Saturday Morning Beard Fact

As the nineteenth century headed into its final two decades and the Aesthetic movement began to take hold, many people had begun to look back longingly to a time before the Crimean War, then men’s faces did not all look identically hirsute. The fashion for facial hair was changing and, just as they had in the classical world, differing styles were not denoting a difference between generations. As the Aesthetic young men began to break away from tradition and shave his face, the older generation spluttered dire warnings. In 1880 a book entitled The Philosophy of Beards was published, warning that the Empire’s moral code was being eroded by newfangled ideas and concluding that ‘the absence of (a) beard is usually a sign of physical and moral weakness’. The underlying fear was that a clean-shaven man was latently homosexual – a criminal offence in Queen Victoria’s Britain.

Moustaches, Whiskers & Beards by Lucinda Hawksley, National Portrait Gallery