Ebook: Watching Hannah: Sex, Horror and Bodily De-Formation in Victorian England (Picturing History)

Based on a vast untapped archive of documents, photographs and sketches, Watching Hannah describes and sets into context the obsession of Arthur Munby, a Victorian gentleman and civil servant, with the bodies and behaviours of working women, most especially his maidservant (later his wife) Hannah Cullwick. Munby's fixations with hands, dirtiness, blackness and various kinds of physical deformity are analyzed in relation to changing definitions of gender, sexual identity and class in 19th- and 20th-century England.Barry Reay is Professor of History at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His books include Microhistories: Demography, Society, and Culture in Rural England, 1800-1930 (1996); Popular Cultures in England, 15501750 (1998); and Sexualities in History: A Reader (2001).