“Stimulated by these agents to vigorous action”: the language of suntanning and materiality of skin in Victorian culture

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the materiality of skin as it is figured and re-figured through sunburn and suntanning descriptions in nineteenth-century culture. In nineteenth-century literary representations, the suntanned skin of white, British subjects is depicted through a rich array of terminology attending not only to the transformation of colour but also to the surface texture of the skin. This article identifies that, amid changing ideas about the embodiment of self within the skin, suntanning representations bring to the surface a particular ambivalence around the stability of the skin that manifests through explorations of the reconfiguration of the skin surface. The article analyses the language of suntanning to explore, firstly, how the action of sunburn and tanning reveals the skin as unstable and susceptible to the invasive actions of the sun, endangering the boundary-lines of the physical and conceptual self; and, secondly, instances in which suntanned skin is conceptualised through likeness to material objects in a way that metaphorically and conceptually hardens the skin and self against the wider world.

KEYWORDS:

• Victorian culture
• Victorian literature
• dermatology
• skin
• materialism

Introduction

Throughout the pages of Victorian literature, suntanned and sunburnt figures recur, appearing “grilled and blistered by the Sun” as in Charles Dickens’s 1848 novel Dombey and Son ([1848] 2002, 402), turned “a bronzed and coppery tint by perpetual exposure to meridian suns” in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1863 novel Aurora Floyd ([1863] 2008, 232), become “more or less mahogany” in Dickens’s 1857 novel Little Dorrit ([1857] 1999, 237), or “dyed a good rich oak colour” as described in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, But Too Well ([1867] 1869, 10). This small selection of references presents an insight into the diverse language through which suntanned skin is depicted, describing not only the changed colour of the skin but also evoking the texture of surface that is reconfigured through sun exposure: hardened into oak and mahogany, smoothed and refined into bronze, damaged by grilling into blisters. At the same time as these bodies – almost always white, British, and very often male – undergo a change that brings their presumed normative and thus typically unmentioned skin colour into visibility, so too is surface intriguingly made visible at a moment of change.

During the nineteenth century, the matter of skin came into new prominence through dermatological enquiries that, facilitated by scientific advances and new technologies, presented increasingly detailed understanding of the physical constitution and functions of the skin. A growing number of publications appeared from around the 1820s onwards,¹ continuing into the mid- and later decades of the century.² These specialist writings refracted into a wider culture of skin knowledge, with many popular publications on the toilet detailing the care and maintenance of the skin,³ as well as cosmetic products to refine and improve the complexion.⁴ Within specialist and popular publications, writers marvel at the skin’s complexity, describing a “diversity of structure, which is again necessitated by the diversity of function which exists” (Fox 1864, 1), a “peculiar and wonderful construction” on account of “its compound character, and its manifold uses” (Cooley 1866, 197), and a “perfect and complete integrity” in the structure of its outermost layer (Chevalier 1823, 114). As “a fine but essential barrier between life and destruction” (117), as Thomas Chevalier quotes from James Smith, the skin was integral to the health of the body: numerous writers deemed the skin “second to none in importance in the human economy” such that “we cannot for a moment hesitate to conclude that health, and even life, must be placed in jeopardy by anything which materially interferes with the integrity of the structure or functions of the skin” (“Review” 1852, 156). Its dual capacity for delicacy and strength is remarked upon, such as its “exquisite sensibility,” which “possesses the softness of velvet, and exhibits the delicate hues of the lily, the carnation, the rose,” while at the same time “it is nevertheless gifted with extraordinary strength and power of resisting external injury, and it is not only capable of repairing, but of actually renewing itself” (Cooley 1866, 197).

These writings begin to convey the significance of skin to the health of the body that is sustained and protected by its outermost layer. The evocative language of “exquisite sensibility,” softness, delicacy, and “wonderful construction” suggests also that the importance given to the skin’s physical functionality is underpinned by a deeper conceptual significance. This attests to a cultural history in which, as Claudia Benthien writes, “the skin marks not only an actual but also a profoundly symbolic boundary that is subject to cultural and historical change” ([1999] 2002, 36). The skin’s role as “both an organic and an imaginary reality” (8) existing at the “symbolic surface between the self and the world” (1) has been theorised and historicised by contemporary scholars. The skin constitutes the psychical projection of the self, containing and cohering the individual as a distinct entity defined against and protected from the surrounding world (Anzieu 1989), as well as affording the medium through which the world is sensed, experienced, and perceived – “a border that feels,” providing “an affective opening out of bodies to other bodies” (Ahmed 2000, 45; original emphasis). Furthermore, it “is not only individual psychological life but also cultural life that is lived at the level of, and through the intercession of, the skin, and its many actual and imaginary doublings and multiplications” (Connor 2004, 48), with cultural practices worked into the skin through how it is treated, marked, and inscribed. The skin offers a surface for self-representation to be interpreted and (mis-)read, simultaneously within and beyond individual agency. The skin is also a product of space and time, for “as well as self-determined marks representing signs and messages, the skin can also be inscribed, altered and affected by such simple processes as the normal passing of time, and the particularities of its physical surroundings” (Bond 2018, 32). At the surface of the body, the skin is thus at the meeting point of physical and psychical experience, subjectivity and objectivity, spatiality and temporality; and the ways in which these are performed, experienced, and interpreted are always historically and culturally situated.

