LAUSR

surprised by what is in this book (even if we might often be delighted by it); work on nineteenth-century literature and culture has long attended to Victorian bodies. But this may not be so in popular culture, where “Victorian” sometimes still (though perhaps less than it used to be) is code for a fearful disengagement with the body. The book, that is, is written more for a literate popular audience than for Victorianists. Despite this qualification, I massively enjoyed reading Victorians Undone, in part because it puts in the place of theory or system the valorization of stubborn particularity as idea and as method. And, in Hughes’s writing, where particularity often takes the form of lists (beards are not only muttonchops but chinstraps, Newgate frills, Piccadilly weepers, and Dundrearies; a woman’s tasks in the dairy are exhaustive and exhausting), the work done by particularity is smart and joyful.