world overflowing with fatness,
he is “too fat” for the costume, morbid obesity, and its attendant cultural meanings exceeding its
medical basis, is not the cause of shame. In that scene, Pickwick initially offers age as the reason for
contesting Tupman’s choice, and then, in the heat of an argument, turns to Tupman’s size as an
additional support. Quickly, Pickwick backpedals to bring about a peace between them. If, then, we
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Take, for example, the edict that we are to drink at least eight glasses of water per day. The rule is arbitrary, incorrect, and yet, nevertheless, it is a
commonplace “rule” still active today.
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can see in Pickwick a moment where one man becomes “too fat” amidst so many other fat men, we
can see in Vanity Fair, through Jos Sedley, how fat takes on the colonial anxieties of the period.
I emphasize the colonial anxieties of the period, as they relate to Jos, in part because, just as
Pickwick omits the word “normal” from the text, Vanity Fair avoids using the term obesity entirely, and,
in a contrast to Dickens, features the term corpulence, that uneasy counterpart, only once, in a reference
to Daniel Lambert, which itself is a reference to Jos’s drunken behavior at Vauxhall. This is not to say
that Jos is ever svelte, for Thackeray’s narrator is at pains to make clear that, though he does gain and
lose weight at points in the novel, he is never not fat, either. For example, quite late in the novel, after
over eight hundred pages (and less than forty pages from his death), Jos tells Amelia about his
reconnection with Becky, and though we have been repeatedly made aware of his size, we get one
final explicit pronouncement: “Jos, who was very fat, and easily moved, had been touched by the story
Becky told” (837-8). Here, perhaps, we might note how Jos’s fatness, at least syntactically, seems to
be connected to his persuadable disposition, which is often referenced in relation to his minimal and
frequently disastrous interactions with women. We might also note how Thackeray’s narrator is careful
to characterize Becky’s explanation of events after Waterloo as “the story,” a detail I will return to in
the final section of this chapter.
That is not, of course, to say that the term “obesity” was not in use outside of the novel.
Recalling Sander Gilman’s anecdote, cited in the previous chapter, of the colonial surgeon W. G. Don
and the case of the obese “Hindoo boy,” named allusively as the “Fat Boy,” Meegan Kennedy’s
chapter, “‘Poor Hoo Loo’: Sentiment, Stoicism, and the Grotesque in British Imperial Medicine,”
furthers Gilman’s sketch by examining the boy, whose name was actually Shakarm, and his case as it
appears in the Lancet in 1859.
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“Uniquely” for the journal, the case includes a large portrait of Shakarm
(Figure 1), which “offers little information other than ethnic marking,” but “also combines the
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“Remarkable Case of Obesity in a Hindoo Boy Aged Twelve.”
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attributes of extraordinary growth, exotic racial identity, spectacular status, and a disorder of
generation”
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(Victorian Freaks 98). Kennedy observes how the journal’s treatment of Shakarm exhibits
an odd mix of information. While the portrait is prominent and conspicuous, it “does not offer much
in the way of medical information, which is provided by the table of his measurements in the text, and
no treatment for his condition is offered—or, indeed, even considered” (98). Consequently, Kennedy
concludes that the Lancet piece prioritizes spectacle and grotesquery over medical science or treatment.
Shakarm’s depiction is important for at least two reasons. First, it helps to reiterate the sheer popularity
and influence of The Pickwick Papers, even two decades after its initial publication. Second, it helps to
offer a sense of how the obese colonial subject is treated. But what about a subject natively British,
but effectively “colonial” in his own right, the “nabob” Sedley?
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This detail, when considered with Jos Sedley and the family’s downfall, as well as the distressing compromise of masculinity to the British, is especially
vicious. The Lancet does not care for Chambers’s putative compassion toward the obese: Shakarm’s genitals “are not larger than those of an infant, while
the testes are very small, and seem either to be undeveloped or to have become atrophied.” Here, then, is an explicit example of the perception of one’s
masculinity eroded by virtue of obesity.
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Figure 22 – Shakarm Portrait
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Returning to the figure that opened this section, the most salient part of Chambers work, for
the purposes this discussion relative to Jos Sedley and Vanity Fair, is the consistent, if not unexpected,
assumed inferiority of England’s colonial subjects. Summarizing the insights gleaned from studying
animals, Chambers notes how the confinement of an animal, against the assumption that reduced
physical activity would promote excess fat, actually accomplishes the opposite. So, in areas where
animals must be contained within a region, he references the “cruel advantage” of the “natives of
India of their knowledge of the above fact”:
The wild hog will not fatten in confinement, because he is constantly looking about for some
way of escape, and is harassed by the prospect of his prison walls. They therefore sew up the
eyelids of the animal, and then he rapidly becomes fit for the table. (39)
Of course, severe as this act is, as well as Chambers’s characterization of the natives, it does not quite
amount to claiming something specific about their own disposition. That comes ten pages later, when
discussing “the instinctive desire shown by all nations for an oily diet, and the association of this
substance with ideas of luxury in all times” (49). Unlike other writers on the subject, Chambers chooses
examples far removed from “all nations,” or even England, by providing examples from the “butter
and honey” favored by “the Hebrews,” and the “Hindoo sepoy, when he devours his gallon of rice
for a meal, will spend all the pice he can get on the clarified butter of the country…” (49). Here, then,
despite his efforts to approach the subject with compassion and seriousness that he finds wanting in
Wadd’s work, Chambers betrays the biases of national pride and racist assumptions about the diet
(and detrimental effects) of the sepoy.
If Chambers broaches these biases, but does not necessarily render them explicit, another text,
reflecting on India and diet, does. Appropriately titled Banting in India, by Surgeon-Major Joshua Duke,
of the 3
rd
Punjab Cavalry, the book, written two decades after Banting’s popular pamphlet first
appeared, reflects on the difficulties unique to addressing health and diet in colonial India. Now, lest
I be subject to the criticism of too freely incorporating texts that do not match the period, I turn to
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this text not as a way to claim that its contents had any influence on Vanity Fair or Chambers’s thought,
but as a way to confirm the inchoate racism and nationalism evident in contemporaneous texts.
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Echoing Venel’s national anxiety, Duke’s book begins with a reflection on the changes wrought by
colonial expansion. Importantly, however, the changes are most acute for the English.
In the latter half of the present century, the rapid strides of civilization and forced education
have altered a great deal the former simplicity of English men and women…Our intercourse
with foreign nations and our adoption of foreign ideas is greater than before. Our soldiers
must be set up, our army reformed, according to the ethics of a foreign nation, whose country
is not equal to a twentieth part of the dominions where the British flag flies. So gentle have
we become, under such influences, that, as many think, the result of moral cowardice, flogging
is considered now unnecessary in our army and navy. (9-10)
Duke goes on to lament the increase, to him, in “Effeminacy, unmanliness, and perhaps
unwomanliness” such changes have helped to produce (10). He then introduces a series of diets,
aligning with Banting, that he claims will help to reduce, if not eliminate altogether, “the inanition and
debility” of “those whose constitutions have been weakened by a long residence in India, or who are
adopting this diet under the terrible and enervating heat of the Indian climate” (50). Jos Sedley, prior
to the events covered in Vanity Fair, is said to have spent “about eight years of his life” in India before
he is sent home on account of a “liver complaint,” which, importantly, does not present until after he
begins living in Bengal (27).
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According to Duke, then, India makes the English weak, which is due
to the different dietary options available in the colony.
Just five pages later, in a curious addition, Duke seems to suggest that all Indians, regardless
of geography, are in need of uplift. This comes during his recommendation of “Cuca,” or, as we know
it today, cocaine, as a treatment for obesity, among other ailments.
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And, if the inveterate slippage between corpulence and obesity wasn’t enough, Duke’s preface to the third edition of Banting in India exhibits a general
confusion about the supposed health effects of dieting, as well as the still-extant treatments that have by now been sufficiently interrogated and debunked.
The opponents to Bantingism are, however, many. In the summer of 1883 (when the author was in England), the lingering death of Comte de Chambord,
who is said to have died indirectly as a result of reducing his enormous bulk by diet, was seized upon the daily Papers as a good opportunity of warning
the public against the adoption of a reducing diet. The same opposition has been extended to the use of two remedies—Mercury and Bleeding; yet both
are still and, probably will forever be, of inestimable value in skilled and cautious hands. (5)
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And, on the subject of climate and health, it is implied that Rawdon Crawley’s insurance denial, in the novel, is due in part to the unfavorable climate
of Coventry Island.
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By way of assisting the obese sufferer, who is commencing the Banting diet, I would
recommend the trial of a comparatively new drug ‘Cuca.’ It is obtained from Peru, and is
chewed by the Indians when going on long and exhausting journeys. The corpulent like the
Indian has a long journey before him…This remedy may be tried not only in obesity, but also
in diabetes and many exhausting diseases. I would recommend it also to Mahomedans as a
preventative of thirst during the Fast of Ramzan (55-56).
Duke, at other points, seems to group together the “Mahomedan” with the “Hindoo,” and, after
outlining the diet he believes to be more suitable for both groups, provides a clear sense of how he
views them: “There is little doubt that the rich in both classes indulge somewhat too freely at the table
to their own cost. Bunniahs, who are generally rich men, as a rule have large paunches (70). Thus, I
argue, Duke’s book solidifies the implied biases of nation and race that Chambers, among others, only
hint at. And in case we forgot about the national crisis afflicting England, Duke closes the book by
reaffirming his allegiance and cause. Should anything he says “seem strong,” that is because, he assures
his reader, they are “the utterances of one Englishman who is loyal to his fellow-countrymen, and
whose only object is to aid in maintaining the vigour, hardihood, and manliness of the British nation” (77,
emphasis added). At stake then, is the very reputation and strength of national British “manliness,”
and too much consorting with the colonies somehow risks that stability. It should come as no surprise
that Jos fails in this endeavor.
If Chambers gestures toward the kind of explicit conception of colonial subjectivity
manifesting in the Lancet article and Duke’s work, such movements are thrown into relief when we
observe the comparative absence of these concerns regarding British virility in earlier texts. For
example, James Johnson’s 1813 The Influence of Tropical Climates, More Especially the Climate of India, on
European Constitutions, published through the 1840s, and James Annesley’s 1828 Sketches of the Most
Prevalent Diseases of India, published through, at least, the 1830s, both read as a guidebook for European
travelers, with recommendations for treatment should ailment or disease present. Of course, some of
this can be explained by the relatively early stages of colonial expansion, and, as we have noted before,
the nascent development of medical practice in the period.
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Another way to think of this disparity is to consider these earlier works as oriented toward
those travelling, but not living with and/or among the colonized. In this view, the latter entries from
Chambers, the Lancet, and Duke are aimed at audiences who have known about and perhaps travelled
to the myriad colonies already. Johnson and Annesley offer advice about how to travel among the
colonies; Duke’s text can be understood as a proscriptive manifesto about the dangers of living in the
colonies, one, we might consider, directed at a figure like the collector of Boggley Wollah.