For nineteenth-century writers, new dermatological understandings of the skin were coterminous with deeper conceptual questions about the status and role of the skin. These were contextualised by materialist enquiries that, as William Cohen has shown, attempted “to locate a unique essence of the human in the physical existence of the body” (2009, xi). While Cohen demonstrates the engagement with these questions across the body’s different sensory capacities, Pamela K. Gilbert has focused upon the particular role of skin in relation to the era’s fervent discussion about “the nature of the self, the boundaries of the human, and the progress of history” (2019, 2). Gilbert traces the evolution of “a surface-self” (1) across the period: by the 1830s, she writes, “the body’s surface was not only expressive of selfhood but increasingly understood as constitutive of it” (107); skin was the site “where the embodied mind gathered sensations of the outer world and then interacted with that world on the bases of those sensations: sensation became knowledge, on the basis of which and in turn, will became action” (183). This locating of the self within the surface presented conceptual challenges: for one thing, as Cohen shows in his reading of Anthony Trollope, this may bring about the troubling realisation “that there may be nothing but surface” (2009, 85; original emphasis).⁵ Moreover, “body surfaces, as mutable representations of a human identity capable of change and growth, were themselves hard to pin down, and changeable over time” (Gilbert 2019, 317). Skin is unstable: it can be permeated, marked, detached, inscribed, and otherwise damaged, as well as accumulating signs of ageing and reflecting the health or illness of the body.

Such enquiries refracted through the literary and cultural sphere, where skin acquired resonance as a representational site for what it could both reveal and conceal about the subject and self within and invited new descriptive capabilities from writers engaging with these questions through the depiction of its materiality in textual form. Amid growing scholarly interest in the cultural history of skin within and beyond nineteenth-century studies, literary and cultural representations of sunburnt and suntanned skin have to date remained largely unexplored, yet engage provocatively with central concepts of skin studies more broadly, and Victorianist enquiries specifically. On the level of skin function, suntanning is multidimensional in the physical responses that it produces, and how these are experienced by the self and perceived by others is deeply culturally conditioned. The physical effects can be experienced as a pleasant “enlivening warmth” (Wilson [1845] 1856, 31) or the painful “blistering, scorching” damage of the opening examples. The colour change effected may be deliberately or inadvertently acquired, and construed positively or negatively in dialogue with discourses of race, class, gender, health, and mobility; it can be interpreted differently by experiencing subject and perceiving other.

The nineteenth century had yet to experience the cultural shift towards the connotations of health, wealth, and leisure that suntanning would later acquire (Carter 2007), and yet descriptions of suntanned and sunburnt skin are prevalent across a range of literary and cultural texts, and all the more intriguing for the manifold readings that their appearances invite. Suntanned characters are situated within various spatial contexts – be it global travel, rural fieldwork, maritime labour – and are often presented through richly descriptive linguistic choices. Such characters may be read through focusing upon a single literary text to look at the structural and thematic resonance accrued as the body moves through networks of (inter-)national space in the narrative; another mode of reading is to approach figures contextually through such lenses as class, race, gender. I have previously explored the dynamics of mobility and masculinity articulated through the body of the sunburnt gentleman in Dickens’s Bleak House (Mathieson 2014) and the national–global relations played out through Peter Jenkyns’s tanned appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (Mathieson 2015).⁶ In this article, however, I work laterally across a selection of nineteenth-century novels, periodical pieces, and life writing, in order to focus upon what I discern as a recurrent concern across the period with how the materiality of skin texture is reconfigured through the action of the sun.⁷ Embedded within depictions showing a change of skin colour, repeated representational tropes show a persistent engagement with understanding the changes provoked to the skin’s surface as a material, physical border; in so doing, I suggest, these unfold engagements with the skin as the “actual but also a profoundly symbolic boundary” (Benthien [1999] 2002, 36), seeking to make sense of the skin as a physical-conceptual construct at the outer limits of the body and self. I identify two themes around which representational tropes cluster. In the first of these, skin is grilled, scorched, and peeling; these representations position skin as unstable, fallible surface that can be worked through and upon, exposing the vulnerability of the border and even its potential for detachment from the body. In the second set of terminologies I examine, suntanned skin becomes likened to bronze and mahogany; these representations enact a metaphorical turn to the solidity and physicality of the material world in such a way as to reinforce the skin as a defensive boundary. Taken together, I suggest that both these descriptive modes reveal a provocation to the skin’s border-status in relation to the white, British selves embodied therein: suntanning presses at a pervasive ambiguity around the certainty of the embodied border, whether it is through exposing its vulnerability or over-articulating its textural (and textual) definition. Earlier readings such as Benthien’s posited a historical shift from the skin as open and porous to “an increasingly rigid boundary” (1), reading the nineteenth century as the turning point in this conceptualisation, but more recent analyses have complicated the suggestion of the rigid boundary in this era. Ariane de Waal, for example, demonstrates how “traces of the porous early-modern body persist in the Victorian skin image” (2020, 104), and Gilbert also posits a more complex historical trajectory that unfolds across her study (2019, 16). While the specific focus on the permeability of the pores in Benthien’s and others’ accounts is distinct from the focus here, my analysis contributes another perspective through which we can see how the rigidity of skin boundary is complicated and compromised through suntanning representations, offering a further lens through which to understand nineteenth-century encounters with the borders of skin and self.

