Clotilde Charvet, of 23 Rue Boissy d’Anglas, gets a reasonable star ranking. ‘Youth and beauty are to be found united here – fine liquid eyes, well-cut features; small waist, and divine bust which proudly advances its twin riches – such are the charms of Clotilde. Her hair, naturally black, is dyed a rich gold, offering a strange contrast, when in a state of nudity, to the other hirsute attractions of her fair form.’
Valentine d’Egbord, of 12 Avenue d’Atnin, fares less well. She ‘appears in our new Book of Revelations as a curiosity. Like a work of art, for marvellous preservation of remains of beauty, we treat her as such and request visitors “not to touch”. Through the use and abuse of some cheap golden dye, her hair has fallen off, never to grow again, and has been replaced by an expensive arrangement of a rich, door-mat colour.’
Cora Pearl, the famous English courtesan who was once carried into her own dinner party on an enormous silver dish, naked but for a sprinkling of parsley, is listed as a blonde. In her heyday this harlot de luxe, who included Napoleon III and the Due de Rivoli among her long ‘golden chain’ of customers, used to dye her hair to match her outfits, often appearing in a fetching canary yellow from head to foot. Her fellow British grandes horizontales, many of them stars of stage and bed, also cultivated an image of blondeness. Lillie Langtry claimed in her autobiography to have had naturally corn-coloured hair. Laura Bell, an ex-shopgirl from Belfast who in one night reputedly relieved the Nepalese envoy, General HRH Prince Jung Bahadur, of today’s equivalent of £250,000, was known as a blonde; and Skittles was described, with some poetic licence, as a natural blonde by an aspiring lover, the Comte de Maugny. Dozens of these magnificent women, the ‘yellow chignoned denizens of St John’s Wood and Pimlico’, as the Pall Mall Gazette described them in 1869, gathered every day in Hyde Park in their fashionable carriages, to be admired by wealthy gentlemen as well as dazzled wives and daughters.
Blonde hair had long been familiar as a symbol of sexual temptation and corruption – both in reality and in fiction. But only the Victorians could have turned it into an instrument of death. Bram Stoker’s story ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’ hinges on blonde hair as the tool of revenge of a murdered woman. The body is walled up in her former lover’s fireplace, and her hair, humming with menace, continues to grow through a crack in the stone. Eventually it mysteriously kills both the lover’s pregnant new wife and the terrified lover himself, who is discovered with a look of’unutterable horror’ on his face as he stares glassily at his feet, which have been entwined with ‘tresses of golden hair, streaked with grey’.84
The Victorian idea that blonde hair possessed terrifying powers was bolstered further by the slew of paintings of exotic blonde soul-stealers that poured from the brushes of Victorian artists. Lord Leighton’s 1858 painting The Fisherman and the Syren: from a ballad by Goethe was first exhibited with a translation of the final lines of Goethe’s poem ‘Der Fischer’: ‘Half drew she him, Half sunk he in, And never more was seen.’ The deadly siren wraps herself around the fisherman, who looks utterly drugged by desire, her long, sinuous fish tail coiled around his legs, her arms clasped round his neck and her streaming mass of blonde hair cascading provocatively down her smooth, naked back.
One of the most sinisterly grasping blonde seductresses of the period appears in John William Waterhouse’s 1893 La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Based on Keats’s poem, the painting depicts the kneeling armour-clad knight, spellbound by his enchantress, drawn down into a fatal embrace by the noose of golden hair she has wound around his neck. This extraordinary image passed on into opera, recreated in a scene in Debussy’s eerie work, Pelleas and Melisande. The love-struck Pelleas, symbolically accepting his own end, wraps Melisande’s golden hair around his neck in ecstasy as the music soars to climactic rapture.
