The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire.

By Michael Anton Budd (New York: New York University Press, 1997. xix plus 218pp. $40.00).

In a small museum in northern France there rests in elegant splendor a bone allegedly from the hand of Charlemagne. The relic provokes a discomfiture. Either the great leader possessed enormous hands, or was a giant, or the bone's human origin is questionable. Sagas and tales tell us of the great size and power of national heroes in the age before visual records were commonplace. But leaders of more recent times, especially after the invention of photography in 1839, have not: become (literally) larger than life after they have died; their size has been documented. During the past two hundred years, some of them, as Michael Anton Budd points our in The Sculpture Machine, took to receiving and even consorting with strongmen to enlarge their stature among their subjects. George IV and boxer Dan Donnelly, Louis Napoleon and Hippolyte Triat, Kaiser Wilhelm and Eugen Sandow and Theodore Roosevelt and various boxers are probably the most notable examples of this political-physical entente.

The history of the body has in the past decade become the subject of the work of social and cultural historians investigating, for example, the history of sport, medical treatment, sexuality, and gender. Budd's investigation of aspects of the physical culture movement is a welcome addition to this growing literature. His most important contribution is a thorough and sophisticated analysis of the career and significance of Eugen Sandow - showman, strongman, educator, publisher and popularizer of the chiseled muscular physique at the turn of the century. His contrast of Sandow and his cultural obverse, Oscar Wilde, is illuminating for those interested in the lives and importance of either of the men.

Budd convincingly links the popular enthusiasm for physical culture to fears of decline in England, especially among the elites that feared both a restive (and physically "degenerate") urban working class and their own seeming inadequacy when compared to the heroes of earlier generations. Many of the same connections can be found in the United States and, to some extent Germany and Scandinavia at the same time, and Budd's book would have been strengthened by developing this comparative element. Aside from passing references to the United States, this book is about England, although the author is not explicit in his geographical concentration.

Budd notes that physical culture advocates considered the novels of Walter Scott and Richard Henry Dana the most uplifting fiction among a welter of cheap novels, especially for the young. What exactly were the characteristics of these authors' heroes that were most "appropriate?" This is one of several incidences of a tantalizing point left unexplored. The detailed and comprehensive bibliography included suggests Budd could have more fully developed his argument.

Budd's attention to the visible form of the male body seems to have precluded his consideration of action as a part of the physical culture movement. There is almost no consideration of the import of sport for the British public upon whom he concentrates. Much of Sandow's significance, and of the ideas and activities associated with physical culture, center around the implication of action and power. Budd mentions the "new athleticism" of the late nineteenth century (pp. 28-9) but does not attend to it. He does not make a convincing case for considering physical culture and sport as distinct cultural practices. Static posing was important, but hardly the whole story.

In the same way, The Sculpture Machine divorces musculature from the social and cultural context of popular and professional medicine in the nineteenth century. This gets his analysis in trouble, as on page 13: "At the same time [when, exactly?] popular, commercial and professional interests [whose, exactly?] in health began to shift away from patent nostrums to preventive approaches such as hydropathy and to an increasing number of books and scientific pamphlets focused on individual bodies." In addition to the temporal imprecision (an unfortunately common occurrence), there is little evidence in the book or in the history of England, the United States, or any other industrially developed nation in the later nineteenth century to support this assertion. Indeed the opposite appears to be true, if we are to believe the work of James Harvey Young, for example. Moreover, hydropathy was not, as Budd explains in note 17 (p. 135) ". . . the idea of better hygiene through more frequent bathing and the popularity of the spa. . . ." It was in fact considered a therapeutic treatment, first made popular in Germany by Vincent Preissnitz and successfully promulgated in the United States by Joel Shew, Russel Trall, and others.

Finally, Budd seems determined not to consider women in his analysis. Yet it is clear that the health and fitness of women had become a concern for a substantial number of physical culturists, running the gamut from crackpots such as Bernarr MacFadden to respectable and respected physical educators such as Diocletian Lewis, Catherine Beecher, and Dudley Sargent. It is difficult to claim that "representative bodies of the sculpture machine were by and large masculine" either in the elite culture of pre-Raphaelite and other art of the nineteenth century or in the popular culture of advertising, engravings, or even funerary sculpture. Depictions of idealized nude female bodies were everywhere; surely they were of cultural significance.

The Sculpture Machine is generally well-written, with only a few lapses into jargon. It is probably too difficult a read for most undergraduate courses, and its major arguments too narrowly developed for graduate students, but this is still an important book. Budd has taken on a risky topic, full of data that are elusive and difficult to interpret. He has made a significant addition to the cultural history of England and, to a lesser extent, the history of the United States in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Harvey Green

Northeastern University