In this section, then, I have attempted to show how assumptions about colonial subjects, as
well as those living amongst them, are assumed to be predisposed to poor health and diet. In the final
section of this chapter, I turn back to Jos Sedley, and offer a reading of his acquired habits as they
relate to his time in India, suggesting that his death in the novel, and the events that lead up to it, can
be understood as a form of punishment for not just over-indulgence, but colonial over-indulgence and
what I will define as “performative transgression.”
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3. ‘Do you put cayenne in your cream-tarts in India, sir?’
With the works of Chambers and Duke in mind, let me acknowledge that I am certainly not
the first person drawn to analyzing Jos Sedley. In the large collection of Vanity Fair criticism available,
Joseph Litvak and Nancy Cantwell have each offered compelling interpretations of, as he is called in
the memorable Vauxhall chapter, Thackeray’s version of “Daniel Lambert” (65).
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For Litvak, Jos
Sedley’s character exists within the novel to serve as a punching-bag for Thackeray’s narrator. Guilty
of what Litvak calls a “fashion-conscious hyperconsumption,” which carries with it the “risk of a
distinctly problematic relation to the norms of middle-class heterosexual masculinity,” Litvak argues
that Jos, from the start, is a doomed transgressor (223; 239).
Poor silly Jos, having failed to mortify his flesh, undergoes a mortification vengefully imposed
from the outside. The homicidal imperative registered by the remark, “he must have died of
loneliness,” finds its fulfillment in the death by a thousand cuts—the social death—that the
narrator starts administering from the moment that Jos, who persists in showing up where he
isn’t wanted,
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starts compromising the distinction not just between amour propre as healthy
self-discipline and amour propre as reprehensibly masturbatory self-indulgence, but between a
normative self- or fashion-consciousness and excesses of the most repulsive cultural illiteracy.
(239)
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Joyce Huff reads Thackeray’s character as a literary instantiation of Daniel Lambert, focusing on what she characterizes as unchecked consumption.
Joseph invests objects with far too much desire and is thus held prisoner by his appetites. His interaction with the world is limited to meaningless
consumer display…The few interactions in which he does engage are mediated by goods and particularly by food; he even finds conversation “delicious.”
When Amelia is pining for her husband who is at war…Joseph “show[s] his sympathy by pouring her out a large cup of tea.” Furthermore, when the
family loses their fortune, Joseph responds to the material loss by sending money but neglects the human loss by refusing to visit and to help restore his
father’s sense of self-respect. (“Freaklore” 47)
In making my argument, I must acknowledge and agree with Huff, but I find Joseph’s consumption to involve a version of colonial anxiety and tension
not discussed in Huff’s formulation.
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Though Litvak is correct, I would offer the idea that items from Jos’s post, like the cashmere shawls given to Amelia and Becky before he enters the
novel, merit further study. Part of argument of this chapter shares some loose affinity with Elaine Freedgood’s materialist appraisal The Ideas in Things:
Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. In Freedgood’s project, she offers analyses of “objects with obvious imperial and industrial histories” in Jane Eyre,
Mary Barton, and Great Expectations (41). Crucially, however, the objects under study (furniture, curtains, and tobacco) “are largely inconsequential in the
rhetorical hierarchy of the text…they suggest, or reinforce, something thing we already know about the subjects who use them” (41-42). Likewise, the
scant details of Jos Sedley’s life as the collector in Bengal, though pivotal in this project, are not substantial within the larger frame of the novel and its
main protagonists. Nevertheless, Freedgood makes a compelling argument for her study.
But each of these objects…was highly consequential in the world in which the text was produced. Accordingly, the knowledge that is
stockpiled in these things bears on the grisly specifics of conflicts and conquests that a culture can neither regularly acknowledge nor
permanently destroy if it is going to be able to count on its own history to know itself and realize a future. (42-44)
To be clear, my argument departs from Freedgood in that I do not limit the focus solely to objects of Sedley’s colonial life, but the emphasis she places
on things, literally, found in the novels she considers, and the ideas we may extrapolate from them, applies to Vanity Fair, too. In particular, Jos’s
portrait, atop the Elephant, that is won at the Russell Square auction, plays an important role in this section.
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Characterized within the first pages as simultaneously one who “loves his pipe” but who is also “vain
as a girl,” it is easy to see how the distinction between normative self-consciousness and self-
indulgence is blurred in Jos. Litvak’s argument, compelling though it is, locates the judgment of Jos
within a social culture of snobbery and sophistication, and, put simply, Jos does not cut the mustard
in that view. Indeed, it is quite obvious from the start, and startled response of Jos’s, that he is, at best,
socially awkward around women, even if, as we see throughout, he is “talkative in man’s society” (37).
It would be misleading, however, to suggest that Jos does not change, somewhat, through the course
of the novel. And while I agree with Litvak, in kind if not degree, that Jos’s thick body is matched by
a similarly thick skull, or, more generously, a shallowness of thought, the character nevertheless
attempts to self-fashion his subjectivity through food, dress, or “costume,” as I have described it, and,
tellingly, through his own personal narration, however false his stories may in fact be.
But, as the novel shows us, despite the questionable veracity of his tales, Jos seems to be
adored in India, even earning the name “Waterloo Sedley” after returning to Bengal to resume his
post (483). In fact, early in the novel, in the same place where Litvak references death by loneliness,
the narrator gives us more detail into his daily life there: “On returning to India, and ever after, he
used to talk of the pleasure of this period of his existence with great enthusiasm, and give you to
understand that he and Brummell were the leading bucks of the day” (27). This could be, obviously,
the narrator’s generous way of honoring, without acknowledging the truth, of Jos’s aspirations, but if
we consider it as legitimate, that his life in Bengal is more good than otherwise, then in that context
he is at least spared the cuts of the fashion police. In her study exploring the figure of the corseted
body in the novel, Cantwell posits that Becky, Miss Swartz, and Jos all “employ the corset as part of
an invasion strategy conducted through physical and sartorial reshaping…the hegemony they seek to
infiltrate is that of heterosexual upper-class British masculinity” (4). Cantwell, as a result, revises Litvak
to focus on the proliferation of military dress and the desire for these characters to blend into the class
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to which the corset belongs. Both Litvak and Cantwell are right, however, in locating in Jos a desire,
not just to belong, but to belong on his own terms.
Ridiculed by his father throughout the first two numbers of Vanity Fair, it is clear that Jos’s
life, in both India and England, is a lonely one, but it’s one he seeks to improve—specifically, I argue,
by attempting to present himself as somehow not simply a fat, “hectoring nabob,” as George Osborne
calls him after the incident at Vauxhall (71). Jos, proto-metrosexual that he may be, is not necessarily
so scattershot or fumbling in his tastes, at least when he is sober. Indeed, if we examine the kinds of
food he consumes through the novel, what we find is that Jos has been habituated to eating Indian
food, though not exclusively. With regard to his appetite, then, he is positioned somewhere between
British and Indian (not unlike Thackeray himself), a liminal position that renders him neither fully
British nor Indian. This detail, I suggest, often overlooked in the favor of a broad reading of, at various
points, homosexuality, failed masculinity, and the like, identifies a different kind of “infiltration” than
that of Cantwell’s article, the infiltration produced by colonial ambition.
Specifically, the sort of infiltration I’m after here is rooted in food. Sidney Mintz’s study of the
proliferation and use of sugar, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, argues that the
steps by which Britain went through, from purchasing sugar in relatively modest amounts to colonial
imports and, eventually, to sugar colonies, were “complex, but…followed in so orderly a fashion as
to seem almost inevitable” (39). Reinforcing Norton at the expense of Perkin, Mintz locates in the
spread and consumption of sugar a simultaneous imperial act, like Fat Joe’s druthers (who reminds us
that he likes eating best), of expanding and swallowing. “On the one hand, they represent an extension
of empire outward, but on the other, they mark an absorption, a kind of swallowing up, of sugar
consumption as a national habit. Like tea, sugar came to define English “character” (39). As a result,
“foods acquired new meanings” in at least two different ways (151).
Over the course of less than two centuries, a nation most of whose citizens formerly subsisted
almost exclusively on foods produced within its borders had become a prodigious consumer
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of imported goods. Usually these foods were new to those who consumed them, supplanting
more familiar items, or they were novelties, gradually transformed from exotic treats into
ordinary, everyday consumables. As these changes took place, the foods acquired new
meanings, but those meanings—what the goods meant to people, and what people signaled
by consuming them—were associated with social differences of all sorts, including those of
age, gender, class, and occupation. They were also related to the will and intent of the nation’s
rulers, and to the economic, social, and political destiny of the nation itself. (151).
What’s more, “Tobacco, sugar, and tea” were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with
their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently” (185). With a slightly
modified phrasing, I argue that Jos Sedley, by virtue of his occupation and presence within Vanity Fair
as a symbol of colonial growth and change, undergoes a recoding of his fat body, from a formerly
“big, swaggering hobbledehoy” thrashing the young George Osborne in school (a memory from early
in novel) to the subject of “one of the blackest” life insurance cases by its close (37; 874).
Early in the novel, after Amelia and Becky make their way from Chiswick Mall to Russell
Square, our narrator, seemingly acknowledging a common fact, says, “Now we have heard how Mrs.
Sedley had prepared a fine curry for her son, just as he liked it” (28, emphasis added).
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Eager to impress
Jos, Becky resolves to “be very quiet…and very much interested in India” (28). Soon after they start
eating, she is offered some of the curry, and, unsure, Becky asks “what is it?” to which Jos replies
“Capital,” which could be read as a deliberate misunderstanding of the query, but it could also suggest
the way Jos conceives of his Indian cuisine—a substance with the fungibility of “capital,” equivalent
to money or the “collections” in his charge in Bengal (28). Even though “his mouth was full of it: his
face quite red with the delightful exercise of gobbling,” he manages to compliment his mother on the
dish, pronouncing it “as good as my own curries in India” (28, emphasis added). Becky tries some of
the dish, and finding it too spicy, reasons, upon Jos’s offering, that a chili might help to balance the
flavor.
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Though it is unclear, Amelia does tell Jos a few pages earlier that his mother has made a “pillau, Joseph, just as you like it” (25). It could be this dish
is part of the curry later described.
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To no one’s surprise but her own, it does not, and in a slanted foreshadowing of the novel’s
end, Becky, uncomfortable and embarrassed at the amusement she has provided for the table,
expresses a wish to “choke” the elder Sedley for laughing at her misfortune (29).
