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We know that Fogg had "the face of Byron"

From: Harry Hayfield <harryhayfield~at~gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:35:50 +0000
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

but I hope he didn't have the eating habits of Byron!
  
(Source: BBC News)
  
The "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord Byron was thought of as the
embodiment of the ethereal poet, but he actually had a "morbid
propensity to fatten". Like today's celebrities, he worked hard to
maintain his figure. At Cambridge University, his horror of being fat
led to a shockingly strict diet, partly to get thin and partly to keep
his mind sharp. Existing on biscuits and soda water or potatoes
drenched in vinegar, he wore woolly layers to sweat off the pounds and
measured himself obsessively. Then he binged on huge meals, finishing
off with a necessarily large dose of magnesia. In 1806 Byron weighed
13st 12lbs (88kg), but he was under 9st by 1811 (57kg) - a huge weight
loss of nearly 5st (32kg). We know all this from records at Berry Bros
& Rudd, a wine merchants of St James's, London.
  
Here, stylish men-about-town weighed themselves on hanging scales, as
personal bathroom scales were an early 20th Century phenomenon. The
Regency dandy, Beau Brummell, weighed himself there over 40 times
between 1815 and 1822. He went down from 12st 10lbs (81kg) to 10st
13lbs (69kg). At the infamous Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, in 1816,
Byron was living on just a thin slice of bread and a cup of tea for
breakfast and a light vegetable dinner with a bottle or two of seltzer
water tinged with Vin de Grave. In the evening he stretched to a cup of
green tea, but certainly took no milk or sugar. To suppress the
inevitable hunger pangs, he smoked cigars. By 1822, he had starved
himself into a very poor state of health, even though he knew that
obsessive dieting was "the cause of more than half our maladies".
Because of Byron's huge cultural influence, there was a great deal of
worry about the effect his dieting was having on the youth of the day.
Dr George Beard attacked the popular Victorian association between
scanty eating and delicacy of mind because impressionable Romantics
were restricting themselves to vinegar and rice to get the fashionably
thin and pale look.
  
Do we know why Verne gave Fogg "the face of Byron" at all?
Received on Tue 03 Jan 2012 - 13:36:13 IST

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