Eugen Sandow (1867—1925)

Author(s): CONSTANCE CROMPTON

Source: Victorian Review, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 37-41
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41413872
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 forum : Eminent Victorians

Eugen Sandow (1867-192^)

CONSTANCE CROMPTON

IN cross-section
cross-sectionAofModem
Utopia'sUtopia
illustrious
of Utopia's
men: (190^),
"Somewhere
illustrious
in this
H.G.Wells
world is,men:
for presents "Somewhere his readers in this with world a facetious is, for
example, Mr. Chamberlain, and the King is here (no doubt incognito), and all
the Royal Academy, Sandow, and Mr. Arnold White" (17). Although largely
forgotten today, in 190^, Eugen Sandow, the first modern bodybuilder, had so
thoroughly shaped the discourse on gentlemanly physique that he warranted
inclusion in such a Utopian list.
Born Friedrich Müller in Konigsburg, Prussia, in 1867, Sandow immigrated
to Britain in 1889. In November of that year, he secured the title of strongest
man on earth by defeating French strongman Charles Samson. The competi-
tion took place at the Royal Aquarium with the Marquis of Queensberry and
Lord de Clifford presiding as judges. On 2 November, as on previous nights,
Samson invited challengers from the audience to match his feats. Sandow s
manager, Louis Durlacher, announced that Sandow could meet Samson's chal-
lenge. Accounts of the match attend as much to Sandow s appearance of gentility
as they do to the weightlifting that ensued. The Graphic depicted him onstage
in evening wear with the caption "he doesn't look it" ("Battle of the Giants ) ,
suggesting that Sandow hardly presented the sartorial or physical vocabulary
of a strongman. One newspaper noted that in "ordinary attire [Sandow] looks
like an ordinary person - short, quiet, good tempered" ("Heroes of the Hour ) .
"Indeed so marked was the disparity between the pair [on stage]," remarked
another newspaper, "that the audience obviously regarded the matter as a joke.
When, however, [Sandow] had taken of [sic] his coat and waistcoat, and was
seen to be attired in a pink jersey which left his arms and neck bare, it was
apparent [that Sandow was] an athlete of immense strength, the develop-
ment of the muscles of the arm being extraordinary" ("Samson's Challenge").
Samson bent an iron rod over his forearm, and Sandow did the same. Samson
wrapped a chain around his torso and snapped it by expanding his chest, and
Sandow did the same. Sandow lifted a man at arm's length, and Samson did
the same. Finally, Sandow lifted 150 pounds straight over his head, but Samson
failed to replicate the feat. The judges decided in Sandow s favour. Sandow
had distinguished himself as a strongman, a strongman who looked like the
apocryphal common man.
Despite losing the title after eighteen months, Sandow retained his popular-
ity and fame, while others who held the title, like Louis McCann and Samson,
were forgotten almost immediately. Famous enough to be named the Professor
of Scientific and Physical Culture to King George V, Sandow advertised his
exercise methods and muscled physique across multiple media. In London,
he was cast (literally) as the representative "European man" in an exhibit at

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 VICTORIAN REVIEW ^ Volume 37 Number 1

the Natural History Museum. His was

Eugen Sandow by Napoleon
Sarony (G. Mercer Adam and Eugen
Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training: A Study
in the Perfect Type of the Human Form New
York: J. SelwinTait, 1894, facing 218).
gender expression. For example, in one editorial, Sandow heralded a physical
revolution for British men:
one of the first moving bodies cap-
tured on Thomas Edison's kinetoscopic
film. Through the 1890s, Sandow ran
seven schools of physical culture, gave
performances and lectures, wrote five
treatises on strength and mental and
physical health, and edited a body-
building magazine. Sandow was, in
short, at the centre of late nineteenth-
century discourse about the male body.
Sandow s success was not simply the
result of great impetus on his part; his
bodybuilding rhetoric allowed white,
middle-class males to ground their
sense of physical superiority through
both art and science. Sandow blurred
the distinction between culture and
nature by exhorting middle-class men
to artificially build "natural" muscle
in gymnasia in an attempt to emu-
late ancient Greek statuary. Sandow s
performance of muscled masculinity
soothed fin-de-siècle concerns about
gender variance by wresting the mean-
ing of men's corporeal beauty from
the aesthetes.
Sandow 's magazine, Physical Culture
(1898-1907), provided a convenient
organ for deriding aesthetic men's

