ABSTRACT
That Brillat-Savarin’s observations on the girth of Europe’s elites are not entirely impressionistic is shown half a century later, when Sir Francis Galton published the first anthropometric record of the English aristocracy in the then still fledgling journal Nature (also see Mennell, 1991). In The Weights of British Noblemen during the Last Three Generations (1884), Galton traces the evolution of average weight throughout the life-course of three consecutive generations of aristocrats born between 1740 and 1829. Regardless of the conclusion he reaches (the oldest generation attains their heaviest weight much earlier than the youngest), it is the actual weights reported by Galton that are of true interest. In fact, his sample of ‘109 peers, 39 baronets . . . and 1 eldest son of a peer’ (1844: 266) does not only prove to be considerably heavier than the average weight of men at the time, but had a body-mass that, by contemporary medical standards, would be considered as severely overweight and this at a time of which Friedrich Engels would later write that ‘every working-man, even the best, is constantly exposed to loss of work and food, that is to death by starvation’ (2009 [1845]: 67).1
