The existential issue facing men in 1850s and 1860s Victorian Britain was the beard question: to have one or not. The fad arose for practical reasons among British soldiers in Crimea, where it turned bitterly cold during the winter: a beard worked as nature’s scarf, and on their return many veterans chose to keep theirs.
Then, as now, civilians secretly envied soldiers. Where before beards had been associated with radicalism and anarchic French- or Irishmen, they now signaled decisiveness and manly vigor. Not having one suggested effeminacy and all manner of moral depravity.
The need to appear manly was more keenly felt by people in desk jobs, including churchmen and intellectuals. According to the Victorian critic T. C. Sandars, the kind of “muscular Christian” found in Charles Kingsley’s novels was able “to hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twirl a poker round his fingers,” and we have Thomas Carlyle celebrating “The Hero as Man of Letters,” as exemplified by Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns.
The need to appear manly was more keenly felt by people in desk jobs.
Beards came in a variety of shapes and sizes: the doorknocker, the imperial, and the Newgate frill, the latter a particularly odd look, with the chin clean-shaven but the neck and lower part of the jaw hairy, providing a “reverse halo” effect, in the words of the literary historian Kathryn Hughes.
Not only did a beard bestow gravitas on the wearer, it could also hide a
