Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Arnold J. Cooley's The Toilet and Cosmetic Arts in Ancient and Modern Times (1866) offers a characteristic mid-Victorian testimonial to the wonders of skin: [Skin] not merely acts as an organ of sense, and a protection to the surface of the body, but it clothes it, as it were, in a garment of the most delicate texture, and of the most surpassing loveliness. In perfect health it is gifted with exquisite sensibility, and while it possesses the softness of velvet and exhibits the delicate hues of the lily, the carnation, and the rose, it is nevertheless gifted with extraordinary strength and power of resisting injury, and is not only capable of repairing, but of actually renewing itself. (Ibid.: 197) Cooley's paean to skin is typical of Victorian popular-science books in its rhapsodic tone. It is also characteristic of that genre that his admiration of skin is expressed in two different registers: the aesthetic and the scientific. Skin, with its “delicate hues” and “velvet” texture, is a sensuous as well as a sensual object. Even more wondrous, however, in an age newly preoccupied with science and particularly with microscopic discovery, is its anatomical function. If skin is, as the title of this section of our book suggests, a border, then Cooley speaks simultaneously of the inside and the outside. Skin's beauty and softness belie its strength, and its scientific properties are ... log in or subscribe to read full text