Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England, and: Love & Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby & Hannah Cullwick (review)

There can be few readers of VS who have not heard of the minor poet and bureaucrat Arthur Munby and his lifelong enthusiasm for women who worked in such physically demanding jobs as coal sorting, milk delivery, fish-bait collection, and acrobatics. His extraordinary love affair with the highly intelligent maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick has been told many times, focusing on the sadomasochistic love games they enjoyed. Their letters and diaries, as well as Munby's large collection of photographs of working women, opened in 1950, comprise an incomparable archive. What more, then, can be said about a couple who compulsively pursued and recorded their erotic interests? The two books under review do not significantly alter our perceptions of Hannah and Munby, but they differ in their intentions. Diane Atkinson simply wants readers to know the details of their extraordinary relationship. Barry Reay has chosen a series of visual case studies, focusing on Munby's cross-class voyeurism.

Atkinson's exclusive focus on their courtship and marriage, rather than either Hannah's working life or Munby's explorations, is a welcome change. For Atkinson, the young Munby was an obtuse and demanding lover who forced Hannah into further feats of exhausting labor, and then made her write about them. But the author's sympathies shift when the married Hannah betrays a serious drinking problem, leaving Munby, she implies, with no choice but to send his wife away, surrounded as they were by intrusive neighbors. Munby's class power and Hannah's depression deserve fuller analysis, but Atkinson eschews any psychological probing. For example, after describing how Munby reluctantly permitted Hannah to lick his boots after he had forbidden her to do so, she writes, "we can imagine Arthur indulging her to keep the peace" (317).

Especially valuable is Atkinson's fresh information about their lives after Munby forced Hannah to live in Shropshire with her family and friends, rather than continuing as his servant at Fig Tree Court in London. This period, from 1877 to 1909, when Hannah died, has been largely ignored by previous writers. Drawing upon both Hannah's letters to Munby and Munby's diaries, Atkinson shows how the rural clergy enforced social mores. One refused to believe that Hannah was actually married to the gentleman who regularly visited her; another accused her of having an affair with a widower, while living with his family. The widower badly needed her rent money and general help, but his mother spread rumors about Munby and turned the children against Hannah, adding to the clergyman's suspicions. The intrusive clergyman freely entered the small home and berated her for immorality. Hannah did not feel strong enough to live alone, though she longed for greater privacy. In addition, Munby had hired her sister Ellen as general servant at Fig Tree Court, giving her the position Hannah so dearly wanted. No wonder she turned to drink!

Although her book is aimed at the general reader, Atkinson could have provided a fuller assessment of the costs of Hannah's lifelong desire to be Munby's slave. She documents Hannah's youthful attraction to Byron's tragedy Sardanapalus (1821), about a king who passionately loves the slave Myrrha. Certainly the impressionable Hannah was fascinated with Myrrha's strength and Sardanapalus's weakness, but this hardly suffices to explain her extraordinary efforts to retain Munby's interest and love. Atkinson also traces Munby's infatuation from 1865 to 1867 with Sarah Carter, the daughter of a genteel tenant farmer. She describes his erotic response to watching "she who sings Mendelssohn with me" clean his boots, but then concludes that "on the brink of a relationship of more or less equal terms...his lack of experience and confused feelings...