An Emigrant and a Gentleman: Imperial Masculinity, British Magazines, and the Colony That Got Away

Abstract

As many scholars have recently noted, young men who came of age in England at the end of the nineteenth century did so as the very nature of masculinity was being contested in social, economic, and sexual arenas. The ideals of British masculinity with which many of these youths grew up, traceable to the muscular Christianity of Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley decades before, were tested and challenged, redefined or reinforced, against backdrops at least superficially disparate: against the cultural boundaries being extended in a continental bohemia by the Aesthetes and Decadents, and against the imperial boundaries being defined and defended across the globe by the soldiers and adventurers of Victoria's Empire, whose manly civilizing mission was celebrated (and occasionally satirized) in the writings of G. A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, and Rudyard Kipling. While the Decadent movement challenged entrenched gender norms and sexual prejudices in the realm of high culture, the literature of empire more fully permeated fin-de-siecle popular culture, not least as an antidote to the degeneracy perceived as threatening British manhood and, by extension, nationhood. Imperial masculinity captured the imagination of the public and was promulgated in the rhetoric of politics, literature, and even science. British manhood would bring to the hinterlands of the world; in turn, the hinterlands of the world would save British manhood from civilization. As late as 1907, George Nathaniel Curzon, world traveler, would contend before an Oxford audience that [o]utside of the English Universities no school of character exists to compare with the Frontier and, further, that on the outskirts of Empire [...] is to be found an ennobling and invigorating stimulus for our youth saving them alike from the corroding ease and morbid excitements of western civilization (56-57).