For the average Victorian male idealist, a man perhaps a little frightened by sex, certainly troubled by the maelstrom of terrifying blondes depicted all around him, still deeply attached to his mother and assailed by religious doubts, home and the comfortingly unerotic devotions of a motherly wife became a sanctuary. As Britain raced into the modern technological age, society too had begun to change at an alarming speed. Some Victorians were intoxicated by the sensation of living in a new world of unlimited opportunities. But many more were anxious about the rapid advances of science and democracy while religious faith and political confidence ebbed away. With no apparent end to the hectic boom-and-bust cycles of the financial markets, and the development of the steamship, the locomotive and the electric telegraph, daily business life became an urgent, highly pressured and exhausting struggle. Middle-class men of rectitude were distressed by the new sense of material greed they saw around them, by the moral degeneration and by the harsh loss of tradition. They watched the exploitation of the countryside, with huge tracts of beautiful land being scarred by the smoke and grime of industrial development. They observed the exploitation of the workers. Few could ignore the growing social malaise: wealth for the few and squalor, disease and crime for the masses.
These men, plagued by the dark implications of their changing world, retreated to the home in search of the reassuringly warm comfort of uncorrupted goodness. Home was the psychological equivalent of slippers, ‘the shelter’, as Ruskin put it, ‘not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division’. A quasi-religious picture of domestic decency and moral respectability became the anchor of their hectic lives. Home provided the solace of order and ritual. There were fixed mealtimes preceded by grace, daily prayers, evening routines of newspapers and needlework, perhaps readings from a novel. At the heart of this picture was a dutiful and devoted wife, free from all corrupting contact with the sins and brutalities of the modern world. The feminine archetype in the home was a creature of moral beauty, pure and immaculately unsexual. By the mid-century such saintly wives were being described as Madonnas – without apparent irony or impiety. Literary heroines characterised by unflagging moral integrity, wore their hair – fashionably dark – parted at the centre ‘à la Madonna’, a style influenced by Raphael’s Madonnas. Dorothea is described in Middlemarch as ‘the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw’. And Tennyson in his poem ‘To Rosa’ refers to Rosa Baring’s ‘madonna grace of parted hair’, by which he implies her inspiring moral qualities.
Conditioned to bashful modesty and passivity, these women cultivated a becoming delicacy, wearing it like some kind of saintly halo. Many were actually enfeebled by frequent pregnancies, lack of exercise, an indigestible diet and the ludicrous fashion of dangerously tight corsets. How remote they seem, these controlled, centre-parted creatures, weaving and stitching away tirelessly at their hair pictures and their antimacassars. How sharply they contrast with the devouring, deceitful blondes of Victorian man’s highly charged erotic imagination. It would be stretching the evidence, however, to imply such a clear-cut division. Nothing is ever quite this tidy, and there were of course dark seductresses as well as blonde wives of immaculate decorum and duty. But the broad pattern of character-typing by pigment is unmistakable.
Home and a Madonna-like wife of perfect devotion was not the only escape for anxious Victorian gentlemen caught in a rapidly changing society which was also repressive and excessively prudish. Children, too, particularly girls, became the subject of strange longings by grown men. Motivated by a nostalgia for lost innocence or perhaps by guilt at the despoliation of their world, these men regarded children as a hope for the future. Men who suffered perhaps from the failure of their own adult relationships, or from an emotional imbalance triggered by an over- or under-protected childhood, seemed particularly drawn to young girls. Those with angelic blonde hair represented a more obvious paradise of innocence, something precious which, like the colour of their hair, is lost by degrees as they grow up and gain experience, learn of sin and guilt, of worldly desires and expectations.
Victorian men of letters, men of the Church, men of great intellectual calibre and standing, enjoyed the easy and innocen
t pleasure of the company of young girls. John Ruskin was one of them. He was brought up on strict puritanical principles by a wealthy wine-merchant father and potently evangelical mother, who doted to an almost suffocating degree on their only son. As a child he was forbidden toys. Instead, his father read to him from Tacitus and his mother read him the Bible from beginning to end, several times. At eleven he wrote two thousand rhyming couplets influenced by Wordsworth, and by the time he had left Oxford, Ruskin possessed a mind which was, even by Victorian standards, prodigiously fine. But he was a loner and a dreamer, who was being gradually pushed by a stifling society into some truly eccentric obsessions. His disastrous adult romances with the young girls Adele Domecq, Effie Gray and Rose La Touche (all three of whom, incidentally, had blonde or pale mousy hair) have been amply documented; and there were many other young girls to whom he was attracted.