In this, we find a further manifestation of how, as Cohen notes, writers of the period find themselves “grappling tenaciously with the material existence of the human body,” coming to identify ways in which “what makes us human is the matter of our being – not some quality that transcends it – even while considering the various ways in which such being is open to, and partakes of, other materialities” (2009, xii). Suntanning, as a visible reconfiguration of the texture of bodily matter, opens up entangled questions about the stability and solidity of the body as matter, and what this means for the self that is embedded within that matter, in a variety of ways: it shows how, as Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey write, the skin provides an apt site to “rethink ‘where’ and ‘how’ materiality comes to be lived, as well as to figure as a limit and constraint to embodied lives” (2001, 8). Reading nineteenth-century suntanned skin contributes more broadly to historicising engagements with biomaterialism, making visible key questions around how, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, “we are ourselves composed of matter. We experience its restlessness and intransigence even as we reconfigure and consume it” (2010, 1). Coole and Frost suggest that “new ways of thinking about living matter are radically and rapidly reconfiguring our material world – both empirically and conceptually – not only transforming our most basic conceptions of life and the human but also intervening in the very building blocks of life and altering the environment in which the human species – among others – persists” (24). Yet, while they write about “new” materialism, in a recent analysis of the “anticipatory materialisms” of the long nineteenth century, Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak, and Rebecca Spence assert the earlier historical precedents of literary, philosophical, and scientific thinking that “has often been deeply invested in the agency and forces of matter […], expressing precisely the variations and complexities of processual embodied activity” (2019, 4). Contributing to the vibrant critical engagements with these themes in recent years, suntanned skin offers a further angle to these enquiries in the complexities and variations of embodied meaning that it provokes and unfolds. Suntanned skin representations offer an overt metaphorical engagement with the texture of skin and its material solidity, bringing to the fore questions around the stability of the materialised self at this historical moment. In what follows, I start by historically contextualising my study through examining the materiality of skin in contemporary medical writings, and then turn to how literary representations encounter entanglements around the skin’s materiality.

The materiality of the skin in nineteenth-century medical writings

Across the century, new understandings of the skin’s form rapidly evolved in dialogue with scientific advances and technologies. As Mieneke te Hennepe has explored, microscopic examinations “visually exposed the interior of the skin” (2009, 58) to produce a new image that “reinforced a substantial shift in the meaning of skin from an open porous cover towards a thick, functional and protective boundary organ of the human body” (51): “the flat, layered and porous skin was replaced by a picture of an organ that harboured multiple active structures,” articulating a “thicker” skin (63). De Waal has further observed the significance of the layered cross-sectional image of the skin that gained wide cultural currency through its inclusion in Erasmus Wilson’s popular Practical Treatise on Healthy Skin ([1845] 1856), which made “scientific visualisations of the cutaneous layers available to a wider readership for the first time”: the continual reproduction of this text throughout the century was such that “most literate Victorians would have been familiar with the image of the magnified cut through the skin’s layers” (De Waal 2020, 105).

This thickening and layering of the skin is accompanied by a new attention to the landscape and geography of the skin surface, further detailing the textures of its material form. Kevin Siena and Jonathan Reinarz identify a use of spatial thinking and geographical techniques for visual representation in the early understanding of the “skinscape” as a corporeal landscape (2013, 3). This is observable in Wilson’s writing, which richly examines the surface qualities of the skin-as-landscape. He starts, “the skin is the soft and pliant membrane, which invests the whole of the external surface of the body, following all its prominences and curves” ([1845] 1856, 25); this is flexible, malleable skin. This becomes further illustrated in the depth and texture of its surface as composed of ridges, furrows, risings, and depressions: in describing a plate of scarf skin from the palm of the hand, he notes the “ridges and grooves,” “oval-shaped depressions,” and “a slightly elevated line” running “along the middle of each groove” (xv), and later, the “laminated texture” (xvii); of a plate from the arm-pit skin, he notes “the numerous lines crossing the figure are furrows adapted to the motions of this part of the body. In the compartments between these furrows smaller divisions are seen, corresponding with the little tufts of papillae of the sensitive layer of the skin” (xvi). As he goes on to describe the structure of the scarf-skin, it takes on a range of textural capacities: it is composed of a “beautiful mosaic” with “different kinds of particles” of “elementary granules, the little aggregated masses and newly-constructed cells” (28) forming together, and continually being pushed upwards from a new layer beneath; as the cells are pushed upwards, they become “dry, flattened scales” (28), “matted together [to] form a dense and laminated texture” (29). Furthermore, skin is networked with a “fibrous web” of connections between the pores, and “the under surface of the skin [has] the appearance of a course net” – “the mechanical arrangement which is here described is one which is calculated to excite our admiration” (38) he writes, shifting from geography to the skin-as-thing in this mechanised arrangement.

Wilson’s skin surface is multi-dimensional in its textures: ridged, webbed, patterned, raised, depressed, laminated, and grooved in its complex structure. It is capable of a range of textural qualities and surface effects, illustrated in a language that turns to the material world – nets, mosaics, webs, granules – to give a sense of the surface as a complex and dense living organism. This attention to the physical matter of skin conceptually reinforces it as thick, substantial border: indeed, the scarf-skin is “horny and insensible, and is a sheath of protection to the highly sensitive skin situated beneath it” (Wilson [1845] 1856, 27). This descriptive skin-scape that Wilson creates is conceptually infused with and participates within the wider cultural significance of skin’s position at the outer limits of the body and the self: indeed, if the self is located within the skin, Wilson’s work dermatologically finds a rich, dense material for it to reside within. While the object world provides a linguistic source for descriptive terminology, he is keen to emphasise the very living, human quality of the skin: discussing the smoothness of leather, he notes its beauty and how “nature has contrived no other substance so beautifully, so perfectly fitted for the countless purposes of utility and elegance, which leather fulfils. But how infinitely more admirable is the living and breathing skin!” (37). Later on, we will see engagements with the potential for skin to become a dead thing played out in sunburn representations.

Wilson also works to assert the action of the skin against its contact with the external, material world through which it moves, posing challenges to the skin. The production of skin is an ongoing process, as a result of the skin being worn off “under the conjoined influence of friction and ablution”: “the scarf-skin is therefore undergoing a constant process of formation and growth at its under part, to compensate for the wear which is taking place as continually on its surface,” and “the place of the little scales which are continually falling off” from the surface are therefore continually supplied by renewed production beneath (Wilson [1845] 1856, 29). The skin is here worked upon, eroded by its contact with the external, material, friction-full world which acts upon it: but in turn, it is responsive, able to compensate and renew itself, thus continually contributing to and producing its materiality. Wilson draws attention to the intrinsic life and death of the skin, in its constant processes of renewal and reconfiguration that keeps the material of skin in constant production at the same time as it is dying and detaching from the body.

