The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain

Abstract

n the middle of the nineteenth century the face of masculinity suddenly changed in Western culture. In a few short years, full beards spread from the social margins inhabited by artists and Chartists into the respectable mainstream. This transformation of men’s faces has thus far drawn remarkably little comment from historians or literary critics. 1 The Victorians, by contrast, had a great deal to say ab outhisenovation ofhe masculine image. In pamphlets, polemical books, and the periodical press, Victorians engaged in a lively discussion that sheds light on changing notions of masculinity and illuminates the decision of millions of British men to spurn more than a century of tradition by letting their beards grow. The timing of this change is significant. The current standard line on this great change was established by G. M. Trevelyan, who explained the new style as an imitation of the heroic and hirsute soldiers returning from the Crimea (549). But the trend was well underway before the war began in 1854. More importantly Trevelyan’s explanation obscures the deeper social roots and cultural significance of this impulse towards remaking the masculine image. When one attends to the conversation about manliness and beards, what emerges is a new perspective on mid-Victorian perceptions of gender, and greater understanding of how and why concepts of masculinity were reformulated in this period. In modern history, the shaved face has be en the rule, while beards have enjoyed widespread popularity only relatively briefly during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and again in the midVictorian period. In the early nineteenth century beards indicated particular radical political affiliations, including socialism or Chartism, and were generally unfashionable. But after 1850, the beard movement in Britain began. In 1852, the editors of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine declared themselves “champions of the long beard,” and drolly prophesied the dawn of a new era: “Already the martial moustache, the haughty imperial, I