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Incidentally, it is
during this scene where Becky derisively puts the question to Joe that heads this section. Jos, during
this, halfheartedly offers her a cream-tart, lamenting the lack of quality cream in Bengal, but,
confirming his love for Bengalian cuisine, confesses that despite the substitution of cream with goat
milk, he has “got to prefer it” (29). Moreover, Jos replies to the question by identifying with the
inhabitants of Bengal: “We generally use goats’ milk” (29).
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These claims, on their own, may not
come across as forceful, but given the assumptions evinced in the works in the previous section of
this chapter, Jos’s preference for Indian food can be understood as indicative of a more pressing threat
of colonial influence. Although his tastes go well beyond “the Cutcherry,”
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they certainly also go
beyond England. In the same number, after the chili scene (as well as the three days’ absence on the
part of Jos’s shyness), he returns with flowers for Amelia and Becky, as well as a fresh pineapple for
tiffin, to which Becky naively, though understandably, comments that “she had never tasted a pine”
(74).
Jos’s relationship with Becky, however, goes beyond their different palates. In fact, where the
two align most is in their capacities to imagine better circumstances for themselves. Quite early in the
novel, after leaving Chiswick Mall but before meeting Jos, Becky imagines what her life would be like
should she end up marrying Amelia’s brother, whom she has not yet met.
She had a vivid imagination; she had, besides, read the Arabian Nights and Guthrie’s Geography;
and it is a fact, that while she was dressing for dinner, and after she had asked Amelia whether
her brother was very rich, she had built for herself a most magnificent castle in the air, of
which she was mistress, with a husband somewhere in the background (she had not seen him
as yet, and his figure would not therefore be very distinct); she had arrayed herself in an infinity
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Late in the novel, just a page before he dies, in explaining the rekindled relationship between himself and Becky, Jos confesses to Dobbin that “she
had been a daughter to him” (873).
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When, later, Becky flirtatiously chides him for the chili, he remembers, per his appetite, how good the meal was rather than her experience of it (33).
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Glossed as “an Indian public office, for administrative or judicial purposes; here, presumably, where Jos collects the Boggley Wollah revenues.
Thackeray’s Anglo-Indian background made him familiar with the jargon” (890).
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of shawls, turbans, and diamond necklaces, and had mounted upon an elephant to the sound
of the march in Bluebeard, in order to pay a visit of ceremony to the Grand Mogul. (26)
Like a less-deluded cousin to Arabella, the titular character of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote,
Becky, noting that Jos has money, imagines a life for herself, but, crucially, without necessarily
considering that life to be shared. In this daydream, she places herself atop an elephant and envisions
an opulent march to meet an important Indian statesman. Jos, too, will spend quite a bit of time on
an elephant, but in a different context. In the fifth number of Vanity Fair, after John Sedley has gone
bankrupt and must sell off the estate at Russell Square, Becky purchases, at auction, a portrait of Jos
atop an elephant, and keeps it for almost the entire novel before returning it to Jos after they reconnect
near the end (Figure 24).
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Figure 23 - An Elephant for Sale
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In this instance, the two are not only sharers of vivid and self-aggrandizing imaginative fancies, but
literally sharers of the same image, the same sort of majestic self-projection described above.
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Whereas Becky is prone to such imaginings throughout the novel, her visions of wealth and high status
remain largely interiorized. That is not to say that Becky is resistant to putting her own plans in motion,
quite the opposite is true, and, from the very first chapters, we know how gifted Thackeray’s narrator
finds her in her ability to command puppets (17).
Jos, on the other hand, chooses to recount various stories of his imagined narrative,
to just about anyone who will listen. When his father falls asleep after the infamous curry dinner, as
Jos is telling him a story of a possible marriage proposal he was to receive in India, “the rest of Joseph’s
story was lost for that day,” but our narrator assures us that Jos is able to tell his “delightful tale many
times to his apothecary, Dr. Gollop, when he came to inquire about the liver and the blue-pill” (30-
31). Though we never quite know if this substitution of his father with Dr. Gollop, as the audience of
his tale, is meant to be genuine, pitiable, comedic, or a combination of all three, we do know that in
Becky he finds both an audience and support for his narrative self-fashioning. For “[a]lmost the first
time in his life,” Jos is surprised to find “himself talking, without the least timidity or hesitation, to a
member of the opposite sex” (39). Becky, in a move that comes across as surprising, actually listens to
Jos and asks “a great number of questions about India,” allowing him to discourse on a variety of
aspects of life in Bengal, culminating in his false account of going on a tiger hunt (39-40). Regardless
of the truth of his stories, Jos gains a newfound confidence and boldness in his conversational abilities.
The accompanying illustration to this scene, “Mr. Joseph Entangled,” shows how Becky, in the
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And, should there still be any lingering worry that obesity or corpulence are not treated with in the novel, a sustained joke gets made about which
subject in the portrait is the elephant. It’s so funny, in fact, that Thackeray himself captions the illustration “An Elephant for Sale,” and, when Jos
assumes a more sustained military affectation later in the novel, Osborne will claim, “with respect to his brother-in-law, that his regiment marched with
an elephant” (338).
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process of knitting a green silk purse, has Jos hold the threads for her (Figure 24). In my reading, then,
each are mutually supportive and interested in their exchange of “yarns,” as it were.
Figure 24 - Mr. Joseph Entangled
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If the burgeoning relationship between Jos and Becky enables him to find new confidence and
conversational comfort in talking with her, it does not help him in all instances. Indeed, Jos’s appetite,
nervousness, and, as Litvak points to, seeming inability to correctly read a social scene, make for
disaster at Vauxhall. On the verge of proposing marriage, Jos drinks far too much rack punch and,
becoming loudly sentimental and maudlin, mistakes the comments of other patrons (“‘Brayvo, Fat
un!’ said one; ‘Angcore, Daniel Lambert!’ said another; ‘What a figure for the tight-rope!’
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exclaimed
another wag, to the inexpressible alarm of the ladies, and the great anger of Mr. Osborne”) for
celebrations rather than insults (66). George Osborne, nearly at the point of fighting with another
patron, makes the decision to escort both ladies home to Russell Square, and Dobbin helps get a
barely-standing Jos back to his own flat (Figure 25).
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A reference conjuring the image of the circus and similar live performances—not unlike the scene of the Victorian freak show, to be discussed in
further detail in the next chapter.
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Figure 25 - Mr. Joseph in a State of Excitement
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In this scene, then, we have a moment where Jos, poised to propose marriage, and having been
strengthened in his resolve by carrying a conversation with her, winds up unable to follow the plan or
even remain a viable escort for his sister and Becky. Though neither Osborne nor Dobbin stand as
exemplary male figures at this point in the novel, both exhibit a more measured control over their
own impulses and, by way of contrast, limit their consternation to stoic frustration.
In fact, for a little while after, both men omit the most embarrassing details of Jos’s evening,
until Osborne reasons that it is his responsibility to know how poorly he behaved. Nursing a hangover
the next morning, Jos learns that, in his state of excitement, he challenged the hackney coach to a
fight, and, looking like “Molyneaux,” (glossed as “an American black man”) he managed to win a
round before passing out and literally being carried up to his bed, in the words of servant, “like a
babby” (70; 899; 70). A failure as a suitor, party guest, and escort, Jos’s embarrassment will remove
him from the text (and London) under the pretense of an illness, until he returns for Amelia’s and
Osborn’s marriage in the sixth number.
When Jos does return to the novel, he comes accoutered with the materials that will develop,
by Waterloo, into a new, pseudo-militaristic affectation. “Splendid” and “fatter than ever,” we are
surely told, Jos’s loud clothing choices are turned up to eleven for the occasion (262).
His shirt-collars were higher; his face was redder; his shirt-frill flaunted gorgeously out of his
variegated waistcoat. Varnished boots were not invented as yet; but the Hessians on his
beautiful legs shone so, that they must have been the identical pair in which the gentleman in
the old picture used to shave himself; and on his light-green coat there bloomed a fine
wedding-favour, like a great white spreading magnolia. (262)
Here, an oblique reference to Cruikshank’s illustrations for Warren’s blacking powder connects Vanity
Fair with the Pickwick Advertiser, but more importantly, Jos has come to the wedding to act “for his
father,” giving Amelia away to be married and seemingly operating with a stronger sense of self-
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confidence and maturity than previously. Ten days later, the group has left for Brighton and Joseph
further immerses himself in the military culture.
Jos was even more splendid at Brighton than he had been at his sister’s marriage. He had
brilliant underwaistcoats, any one of which would have set up a moderate buck. He sported a
military frock-coat, ornamented with frogs, knobs, black buttons, and meandering embroidery.
He had affected a military appearance and habits of late; and he walked with his two friends,
who were of that profession, clinking his boot-spurs, swaggering prodigiously, and shooting
death-glances at all the servant girls who were worthy to be slain. (265)
Though swagger may mean something different now than it did then, it is noteworthy that in this
scene at Brighton, Jos and Becky (now married to Rawdon Crawley) banter flirtatiously, and Jos,
perhaps spiritually akin to Becky’s earlier musings, wishes that “all Cheltenham, all Chowringhee, all
Calcutta, could see him in that position, waving his hand to such a beauty, and in company with such
a famous buck as Rawdon Crawley of the Guards” (266-267). Here, then, we see the kind of wishful
imagining Jos harbors, to be seen as belonging on his own terms—in proximity to beauty and the
buck.
Of course, the triangulated desire evident in his delight at being seen with Crawley lends
credence to previous readings of Sedley as a closeted homosexual, but, as his affectation becomes
something closer to a form of drag, we can discern what kind of “position” he desires. As he continues
to, in Litvak’s formulation, show up where he isn’t wanted, Jos continues to nurture his performative
fixation on all things regimental. In the eighth number of the novel, he grows into a different kind of
imposter.
As soon as he had agreed to escort his sister abroad, it was remarked that he ceased shaving
his upper lip. At Chatham he followed the parades and drills with great assiduity. He listened
with the utmost attention to the conversation of his brother officers (as he called them in
afterdays sometimes), and learned as many military names as he could. In these studies the
excellent Mrs. O’Dowd was of great assistance to him; and on the day finally when they
embarked on board the Lovely Rose which was to carry them to their destination, he made his
appearance in a braided frock-coat and duck trousers, with a foraging cap ornamented with a
smart gold band. Having his carriage with him, and informing everybody on board
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confidentially that he was going to join the Duke of Wellington’s army, folks mistook him for
a great personage, a commissarygeneral [sic], or a government courier at the very least. (335)
At this point, Jos’s previous dalliances with military costume turn into a bona fide affectation. His
female vanity transformed into a valorization of the most masculine regimental soldier, Jos’s assiduous
“studies” of how these men dress, comport themselves, and speak amounts to an attempt at
impersonation, or, in another register, drag; and, tellingly, the assistance provided by Mrs. O’Dowd,
the Irish military wife, another sort of colonial other, equips him to act the part, but not when it really
matters. And, though he still seems to think of himself as a young blood or buck in the vein of Beau
Brummell, he even secretly belittles what he sees as “dandified airs and impudence” in Amelia’s now-
husband, George Osborne (374).
