People keep telling me that the Victorians were fat.
There have always been fat people. I remember really fat people from my own childhood. I remember seeing a very fat man on a bus once, when I was maybe ten years old, and being told not to stare because it was very rude to make people uncomfortable by staring at them.
But I also remember that it was a shocking thing, and that it was difficult not to stare, because it was so shocking and so unusual.
The question is, how fat were the Victorians? How many Victorians were fat?
Statistics are hard to come by!
These industrious, clever, curious people seem not to have thought of obesity as anything worth keeping statistics about.
It's true that if you google for images of "fat Victorians", you'll find plenty. Interestingly, they're almost always of fat women.
And they are indeed very fat.
I concede the point. There were fat Victorians. Some of them were very fat indeed.
But there were an awful lot of Victorians.
If you google for images of "black Victorians", you'll find plenty. Interestingly, there seem to be about as many black men as black women.
The existence of images of black Victorians proves that there were black people in England in Victoria's time. It doesn't prove that there were a lot of black Victorians.
If you google for images of "Victorians" you'll find plenty. Almost none of them are fat, and almost none of them are black.
The existence of fat Victorians proves that the calories were available in Victoria's time for those who wanted them.
But we already knew that. The Victorians were the richest people in the world. They weren't short of food.
After a bit of googling, I came up with this excellent article on Victorian Fat Shaming:
In it we are introduced to Cesare Lombardo.
Cesare is an Italian doctor in London in 1897. Much like a modern doctor would, he's trying to establish a connection between obesity and immorality.
And he makes a table of the weights and heights of prostitutes, and a table for comparison of the weights and heights of some more moral women.
Now I strongly suspect that Cesare has cherry-picked his data a bit here:
He is trying to prove his case.
He is going round London looking for fat prostitutes, and he can be forgiven, I think, if he was looking for particularly fat prostitutes and measuring their weights and heights.
People in the infancy of statistics were perhaps a little less virtuous than they could have been.
Presumably this is a service that prostitutes are happy to provide to a charming Italian doctor, so I bet he has got some real fatties in there.
Being a foreign devil, Cesare appears, in his barbarian way, to have given these weights and heights in kilograms and meters.
Which makes it easy to calculate their BMI scores. So I have taken the liberty of doing so:
The scores on the whores:
[21, 22, 21, 21, 20, 21, 26, 24, 23]
The scores on the virtuous:
[20, 19, 20, 23, 22, 22, 25]
Case established, says Cesare.
But what I notice here, is that the fattest whores in London seem to be a bit skinny by modern standards.
Most modern ladies, I think, would be happy enough with a BMI of 20 or 21?
He has managed to find a single truly hippopotamus-like whore with a BMI of 26.
I think we'd call her 'ever so slightly overweight', wouldn't we?