Arthur Munby
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Arthur Munby (1828-1910) was a Victorian era British diarist, poet, barrister and solicitor.
He was a civil servant in the ecclesiastical commissioners' office from 1858 until his retirement in 1888. His published poetry included Benoni (1852) and Verses New and Old (1865). He also taught Latin at the Working Men's College for more than a decade.
Munby had a life-long fascination and fetish for working-class women, particularly those who did hard, dirty physical labor (a form of mysophilia). His favorite pastime was to wander the streets of London and other industrial cities, approach working women and ask them about their lives and the details of their work, while noting their clothes and dialects. These observations went into his journals. He was an amateur artist, and his diaries contain sketches of working women, many of whom strongly resemble caricatures of black men: squat, black-faced figures in coats and trousers, with massive feet and hands and protruding lips.
He also collected hundreds of photographs of female mine workers, kitchen maids, milkmaids, charwomen, acrobats and so on. These diaries and images provide historical information on the lives of working-class Victorian women. Much of his obsession is hinted at in his last book, Faithful Servants: Being Epitaphs and Obituaries Recording Their Names and Services (1891). His papers are housed at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1854, Munby was on one of his urban wanderings when he met Hannah Cullwick, a Shropshire-born maid-of-all-work. They formed a relationship that led to a secret marriage in 1873 and lasted for the rest of their lives. The marriage remained a secret from all but a few close friends; he revealed it to his brother only a few months before his own death.
[edit] Sources
- Judith Flanders. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
- Diane Atkinson. Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. New York: Macmillan, 2003.
- Barry Reay. Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England. Reaktion, 2002. (ISBN 1-86189-119-9)
- Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sex in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. (ISBN 0-415-90890-6)
- Derek Hudson. Munby: Man of Two Worlds. Gambit, 1972. (ISBN 0-87645-066-4)