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And just when it seemed like Jos had matured into an improved,
more confident and outwardly masculine individual, his old attachments to narrating his adventures
still linger. Just before we are told of his new pursuits, Thackeray’s narrator indicates that, above all
else, it is to be “[t]hat period…which…was so full of incident, that it served him for conversation for
many years after, and even the tiger-hunt story was put aside for more stirring narratives which he had
to tell about the great campaign of Waterloo” (335).
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For his part, Osborne tells Amelia that, as an honest man himself, he has little ground or reason to consort with her brother, the fool (374).
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Chapter 4: The Woman in White’s Freak Show and the Non-Normative Body
[To readers,] Count Fosco suggested metaphysical considerations to the learned in such matters (which I don’t quite
understand to this day), besides provoking numerous inquiries as to the living model, from which he had been really taken.
I can only answer these last by confessing that many models, some living, and some dead, have ‘sat’ for him; and by hinting
that the Count would not have been as true to nature as I have tried to make him, if the range of my search for materials
had not extended, in his case as well as in others, beyond the narrow human limit which is represented by one man.
If the critic tells the story with these [plot details, spoilers], can he do it in his allotted page, or column, as the case maybe?
If he tells it without these, is he doing a fellow-labourer in another form of Art, the justice which writers owe to one
another? And lastly, if he tells it at all, in any way whatever, is he doing a service to the reader, by destroying, beforehand,
two main elements in the attraction of all stories – the interest of curiosity, and the excitement of surprise? (Collins, The
Woman in White 4-5)
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Each cultural moment has its own ideals for the body that are illustrated through its portrayal of difference, but odd bodies
are also defined by and carry implications for other ideological debates like social class and gender. Thus images of the
unusual body in circulation within a culture, like any form of text, can be read for their role in these ideological negotiations.
(Craton, The Victorian Freak Show, 5)
1. The Story Begun
At the beginning of this project, I set out to explore the history of an idea, or rather, the
contracting meaning behind an idea, obesity. From the vantage of the work of Joyce Huff, Paul
Campos, and Christopher Forth, among others, I was curious about discourses that have not yet been
previously addressed with the same force and analysis of, for example, medical or governmental
institutions. My argument, at its most ambitious, is that the trajectory from conceptions of male
corpulence to obesity, as it occurred in the nineteenth century, was far less streamlined and obvious as it
may appear to us now. Indeed, though the term “obesity,” as I have previously shown, was contested
and often unclear in relationship to corpulence and its near-synonyms, the concept was alive and well.
Covering the shifting meaning of fat from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the first
chapter provided an overview of how the change from century to century, arbitrary though it may be,
in fact signaled a distinct shift from individual, atomized understanding of physiology and medicine
to one where the “average” became the standard measurement to use. And it’s a standard that informs
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Preface to the 1860 edition of the novel.
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our present, lived experience. Quetelet’s conception of the “average man,” along with his implicit
social determinism, enabled, for both Victorians then—and us now—an understanding of subjectivity
rooted in a discourse with the force of law and the unassailability of mathematics.
This intervention, as Audrey Jaffe’s The Affective Life of The Average Man has shown, allowed
doctors, patients, insurance officers, and others, “to define the self as an effect (indeed, a
personification) of quantitative representations” (18). It is in this period, roughly the first decade
coinciding with Victoria’s first decade as Queen, where the former century’s fascination with Beau
Brummell and dandyism gave way to a “new man,” as we might understand Jos Sedley strive to be (or
self-made, new middle class). But with that came generational and social biases, among others, about
who could be such a man and under what circumstances that should obtain.
Moreover, as the previous chapters have suggested, such a shift in self-conceptualization,
among other consequences, influenced the business of life insurance, or “assurance.”
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While a
thorough evaluation of Victorian life insurance discourse is beyond the scope of this current project,
it beckons to be studied in relation to the rise of obesity.
111
Even if, not unlike our current moment,
110
If we can imagine Tony Weller as a precursor to Jos Sedley, then, I argue, we can supplement and extend work on the rise of not just medical discourse
and the effects of the New Poor Law and reform movements, by looking to the history of insurance companies, and in particular, life insurance, to better
understand this discursive shift. When the business is founded, quite literally, on banking on life and avoiding death, these institutions needn’t have been
convinced that insuring obese clients was risky—they simply operated with that notion in place regardless. And, recalling Weber’s Fatness, Overweight, and
Life Assurance, though published in 1901, references data from the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance, which had been gathering data on “overweights”
and “underweights” (the lower and upper quartiles) as far back as 1846, before the publication of Vanity Fair and not quite ten years after Tony Weller
turns to Pickwick for help managing his wife’s estate, managing, in essence, a life insurance benefit (3). As I have previously argued, the proximity of this
insurance discourse to the medical and statistical discourses of the period is undeniable. Due respect is paid to familiar names: to Quetelet, Daniel
Lambert, and George Cheyne (Walford, Insurance Guide and Handbook (1867) and Weber).
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Contributions to Vital Statistics (1845), published just before Vanity Fair, by F. G. P. Nelson, “Actuary to the Medical, Invalid, and General Life Office,”
expresses the wish that, instead of sanitation, tailors, and other classes of less active vocations, would exercise more:
It would further appear, by viewing the various classes of society more in connexion with the physical exercises to which they are habituated than in
connexion with their moral position and rank in society, and consequently with their sanitary condition, that a better clue will be found to the differences
in the duration of life. It is not to be expected that any arrangements whatever as to the drainage and planning of streets are likely to add to the longevity
of a tailor; but if it were possible to give his frame the physical exercises of a ploughman, twenty per cent. would be added to the duration of his life…If
improvements and changes are to be effected in the sanitary regulations of our large towns and cities, let them at once be carried out,—not upon the necessity
of such municipal innovations to avert a pestilential havoc in human life,—but on the true merits of the question, the comforts, conveniences, and elevation of taste and moral purity,
thence arising. (55, emphasis added)
Nelson, perhaps channeling Wadd, supports sanitary reform insofar as it will elevate society’s taste and moral purity; he doesn’t care if it also happens to
save lives, unless, we may speculate, those lives of policyholders. In reviewing these contemporaneous insurance texts, one finds a new manner of
grouping individuals, based on risk. Stillman’s The Life Insurance Examiner (1888), for example, offers a four-level classification of risks by occupation,
from most to least risky. So, a “Brakemen on freight trains” (Class I) is among the riskiest occupations, followed by “Grinder of edged tools” (Class II),
Barkeeper (Class III), and Physician (Class IV); notably, Physician, Teacher, Tanner, Policeman, and Pencil maker all carry the same level of risk (26).
And where Weber’s text was vague about how to effectively evaluate one’s level of fatness, Stillman’s offers helpful questions and details to look for
during a medical officer’s inspection. In a section on “Physique,” for example, the aim is to determine whether or not deviations from the normal weight
expected are individual or a family trait, and if the weight gained or lost has been recent and sudden. Later in the text, something of a spectrum of body
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the understanding of obesity, who was and who wasn’t, and what such a condition meant for one’s
health, was in flux and challenged by a whole host of newly professionalized authorities, the concept
of excessive male overweight, as characterized in “The Fleshy One,” exhibits a narrowing range of
meaning for male obesity, from Pickwick on.
In reviewing that novel, the concept of “flexible fat studies” was proffered, a scenario where,
depending on how one reads the novel, one might instantiate an interpretation of fatness (like a
versatile outfit upon Jos’s body) that suits just about any taste. Then, in the wake of such a difficult
interpretive dilemma, I sought to better understand how male corpulence became male obesity by
anchoring my reading of the text to contemporaneous discourses. I then explored the wider world of
Pickwiania to argue that, despite its celebration of the titular character, and the sustained legacy of the
novel throughout the century, crucial and important complications arise when we examine it in this
wider context. Consequently, I contend, in the early nineteenth century, Pickwick was both a source of
celebrity and valorization as much as it implicitly suggested that actually being a Samuel Pickwick, Fat
Joe, Tracy Tupman, Tony Weller, or a Daniel Lambert, was something else entirely, a vestige of former
days—a residue of an aging masculinity and aristocracy.
In the previous chapter, I examined Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, published a little over a decade
after Dickens’s novel. In that novel, “without a hero,” I argue, we find in the figure of Jos Sedley a
morality tale of ambitious colonial enterprise and performative transgression. Buttressing this
argument were examples from Thomas King Chambers, The Lancet, and Joshua Duke—pieces
size is offered: “compact or spare, thickset, corpulent, or emaciated. Surprisingly, the “big-boned” individual, a phrase often used to alternatively explain
one’s corpulence, is viewed as “more desirable in a risk.” And, lest the novice medical officer be left to imagine what a healthy abdomen looks like,
Stillman’s section on “Examination of the Chest” supplies an image of what, by implication, must have been an ideally proportioned man. Crucially,
however, these guides and questionnaires only consider those who, as Stillman phrases it, are not compromised by “established extreme obesity,” which
seems to be left to the medical officer’s subjective determination. Those with such a “chronic condition” are immediately disqualified from the process.
This dismissal is even more fascinating when we look at attributes that do not immediately disqualify an individual: those of the “Female sex” and persons
with “Negro blood, pure, or mixed” are still considered valid applicants, but are subject to a “special rate or premium,” usually “one-half per cent extra”
beyond the normal premium (8-9). Thus, in the eyes of medical officers, obesity is divorced from all other considerations, rendering the chances of an
obese person attaining insurance unlikely. In Stillman’s text, it transcends race and gender, and has no bearing on occupation one way or another. The
obese body tells us all we need to know, and a medical officer can make a short trip of an inspection should this be the case.
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designed to offer both a sense of how distinctively unscientific the science was as well as the perception
and implications of the colonial other.
As a contrasting example to Pickwick, Vanity Fair features comparatively little in the way of
discussing obesity or corpulence explicitly, but the novel is nevertheless committed to consistently
emphasizing Jos’s fat body, and, toward the end of the novel, when we last encounter Jos, Thackeray’s
narrator variously but emphatically labels him “Joe Sahib,” “the Indian,” and the “gentleman from
Bengal,” imbricating his body (which is, in case we had forgotten, “very fat”) with a colonial
subjectivity that erases his Britishness entirely (751; 752; 831; 837). Indeed, given how frequently the
word and color “black” are used in Vanity Fair to underscore race,
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it seems telling, given my colonial
argument, that the insurance investigation of Jos’s death is “the blackest case that ever had come
before” the solicitor (874).
