Pamela Gilbert's Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History is a learned and imaginative work of cultural history and literary criticism. Readers coming to the topic of skin from a historical perspective might expect a treatment of interrelated topics, including race and cleanliness. Gilbert incorporates now widespread understandings of racialization and hygiene in her account of the nineteenth century. Yet this is a surprising and expansive work that asks questions eclipsing these important matters. Instead of providing the now-familiar account of modernity, Gilbert integrates well-worn themes into a broader discussion of nineteenth-century selfhood, intellectual history, and literary expression. In the nineteenth century, Gilbert contends, skin “became a substance integral to and having a creative role in the generation of the self” (1). To demonstrate this point, Gilbert has offered up an ambitious work with four parts and eight chapters. The parts engage “four general thought-categories,” considering skin “as a surface for the sensing and expressive self”; “as a permeable boundary”; “as an alienable substance”; and “as a site of inherent and inscribed properties” (2). Gilbert builds her literary readings at the end of each chapter on a deep understanding of philosophy and history, which she lays out extensively. In the process, she draws generously on the scholarship of cultural critics and historians. Across her text, she addresses a wide range of aesthetic and social phenomena, including blushes, baths, and blemishes.

Literary critics will notice in the subtitle and in Gilbert's contention that “skin is a surface for the sensing and expressive self” (2) a nod to the work of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus. Their germinal essay, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (Representations 108, no. 1 [2009]: 1–21), called on literary critics to move away from suspicious readings of texts. Gilbert builds on—and also complicates—this method in canny ways as she places a great importance on a particular surface, the human skin. “Skin communicates,” Gilbert notes, “but like any signifier, it must be read and interpreted” (21). Her readings culminate in a new understanding of Victorian realism. “As the surface of the body becomes the site of self,” Gilbert argues, “realism becomes a dominant aesthetic mode of narrating that self” (22). Particularly critical for her understandings is the work of Charles Bell, a surgeon, neurologist, and artist from Scotland, whose writings (and intriguing animal drawings) facilitate the understanding that the self is a surface that allows for engagement with the broader world. Building on her exposition of Bell, Gilbert contends that the literary realism of the nineteenth century, which is often associated with interiority, “might profitably be considered in terms of exteriority, or surface” (43). This understanding, which goes against the grain of much orthodoxy, informs Gilbert's literary analyses, which come at the end of chapters that are chock full of insights from intellectual history, cultural studies, and medical history. Her literary objects of analysis range widely. The literary realism of George Eliot bookends her study, at the front and at the end, but Gilbert addresses other mainstays of realism, including Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, as well as sensation writers like Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. Her literary reach is impressive, and Victorian Skin includes within its ambit the authors of Victorian poetry and nonfiction prose, as well as transitional figures like Oscar Wilde.

Along with surface and self, the third word of Gilbert's subtitle is “history.” Gilbert comes to the nineteenth century with a long-established understanding of its cultural, social, and medical histories. Building on her earlier work, she performs, in this text, acts of historical reorientation. I was struck, in reading the book, by the centrality of the French Revolution, and particularly the Reign of Terror, in the making of Victorian literature and sensibilities. Along with the Scottish Enlightenment and German Idealism, the French Revolution shaped British expression and self- conception in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution, and its most dramatic, excessive, episode, the Terror, were central to production of collective trauma and to understandings of selfhood. In Gilbert's rendering, the Terror hangs over the nineteenth century. One nineteenth-century fetish, the bath, was embodied in the historical figure of Marat. Another fetish, the flayed skin, epitomized by the Greek figure of Marsyas, also hearkens back to the Terror. By focusing on the French Revolution and threading it through her text, Gilbert has offered an act of interpretive and historical reorientation. It is now commonplace to understand the British nineteenth century—and the Victorian age—as produced in the crucible of empire and through the experience of urbanization. To be sure, race and color, along with hygiene and eugenics, are hardly absent from this account; particularly helpful is the consideration of the separation of race and color in the chapter “Marked.” Yet Gilbert offers a different story about the making of the self and the surface as she begins from the French Revolution. She closes her expansive account at the turn of the twentieth century, when depth trumps surface and the collective eclipses the individual.

While there are some familiar elements and interpretive turns in this work, Gilbert offers an uncommonly thoughtful narration and a highly original interpretation. She succeeds in her effort to recenter the skin and to reorient the century. Readers will benefit from this deeply embedded, while also defamiliarized, assessment of the nineteenth century. There is little here that escapes Gilbert's generous and thoughtful attention. The one place I would have liked to have seen more interrogation is in the term Victorian itself. In Gilbert's hands, the British nineteenth century was made in France, Scotland, and Germany. Perhaps the Englishness of the Victorian age is only skin deep.