It was the fantasy imagery of the innocent young girl that seemed to appeal to him as much as anything else. Ruskin was particularly taken by the illustrations of Kate Greenaway. These cloyingly sweet watercolours depicted innocent little girls, often blonde and curly-haired, playing in a Regency setting. Childish innocence as beauty and the preciousness of childhood were themes much discussed by philosophers, artists and writers of the period. Ruskin would have been aware of the artworld view that the face of a child is the nearest thing to the ideal beauty of classical art. Yet with Greenaway’s work, in spite of his position as the leading art critic of the day, Ruskin allowed his sentimental inclinations to overcome his critical faculties. He delivered infatuated lectures on her art at Oxford and collected large numbers of her pictures.
Victorian prudery acknowledged so little but, by some upside-down logic, therefore sanctioned so much. Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematics lecturer better known as Lewis Carroll, was another Victorian with a freakishly fine mind and reverence for young girls. Carroll was a celibate cleric with a stammer and a somewhat eccentric appearance. His private world centred on the children, particularly girls, he pursued and befriended at social events, on trains, at the beach at Eastbourne, anywhere, from his twenties until his death at the age of sixty-six. In the company of these children he found that his shyness and stammer vanished and he was able to abandon his masculine world of strict logical sense and escape into a fantasy world of childish nonsense. As an author of children’s books, he needed the company of children to help him understand the workings of the childish imagination. But he also seems to have needed the escapist indulgence of children as a prop for his psychological balance. On his summer holidays at Eastbourne he actively sought out children to befriend, totting up his score at the end of each holiday. In 1877, for example, he noted ‘my child-friends, during this seaside visit, have been far more numerous than in any former year’. He then listed the names of twenty-six children from eleven families.85
One of his favourite girls was Alice Liddell, the daughter of his neighbour the Dean of Christ Church. She was a lively and pretty girl with short, straight dark hair and a pixie face; and she was the inspiration for his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Carroll did some preliminary manuscript drawings of Alice for his books, but they look nothing like the impish scabby-kneed Alice Liddell. They show Alice as an angel instead of a child, a creature without real imperfections, a bride just out of reach, who has been transformed into an idealised, intensely ravishable beauty. Carroll drew long, luxurious wavy hair on his Alice. It was just like that of the blonde Helen of Troy painted by Rossetti, whom Carroll knew and whose works he admired and, in at least one case, owned. Carroll also owned a painting by Arthur Hughes, Girl with Lilacs, a rather blowzy celebration of feminine innocence in which a melancholic girl bends her head of thick blonde hair beneath a branch heavy with lilac flowers. Perhaps Carroll illustrated his own masterpiece while gazing up at this picture, which hung over the fireplace in his study, because the hair, dress and pose of the Hughes girl are almost exactly reproduced in his drawing of Alice growing under the influence of the ‘Drink Me’ potion. Carroll’s nephew recalled that his uncle ‘dwelt with intense pleasure on the exquisite contrasts of colour which it contained – the gold hair of the girl standing out against the purple of lilac blossoms’. Clearly, Carroll shared with Hughes an image of the perfect golden-haired female innocent that was inspired by visions of threatened virgin beauty.86
In the first published edition of the books of 1865, illustrated by John Tenniel with an intrusive collaboration by Carroll, Alice is blonde. Carroll had sent Tenniel a photograph he had taken of his child-friend Mary Hilton Badcock, suggesting he should use her as a model for the Alice illustrations. In the photograph, Mary is a faintly grumpy-looking blonde sitting rigid as a peg doll in a hairband and the sort of puff-sleeved and crinolined party dress that Alice wears for her adventures. Tenniel probably worked straight from the photograph as he rarely used live models, and his illustrations set a high standard for all the many Alices to come.f
In almost all the post-Tenniel editions, artists have remained true to Alice’s blonde colour-coding. Her hair colour became an essential marker to her character and to her powers of attraction – the innocent, unsullied child, open to the purest, most intense, most spiritual feelings and utterly receptive to the fantasy nonsense and anarchy of the stories she inhabits.
