One of the minor regrettable features of modern life (and there are plenty of major ones, heaven knows, but I'm not going there) is the prevalence of whiskers on men's faces: from the full-on righteous hipster beard to carefully curated (or not) permanent stubble, by way of every possible form of facial hair display – though Piccadilly Weepers seem to be out of favour. When did this inexorable spread of face fungus begin? When did it become acceptable for pillars of the establishment such as BBC director generals and UK attorney generals to appear in public with stubble all over their faces? (Never, in my book.) What are they trying to tell the world? That they can't be bothered to shave? More likely, alas, that beneath that formal suit lurks a rebel soul, a pretty hip kind of guy. Where did this madness come from, and when? There's probably material for a semiological thesis there...
With the Victorians, it seems, there's a simple answer (at least according to Richard Holmes – yes, I'm still reading The Boundless Deep, but I am reading other stuff, and I've very nearly finished). We tend to think of nearly all Victorian men as bearded, or at least extravagantly whiskered – but it was not always so: before the 1850s Tennyson, Darwin, Dickens, Charles Lyell, Edward Lear and Thomas Carlyle, to name but a few leading lights, were all clean-shaven. In 1847 there was only one bearded member of the House of Commons, and the majority of male visitors to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were not bearded. There were signs of a coming change of fashion in the early 1850s, and one of the factors driving it was that in 1850 the army had officially permitted beards and moustaches. By the mid-1850s, beards had become virtually obligatory in the fighting regiments, and the photographs that came back from the Crimean War – the first of their kind – showed our soldiers bearded to a man. It was the impact of these photographs, Holmes argues, that led the hitherto clean-shaven English to grow beards. As for Tennyson's beard, this began with an experimental prototype in 1851 (to the alarm of his long-suffering wife), then reappeared in more luxuriant form in 1853, and finally became the wondrous and fearful thing on display in Julia Margaret Cameron's literally iconic photograph, the one the poet himself described as 'the Dirty Monk'. As with so many beards, one rather wishes he hadn't...
The thing about beards, the thing nobody seems to mention, is the disgusting food fragments that appear.
ReplyDeleteFood fragments, that's what's wrong with big beards
ReplyDeleteVery true, and I'm sure Tennyson's beard was no exception. His poor wife was right to be alarmed.
ReplyDeleteWell, beards make the chin and lower third of the face look larger, so if you're living in a time when fighting and looking intimidating to other men is important, and or when men are less masculine and weaker chinned for whatever reason, that could explain it.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that occurred to me is a tawdry explanation, which is that a clean shaven male face feels better to a women for various intimate activities, so a bearded man (like a celibate monk) can be indicating he's above worldly desires of the flesh.
Could be, Anon. And that's one of the mysteries of stubble – surely a stubbly face can't feel good to a woman, or anyone. I'm surprised more women aren't covered with skin rashes.
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