In that interpretive moment—understanding Jos’s body and function in the novel despite the
relative diegetic absence of medical or statistical discursive evidence—we can observe an axiom of fat
studies that is logically prior to reading or understanding the fat body. Extending the thinking of
Gilman and Craton, with respect to the seemingly infinite reinterpretability of the fat body, there is an
overwhelming urge to understand or render intelligible the fat body. Regardless of the specific
interpretation, the need to interpret prevails. And here, again, we have another reason why fatness, in
virtually every context, seems to demand for an interpretation, a squaring of the exterior sight with
some insight into the internal, interior, psyche that exists within: “The fat body is presumed to be a
legible body; ontology implies etiology” (Huff, “Fosco’s Fat Drag” 104). And, of course, such an
assumption certainly underwrites the inquiry of this project. But if we needed to turn to the
“prosthetic” extensions of Pickwick to better situate the topic, and to explore the colonial anxieties in
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We have already seen John Sedley’s use of the term in expressing his anxiety that Jos will marry an Indian woman, but it is also quite present (even
overmuch given the accompanying illustrations) in the failed courtship between Miss Swartz, “the rich woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,” and George
Osborne, in the novel’s fifth number.
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Vanity Fair to better understand it there, this final chapter presents us with an altogether different
problem—the incompatibility of character.
In the previous chapters, I have suggested that both Pickwick and Vanity Fair, as texts, exhibit
a kind of narrative progression with respect to the fat male bodies they contain. In Dickens’s text, the
development operates generically, from, broadly, theater to realism. In Thackeray’s novel, that
progression can be seen by closely examining the scenes at Vauxhall, Waterloo, and Germany where
we spend sustained narrative time with the peripatetic Jos. In Collins’s The Woman in White, the
progression I mean to examine operates as a process of normalization throughout the movement of
the novel. Initially populated with a variety of quirky “freaks,” I argue, the novel systematically changes
these characters or removes them entirely, so that, by its conclusion, the reader ends the novel on a
scene of the (perverse) heteronormative family,
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with all freaks removed or “corrected,” so to speak.
Put differently, if The Woman in White is initially populated with bodies and physical attributes that are
incongruous with “normal” or “average,” it returns us to a semblance of physical normality by its
close.
Some care, however, must be exercised in deploying the word “freak” in this discussion, for,
in the same way that Roxane Gay points to the foreclosed meaning conveyed in the modern use of
“obesity,” it is difficult, from our perspective, to think of performers in freak shows as anything but
“a self-evident anomaly with which someone is born” (Victorian Freaks 4). To be sure, biological
anomalies were certainly a large part of the attraction, but as Marlene Tromp and Karyn Valerius have
argued (and this project has taken as implicit), “the body and its characteristics only come to mean
something within a particular social and conceptual system,” and, as result, it is “because we frame
something as freakish that it becomes freakish to us” (Victorian Freaks 3; 4). Moreover, in Matthew
Sweet’s introduction to the Penguin edition of The Woman in White, these exhibitions of non-normative
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I thank Joe Boone for reminding me of this perversion.
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bodies drew more than simply those interested in the most lurid displays.
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And, similar to the
interpretive quandary stimulating my use of “flexible fat studies,” the relationships and perceptions of
freaks at the time was far wider and ambivalent than what the term may conjure today.
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As an example, a poster for Mrs. Elizabeth Armitage, “A Rival to the Celebrated DANIEL
LAMBERT,” from 1846, treats her large size with rather more respect and sensitivity than we might
expect (Figure 1). Compared to the portrait of Shakarm in The Lancet, at the least, the advertisement
is far more sensitive in expressing her positive qualities, that just so happen to be contained within her
“tout ensemble, denominated portly.” Supplemented with notes of endorsement from Dr. John Thatcher
(who, curiously, describes Armitage as “more perfect than the celebrated Lambert”)
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and the Glasgow
Constitutional, the poster conspicuously omits the word “freak” entirely. Thus, within the context of
this discussion on The Woman in White, “freak” is not meant to refer to an extreme or superlative form
of the non-normative body, though, of course, in Fosco, we have an appropriate example, but also to
those characters that, to varying degrees, disrupt and complicate normative assumptions about the
body. As we will see, beyond the most obvious example in Fosco, Collins’s novel delights in presenting
characters that confuse assumptions about conventional masculinity and femininity, and, as the novel
progresses, omitting or correcting such characterological traits, implicitly underscoring the reification
of the average or normative body.
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“Freak shows – entertainments that now seem indefensible, but in their day were attended by people as respectable as you or I – enjoyed remarkable
success throughout the 1850s and 60s, with bizarre personalities such as Julia Pastrana the Bear Woman (first exhibited 1857) and the Sensational Talking
Fish (1859) dispensing thrills for a shilling to the paying public, under the guise of scientific edification. (For an extra fee, your favourite freak could also
visit you in your own home)” (The Woman in White xv).
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“This is not to elide the exploitation of freak performers or the asymmetrical power relations between audiences and performers. It does, however,
challenge us to imagine that, while freak shows did help to materialize the politically invested distinction between the normal and the pathological, the
relationship between the terms was not always simple and was always heavily inflected by social engagement. Freaks provoked both identification and
disavowal. The ambiguity, rhetorical excess, and ambivalence mobilized by the freak could work to oppose the standard for normalcy—to destabilize its
naturalized status—as well as to produce and confirm it” (Victorian Freaks 9).
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Even more curious is his claim that he considers “her an astonishing prodigy of development.”
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Figure 26 - Cosmorama Rooms Poster (1846)
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2. Isidor Ottavio Baldassare Fosco: “A Very Undecipherable Villain”
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In this section, I examine Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, with particular emphasis on
Count Fosco. To sketch out my argument, I will start by reviewing the success of the novel and the
contemporary response to Collins’s villain, and then survey the most salient critical work on Fosco, in
part to demonstrate his enduring draw to readers then and now. In my reading of the novel, Count
Fosco is one of many freaks we encounter, and consequently demands some attention to the
institution of the Victorian freak show. Fosco, I claim, is a freak in the novel—designed to be looked
at as a curiosity, but, more than that, Fosco is a freak existing outside of a freak show. Displaced from
that context, his presence is transgressive and threatening, and in the novel’s resolution, his lifeless
body is returned to an appropriate forum for display. But, as the novel progresses, a broader trend
emerges, where, not just Fosco, but several other non-normative bodies undergo either transformation
or, in death, elimination, from the text. Consequently, the novel’s progress in this manner can be read
as a culling of the “odd bodied,” as Craton phrases it; or, in a now-familiar register, a contraction of
variety—a return to the concept of the “average” body.
But first, a summary of the novel, given its complex form, is in order. The novel’s primary
character, Walter Hartright, is a drawing master. On the last evening of July, he makes his way from
London to Hampstead to visit his mother, his sister Sarah, and Professor Pesca, an Italian teacher and
close friend of Walter’s. During this, he learns from Pesca that a family in Cumberland is in need of
an art teacher and decides to pursue the post. Later that night, after the summer heat has given way
to a more comfortable climate, Walter decides to walk back to London. Along the way, he comes to
a crossroads, and while “idly wondering…what the Cumberland young ladies would look like,”
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Unsigned review, Saturday Review 8/25/1860; source: Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage.
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abruptly “every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop by the touch of a hand laid lightly
and suddenly on my shoulder from behind me” (22). The encounter,
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quick and jarring, continues:
I turned on the instant, with my fingers tightening round the handle of my stick.
There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road – there, as if it had that moment sprung
out of the earth or dropped from the heaven – stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed
from head to foot in white garments; her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing
to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her.
I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition
stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The
strange woman spoke first.
‘Is that the road to London?’ she said. (23-24)
Walter, still startled by her seeming spontaneous manifestation, doesn’t immediately answer. She asks
him the same question again, and he answers. Anxious that he thinks her suspicious, she defensively
insists that she has done nothing wrong and has “met with an accident,” explaining her presence on
the road so late at night (24). Their conversation continues, and the mysterious woman asks him if he
knows “men of rank and title” in London, to which Walter replies, after some confusion, affirmatively
(26). She then expresses her hope that he doesn’t know a particular Baronet, but refuses to name him
or offer anything further. Walter surmises that this Baronet is responsible for the woman’s misfortune
but is unable to glean more about his identity. While the two talk, she is skittish and changes subjects
on Walter. Toward the end of their conversation, he lets her know that while he technically does live
in London, he will likely be away due to the job opportunity Pesca presented to him earlier that
evening. After some discussion, he tells her he will be in Cumberland, at Limmeridge House.
Coincidentally, the woman reflects that she “was once happy in Cumberland,” and renders Walter
“staggered with astonishment” by telling him that she has personal knowledge of Limmeridge House,
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What D. A. Miller and others have referred to as the novel’s “primal scene.”
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the residence of his new employer, Frederick Fairlie (28). Shortly after, they come to a turnpike just
inside London and Walter directs her to the nearest cabstand.
After they have parted ways, an open chaise with two men stop, and within earshot of Walter,
ask a policeman if he has seen a woman. After some deliberation between the men in the chaise, they
agree that it would be a woman in white they’re after. With the policeman replying in the negative, the
two men speed on, punctuating their brief stop and interview by telling him that she has escaped from
an asylum. Further dismayed, Walter walks the rest of the way home worried that he has somehow
aided the woman. From there, he takes up the position at Limmeridge House, where Frederick Fairlie
hires him as a drawing master for his niece, Laura Fairlie, and her half-sister, Marian Holcombe.
Some months pass, and we learn that Laura bears a striking resemblance to the woman he
encountered that night at the end of July. Walter falls in love with Laura, who is already engaged to be
married to Sir Percival Glyde, Baronet. Because it would not do to have Laura dissolve her engagement
to a man of rank, Marian advises Walter to leave his position, and he does so, joining an expedition to
Honduras. Laura marries Glyde during Walter’s absence, despite an anonymous letter warning her
against the marriage. We learn that this letter came from Anne Catherick, the woman in white. Anne
claims to know a secret about Glyde, but her mental instability and ill health make her unreliable. After
the marriage, Glyde’s behavior towards Laura changes for the worse. Verbal and physical abuse ensue,
and along with his overt interest in establishing Laura’s inheritance as his property, cause Marian to
be suspicious of Glyde and his Italian companion, the prodigiously fat, smart, and baffling Count
Fosco.
Together, Walter, Marian, and Laura eventually discover that Glyde’s lineage was forged, thus
making him illegitimate in both name and marriage, and that Glyde convinced Anne Catherick’s
mother, Jane, to assist in his forged identity. What’s more, Fosco and Glyde conspired to switch the
identities of Anne Catherick and Laura Fairlie, exchanging their positions so that Anne (as Laura)
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would die quickly while Laura (as Anne) would be dismissed as mentally incompetent in the asylum
and forgotten. With Anne (as Laura) dead, Glyde, momentarily, has sole right of her substantial wealth.