The composition and production of colour is also an active production attributable to the “granules” that form in the deep, new layers. The “various tints of colour exhibited by mankind are therefore referrable to the amount of colouring principle contained within the elementary granules of the scarf-skin and their consequent depth of hue,” from black to “amber-coloured” to “pale and almost colourless” (Wilson [1845] 1856, 31). Colour is materially encapsulated in a distinct, discernible form. Yet it is also a mobile, active process when it comes to the response of the skin to its environment, and it is worth quoting Wilson at length for the vivid description that he provides of this:

Colour of the skin has reference to energy in its action; thus, in the tropics, where light and heat are in excess, and the skin is stimulated by these agents to vigorous action, colour is abundant and intense. […] The same observation relates to summer and winter: under the enlivening warmth of the summer sun, with its flood of light, exposed parts of the fairest skin become brown – that is, their pigment-forming energy is increased. […] If these changes follow naturally alternations of climate and alternations of temperature, we may easily conceive the influence of the scorching rays of the fire, the parching of the east, and the piercing of the north wind, in injuring the complexion. To be preserved in the beauty and freshness of youth, the skin must be protected against these noxious irritants; it must be veiled against causes of irritation acting from without, and guarded against stimulants, not less dangerous, working from within. (31–32)

The skin here is acted upon by the external world, in ways that are endangering: a turn to evocative extremes of language – scorching, noxious, irritation, stimulants – suggests threats to the vulnerable, fragile skin that must be protected and guarded; this significantly anticipates some of the language encountered later in this article. Yet the skin is responsive: “stimulated by these agents to vigorous action” to produce “abundant and intense” colour, the energy of pigment formation is brought into being through the “enlivening warmth of the summer sun.” The skin is a mobile, responsive interface, stirred into action: it is living, capable, asserting its own material qualities against the forces of the world through which it moves. Furthermore, it is worked upon by “agents,” but it seems almost to have its own agency, becoming “stimulated” as it is to “vigorous action.”

The dermatological description of the skin thus affords a conceptual thickening and reinforcement of its boundary through the language in which it is described: from the geographical skin-scape to the constantly active border defending and producing itself against the friction of the material world and in response to the surrounding environment. Dermatological knowledge thickens, layers, reproduces, and constitutes a geography of the skin that reinforces the conceptual boundary as an actual, physical boundary. It also raises the interplay between life and death formed through the renewing skin, at once falling off from the body and at the same time regenerating itself. Sun exposure in particular exaggerates these effects, accelerating the process of damage and renewal of the skin through the stirring of the skin into motion and being, while the language also gestures towards the dangers of skin damage that we will see unfold further in what follows.

The material skin in literary texts

In literary representations of suntanning, this assertion of the skin as solid border is both refuted and reasserted. As indicated already, many descriptive terms are used for sun-exposed skin: bronzed, browned, sun-browned, burnt, reddened, mahogany, coppery, peeling, scorched, blistered, grilled. In the first instance, these terms bring into view through an array of reds and browns the skin colour and, in turn, the race of the bodies. The subjects of these descriptions are typically white, middle-class men, their bodies and especially skin colour otherwise going largely unnoticed in their normative status: they form the universalised body of social order, becoming visible at the moment of their whiteness being changed. This change in skin colour – about which there is, of course, more to be said beyond the bounds of this article – significantly contextualises the skin-boundary explorations that follow: it is central to the social codes of these texts and their contexts that this is white skin being worked upon, and upon which the changes of and to skin surface and texture function.⁸

Intersecting with this changing colour, and inviting further attention itself, is the interesting recurrence of terms such as grilled, blistered, scorched, bronzed, and mahogany, which convey a range of textural changes to the material quality of the skin. These, I suggest, unfold a series of engagements around the boundary surface of the skin and its potential for reconfiguration. In the first grouping I examine, representations of grilling, scorching, blistering present the skin as penetrable, unstable, and even detachable, surface. In the second grouping, descriptions of bronze and mahogany skin undertake a metaphoric smoothing and hardening of skin-surface into strong, material form. On the one hand, the action of the sun exposes the skin border of the white British subject as vulnerable, susceptible matter; while on the other hand, a symbolic turn to materiality enacts a metaphoric hardening of the skin surface in order to conceptually strengthen the bodily border. In dialogue with one another, these representational modes reveal a potential for alteration of the bodily border that suggests an exploration of its actual and symbolic function at the interface of the body.

