Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: Britain, 1800–1914

Abstract

I the present intellectual climate, writing history by period is distinctly out of fashion. The cultural mode of historical analysis tends to bypass such concerns. In pursuing the cultural turn, we have become used to finding a plurality of contested meanings in the texts and images of the past, which has the effect of dissolving any sense of trajectory or process. But the long view—or the bird’s eye view—brings into focus the sequential development of a few large themes, not all of which may be visible to the cultural analyst working on a particular moment in time. My purpose in this article is to restore a sense of trajectory to the history of British masculinities in the nineteenth century, while at the same time acknowledging the continuing appeal of more traditional gender formations. During the period 1800–1914, Britain was first and foremost an industrializing society; it was also, with growing conviction, an imperialist country; and it was a society characterized by increasingly sharp category distinctions of gender and sexuality. Masculinity is self-evidently central to our understanding of the last of these themes, which has been the subject of important work over the past fifteen years. Industry and empire, on the other hand, have been the property of entrenched historiographies, which have proved resistant to gender perspectives. Thus E. J. Hobsbawm’s influential text, called explicitly Industry and Empire, included no intimation that gender might be a significant dimension when it was first published in 1964; and when a second edition appeared as recently as 1999, the historical role of women was in part acknowledged, but men continued to be seen as entirely ungendered persons. That kind of myopia is all too typical of syntheses of modern British history. At the same time, historians of masculinity