19th Century Beauty For Sale
The above meme is one that’s popped up frequently this year in social media, and we finally got a volume in the shop! The truth is—well, the truth is, women are humans, not some kind of mysterious humanoid species from another planet, and understanding them merely requires communicating with and listening to them, not a multi-volume academic text. That said, man’s quest to pin and pen woman down is a long, long tradition, and the book the meme depicts would be more accurately titled Misunderstanding Women, Volume One.
- Lovely leatherbound 1846 second edition of Walker's Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman.
The subject became particularly popular, if not obsessively so, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, incited by a Molotov cocktail of Enlightenment and French Revolution ideals and the political, economic, and social impact of industrial capitalism. As scholar Robyn Cooper notes, “Vast quantities of mental effort and textual toil were expended by philosophers, clergymen, men of science, and men of letters generally on the subject of woman—her nature, her role, her body, mind, and soul, as well as her relationship with her other half, man” (341). This phenomenon is easily beheld in the oeuvre of Scottish physiologist Alexander Walker: 1836’s Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman, 1838’sIntermariage: or, The Mode in Which, and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease, and Insanity from Others, and 1839’sWoman Physiologically Considered as to Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slaver, Infidelity, and Divorce. Walker was well aided in his studies, drawing on the voices of heavy-weights Hume, Hogarth, Burke, Knight, and Alison and the art of masters Da Vinci, Winckelmann, Mengs, and Bossi in his “analysis and classification of beauty in woman.”
Though not a well-known title today, Alexander Walker’s Beauty was a well-received, well-reviewed, and well-published treatise in its own time, and certainly holds value for multiple areas of study, most interestingly the impact of the Enlightenment and naturalism on ideas of beauty and women’s bodies, minds, and social place.Walker drew on an exhaustive range of material in the pursuit of his analysis of beauty and of women, from art and aesthetics to philosophy and the classics, from biomedical science and sexual selection to the psuedosciences of phrenology and physiognomy, a personal favorite of Walker’s (342).
Readers both today and at the time of its publication would be familiar with the Victorian ideal of woman as “the angel in the house,” a pure, moral, and sexless domestic being happily charged by God with the care of husband and children. Walker’s beautiful woman stands in stark opposition, identified heavily with her body, sexuality, and reproductive ability. In Beauty, we see woman as crafted by Nature, rather than God. Though Walker’s counterview was not wholly favorable to women(to say the least), new, more affirming outlooks on women’s sexuality, pleasure, and menstruation found expression in Walker’s works.
This edition of Beauty truly lives up to its name, with luxurious burgundy leather and lavish gilt decoration.Beauty’s endpapers alone are worth awing over, not to mention the gilt floral designs immodestly peeking out over the book’s fore-edges. The spine, with its five bands, their compartments like flowerboxes full of gilt leaves and sun designs, would be the glory of any shelf. Lovely plates by Henry Howard, a professor of painting at the Royal Academy, accompany the text, and depict many nude studies of the female form, as well as several illustrations of those that Walker reveres as the ideal of female beauty, the triumvirate goddesses of “mental,”“locomotive,” and “nutritive beauty,” Minerva, Artemis, and Venus, respectively. The concluding plates are intended to depict imperfections like “excessive breadth of trunk” or “aridness or want of plumpness,” yet they portray women as lovely to look upon as the Venus de Medici of the frontispiece, showing that even before the age of television and tabloids, the sheer arbitrariness of standards of beauty was alive and well.Beauty is one of the most beautiful books we’ve handled, as well as one of the most thought-provoking.
Work cited and for further reading:
Cooper, Robyn. "Definition and Control: Alexander Walker's Trilogy on Woman." Journal of the History of Sexuality 2.3 (1992): 341-64. Web. 9 Sept. 2014.
Walker, Alexander. Beauty: Illustrated Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Woman. Preceded by a Critical View of the General Hypotheses Respecting Beauty, by Hume, Hogarth, Burke, Knight, Alison, Etc. And Followed by a Similar View of the Hypotheses of Beauty in Sculpture and Painting, by Leonardo Da Vinci, Winckelmann, Mengs, Bossi, Etc. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846. Second Edition, Revised.9 ¾ x 6 3/8. 395pp. Handsomely bound in burgundy leather, with covers, spine, and all edges of front and back boards lavishly decorated with floral dentelles in gilt, continuing onto the versos. Five raised bands to spine, with stunning decorations accompanied by lettering, also in gilt. Edgewear to boards and spine, with rubbing through leather and bumping to corners of boards and edges of spine.
Two inch strip diagonally from bottom left corner of back board, where leather has been torn or rubbed bare. All page edges gilt. Ornate red and gold endpapers.Previous bookseller’s pencil notations on first blank page.Some foxing to pages, and water stain to bottom of frontispiece, not extending to plate.Illustrated in 22 lovely plates plus frontispiece by Henry Howard, drawn on stone by M. Gauci and R.J. Lane.Tightly bound, sound copy.
No American library holdings of this edition on WorldCat. There is one holding in France and one in the United Kingdom.
This book is available for purchase on our website here.