Skin as unstable surface

In this first set of representations of suntanning, the skin surface is grilled, scorched, and blistered, and thus revealed as an unstable, detachable surface: the skin border is fallible, vulnerable, and potentially removable. There are many literary instances in which skin is depicted as susceptible to the penetrating effects of the sun, which can grill through and work into the skin of the subject: in one of the most vivid instances, a Household Words piece on “Christmas in India” describes India as “a clime where the scorching rays of the sun eternally pierce the very marrow of man, and penetrate the very bowels of the earth” (Siddons 1850, 305). The “penetrating” effect of the sun is expressed again in an article in All the Year Round on “Summer” in which an (unnamed) author writes about “the sun’s penetrating power”: “heat rays, everybody knows, are distinct from light rays, and are much more penetrating in quality,” and sunstroke can result “from exposure to the sun’s fiercer and more projectile rays” (“Summer” 1862, 343). In literary texts, this language of penetration is similarly evoked in descriptions of grilling and scorching: in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, it is feared that if Jane goes to India she will be “grilled alive in Calcutta” ([1847] 2000, 415); likewise, Edward in Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy is imagined to be “dying of thirst and fever under a scorching sun” ([1863] 1999, 50). In Dombey and Son, the young Bitherstone has been “made revengeful by the solar heats of India acting on his blood,” and Bagstock is “grilled and blistered by the Sun” from the “high hothouse heat in the West Indies” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 157, 402). Describing the heat of playing cricket in the West Indies in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Mr Jingle recollects it was “Warm! – red-hot – scorching – glowing” ([1837] 2003b, 103). These grilled bodies exposed to scorching suns are suggestive of a fragile, fallible surface that can be penetrated by the rays of the sun with potentially deadly effect upon the subject. Contextualised by the imperial environments of India and the West Indies mentioned here, these references articulate contemporaneous concerns of imperial medicine around the vulnerability of the white, British subject in the space of empire. This included enquiries into the connection between skin colour and the “power of withstanding the sun’s heat in torrid regions,” with white skin regarded as prone to the most severe effects of the “scorching and blistering effect of the sun’s rays” (Glover 1840, 125). These literary examples similarly situate the skin as the susceptible border through which the dangers of imperial health play out.⁹

Amid this context, it is worth focusing further here upon the particular surface-effects afforded to these susceptible skins. These descriptions overtly threaten the “perfect and complete integrity” (Chevalier 1823, 114) of the skin border, evoking an impression of physical instability that entails a concurrent conceptual instability with regard to the ideal of the skin as protective enclosure. Discussions around the impenetrability of the body are more widely found in the period’s engagements with porosity: Gilbert notes a concern with “the body being penetrated through the pores,” which meant that “the most characteristic element of the individual consciousness, his or her feelings, might be invaded by outer forces” (2019, 11). Porosity is a distinct form of skin penetration, specifically involving material elements such as water physically entering into the body through the pores (and, in reverse, perspiration exiting out). It was highly significant in the context of sanitation and health and, as well as the concern with what could enter into the pores, there was a concurrent interest in the exhalation of waste out of the skin.¹⁰ Suntanning does, of course, differ from porosity, as it is not the pores of the skin that are worked upon or through by the sun; yet I would suggest that it is indicative of a complementary, parallel concern that similarly articulates the potential of the body surface to be permeated. The rays of heat and light are somewhat less visible and materially traceable than those of substances that might enter into the pores, and effect a more dispersed impact across and into the surface. Set against this, the literary representations above work hard to transform this diffuse, invisible process into a metaphoric articulation that particularly materialises the effect of sun penetration, making it visible not just on, but furthermore as, the changed textual surface that appears here in grilled, scorched form. As embodied surface, skin seems to undergo a deep transformation of its matter. At the same time, it is noticeable that, while we can discern that these effects are ones that take place on the surface of the body, the word skin is absent from the references above, its presence implied to the reader through the surrounding descriptive terminology; this absence itself is perhaps also revealing in how it situates the skin as overpowered by the effects of sun exposure. Where, we might ask, has the skin-self gone?

The use of the word blistering enacts a further destabilisation of surface. Dickens’s Bagstock becomes “grilled and blistered” by the sun, and the author of “Summer” writes of how “sudden exposure would blister or excoriate thin-skinned folk” (1862, 343). Blistering again presents skin damage and, particularly, reveals the skin as layered in its composition: Wilson uses blistering to exemplify the skin’s layers: “it must have been observed by every one, that the skin is composed of two layers; for these we see separated from each other by the action of the common blister” ([1845] 1856, 27). In the blistering effects of the sun, layers break apart and reveal the skin as unstable surface, beginning to detach from itself. This breaking apart develops into a further stage of destabilisation through the action of sunburnt skin peeling off. In Bleak House, the “sea-bronze” of the “judicial countenance” is completed with “a strip of bark peeled by the solar rays from the judicial nose” (Dickens [1853] 2003a, 301), and in Pickwick Papers, Pickwick is exposed to a sun that he describes as “tremendously hot, even to me” (Dickens [1837] 2003b, 251), resulting in the following effect: “Mr Pickwick, the skin of whose expressive countenance, was rapidly peeling off, with exposure to the sun” (253). Two examples from life writing earlier in the century also present evocative descriptions of these effects: Robert Southey, writing from Faro in a letter of 17 April 1801 describes how “our faces are skinned by the cutting wind and sun: my nose has been roasted by a slow fire – burnt alive by sunbeams” (1849, 143); and Lord Byron became so sunburnt while swimming in the sea in Pisa that he described in a letter of 27 August 1822 to Thomas Moore, “my whole skin’s coming off, after going through the process of one large continuous blister,” leaving him “as glossy as a snake in its new suit” (Lansdown 2015, 418); his mistress Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli, “kept among her Byronic relics a piece of blistered skin” (Peattie 2019, 403).¹¹

