Manliness in Britain, 1760-1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture, by Joanne Begiato

Abstract

Reviewed by: Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture by Joanne Begiato Heather Ellis (bio) Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture, by Joanne Begiato; pp. xii + 225. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, £85.00, $130.00. Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture explores the role and importance of men's bodies, emotions, and material culture in constructing understandings of manliness and masculinity in the long nineteenth century. In the introduction, Joanne Begiato situates the book within existing historiography on masculinities, emotions, and material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, setting out its aims and contributions to the literature. The first two chapters explore how men's bodies have been idealized and made to embody forms of manliness which have exerted attraction for men and women from different social classes, both positively (chapter 1) and negatively (chapter 2). The remaining three chapters focus on three domains central to the construction of ideals of manliness: war, home, and work. The book makes a number of claims to innovation: it seeks to queer the history of masculinity, a process defined as viewing the concept "sceptically, to pull apart its constitutive pieces and analyse them from a variety of perspectives, taking nothing for granted." In particular, Begiato emphasizes that, for men and women, "the enchantment of a manly body might be non-sexual," a point that she argues is important and not acknowledged often enough in works on the history of masculinity (4). The book's second claim to originality, that it breaks with conventional chronologies, is also justified. It is welcome to see a study adopting a longer-than-usual chronological period for its focus, as the expansive timeframe allows more gradual changes to be drawn out for the reader. Another strength of the book is its refusal to isolate a particular facet of life to study in connection with the history of manliness. As Begiato notes, Manliness in Britain "moves beyond families, education, employment, recreation, and print culture" as discrete "sites of gender formation" to argue that manliness is always and everywhere "produced, maintained and disseminated" through men's emotionalized bodies and material culture (5). While particular "domains" are highlighted, the book is also a work of synthesis, bringing together areas of life which are often separated from each other in the historiography of masculinity. Here, for example, Begiato highlights the important role of the domestic sphere and its material culture in promoting warlike qualities and martial manliness. The book also synthesizes different types of sources which are frequently discussed apart from each other. Begiato calls rightly for greater attention to be paid to "the intermateriality of text, image, object, and their conjunction with bodies and emotions that facilitated the conveying, reproducing, and fixing of manly values" (17). In combining analysis of [End Page 476] literary, visual, and material culture, this book is an important resource not only for scholars working in the history of masculinity or the history of emotions and bodies, but also for students working at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels who seek an accessible and synthetic overview of manliness in this period. Manliness in Britain rightly stresses the need to move away from a traditional focus on "white, literate, middle-class and genteel men" and to move beyond representations, to "capture masculinities as perceived and experienced by a broad range of men" (5). While there is much in this study on the ways in which the working-class male body was idealized and used in framing ideals and understandings of manliness, in the majority of cases, the perspective analyzed is that of middle-class men or women, something that Begiato acknowledges. This is, in large part, a product of the sources most widely available to historians and the people who produced them. However, through an interesting analysis of working-class material culture in the final section of chapter 5, we begin to scratch the surface of working-class idealizations of worker and other male bodies, and some conclusions can be drawn about how these differed from middle-class perspectives. This is one of the most interesting sections of the book, highlighting the analytical potential of material...