There was perhaps no more celebrated male body in the Victorian period than that of Eugen Sandow. Born in Prussia, Sandow worked as a circus and music hall performer before moving to London in 1889, where he eventually became the world's first modern celebrity bodybuilder. As his recent biographer David Waller notes, Sandow's appearance could solicit hysterical reactions from adoring crowds of women. An audience member at an 1890 music hall performance records that when Sandow appeared on stage, ‘Those at the back of the room leapt on the chairs: paraquet-like ejaculations, irrepressible, resounded right and left; tiny palms beat till […] gloves burst at their wearer's energy’ (qtd in Waller 2011: 9). Sandow's sculpted physique extended beyond the boundaries of popular entertainment and erotic desire. The Natural History Museum moulded a plaster cast from his body to represent the ideal form of European manhood and Thomas Edison recorded him in one of the first films ever made (ibid.: 9). Artist E. Aubrey Hunt ‘discovered’ Sandow when he spotted him walking along the Lido in Venice in his bathing suit, after which he hired him to be the model for his portrait of a Roman gladiator. It was also Hunt who told Sandow about a strongman competition in London, which earned him the title of strongest man on earth and catapulted him to fame.

Though not an Englishman, Sandow's physically fit body and disciplined exercise regime made him the perfect antidote for late-Victorian anxieties about national degeneration and male effeminacy. For instance, in an 1894 article entitled ‘The Man of the Moment’, New Woman author Sarah Grand expresses the concern, shared by many, that ‘the physique of the race is deteriorating’ (Grand 1894: 622). Grand attributes this ‘national deterioration’ specifically to the male of the species, finding men less energetic, less productive, and in need of guidance from women (ibid.: 625). She complains that while the ‘girls are up and doing in the morning […] the young men, indolent and nerveless, lie long in bed. Idleness and luxury are making men flabby’ (ibid.: 626). Sandow, with his sculpted muscles and regime of physical fitness, presented a corrective to this lazy and flabby manhood, as well as an ideal that British men could themselves adopt.