The peeling of sunburnt skin reveals, and indeed accelerates, the renewal-regeneration capacity of the skin that we previously saw discussed by Wilson, drawing attention to the unique capacity of skin to “migrate itself, through its ability to flake, and then regenerate entirely” (Bond 2018, 52; original emphasis). The body’s boundary here becomes not just fallible but fully removable, disrupting the physical border in ways that gesture towards a deeper conceptual disturbance produced through this effect: if the skin is the location of self, what happens when it becomes removed? Gilbert writes of impairments of the skin that “damage to the sensing surface” pointed to “the capacity of the living body to lose its identity, or even to the possibility that the self, so vulnerably exposed, might be forcibly seized for the purposes of others” (2019, 181). In the Pickwick Papers example, it is the skin of Pickwick’s “expressive countenance” that is rapidly peeling off through its sun exposure, suggesting that it is the very embodied being of his countenance that is becoming detached. This reveals – at the same time as it removes – the location of his self within the material surface. The skin occupies an unsettling position as the outer definition of the self: Steven Connor observes that the skin is the only organ which, when removed from the body, leaves behind something that is not “recognisably a body”: “the skin always takes the body with it. The skin is, so to speak, the body’s face” (2004, 29). Meanwhile, the skin peeled from the body “itself is no longer a skin once it is detached. By being peeled away from the body, it has ceased to be itself” (29). In becoming separable from the body and transforming into an extra-corporeal material, skin peeling makes visible the body’s simultaneous capacity for renewal and death as intrinsically connected within the regenerative process. This reveals the vulnerability of the human as ultimately only detachable, dead matter; but at the same time, it suggests the capacity and capability of the body-as-matter which can be transformed into a thing beyond itself at the point of skin-peeling, a thing that can outlast the living human self. While Connor argues that the skin peeling from the body ceases to be itself, Byron’s skin as relic would suggest otherwise: the preservation of the sunburnt skin as a relic by his lover after his death implies that the skin here retains something of the self located within it.

These representations of detachable, damaged skin raise questions about the location of the self within the skin, as well as the possibility of the detachment of that self into a material, separable thing that can come away from the body and have its own material existence beyond. While the preservation of skin as relic is interesting in its transformation of skin into an object with the capacity for temporal duration (Byron’s skin remains today),¹² I would suggest that sunburnt skin peeling can also be situated as a distinct category of skin-becom(ing)-thing, due to the ability to observe the action at the moment of transformation. The peeling skin coming off the body exists in the very instance of change from living to dead, body to thing; it is both part of and becoming separate from the body; it holds the future potential to become an extra-corporeal thing that is not, at the moment of peeling, fully realised but exists as a possibility while, at the same time, it still remains as part of the living, moving body. The skin is here poised between its interconnectedness with the living human subject and its potential to depart into the material, non-human world, and simultaneously holds the capacity to exist as a moment of transition – of and almost beyond the body – that can be itself preserved both as material and through the further representation in textual form. We see here emerge, then, the vulnerability of the body as matter, but also begin to develop a sense of the capability and capacity of the skin material as it becomes reconfigured through suntanning.

The hardened surface

In the second grouping of representational similarities, suntanned skin is conceptualised through a likeness to material objects in such a way as to metaphorically solidify the surface of the body. In literary texts, there are frequent references to suntanned skin becoming bronze and mahogany, each of which evoke a change of colour but also of surface texture. Depictions of bronzed skin can be seen in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, where George Talboys returns from Australia with “a dark face, bronzed by exposure to the sun” (Braddon [1862] 1998, 18), while in The Lovels of Arden, George Fairfax’s hands are “bronzed a little by sun and wind,” and he has “the same healthy bronze upon his face” (Braddon 1871, 3); in Aurora Floyd, Prodder is described as having become “such a bronzed and coppery tint by perpetual exposure to meridian suns” (Braddon [1863] 2008, 232). Returning soldiers and sailors are also often bronzed, such as the “bronzed old soldier” George in Bleak House (Dickens [1853] 2003a, 954); the “bronzed cheek and courageous eye” of Walter in Dombey and Son (Dickens [1848] 2002, 751); and in Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Will returns “a dashing, bronzed-looking” sailor ([1848] 2006, 143). Later in the century, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Lord Warburton is described as being “splendidly sunburnt; even his multitudinous beard had been burnished by the fire of Asia,” with a “bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its seasoning” (James [1881] 2009, 291, 292).¹³

These references clearly articulate a change in colour: skin that is (presumed) to be white deepens to bronze. Noticeable too is the sense of a positive acquisition of “healthy bronze,” which is overtly expressed in Braddon’s representation of George but also implied in the positive phrasing of others. There are also suggestions of physical attractiveness, such as the “dashing” Will and “splendidly” burnt Lord Warburton, who is further described as having a “manly figure” and being “such a representative of the British race” (James [1881] 2009, 292). The bronzed skin thus reaffirms the valorous, attractive masculinity of these men returned from overseas. While there is more to be said about the imperial and racial associations employed therein, I want to focus again on the particular surface quality that skin takes here through the choice of bronze as the descriptive term that recurs so frequently.¹⁴ As a physical material, bronze confers a change of surface texture that is metaphorically suggestive of robust, sturdy metal, seemingly underscoring the healthy, attractive masculinity through a metaphoric hardening of the skin border. Indeed, in the aforementioned Household Words piece “Summer,” the author extols the “wondrous effects of the solar beam, which admirably tempers the human race,” producing “Provençal, Genoese, or Greek sailors, who are bronzed and coppered until they seem almost turned into metal” (1862, 344). “Tempered” skin is hardened, solidified skin: it asserts the skin as a definable, reinforced, and impenetrable border.

This interestingly anticipates how, as Kenneth Dutton notes, from the 1930s onwards a tanned appearance was favoured by bodybuilders to create an impression of surface-strength and impenetrability, becoming increasingly sought-after and perfected later in the century through fake-tanning and oiling. Dutton suggests that the bronzed skin conveys a visual and tactile impression of “looking hard,” in which, “at the level of metaphorical suggestion,” “the aim is not simply to resemble the appearance of burnished bronze, but to convey what the bronze statue and the bronze-like body alike suggest to us. […] Its dark, gleaming surface is suggestive of impenetrability or even invulnerability (1995, 315). Dutton notes that the earlier iteration of this in the nineteenth century was enhancing the surface of the skin through a coating of white powder “in order to stress its resemblance to marble statuary” (312). Yet I would suggest that these bronzed, masculine bodies of Victorian literature anticipate this metaphoric effect. Indeed, bronze was not without significance in the period: it had specific resonance not only as a hard metal used in statuary, but was especially used in commemorative works in the early nineteenth century: M. G. Sullivan notes “a growing domestic market for bronzed depictions of non-monarchical ‘worthies’” in the mid-eighteenth century, which helped “to establish a common association of bronzing with commemoration of the British hero” (2005, 31; original emphasis). This paved the way for later cultures of commemoration and led to “an explosion of bronze commemoration in the period leading up to the Great Exhibition and beyond” (30). There was also a “reinvigoration of bronze casting” enabling the mass production of statuettes throughout the latter part of the century (Dunstan 2016, 8). It seems no coincidence, then, that these masculine figures are asserted through this mode, creating a solid and defined border that protects the body, accentuating its material form, but also emphasising a heroic masculinity. Moreover, the “impenetrability” of the skin that is metaphorically implied is significant in the context of concerns around the erosive, penetrable effects of the skin that we have seen as matters of concern already. The skin here becomes distinctly material, impenetrable, a solid boundary reinforcement achieved.

