Welcome to the Victorian Underground Project

Historical attitudes towards portly people, particularly women, have ebbed and flowed over millennia. To a lesser degree, leaner people have also been a subject of derision. It’s almost impossible to find examples of societies where attitudes had made peace with weight diversity– including ours.

During the latter half of the Victorian era, a school of thought tended to tilt towards seeing corpulence as a symptom of laziness, stupidity and insanity. However, the same society was being watched over by an overweight Queen Victoria which no doubt tempered these prejudices.

But as we know; just because some people enjoy shouting about how much they dislike a certain demographic, it doesn’t mean they speak for everyone. Around the same time, the arts was chock-full of descriptions of portly women being healthy and beautiful. Quite literally there is no one size fits all.

This brings us to The Fat Wives’ Club which was a quarterly magazine mostly distributed in the underground circuit of brothels and peeping Tom establishments. It was a huge success although nobody knew who was responsible for it.

The other mystery was what it was published for. We can jump to conclusions about all sorts of things but there’s no real reason on record. The only writing within the magazine was to give readers the supposed first name of the subjects. Other than that it was blank.

At TVUP we find the images of these women absolutely captivating. The vast majority appear to be joyous and some of them even appear to have had cake thrown at them. We prefer to think that the true intention of the publication was to comment on how we’re all just human looking to have fun. But it’s equally likely that it was only ever just erotica.

Enjoy your weekend.

TVUP