Abstract
This chapter could alternatively be entitled ‘Never Was There Such a Nurse as He’, after a ringing endorsement of masculine care in Charlotte’s Yonge’s hugely popular 1853 novel, The Heir of Reddyffe.1 Yonge’s gendering of her exemplary nurse and hero, Sir Guy, raises questions about mid-Victorian ideals of masculinity and the gendering of tenderness. A paragon of the sickroom, ‘Guy persevered indefatigably, sitting up […] every night, and showing himself an invaluable nurse, with his tender hand, modulated voice, quick eye and quiet activity. His whole soul was engrossed: he never appeared to think of himself, or to be sensible of fatigue; but was only absorbed in the one thought of his patient’s comfort!’ (p. 322). Like many, variously classed, male nursing figures of the period, Yonge’s heir confirms his moral worth through a sacrificial act of nursing. In these high Victorian explorations of the gentle-man, tenderness, rather than ancestry or class position, becomes the defining feature of social value.
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Notes
I am deeply grateful to Ben Winyard for sharing his capacious knowledge of Victorian religious thought, and for his incisive comments about this piece. I am also thankful for the thought provoking comments of delegates at BAVS 2006 and Dickens Day 2005, where I first presented sections of this work.
Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 338.
Chad O’Lynn and Russell E. Tranbarger (eds.), Men in Nursing:History, Challenges and Opportunities (New York: Springer, 2007)
Chad O’Lynn, ‘Men Working as Rural Nurses: Land of Opportunity’ in Rural Nursing: Concepts, Theory and Practice, eds. Helen Lee and Charlene Winters (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 232–47
Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not (London: Duckworth, 1970), p. 6.
B. M. Dossey, Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer (Springhouse, PA: Springhouse, 1996), p. 291].
Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 70.
See Whitman’s war memoir Specimen Days and Collect (Philadelphia: Ross Welsh, 1882–3)
Whitman’s life and work in ‘Meeting the Mother Man: Rediscovering Walt Whitman, Writer and Nurse’, International History of Nursing Journal, 3.2 (1997–8), pp. 32–44.
Louisa M. Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863; rpt. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960).
Significant efforts in this direction include Vern Bullough, ‘Men in Nursing’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.5 (1995), p. 267
Bullough, ‘Men, Women, and Nursing History’, Journal of Professional Nursing, 10.3 (1994), p. 127
Carolyn Mackintosh, ‘A Historical Study of Men in Nursing’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 26.2 (1997), pp. 232–6
Linda Sabin, ‘Unheralded Nurses: Male Care Givers in the Nineteenth Century South’, Nursing History Review, 5 (1997), pp. 131–48
See especially David Wright, ‘The Dregs of Society? Occupational Patterns of Male Asylum Attendants in Victorian England’, International History of Nursing Journal, 1.4 (1996), pp. 5–20.
Santanu Das, Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Carol Christ, ‘Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House’ in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (1977, rpr. London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 146–62
For militaristic overdetermination see for example, Peter Stearns: ‘For men, the nineteenth century, effectively launched and ended by major wars, was a militant, indeed military century’ [Be a Man: Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979, rpr. 1990), p. 189]
Mark Girouard: ‘“Fighting” was one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary’ [The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 281].
See Holly Furneaux, ‘“It is Impossible to be Gentler”: The Homoerotics of Male Nursing in Dickens’s Fiction’, Critical Survey, 17.2 (2005), pp. 34–47.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 90.
Alison Bashford, Purity and Pollution: Gender, Embodiment and Victorian Medicine (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), p. 21.
Joe embodies a similar dichotomy to that which Tim Barringer has explored in relation to James Sharpies, mid-Victorian blacksmith and artist. Sharples’s famous steel engraving, ‘The Forge’, was completed and widely reviewed in 1859, the year before Dickens began work on Great Expectations. As Barringer puts it, ‘to confront the historical figure of a blacksmith who was an artist by night — an artist who was a blacksmith by day — is to enter an uncomfortable territory in which traditional ideas of class and status are overturned’ [Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 136].
Mamie Dickens, My Father as I Recall Him (New York: Haskell, 1974), pp. 17–18.
Lucinda Hawksley, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens’s Artist Daughter (London: Random House, 2006), pp. 35–9.
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999).
See Margaret Markwick, ‘Hands-on Fatherhood in Trollope’s Novels’ in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) pp. 85–95.
In an important early reading of the significance gentlemanliness in Great Expectations, Robin Gilmour observes the doubling of Orlick and Drummle, which ‘Remind[s] us that violence and brutality are not confined to life on the marshes, that they also exist in the supposedly refined society of London’ [The Ideal of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 139].
Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (London: Associated Newspapers, 1934), pp. 30
Arlene Young, Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 37.
Sally Mitchell’s chapter, ‘John Halifax: Epitome of an Age’ in her Dinah Muloch Craik (Boston: Twayne, 1983).
Dinah Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (Gloucestershire: Nonsuch, 2005), p. 9.
Joseph Bristow, ‘“Churlsgrace”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body’, ELH, 3 (1992), pp. 693–711
Donald Hall (ed.), Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 9.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Charles Kingsley, Yeast (London: Dent, 1976), p. 124.
Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 17.
For more on Guy Livingstone and the influence of this aggressive model see Girouard, p. 149 and Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literary and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 14.
Donna T Andrew, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700–1850’, Social History, 5.3 (1980), pp. 409–34
John Henry Newman, The Idea of A University (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), Discourse VIII, p. 145.
Martin Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2005), p. 19.
Lori Miller, ‘The (Re)gendering of High Anglicanism’ in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, eds. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 27–43
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1995).
For an influential account of the shift from an ‘age of atonement’ (c. 1780–1850) to an ‘age of incarnation’ (c. 1850–1900) see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1795–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Christabel Coleridge, CharlotteMary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), p. 183.
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Furneaux, H. (2010). Negotiating the Gentle-Man: Male Nursing and Class Conflict in the ‘High’ Victorian Period. In: Birch, D., Llewellyn, M. (eds) Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230277212_8
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