The word mahogany similarly solidifies the skin through a turn to the object world: the surface appearance of sunburn takes on a smooth reconfiguration through the appropriation of a “mahogany” surface. In Little Dorrit, “travelling-people usually get more or less mahogany” (Dickens [1857] 1999, 237). In Dombey and Son, Jack Bunsby is described as having a “mahogany face,” or a “stolid mahogany visage” (Dickens [1848] 2002, 367, 598); Bunsby is also described as “bulky and strong” (367). There is also one instance of another form of wood, in Not Wisely, But Too Well, in which there is a description of a young woman sitting in the “baking hot” sun, wearing a hat pulled “very low over her eyes, to balk the sun’s inquisitiveness,” but her hands, “being innocent of gloves, [are] in the process of being dyed a good rich oak colour” (Broughton [1867] 1869, 10). Earlier in the century, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Sir Walter Eliot’s complaints about the naval profession include its bearing on the skin: it has turned Admiral Baldwin into “the most deplorable looking person you can imagine, his face the colour of mahogany, rough and rugged to the last degree” (Austen [1818] 2004, 22). These references take us to the material of wood, and in particular of mahogany furniture: quite explicitly so in the case of The Uncommercial Traveller, where the ship’s skipper is “a mahogany-faced Old Salt, with the indispensable quid in his cheek” (Dickens [1863] 2021, 208), whose face fully takes on the appearance of furniture: in the naval drill that unfolds, he performs “manoeuvres” which “made the Skipper very hot (French polishing his mahogany face)” (209). As Kelley Graham notes, mahogany – along with oak, walnut, and rosewood – was amongst the most popular furniture materials (2008, 80), and mahogany furniture populates the drawing rooms and parlours of Victorian texts.¹⁵ Mahogany as the descriptive term of choice is significant in evoking material solidity: Elaine Freedgood writes that it was favoured for being “termite resistant; it is not subject to dry rot; it has little tendency to warp or twist; it is hard-hearted, which is a good thing for wood, making it dense and heavy; it has a fine straight grain and it polishes up beautifully to a reddish brown hue” (2006, 33). As the likeness for the material of skin, this metaphorically gestures towards a dense, heavy, thickened skin border that, as with bronze, is impenetrable. Furthermore, mahogany has significant imperial connotations: it was imported into England in large quantities from Madeira and Jamaica, and thus “mahogany furniture symbolizes, naturalizes, domesticates, and internalizes the violent histories of deforestation, slavery, and the ecologically and socially devastating cultivation” of crops in Madeira and Jamaica (35). In the use of this word to describe the skin, these texts also briefly signal to the imperial mobilities and networks through which the characters of the texts circulate, and which are often the reason behind bodies becoming suntanned and burnt in the first place.

The turn to the material world of bronze and mahogany thus metaphorically strengthens the skin-border through a turn to the solidity of the material world. Skin is smoothed and refined into the shine of bronze or the polish of mahogany, and it is reinforced into impenetrable surface. Ahmed and Stacey, interrogating how “‘the skin’ is attributed a meaning and logic of its own,” write that “it is the fetishising of the skin as boundary-object that allows the contours of the body to appear as a given” (2001, 3); we see here the symbolic over-articulation of skin-as-object to reinforce the contours of the body into a hardened, impenetrable boundary. The skin is constructed as metaphorically strengthened against its potential vulnerability and penetrability which, as we have seen, resonate as recurrent concerns. Yet these references do so through a momentary turning of the surface into an object itself: skin is once again absent as skin, referenced through association rather than directly named within the course of these descriptions. What, then, becomes of the self embodied in the skin? Writing on nineteenth-century sense perception, Cohen notes that attending to the senses “enables embodied subjects to experience themselves as objects, and objects reciprocally to function as subjects, so as to permit a mutual perviousness between self and world” (2009, 6). Turning to the material-skin might also enable the self to momentarily experience itself as object, just as we have seen briefly glimpsed in the examples of peeled skin departing from the body; here, though, the object-potential of the body becomes fully embedded into its surface. As a recurrent trope in these texts, this seemingly appears as an attractive prospect for the otherwise vulnerable body.

The matter of skin, therefore, manifests as not quite living, human form, but is solidified into non-human material. If the skin is vulnerable matter exposed and reconfigured through its physical contact with the world through which it moves, then, the reference to material objects suggests a way of conceptually (through metaphorical likeness) strengthening and reinforcing the skin boundary. Unlike the detachable, potential object-nature of skin blistering and peeling, here we see a manifestation of materiality, or object status, worked into the very surface of the living body, both transforming and retaining its vitality. Thus, in defiance of the fallibility of the skin, these texts manifest a representational turn to the object-body that suggests the capacity for the body to become “thing” in a way that seems to exceed the capabilities of the human skin, but also potentially disturbs the location of the human self within this transformed, material form.

