THE WELL WORN WALKER

A.E. Housman is not an open book to me, and much of what I know about him comes from an essay I read by Alan Bennett. And the most interesting thing in that essay runs as follows, “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.”

The curious part of that sentence is the word “all.” Just how much, how many kinds, of underwear did he (or they) wear?  More than just vest and underpants?  Combinations? Drawers? Something more exotic?  This kind of thing?

 

        

 

If a work of statuary can be believed, Housman did look like a walker.

Swinburne on the other hand looks like a man who’s got his knickers in a twist.  

Though this is how Swinburne looks in a portrait by Robert M.B. Paxton, at the National Portrait Gallery, which is much more persuasive.

Alan Bennett does look convincingly like a walker.  

His underwear arrangements, to date, must remain a private matter, and personally I prefer it that way.

WALKING IN COMBINATIONS

 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.