The final segment of the novel has Glyde attempting to destroy evidence of his forgery but
dying in the process, while Pesca assists Walter in finding and dispatching with Fosco, but only after
he has written a full confession detailing his motives and actions. With Glyde, Fosco, and Frederick
Fairlie dead and Laura restored to her rightful place at Limmeridge House, the novel ends with Walter
Hartright and Laura Fairlie married, and a new heir, in the form of their son, to the estate.
Though the plot of the novel may be deceptively simple when reconstructed, the form of the
text makes the experience of reading the book more labyrinthine. Using a technique often explained
by way of Collins’s legal training in the 1840s, the text is organized into “Epochs,” with testimony, so
to speak, from, among others, Walter Hartright, Marian Halcombe, Count Fosco, Frederick Fairlie,
and Robert Gilmore, solicitor to the Fairlies. Occasionally, the text is supplemented by an unidentified
narrator serving as an editor to the collection of materials.
Published from November of 1859 through August of the following year in Dickens’s own
All the Year Round, The Woman in White was an instant success. At present, it is widely regarded as the
first sensation novel, though that claim has been challenged.
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That generic instability
notwithstanding, the success and popularity of The Woman in White certainly helped put Fosco’s
character into wider circulation (and so much so that many critics point out that Oscar Wilde adopted
“Fosco” as his nickname while an undergraduate). But that circulation does not mean that
contemporary reviewers felt confident in their understanding of him. As Huff summarizes it,
Nineteenth-century reviewers labeled Fosco a mystery. For example, an unsigned 1860 review
in the Times describes Fosco as a “mystified character” and “an enigmatical personage.” The
same critic goes on to compare Fosco to Harold Skimpole from Dickens’s Bleak House,
because he raises similar questions regarding the sincerity of his performance. Likewise, an
anonymous critic in the Saturday Review referred to Fosco as “what Mr. Wilkie Collins is so
fond of—a puzzle”: “Subtract from him his eccentricities, his Italianisms and his corpulency—
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Rachel Ablow’s “Good Vibrations: The Sensation of Masculinity in The Woman in White,” offers a discussion of this debate.
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what is left? Simply this, that he is a very undecipherable villain.” The reviewer lumps
eccentricities, Italianisms and corpulency together as nonessential, part of the mask Fosco
wears, and yet he or she does not find a stable, “true” identity with which to contrast these
external trappings. The reviewer concludes, however, that this is a strength of Fosco’s
character: “Human nature is an enigma which the truest painter will leave unsolved and
unattempted.” (“Fosco’s Fat Drag” 95)
And such confusion is understandable, for, as Marian Halcombe observes, “he is immensely fat,”
which is a hard detail to accept because, prior to meeting Fosco, Marian had “always especially disliked
corpulent humanity” (217). But by the end of their first meeting, he gains her “favour, at one day’s
notice, without let or hindrance from his own odious corpulence” (217). Moving from his body to his
face, Marian is mesmerized by his eyes, “the most unfathomable gray eyes I ever saw: and they have
at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them, which forces me to look at him” (218). His
command of English, she speculates, probably also contributes to her positive impression of him.
Moreover, his conversational demeanor is marked by “quiet deference,” “pleased, attentive interest,”
and “that secret gentleness in his voice” that no woman can resist (218).
Despite his imposing figure, “his movements are light and easy…as noiseless in a room as any
of us women” (219). The comparison to women, of course, we know to be part and parcel of the
novel, and the more overt moments of gender fluidity/confusion inform many of the critical
engagements of the novel. But Marian’s evaluation is not complete, for among these other qualities,
ones “strikingly original and perplexingly contradictory,” “he is as nervously sensitive as the weakest
of us” (219). He is easily startled at strange noises, and winces and shudders when Percival beats one
of the dogs at Blackwater Park. His fondness and sensitivity to animals, “one of his most curious
peculiarities,” manifests most distinctly in the entourage of pets he brings with him, his extended
family (220).
he has brought with him to this house a cockatoo, two canary-birds, and a whole family of
white mice. He attends to all the necessities of these strange favourites himself, and he has
taught the creatures to be surprisingly fond of him, and familiar with him. The cockatoo, a
most vicious and treacherous bird towards every one else, absolutely seems to love him. When
he lets it out of its cage, it hops on to his knee, and claws its way up his great big body, and
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rubs its top-knot against his sallow double chin in the most caressing manner imaginable…His
white mice live in a little pagoda of gaily-painted wirework, designed and made by himself.
They are almost as tame as the canaries, and they are perpetually let out, like the canaries. They
crawl all over him, popping in and out of his waistcoat, and sitting in couples, white as snow,
on his capacious shoulders. He seems to be even fonder of his mice than of his other pets,
smiles at them, and kisses them, and calls them by all sorts of endearing names. If it be possible
to suppose an Englishman with any taste for such childish interests and amusements as these,
that Englishman would certainly feel rather ashamed of them, and would be anxious to
apologise for them, in the company of grown-up people. (219-220)
The Count, of course, is not embarrassed by his adoration for his pets, and, in fact, his capacity to
tame animals (and, as we read on, humans) is sustained throughout the novel. Indeed, after he
effusively reacts to Percival’s abuse, he approaches “a chained bloodhound, a beast so savage that the
very groom who feeds him keeps out of his reach,” and, after quickly rendering the bloodhound docile,
starts at the dog’s slobber having gotten on to his waistcoat. Like Berry Huckel from “The Fleshy
One,” or Tracy Tupman, or Jos Sedley, Fosco “is fond of fine clothes as the veriest fool in existence;
and has appeared in four magnificent waistcoats, already – all of light garish colours, and all immensely
large even for him – in the two days” since his arrival (221).
And so, through Marian’s evaluation, we have been introduced to Fosco’s size, his mesmeric
eyes, his facility with English, his performances with his pets (although he also performs without
animal accompaniment, singing Figaro’s “The Barber of Seville” while playing a concertina), and his
penchant for loud clothing. But, his external size is matched by an internal knowledge that is equally
broad: Fosco “can talk, when anything happens to rouse him, with a daring independence of thought,
a knowledge of books in every language, and an experience of society in half the capitals of Europe,
which would make him the prominent personage of any assembly in the civilised world” (220). And,
in a discussion about virtue and whether or not it exists outside of a given context, Fosco defends his
uncertainty by declaiming that he is “a citizen of the world,” and having been introduced to a variety
of forms of virtue, is unable to settle on one that may be universalized (234). In terms of more specific
knowledge, we learn that, in a sly foreshadowing of his own fate, the Count is “one of the first
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experimental chemists living, and has discovered, among other wonderful inventions, a means of
petrifying the body after death, so as to preserve it, as hard as marble, to the end of time” (220).
Rounding out this sketch, we may add Fosco’s liking for bon bons, cigarettes, pastry, and sugar and
water.
There’s more to be said of Fosco, and, indeed, many other critics have. Perhaps the most
influential reading of the character comes from D. A. Miller’s “Cage aux folles: Sensation and Gender
in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White,” later incorporated into The Novel and the Police. Among other
contributions, Miller’s virtuosic reading explores the mechanism and effects of the sensation genre,
isolating Collins’s novel, “of all sensation novels considered the best and best known,” to explore the
topic of discipline, and the disciplinary subject, where the “sensationalized body both dramatizes and
facilitates his functioning as the subject/object of continual supervision” (108; 114). Arguing for the primary
shock of “homosexual panic and heterosexual violence” at the core of the novel, Miller reads the
gender fluidity, and Fosco in particular, as signs pointing to the fear of the closeted homosexual and
the negotiations the novel undertakes to conceal that reality.
Since Miller, other critics have followed his path, either to agree with some of the argument,
or to offer alternative readings. To name but a few examples, M. Kellen Williams contributes an
extension of Miller’s take, so that “while the ‘sensationalized body’ may indeed be crucial to our
understanding of how [the novel] constructs masculinity and femininity…that
understanding…remains incomplete without taking into account the sexed body as well” (93). More
recently, Monica Flegel eschewing Miller in favor of an argument about domestic masculinity and the
home. She interprets Fosco’s affection for animals as a critique of domestic, familial Victorian
masculinity, thereby challenging “the narrative of the animal-loving family man and all that figure is
mean to uphold” in the period (99). Richard Nemesvari fastens upon the “threat posed by improper
masculinities,” considering Fosco’s foreignness as a crucial element of the masculinity he represents,
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arguing, by virtue, that “the text that initiated the Victorian sensation fiction craze combines
xenophobia with homophobia so that the one reinforces the other” (603; 604).
For the purposes of my argument, two pieces of criticism have been most useful. The first,
Flora de Giovanni’s “Displaying the Anomalous Body, Wilkie Collins’s Freak Show,” surveys a host
of Collins novels to show how the non-normative bodies frequently on display evidence a likeness to
the Victorian Freak Show. “The literary display of their impairment, in fact, appears to resemble, in
devices and effect, the freak shows of an age that Punch called of ‘deformito-mania’” (153). Second,
Joyce Huff’s “Fosco’s Fat Drag” ingeniously reads the ambiguity of the Count’s corpulence (it is said
that he radically altered his appearance after leaving Italy and the Brotherhood, leaving open the
possibility that part of the disguise was owed to his increased proportions) as a form of drag, where
he “espouses a notion of corporeal identity that prefigures Butler’s theory of performativity…he
appropriates and redeploys dominant Victorian constructions of fat in a way that exposes their social
construction and reveals the coercive nature of bodily norms in general” (90). In the remainder of this
section, I will draw these two pieces together to argue that Fosco’s ultimate incommensurability within
the novel, and, for viewers of Collins’s play adaptation, are illuminated by the notion of the Victorian
freak show, as it surfaces in the novel and as it waned in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
Reflecting on his presentation in the novel, however, I would argue that, following de
Giovanni and Huff, Fosco’s incommensurability comes from, at least in part, the fact that, as readers,
and well before we meet the Count, we are unwittingly invited into a version of the Victorian freak
show. According to Lillian Craton,
The growing social impulse to explain and control difference altered the nature of bodily
spectacle, and thus Victorian freak shows were increasingly criticized for their challenges to
middle-class ideology…Spectacles of bodily difference…changed venue over the course of
the century, moving from the hedonistic fairground to the more restrained surgical theater and
public hall, and ultimately to the museum, a venue that promises defined meaning as well as
entertainment. (26)
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Returning to the novel, then, it may be less surprising to recall that when Professor Pesca first enters
the narrative (and then leaves for the majority of it, returning at the end), the diminutive Italian teacher
(and eventual foil to Fosco) Walter muses that he was “the smallest human being I ever saw, out of a
show-room”
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(11). Though Pesca is “not actually a dwarf – for he was perfectly well-proportioned
from head to foot,”
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Walter still suggests the site of the freak show as a near-suitable location for his
height-challenged friend (11).