From the gospel of the aesthetic soul, which gave us not so many years
ago the anemic, soulful-eyed curate, attenuated to the verge of
visuality, and with him the fragile blossom of femininity destined
to perish in early but beautiful decline, we have passed once more
to the gospel of flesh and blood - the gospel that has made England and
will keep England. ("National Physical Education" 163)

This passage, from an editorial praising mandatory physical training in the

military, surreptitiously references femininity. "Femininity" may refer to the
aesthetic women who are bound, so the magazine insinuates, to die out with
aesthetic men, or it may refer to "femininity" as the property of the attenu-
ated curate. Just as Sandow s "quiet, good tempered" masculinity was visible

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 forum : Eminent Victorians

("Heroes of the Hour") , so too was men's femininity. Although, in this passage,
men's gender expression seems to have its genesis in an inner wellspring, the
soul, its real origin is a gospel, tenets held to be true, that can be replaced by a
new gospel - one of flesh and blood. By its very name, this nationalist gospel
suggests that manliness originates in the body. Corporeal manliness must be
fragile if it can be overwritten by aestheticism so easily as to induce anemia,
attenuation, and decline. Sandow offers a solution: men must build a muscled
physique to denote inner masculinity.
Sandow 's invocation of "the gospel that has made England and will keep
England" exposes his aspiration to be a perfect British gentleman. Sandow never
fully erased his German accent, but he did marry the daughter of a Manchester
photographer and was granted British citizenship in 1906. Although journalists
often commented on his Prussian origins, they were not openly xenophobic.
As the boy's paper Chums observed, "there is only one serious fault to be found
with [Sandow], and that is that he was fool enough to be born a German
instead of an Englishman. It will be a lesson to him, though, for the future,
and I don't think he is ever likely to do such a silly thing again" (Phipps 19).
Even though pronounced musculature was properly British and normatively
manly, it presented a classed problem. Reminiscent of the archetypal village
blacksmith, the aborigine, or worse, the circus strongman, the muscled body
was not coded as genteel at the fin de siècle. To counter this, Sandows first
strategy was to conceal his petit-bourgeois origins;1 he fashioned himself
into the middle-class man's perfect physical role model. Early in his career,
he offered disparate accounts of his youth, finally weaving a fiction about two
years spent studying anatomy in a Belgian university before a falling out with
his father forced him to join a travelling circus. His second strategy was to ally
himself with the middle class by posing as a professional-sounding "physi-
calician" ("A Chat With Sandow"). The leading theatre journal, the Era, noted
that "in appearance Sandow might very well pass for the West-end medical
practitioner" ("A Chat With Sandow"). By prescribing his own products, like
Sandow 's Combined Developer and Sandow 's Grip Dumbbells, to treat "con-
stipation, indigestion, insomnia, loss of vigour, nervous & functional disorders"
(Body-Building viii) , Sandow invited his readers to think of him as physician. He
lectured at gentleman's clubs, scientific societies, and medical associations
in Britain and the United States, giving demonstrations in which his body
was both the subject and object ("Sandow is a Wonder"; "Private Exhibition
By Sandow"; "Herr Sandow and Muscular Development"). Ultimately, he
dismissed workingman's labour as "mechanical and desultory exertion" that
would "never materially increase a man's strength" (Strength and How to Obtain It
9). Building muscles, he assured his readers, would result in a class-appropriate
body because bodybuilding required a cultivated mind and body.
Sandow 's followers were encouraged to think of their muscles in aesthetic
terms. To this end, Sandow distinguished between bodybuilders and weightlift-
ers: a bodybuilder did not develop brute ability to lift weights but rather pursued

