Analysis: British and Irish men in the 1890s mailed their portraits to fitness guru Eugen Sandow, who created a global business with gyms, books and training kits
By Conor Heffernan, Ulster University
Scroll through social media and you find bodies in progress with flexed arms, mirrored poses and before-and-after collages. We might think the gym selfie is a creation of the digital age, proof that discipline, desire and attention now live through the camera. It feels modern, but the Victorians got there first and pioneered their own version of the selfie body, long before smartphones and filters.
In the 1890s, men across Britain, Ireland and the wider British empire posed bare-chested in photographic studios and mailed the pictures to Eugen Sandow, a Prussian-born strongman who turned fame into a global fitness business. Sandow became the world's best-known exercise promoter, touring music halls and world fairs before building an empire of gyms, books, magazines and mail-order training kits.
From Barbell Films, the rise and dramatic fall of Eugen Sandow's fitness empire and gym chain. With insights from Brainstorm author, Dr Conor Heffernan
Customers purchased spring-grip dumbbells or 'developers,’ simple metal handles joined by coiled springs, and a printed chart to measure chest, arm, thigh and waist. They compared their numbers with Sandow’s ‘ideal proportions," said to match the Apollo Belvedere statue. Followers could mail progress photographs for assessment, and the most impressive appeared in Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture.
As historian David Chapman notes in Sandow the Magnificent, earlier strongmen such as Professor David L. Dowd had already used photographs and correspondence lessons in the 1880s, but Sandow scaled the idea through mass marketing. His followers treated exercise as a moral duty as much as a pastime. To sculpt the body through daily training was to display order and willpower. The camera became a witness to self-control.
Metrics and morality
Victorian society was obsessed with numbers. Scientists classified skulls, clerks tallied output and schools timed drills to the second. Sandow’s charts fitted perfectly into this world. They made the body measurable. Strength could be counted and compared.
He told readers that health followed scientific law and his books promised perfection through routine, diet and moderation. Alongside dumbbells and rubber expanders he sold a cocoa-based supplement called Plasmon. Each product included a measurement chart and moral guidance. As I explain in When Fitness Went Global, Sandow’s business blended commerce and virtue. Buying his equipment meant joining a disciplined community.
His London gyms displayed the charts on their walls, and members logged progress monthly. Numbers gave shape to self-improvement. By 1900, Dublin had a Sandow gym in the form of a mail-order program. An Irish Independent article that year promised it would produce healthy, efficient men for the modern age. Local newspapers reprinted his diet advice and praised his ‘scientific’ methods.
The fascination reached Irish literature. In Ulysses, James Joyce referenced Sandow directly. Leopold Bloom's reflections on digestion and exercise echoed the belief that bodily management revealed moral order. Bloom even keeps a Sandow exerciser at home, as a symbol of modern control.
While Sandow’s audience was overwhelmingly male, women soon entered this culture through teachers such as Bess Mensendieck and Minnie Randell, who promoted posture and measurement systems for women’s health. The arithmetic of proportion quickly extended to the female body, often with even greater scrutiny.
In Victorian life, measurement implied morality. To record the body was to prove progress, and to prove progress was to display virtue. The photograph and the chart turned self-discipline into something visible and marketable.
From Natty Life,the life and accomplishments of Eugen Sandow, the father of bodybuilding
The data body lives on
Sandow’s approach anticipated much of modern wellness culture. His measurement charts prefigured fitness trackers and his postal courses foreshadowed remote coaching. The logic endures: record your progress, seek validation and display success.
Today, we use apps instead of charts and phones instead of cameras, but the idea of the data body remains. We still believe numbers reveal truth and that the right data can make us better. The wearable tracker counts steps and calories; Sandow’s followers counted inches and chest expansion. Both transform self-care into surveillance.
Sandow’s Magazine of Physical Culture published letters from readers who confessed frustration at slow results or guilt for 'neglecting daily discipline.’ The emotional rhythm of pride and disappointment would be familiar to anyone scrolling a modern fitness feed.
From the US Library of Congress, Eugen Sandow poses for his friend Thomas Edison in 1903
His idea of ‘perfect proportion’ also reflected Victorian hierarchies. The measurements were based on white classical statues, and his magazines linked strength with national and racial vitality. Fitness became a language of purity as much as progress. The modern industry still wrestles with that inheritance, from filters that lighten skin to algorithms that reward certain physiques and hide others. Technology has changed the tools, not always the ideals.
The selfie body no longer belongs to men alone. Women dominate contemporary fitness spaces, redefining strength and aesthetics far beyond Sandow’s narrow vision. But the same impulse to measure, improve and display persists, now amplified by algorithms that reward visibility itself.
When Sandow died in 1925, he left behind a business empire and a way of seeing the body. His followers had learned to treat exercise as evidence and photography as proof. In one surviving 1893 portrait, a Sandow trainee stands on a plain mat, hands on hips, muscles tensed, eyes fixed ahead. Behind him hangs a chart marked with chest and arm girths. He is showing the numbers made flesh. A century later, the mirror has become a screen, but the desire to find virtue in the body is exactly the same.
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Dr Conor Heffernan is Lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University. He is a former Research Ireland awardee.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