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Pesca’s non-normativity, beyond his size, extends to “the eccentric
little foreigner[‘s]” Italian nationality and inelegant attempts “to turn himself into an Englishman,” a
detail that helps to set apart, and render more offensive, Fosco’s complete refusal to do the same (14;
11).
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But if Pesca’s presence in the very first pages of the novel explicitly points to the freak show,
we are also given an indirect reference to the kinds of non-normativity we will see later at the very
start of the novel, in its opening sentence: “this is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure,
and what a Man’s resolution can achieve” (9). If we take seriously the claim, then, what we should
expect to find, by the end of the novel, is something amounting to the triumph of womanly patience
and manly resolution. What we get, before the end, however, is an array of non-normative characters
that often exhibit a marked mixture of these putatively gendered qualities. Frederick Fairlie, though
not apparently physically non-normative, expresses to Walter
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a mixture of femininity and
masculinity that the newly appointed teacher finds confusing (42).
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Moreover, Fairlie will later allude
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“Show-room,” here, is glossed simply as “[a] freak show” (655).
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And, to further support this, such phrasing of his body as “well-proportioned” or “perfect” proliferates in posters for Victorian freak shows, as we
have seen with Armitage.
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Later, Collins himself seems to have been taken with such specific imagery, metaphorically likening the effects of speech to bodies, it should be noted,
above and below the average: “[o]ur words are giants when they do us an injury, and dwarfs when they do us a service” (64). Even in Old Welmingham,
Jane Catherick informs Walter that when he goes to the vestry to investigate Glyde’s lineage, he may notice a petition aimed at barring a circus from
performing because of its ability to “corrupt morals” (487).
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For Nemesvari, this element is foundational to his argument: “Victorian England often defined itself against what it saw as the moral failings, and
sexual perversities [of the ‘European Other’]…In The Woman in White Italy is presented as the source of all those forces that subvert English law, both
moral and judicial, and that undermine British masculinity,” which, in turn, leads Nemesvari to conclude that “the text that initiated the Victorian
sensation fiction craze combines xenophobia with homophobia so that the one reinforces the other” (604).
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There is, it must be admitted, a separate project focusing on the various gazes and estimations of characters operating in the novel, if one hasn’t
already been essayed.
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One might make the argument, however, that in the unclassifiability of Fairlie’s condition, outside of the parameters, according to Marian, of
contemporary medicine, his character is most anomalous in its incompatibility, and thus freedom from, “the tyranny of expert medical opinion” (xxiv).
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to the novel’s opening sentence by claiming exhaustion at being made to offer his own testimony:
there are “limits to his endurance” (345). Furthermore, given his role as protagonist, manly resolve is
often considered in relation to Walter’s trajectory, but it also manifests, chillingly, in Fosco’s method
of exerting control over his wife, “quiet resolution” (323).
This particular sort of gender trouble also manifests on the body. We quickly meet with a
reinforcement and repetition of Walter’s first impression of Frederick Fairlie just a few pages later,
during his initial meeting of Marian. In one of the most critically cited passages of the novel, Walter’s
initial study of Marian’s form (she’s standing with her back to him) begins with an outright celebration
of her seeming physical perfection. Whereas, earlier, when he is surprised by the woman in white, he
notes her “above the average height,” in this moment he registers Marian’s figure as “tall, yet not too
tall” (24; 34, emphasis added). In this instance, comparison to the average is explicit and then
reiterated, albeit in less specific terms—as though, having mentioned the average once, all later
descriptions refer to it tacitly. However, celebration turns to bewilderment when Marian turns around.
Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted –
never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more strangely and startingly belied by the face
and head that crowned it. The lady’s complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on
her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw;
prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low
down on her forehead. Her expression – bright, frank, and intelligent – appeared, while she
was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability,
without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. (34-35)
Much has been made of this passage, with obvious implications by virtue of the gender confusion and
seemingly incompatible features of Marian’s body, but Rebecca Stern’s work on Juliana Pastrana, a
well-known Victorian freak (named “Bear Woman” in one advertisement) suggests a stronger
connection to the freak show.
126
Accordingly, Walter’s reaction can also be understood as a jolt at
126
“Wilkie Collins’s depiction of the troublingly hirsute but explicitly engaging Marian Halcombe in The Woman in White emerges shortly after Pastrana’s
first London appearance. Walter Hartright’s first response to Marian repeats almost verbatim the rhetoric that various handbills used to promote Pastrana.
Consider, for example, his admiration of ‘the rare beauty of her form’ and ‘the unaffected grace of her attitude’ when Marian’s back is turned toward
him. His admiration turns to shock when he first sees her face…” (“Our Bear Women, Ourselves,” Victorian Freaks 226)
164
witnessing the non-normative figure of Marian. Though not quite a bearded lady, she does have hair
enough for “almost a moustache,” along with “a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw,” which appear
to shock and intrigue with similar force, causing him “to feel a sensation oddly akin to the helpless
discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and
contradictions of a dream” (35, emphasis added).
127
Beyond the scope of Walter’s gaze and estimation,
Marian herself admits that her hands are “as awkward as a man’s,” and, initially enamored with Fosco,
is flattered by the way he speaks with her “as seriously and sensibly as if I was a man” (222). In Fosco’s
case, we shouldn’t find it surprising that he vacillates, at points, from masculine, “quiet resolution” to
sharing, he claims, the same delight women and children have for “sweets” (289).
Other forms of non-normative bodies populate the beginning of the novel. At the level of
secondary characters, Mr. Merriman, Glyde’s solicitor, actually precedes Fosco as the first notably fat
male, who, though aptly named in the vein of Hardy’s “cheery-fat,” is also quite an ineffective
negotiator, according to the Fairlies’ counterpart, Vincent Gilmore (152). Mrs. Vesey, whose “plump,
placid face,” I would argue, operates metonymically with respect to the rest of her body, is
distinguished by her unmatched indolence, and, though put politely, is deemed by Walter an accident
of nature (48).
128
Even, permitting a leap beyond character, on a formal level, the odd bodied Fosco reproduces
the distress and stupefaction Walter experiences by literally invading Marian’s narrative. In a fevered
frenzy after spying on a private conversation between Fosco and “his more ‘masculine,’ less
aristocratic sidekick, Sir Percival Glyde,” Marian falls ill and eventually contracts typhus (Between Men
127
Collins uses dreams frequently to describe encounters with other characters. Earlier, when Walter is first stunned by the instant materialization of the
woman in white, he describes it as “like a dream” (26).
128
“A mild, a compliant, an unutterably tranquil and harmless old lady, who never by any chance suggested the idea that she had been actually alive since
the hour of her birth. Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must
surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from
this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the
good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all” (48-49). What Hartright’s characterization
presumes, however, is that this “vegetable preoccupation” is tied to her inveterate laziness and disclosed through her body.
165
175). The text dramatically breaks off at the height of her illness, and a mysterious postscript, “by a
sincere friend,” and later signed by Fosco, the appended text endorses Marian’s description of him
and his battery of “incomprehensible oddities,” lamenting their oppositional relationship. In what
seems to be a moment of genuine affection, he pays Marian the complement of his adoration and
sincere appreciation for her loyalty to Laura,
129
observational acumen, and cunning.
130
For the reader,
Fosco’s corporeal largesse, excessive as it is, exhibits its power by literally spilling over into another
discursive location, Marian’s diary. Though there is no physical freak show to speak of within the
novel, this formal rupture, this ekphrasis, to paraphrase Walter Hartright, is at the very least a fascinating
substitute for it, outside of a show-room.
131
Marian’s illness, and subsequent recovery, also indexes a shift away from the non-normative
bodies and their resonances that populate the first half of the novel. As mentioned earlier, this is
achieved by either a sort of physical transformation or an outright elimination, through death. By the
novel’s end, Sir Percival Glyde, Frederick Fairlie, and Fosco have all died. Marian, seemingly changed
in Walter’s eyes, and, as result, to the reader as well, loses her previously noteworthy masculine traits,
closing out the novel’s final line as “the good angel of our lives” (627). Even the more minor
characters, like Mrs. Vesey and Mr. Merriman, disappear from the novel. Walter, himself essentially
the normative center of the novel, also changes after his tenure in Central America. For most critics,
this change is interpreted as “a forcefully successful masculinity…represented as Walter becoming
worthy of his eventual rewards: marriage, social status, wealth, and a male heir” (Nemesvari 605).
129
Though Laura is quite conventionally attractive and the consistent object of Walter’s love, she expresses a wish, just before her marriage to Sir Percival
Glyde, (in an unsettling prefiguring of her internment in the asylum) to be an unthinking body: “don’t let me think,” she begs of Marian (187).
130
“The presentation of my own character is masterly in the extreme. I certify, with my whole heart, to the fidelity of the portrait. I feel how vivid an
impression I must have produced to have been painted in such strong, such rich, such massive colours as these. I lament afresh the cruel necessity which
sets our interests at variance, and opposes us to each other. Under happier circumstances how worthy I should have been of Miss Halcombe – how
worthy Miss Halcombe would have been of ME” (336-337). Nemesvari makes more literal sense of this, arguing that “Fosco does not fall in love with
a woman, he falls in love with a man-in-a-woman’s body, and in doing so, he both reveals his perverse foreign desires and brings about his own
destruction” (622).
131
Walter himself, it can be argued, occupies the spectator position for a couple different instances of quasi-freak show exhibition. At the vestry in Old
Welmingham, he literally watches Percival transform from a body into a pile of ash; at the end of the novel, he notices the crowd of Parisians marveling
at Fosco’s naked obesity, but does not realize he is one of the crowd, too.
166
What seems to go unnoticed, or at least unincorporated, into this reading is how Marian imagines this
shift occurring symbolically. In a curious phantasmagoric vision, she sees Walter in a forest of tropical
trees, facing adversity but nevertheless maintaining a determined commitment to overcome whatever
obstacle. In the second of four visions, she sees him thus:
He was still in the forest; and the numbers of his lost companions had dwindled to very few.
The temple was gone, and the idols were gone – and, in their place, the figures of dark,
dwarfish men lurked murderously among the trees, with bows in their hands, and arrows fitted
to the string. Once more, I feared for Walter, and cried out to warn him. Once more, he turned
to me, with the immovable quiet in his face. ‘Another step,’ he said, ‘on the dark road. Wait
and look. The arrows that strike the rest, will spare me.’ (274)
Here, in this excerpt, we cannot help but notice how the figure of the dwarf, formerly instantiated
with Pesca, has taken on new, colonial valences in Marian’s imaginary. Though Walter is not a freak,
he certainly seems to guard against their represented threat in this scene. Stoically confident that he
will overcome, Walter returns, as he has promised her in this phantasm, hearty and hale—a triumph
of manly resolution, indeed. Moreover, this scene is the last time the word “dwarf” appears in the
novel. Even when the dwarf-like Pesca returns to assist Walter in finding and finishing Fosco, his size
is no longer described as such, and is even put to use advantageously in spying on him at the opera
(571).
