Abstract
The Gentleman’s Magazine’s title was redolent of a traditional, superior masculine standing, evoking implied readers who were male rather than female, adult, and of high social status, Naomi Tadmor’s ‘lineage families’ — the gentry, perhaps even loftier.1 Their self-confidence was apparent in its contents, their ordered, hierarchical society represented in regular factual information of institutional promotions in the Church of England, army, navy, royal court and diplomatic service. The month’s news chronicled the official engagements of the court, sessions of Parliament, meetings of directors of the Bank of England, of the South Sea Company and of the aldermen of the City of London and proceedings in the civil and criminal courts. Individual lives were inserted into this picture in lists of births, marriages and deaths, often featuring again the leading families from the news and promotions columns.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth–Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 73–102.
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (revised edition 1999, 1st published New York, 1988), p. 115.
Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY, 1991), p. 2.
See Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 2001, 1st published Paris, 1998), p. 9; Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh, eds., Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (Manchester, 2004), ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–21 (pp. 3, 6); Michael S. Kimmel, The History of Men: Essays in the History of American and British Masculinities (New York, 2005), pp. 3–15, and Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park, PA, 2002).
For critiques see Matthew McCormack, ‘Men, “the Public” and Political History’, in Matthew McCormack, ed., Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 13–32 (p. 17). Connell answers some of the criticism in R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity. Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19 (2005), pp. 829–59.
Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991), p. 14. See also Antony Rowland, Emma Liggins and Eriks Uskalis, eds., Signs of Masculinity: Men in Literature 1700 to the Present (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 3–36.
See Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995) and Matthew McCormack, ‘ “Married Men and the Fathers of Families”: Fatherhood and Franchise Reform in Britain’, in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 43–54.
For the development of the conservative mindset see Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, 1998).
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693).
Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (Yale, 1995).
Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001).
Lawrence Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), pp. 869–98.
George Colman and David Garrick, The Clandestine Marriage (London, 1765) and Frances Burney, Evelina: or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford, 2002, 1st published London, 1778).
Matthew McCormack, Independent Man. Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005), p. 2.
Lisa Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth–Century Britons (Oxford, 2005); Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard, 1990) and Andrew Wells, ‘Masculinity and its Other in Eighteenth–Century Racial Thought’, in Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives, ed. Heather Ellis and Jessica Meyer (Newcastle, 2009), pp. 85–113.
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003).
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth– Century Britain (Chicago, 1992).
See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1986).
Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination and Michael McKeon, ‘Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1995), pp. 295–322.
Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford, 2012), p. 247. On continuities see too Henry R. French and Mark Rothery, ‘Hegemonic Masculinities, 1700–1900’, in What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. John H. Arnold and Sean Brady, pp. 139–66.
Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 230–1.
Thomas Gisborne, AnEnquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London, 1797), pp. 21, 22.
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London, 2012).
John Tosh, ‘The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities, 1750–1850’, in Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire, ed. John Tosh (Harlow, 2005), pp. 61–82 (p. 61), and Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 381–400.
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 2007, 1st published 1999).
Benjamin Heller, ‘Leisure and the Use of Domestic Space in Georgian London’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), pp. 623–45.
Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998), p. 318.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Gillian Williamson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Williamson, G. (2016). Gentlemanly Masculinity. In: British Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1815. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542335_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542335_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55512-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54233-5
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)