I’ve been reading an essay by Alan Bennett on A.E. Housman, an author who is not an
open book to me, though I know he wrote 'A Shropshire Lad,' and that he looked
somewhat like this.
Bennett writes in the essay, ‘At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.’ Swinburne is not an open book either, though I believe he looked somewhat like this:
But I have a few questions. The first of course is how does anybody know the details of Housman and Swinburne’s walking and underwear habits? The answer may be that literary biography has reached such a state of perfection that we know just about everything about everybody.
A further question – why does Bennett say ‘all his underwear’ – as though Housman might be expected to change some of his underwear while keeping other bits on. Which leads to the question of just how many pieces of underwear Housman and Swinburne wore. It must be more than two because otherwise Bennett would have said ‘both’ rather than ‘all.’
An online search for ‘Victorian Underwear’ brings up the images below: (And yes I know that both Swinburne and Housman outlived Victoria – the latter didn’t die until 1936).
I also suspect Housman and Swinburne didn’t do their own laundry.
This is Alan Bennett: one day literary biographers may tell us all about his underwear arrangements.
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