In fact, of all the non-normative bodies encountered above, the Count’s is the only one that
makes it through the novel to the very end. An inimitable “magician,” a freak without a show, Fosco’s
“voracious vanity,” perhaps consonant with Jos Sedley’s, and his flouting of English national
convention and gendered subjectivity, register in his oversized body, well above the average, if we
stick with Walter’s use of the term (217; 569). Constantly performing with his coterie of animals, even
to the point of “exercising,” or, I would say, rehearsing with them in private, the world of the novel
is his stage (566). Except, as we draw the novel to a close, that stage is no longer commensurate with
the vastness of the novel’s world. Even posthumously, Fosco’s life and contradictions, all that his
“odious corpulence” contains, is erased (217). Though Madame Fosco writes a biography of her
167
deceased husband, it is reductive and pedestrian, echoing the same nostalgia for the bygone stratified
aristocracy to which Frederick Fairlie cannot let go and Percival Glyde cannot justifiably maintain.
132
In other words, the elements of his life that are shared by many—those that we might consider
average. The grandiosity of the character, therefore, is flattened into simply a grandiose body, naked,
and in the service of “something…which excited the popular curiosity, and fed the popular appetite
for horror” (622-623). As the novel fades out on a scene of perverse, though legibly heteronormative
resolution, Fosco’s incompatible body is enclosed within a scene of display.
There he lay, unowned, unknown; exposed to the flippant curiosity of a French mob! There
was the dreadful end of that long life of degraded ability and heartless crime! Hushed in the
sublime repose of death, the broad, firm, massive face and head fronted us so grandly, that
the chattering Frenchwomen about me lifted their hands in admiration, and cried in shrill
chorus, ‘Ah, what a handsome man!’ (623)
For all his work in populating his fiction with non-normative characters, one disadvantage, in this
context, of Collins’s novel is the culling of the non-normative characters evident in the narrative’s
unfolding. And yet, such a venue for this body, twice removed from his own nation, does not do
justice to the character it once contained. The “shrill chorus” that cries out in response to this spectacle
only manages the most basic, even asinine, complement. Fosco’s freakery, contrasted with Lambert,
Armitage and Pastrana, isn’t even positioned as unique or interesting, but merely “handsome.” Fosco’s
excesses, then, are only vaguely evident in this display, a specimen of the non-normative, and a very
limited one at that.
132
“The work throws no light whatever on the name that was really his own, or on the secret history of his life: it is almost entirely devoted to the praise
of his domestic virtues, the assertion of his rare abilities, and the enumeration of the honours conferred on him. The circumstances attending his death
are very briefly noticed; and are summed up, on the last page, in this sentence: – ‘His life was one long assertion of the rights of the aristocracy, and the
sacred principles of Order – and he died a Martyr to his cause’” (624-625).
168
3. “the Fosco of Mr. Vining…is one of the most elaborate failures, in the way of dramatic art…in recent times”
133
The play adaptation of The Woman in White, written by Collins and first performed in 1871, did
not meet with the same success as his novel. Curiously, reviewers of the play version were not
impressed with the Fosco they saw on stage. This shift from confusion to rejection, from novel to
play, functions as a point of departure and reflection on the previous chapters.
That Collins’s Count Fosco generated mystery and puzzlement is undeniable. That The Woman
in White has been the source of much critical work since, is equally irrefutable. So what caused such a
backlash to the stage performance of the novel, roughly ten years after it swept the nation?
134
To be
sure, some of the incongruity is due no doubt to the change in medium. Whereas in the novel, for
example, Fosco’s subtle overtaking of Marian’s narrative creeps into our minds as we read, like Miller’s
sensationalized reader, to our surprise and shock, the stage version, by its very form, is unable to
duplicate such intimacy. And, by way of distinguishing this novel from Pickwick and Vanity Fair, The
Woman in White does not include illustrations or other images—as readers, we have our mind’s eye to
imagine the Count. Contemporary reviewers seemed to fasten upon the actor, George Vining, for the
failure of the portrayal. Collins, ever in contact with the press and the critics he read, was quick to
defend Vining, and pin the blame on the process of adaptation itself. In a letter to The Telegraph, a day
after the review from the Daily News, from which I draw this section’s epigram appeared, he politely
states his case.
I have no wish to intrude on your valuable space with any critical theories of my own. I only
ask to let you remind the writer of the notice that the difficulties in the way of presenting this
character on the stage are enormous. Knowing those difficulties as I do, it seems only due
from me to Mr. Vining to say, that I carefully considered what I was trusting to him when I
asked him to play ‘Fosco’, and that his representation of the part thoroughly satisfies me. (The
Woman in White, 637)
133
Daily News, 10/11/1871.
134
Sweet, in his introduction to the novel, cites Edmund Yates, in the same year as the play’s debut, to suggest that the novel’s success was further
reaching: “the novel was ‘known to the entire world through the medium of translation into every civilized language’. It was ‘a book that at once placed
the author in the front rank of European novelists’” (xx).
169
It was fortuitous, in retrospect, for Collins to publicly reiterate his endorsement of Vining, for just a
few months later he fell ill and left the production, never able to offer an improved version for the
audience or such exacting critics.
In this way, then, Fosco has continued to puzzle readers, audiences, and actors since his
inception, and attempting to isolate the features that simultaneously attract and repulse us seems to
be a perpetual activity.
This disparity between the literary and theatrical versions of the character carves out an area
of further study. If, as mentioned above, we think of the different responses to the Fosco iterations
as divided between “reading fat” and “seeing fat,” then more research into the experiential or
phenomenological mechanics of reading, as opposed to sight, is in order. In other words, what is the
difference between reading fat and seeing fat?
135
If we are reading fat, does that suggest an altogether
different sense of engagement with the fat body? Under what conditions does seeing a fat body
amount to knowing a fat body?
On the subject of difference with respect to fat, we can say with justification that the unclear
relationship between male “corpulence” and “obesity,” especially given the medical valence and
presumed unassailable truth of science, comes as a surprise. Science, despite its importance and
relevance, historically, is not always rooted in scientific fact. Further, this fuzzy relationship between
the two terms generates a scenario where one’s fatness is to be judged, like Jos Sedley’s amour propre,
from an outside or external evaluation. One may not necessarily even know that they are “too fat,” at
least until we incorporate an understanding of the “average man.”
But now, after nearly two centuries of the concept, measuring oneself relative to the average
has become naturalized, and, as averages and all the benefits that statistics and quantification bring to
135
I thank Sarah Banet-Weiser for this insightful observation.
170
our daily lives, we operate, seemingly, with a nearly unconscious acceptance of the notion. Perhaps we
are hardwired to recognize and mistrust human body difference. Perhaps, on the other hand, we are
conditioned to do so by virtue of the hegemony of normality. I’m less interested in the causes or
explanations for this response than I am in the behavior it produces: we desire, maybe even need, to
understand fat. As I have attempted to show, part of this urge, this epistemological hailing, must stem
from the noso-political shifts that I outlined in the first chapter. In the transition from the eighteenth
to the nineteenth century, a dramatic shift in conceiving of our bodies in relation to an entire
population of demographically clear traits and variables generates a conception of self that, from that
moment, seems forever imbricated within a conceptualization of the “average” body.
Despite the wobbly origin story of obesity this project contains, the concept certainly gained
prominence ever since. And, as Roxane Gay so forcefully shows, such a history is simultaneously
surprising at the same time it is powerful and potentially detrimental. But body fat, on anyone, is
limited by its superficiality, too. Though there may be an overwhelming impulse to interpret and
understand it, it is only one vector, tantalizingly totalizing, perhaps, but only one kind of human body
difference. In the nineteenth century, developments from statistics, medicine, and the insurance
industries help to bring about a shift from noso-politics, the uneven and scattered processes of a loose
governmentality, to bio-politics proper. In that process, obesity, viewed as anomalous, flexibly stands
as a cipher for nationality, race, coloniality, and gender.
Returning all the way back to Mintz’s “webs of signification,” the benefit of a project like this
is that it allows us to reconstruct and conjecture the processes by which our own assumptions and
conceptions of human body difference arise and become solidified. Like Becky Sharp, Jos Sedley,
Walter Hartright, and Marian Halcombe, daydreaming of a different world, exploring how things came
to be, in this context, also affords us a glimpse of how things might otherwise have been. Moreover,
this interrogative mode of questioning the assumptions and biases of our own internalized senses of
171
lipoliteracy, or the hypervisibility of fat, helps to historicize and complicate those forms of meaning-
making.
172
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
This is a project about the history of an idea. More specifically, it’s a project about the history of what I see as a narrowing range of ideas that constellate around the word obesity and its cultural signification in three enormously popular mid-Victorian novels. In this project, I argue that the solidification of the term “obesity,” as a condition denoting a medically morbid state of jeopardized health, is a uniquely Victorian event, one which opens a useful lens through which to reassess representations of corpulence in the Victorian novel. Following the historical overview that serves as the first chapter, the three subsequent chapters focus on Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. These texts, I contend, are rich sources for exploration because they exhibit what I define as a form of literary excess, a capacity to transcend their text of origin. ❧ In each, I examine the role and consider the broader context of, in the case of Pickwick, a range of fat male characters, Joseph Sedley, and Count Fosco, respectively. Throughout, I endeavor to contextualize and marshal evidence from a variety of discursive sources and materials, but focus the most on texts from the developing medical and insurance industries of the period. I raise the specter of life insurance as part of my overall argument to illustrate one of the consequences of the interventions produced by the statistical classification of the word “normal,” and to offer a reading of each novel’s focal characters made possible by the work of this contextualization. Masculinity, as it manifests in these novels, is explored in its relation to obesity and life insurance. Methodologically, this project hews closest to a historical/cultural materialist analysis, which, spiritually, I conceive of as a continuation of the work of Foucault, and an attempt to proffer a more multiply discursive analysis to a familiar charge.
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Bennett, James Michael
(author)
Core Title
'Such weight': Obesity, life insurance, and masculinity in mid-Victorian culture
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
English
Publication Date
12/13/2017
Defense Date
12/13/2017
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
assurance,life insurance,masculinity,OAI-PMH Harvest,obesity,victorian culture,victorian literature
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Boone, Joseph Allen (
committee chair
), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (
committee member
), Modleski, Tania (
committee member
)
Creator Email
jamesmbe@usc.edu,jmbennett@uchicago.edu
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https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-460961
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etd-BennettJam-5952.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-460961 (legacy record id)
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etd-BennettJam-5952.pdf
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460961
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Bennett, James Michael
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(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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Tags
assurance
life insurance
masculinity
obesity
victorian culture
victorian literature