Most Victorians were probably unaware of the lustful undertones in the Alice that finally appeared on the page in 1865. These same Victorians also barely flinched at contemporary poetry full of the urgent and flagrantly sexual desires of adults for children. Ernest Dowson in the fourth of his Sonnets of a Little Girl, wrote of a young blonde girl:
. . . and in those pure grey eyes,
That sweet child face, those tumbled curls of gold,
And in thy smiles and loving, soft replies
I find the whole of love – hear full and low
Its mystic ocean’s tremulous ebb and flow.87
It seems extraordinary that this kind of sexually fraught material barely elicited comment. At the same time a multitude of harmless childish imagery was being produced on a prolific scale in art and literature to feed the more innocently mawkish
Cherubic boys and girls were a popular subject for painters. John Everett Millais’s most famous painting, Bubbles, of his blond curly-haired grandson, was used by Pears Soap as one of the first big advertising campaigns. If the public wanted pictures of pretty children, Millais reasoned, then he would give them just that. He made between -£30,000 and -£40,000 a year providing effusively sentimental images of childish purity and innocence.
Blonde hair’s dual significance to the Victorians as a sign either of innocence or of bewitching sexuality gave it a dangerous ambiguity. But blonde hair had also begun to develop a third distinctive significance which was to lead in the early twentieth century to an inflammatory belief in its political superiority. This was to prove devastating.
f One of the most original was the 1929 edition with illustrations by Willy Pogany showing Alice as a bobby-soxer with a blonde bob. fascinations of Victorian society. Perhaps its huge popularity helped to make a sexual reverence for children seem more respectable.
1O
The Aryan Awakes
In the glittering light of candles, a sentimental middle-class Victorian celebration of Christmas Eve is in progress. A tree stands in one corner laden with strings of glass beads and bright ribbons, sweetmeats and sugar-coated biscuits. Children in their best clothes are gathered around the piano singing ‘Silent Night’, their faces bathed with a pink glow of delicious anticipation. Perhaps they will have fairytales before bed, Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood, but not until Papa has been indulged and allowed to sing his favourite Lieder.
The trappings of the fashionable Victorian Christmas in the mid-nineteenth century hardly presented a picture of true British culture. The idea of a tree was a German import, its dangling baked goodies of German inspiration too. ‘Silent Night’ was a translation from the German. Cinderella
and Little Red Riding Hood were favourites from the German Grimm brothers’ fairy-story collection. And Papa’s melancholy renditions of Schubert and Schumann were certainly inspired by romantic dreams of the Rhine. All this was no coincidence, for Britain in the mid-nineteenth century was gripped by a cult of all things Germanic. In literature, art and music, Germany was proving to be an irresistible fashion-leader. Writers, historians, philosophers, musicians and artists flocked to Germany to suck inspiration from the country’s great creative brains. Thomas Carlyle was indefatigable in his translations and interpretations of Goethe and Schiller. George Eliot devoted the same efforts to Strauss. Turner romanticised the Rhine. British composers and musicians migrated to Leipzig, Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, the better to idolise the great German classical composers, and to warm their bones with the music of the Romantic era, the sounds of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Schumann.
Germany was emerging as the powerhouse of Europe. It was producing the most exhilarating ideas in art and intellect, and it was gathering steam in the newly developing worlds of science and invention. At the same time, under Bismarck’s glittering eye Germany was transforming itself into an industrialised economic behemoth. There were many contexts in which the peculiar genius and manifest destiny of the Teutonic race could be vaunted. By the mid-nineteenth century a self-flattering cult of things Germanic had begun to affect many British historians, who promoted the idea of the Anglo-Saxon race being part of a greater glorious Teutonic pedigree. The addiction to this crudely romantic view of Germany spread fast. Thomas Arnold in his 1841 series of lectures as Regius Professor at Oxford lauded the Germanic roots of the English nation and noted approvingly that ‘half of Europe, and all America and Australia, are German more or less completely, in race, in language, or in institutions, or in all.’ John Green, the author of the immensely popular Short History of the English People (1874), spread the perception that the Anglo-Saxons were really a Germanic people. Many more respected chroniclers continued the growing homage to Germany.88
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