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 Victorian review ^ Volume 37 Number 1

a proportionate and symmetrical and therefore - to Sandow s mind - healthy

body. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the second use of the term
"body building" in a weightlifting context. ("Body").2 He encouraged his
readers to develop "the muscular system of the body . . . symmetrically [and
not be] tempted to develop one portion of the body to the exclusion of the
other" (Body-Building 34). Often likened to a Greek statue, Sandow emphasized
his own proportionate physique: "The general impression everywhere was
that I was possessed of an enormous bulk." He observed, however, that people
were often surprised to find him "a man of ordinary stature, with nothing of
the 'strong-man' appearance" (Body-Building 11^). Bodybuilding was not about
exertion or strength but about symmetry and physical beauty.
Sandow moved the discourse of the beautiful male body from the domain
of the aesthete to that of the gentleman of science. In 1901, he was hired by
Edwin Ray Lankester, head of the British Museum's Natural History division,
to model for the statue representing "European man" in an exhibit "displaying
all the major races of the world" ("Sandow in Plaster" 461). The statue was
made from a cast of Sandow 's body. The Strand enthused: "Authorities should
have been remiss in not seizing the opportunity of handing down to future
generations a permanent record of the most perfect specimen of physical cul-
ture of our days - perhaps of any age" ("Sandow in Plaster" 461). The resulting
statue carried two simultaneous meanings: on the one hand, it represented
the anthropologically typical European male; on the other, it modelled the
masculine ideal derived from classical Greek statuary. Sandow 's cast exempli-
fied the perfect amalgamation of science and art.
Sandow continued to write exercise manuals and run gymnasia until his
death, in 192^, which resulted from an attempt to lift a car. Wells's novel
notwithstanding, Sandow was not an Elysian figure who belonged in an oth-
erworldly utopia. He was an immigrant who shaped the bodies of countless
middle-class British men, while refashioning the discourses of strength, gen-
tility, and ideal masculinity.

Notes

i Sandow was likely the younger son of a Prussian grocer.

2 Second only to an article in the Daily Chronicle from earlier in 1904, the year that
Sandow s Body-Building Or Man in the Making was released.

Works Cited
"A Chat with Sandow." Era 9 Jan. 1897: n. pag. Print.
"Body." Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. London: Oxford UP, 1989. Web. 1 Sept. 2009.
"The Battle of the Giants - Contest between Sandow and Samson at the Royal Aquarium."
Graphic 9 Sept. 1889: 1041. Print.
"Heroes of the Hour." Licenced Victualler's Mirror £ Nov. 1889: 489. Print.
"Herr Sandow and Muscular Development." Ludgate Monthly Aug. 1893: 397-404. Print.
Phipps, Sydney A. "Boys' Muscle." Chums 30 Nov. 1892: 191. Print.
Private Exhibition by Sandow." Birmingham Daily Post 19 Mar. 1891 : n. pag. Print.

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 forum: Eminent Victorians

"Samson's Challenge: The Wager Won." Belfast News-Letter 3 Nov. 1889: n. pag. Print.
"Sandow in Plaster of Paris." Strand Oct. 1901 : 461-68. Print.
"Sandow is a Wonder: The Strong Man Gives an Exhibition of His Marvelous Strength."
The Banaor Daily Whia and Courier 14 Tune 1897 : n. pag. Print.
Sandow, Eugen. Body-Building Or Man in the Making: How to Become Healthy and Strong. London:
Gale and Polden, 1904. Print.

Physical Culture Sept. 1900: 163-71. Print.

Wells, H.G. A Modern Utopia. White fish: Kessinger, 2004. Print.

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