Victorian standards to note. Thanks Mimi!
“All defects are in the nature of ugliness, but certain ones are more degrading than others; and of these obesity, which is a deformity, is signally ignoble.”
The Woman Beautiful, 1899.
Unknown Painting by Ivan Makarov, 1870.
During the early and mid-Victorian era, a great many health and beauty books echoed the popular 19th century sentiment that plumpness equaled good health. It was leanness, not heaviness, to which beauty experts directed the majority of their criticism. For example, in his 1870 book Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and Preserve it in Accordance with the Laws of Health, author Daniel Brinton states that a “scrawny bony figure” is “intolerable to gods and men.” According to Brinton, the only occasion on which excessive leanness had ever been beneficial to a lady was in an encounter with a cannibal. As he explains:
“The only lady who we ever heard derived advantage…
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