Conclusion

Throughout the nineteenth century, skin came to prominence in literary and cultural texts as a site where the embodiment of self was examined by writers. Amid this context, suntanned skin represents a particularly resonant site where the materiality of the body comes into view through the textural reconfigurations that sun exposure effects, in ways that provoke deeper conceptual questions about the self contained within and upon the skin surface. Literary authors find themselves contending with suntanning as evoking a change not only to the colour of the skin, but also to the textural, material qualities of surface as a penetrable and reconfigurable medium. While dermatological writings such as Wilson’s contributed to a “thickening” of the skin as a complex, multifaceted, bodily surface that presents a robust textural cover at the borders of the body, literary and cultural authors enter into a more entangled engagement with the stability of the skin as the interface between self and world. Amid a vast array of descriptive terms that were used to describe suntanning, I have focused here especially on those that metaphorically bring these border-entanglements to the surface, to argue that there is a pervasive ambivalence about the role of the skin and its relationship to the white, British self that manifests through these depictions. In the terms of these texts, such questions are limited in their focus upon the white, and almost always male, body as the universalised norm through which these questions are centred, with less attentiveness to those perceived as “other” through the cultural modes through which these texts operate; but this also reveals a vulnerability in the stability of this universalised body. In the examples I have discussed, the skin is exposed as vulnerable, penetrable matter, unstable in its surface qualities to the point that it can detach and become separate from the rest of the body, posing conceptual challenges about the embodiment of self within surface. Yet in the second set of descriptions, an over-articulation of boundary is achieved through a metaphoric turn to the material, object world which becomes embodied within the skin by way of conceptually strengthening the self against an unstable world. This positive hardening of the self is underscored by a sense of potential ambiguity that the human body can only achieve solidity through becoming a non-human thing, thus raising questions as to where the human essence of self is located. Throughout both descriptive modes, there unfolds a central, pressing question about the materialised self, and how that materiality is lived, transformed, and reconfigured as it moves through and within the world, and how the skin is “stimulated into vigorous action” in the process.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Academy for the research enabled through a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant. Research was conducted in Leeds University Library Special Collections, King’s College London Foyle Special Collections, and the Wellcome Library; my thanks for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported through a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant held from 2017 to 2019 (award number SG170929).

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Mathieson

Charlotte Mathieson is a Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century English Literature in the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Surrey. She researches nineteenth-century literature, with an interest in mobility and the body in the novel. Her publications include Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She is co-editor of the series Palgrave Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture.

Notes

1. These include, for instance, Thomas Bateman’s Practical Synopsis of Cutaneous Diseases (1817), Samuel Plumbe’s Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Skin (1829), and Jonathan Green’s Practical Compendium of the Diseases of the Skin (1837).

2. Among the most significant was Erasmus Wilson’s Practical Treatise on Healthy Skin ([1845] 1856), which went through multiple editions in the UK and USA until the 1870s; other publications throughout the century include Tilbury Fox’s Skin Diseases: Their Description, Pathology, Diagnosis, and Treatment (1864), and H. Radcliffe Crocker’s Diseases of the Skin: Their Description, Pathology, Diagnosis, and Treatment (1888).

3. Indicative volumes across the century include The Duties of a Lady’s Maid; with Directions for Conduct, and Numerous Receipts for the Toilette (1825), Arnold J. Cooley’s The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts in Ancient and Modern Times (1866), and J. McGregor-Robertson’s The Household Physician: A Family Guide to the Preservation of Health (1890).

4. See, for example, Rowland’s Kalydor (A Treatise 1839). A multitude of recipes for home-made products also exist in books such as those described in the previous endnote: see, for example, the extensive collection of skin cosmetic formulae, many to “whiten and soften the skin,” provided in Cooley’s The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts (1866, 391).

5. For other writers, however, the “dermatological gaze” might be more positive in what it affords: in George Eliot’s work, Ariane de Waal suggests, this gaze does not “unearth a supposedly true core” but rather “uncover[s] more cutaneous surfaces” in which “physiological processes” are “described within materialist, rather than metaphysical, registers” (2020, 102).

6. See also Judith Pike (2013), who examines Rochester’s bronzed appearance in the context of race, gender, and imperialism.

7. For a detailed discussion of texture as a critical tool in Victorian material culture studies, see Anja Hartl’s article in this special issue.

8. On skin colour and tanning, see also Ahmed (1998) and Dyer (1997, chap. 2).

9. On sun exposure and imperial health, see Carter (2007, chap. 2) and Mathieson (2014, 2015).

10. On discussions of the skin in relation to sanitation and public health, see Te Hennepe (2014) and Gilbert (2019, chap. 3).

11. The preservation of bodily objects in the period was not altogether unusual: Gilbert notes that “skin, as a removable surface that could be preserved,” was, like the hair, “in the category of body parts that are also ‘things’ – subject to conversion into memento, souvenir, or fetish” (2019, 181). On the preservation of hair, see also Heather Hind’s contribution to this special issue.

12. These and other relics are now held in the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna, Italy.

13. Examples are found also in shorter fiction in Household Words and All the Year Round: Henry Spicer describes a colonel “whose countenance was bronzed by an Indian sun” (1867, 143), and Charles Mackay writes about a man “in the prime of life, with a military air and bearing; with a handsome beard and moustache, and a face bronzed by exposure to the sun” (1868, 539), while in another story a man named Gaston goes for a soldier, and “he came back a bronzed and handsome fellow, with wonderful stories of his exploits and travels” (Martin 1859, 551).

14. On the masculinity of the sunburnt British traveller, see Mathieson (2014).

15. For instance, as detailed in Elaine Freedgood’s reading, Brontë uses the furniture to significant effect in Jane Eyre (2006, chap. 1).