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BETWEEN POISE AND POWER: EMBODIED MANLINESS IN EIGHTEENTH- AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2016

Joanne Begiato
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Abstract

This paper explores representations of the manly body and the ways in which its relationship with masculine identity and embodied selfhood changed over time and class. It spans a period in which different types of masculinities were dominant, from the later eighteenth-century man of feeling to the later nineteenth-century muscular Christian, and proposes that an embodied approach offers a more nuanced consideration of the ways in which ideals of masculinity were culturally viewed and utilised. First, it provides a chronology of the manner in which the ideal manly body changed over the two centuries, demonstrating that abstract masculine values were always rooted in male bodies. Secondly, it proposes that although most idealised masculine identities were elite, attention to the more corporeal aspects of gender offers evidence that there were features of the manly body, for example hardness, that appealed across social ranks.1 Elite men valorised idealised working-class men's bodies and saw in them something to emulate. Moreover, working-class men used classically inspired figures to represent themselves when formulating class and gender identities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 26 , December 2016 , pp. 125 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2016 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank a number of people for their contributions to this paper. First, my thanks to Tim Reinke-Williams for inviting me to give the lecture upon which it is based, and to the participants at the RHS Symposium: Masculinity and the Body in Britain, 1500–1900, for their questions and observations. I am also grateful to Matthew Craske, Christiana Payne and Andrew Spicer for their support and judicious comments. Finally, sincere thanks to Michael Brown for discussing and reading the paper in its several versions.

References

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42 ‘Further Gleanings from the Late English Newspapers’, in Independent Journal or the General Advertiser, Wednesday 28 Jan. 1784, 2. I am grateful to Dane Morrison for directing me to this.

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47 My thanks to Stephen Gregg, Matt McDowell, Elaine Chalus and Freya Gowrley for a discussion on this quotation.

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68 A. W. Fitz Roy, Report of the Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904); Budd, Sculpture Machine, 18. For similar fears of degeneration in France, Germany and the US, see Hau, ‘The Normal, the Ideal’, 15–19.

69 For example, the Young Men's Christian Association, founded 1844, and the National Physical Recreation Society, founded in 1886, which promoted fitness for working-class men, Budd, Sculpture Machine, 25.

70 Crackers for the Ingenious, Boys of England: A Young Gentleman's Journal of Sport, Travel, Fun and Instruction (London, England), [Friday], [17 July 1868] Issue 87, 142. For the magazine, see Knuth, E. J. B. Rebecca, Children's Literature and British Identity: Imagining a People and a Nation (Lanham, Toronto, 2012), 64 Google Scholar.

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76 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wright-an-iron-forge-t06670/text-summary.

77 In this way, his paintings are similar to Chardin's images of dignified working people. Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby, ch. 1. For the argument that the forge-man is portrayed as heroic, see Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 35.

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117 Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 28, 38.

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122 Ibid., 74.

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127 Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 31.

128 Ibid., 107.

129 Ibid., plates 1–90.

130 Barringer, Men at Work, 173–5; Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 28.

131 Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 35, 38, 40.

132 Barringer, Men at Work, 139.

133 Ibid., 149–50.

134 Ravenhill-Johnson, Art and Ideology, 2.

135 Ibid., plate 21. For colour version of engraving, see www.unionhistory.info/Display.php?irn=7000001&QueryPage=AdvSearch.php.

136 Glasgow Museum, accession no. A.1938.11.du, http://collections.glasgowmuseums.com/starobject.html?oid=139177. Also discussed in Gorman, Banner Bright, 70.

137 Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle http://www.tulliehouse.co.uk/thecollection/cotton-spinners-banner-victorian

138 Gorman, Banner Bright, 113.