Henry French, Mark Rothery. Man's Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. viii + 281 pp. $125.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-957669-2.
Reviewed by Karen Harvey (University of Sheffield)
Published on H-Histsex (September, 2013)
Commissioned by Timothy W. Jones (University of South Wales, & La Trobe University)
Gentlemen Standing Still?
Man’s Estate is a scholarly and important book that gives a new perspective on landed masculinity in the period ca. 1660 to ca. 1910. Its strength derives in large part from the formidable volume of research on which it is based, research that yielded no less than 36,528 digital images of letters and diary entries. This collection was then whittled down to 4,153 items identified as relevant for the study and entered into a database. The sustained use of these rich sources allows Henry French and Mark Rothery to reconstruct the texture of landed men’s lives and relationships well. The authors have done students of gender and masculinity a great service in uncovering this material and presenting it, with care and sensitivity, for the first time. Such a thoroughgoing study of English landed gentlemen has not existed before.
The book is structured around the male life course, with chapters examining schooling, university and apprenticeships, the Grand Tour and travel, and marriage and family life. And in each chapter, French and Rothery revise some significant facets of historians’ understanding of masculinity in this period. Landed masculine identity was not the product of homosocial contexts that followed infanthood, but instead mothers played an important role throughout their sons’ lives (chapter 1). Well before the high-point of sensibility in the second half of the eighteenth century, a gentleman’s social authority and role as dynastic head enabled his greater emotional expression in and about the family as consonant with his role as household head (chapter 4). Such important insights arise from the thoughtful approach to gender, relationships, and language adopted in Man’s Estate.
The central argument of the book is clear. There was no change in the core qualities of landed masculinity, the authors suggest. Wherever they look, French and Rothery find evidence for the “timeless deep-level habitus of patriarchy” (p. 35). This Bourdieuian space comprised values and understandings that shaped what was normative for landed gentry men. During the period covered by this book--an ambitious two and a half centuries--this space included honor, virtue, authority, honesty, independence, prudence, and industry. These values or ideals formed “a distinct and bounded system by which elite masculine identities were understood and policed” (p. 236). The core values remained constant in the case of the landed gentry, because, French and Rothery suggest, the power of this particular social group depended precisely on the conservation of the status quo. The authors thus open up an important new seam for the history of gender and masculinity: the possibility that masculine identities in different social groups followed a distinct chronology.
The book also shifts our understanding of how masculine identities worked. French and Rothery dispatch with the idea of “hegemonic” masculinities that shift over time, whether those of “polite civility” or “muscular Christianity,” viewing these merely as the top-level, behavioral changes that rested on the unchanging deep-level core values (p. 37). By the same token, though they recognize the challenges to and collapse of these core values in some individual cases, the authors do not see competing codes of masculinity when these men had sexual encounters on the Grand Tour or engaged in trade, but instead find that the boundaries of these core values were “stretched.” The deep-level habitus was remarkably constant over not only time but also space. The result is sometimes a flattening of differences within this social group, as well as a silence on the close proximity to other social groups. Did the experiences of a young man from the landed elite serving an apprenticeship in the house of a manufacturer express the values of the former or latter social rank? I agree with the central claim: at the level of general core values, the continuities in landed masculine identity are striking. I suspect, though, that many of these general core values were key aspects of masculine identity for other social groups.
Yet there is dynamism in the picture reconstructed by this study. First, if the core qualities of landed masculinity remained fairly constant, their reproduction was the focus of much effort on the part of parents. It took hard work to stand still. Second, then, deep-level continuity in masculine identity is expressly not the same as no change. Such a claim, as the authors acknowledge, would be “ridiculous.” On the one hand, the way that men performed the core values of landed masculinity transformed, though the authors downplay the significance of such changes: eighteenth-century politeness emphasized the (“softer”) mannered expression in sociable situations of the older (“harder”) value of honor, while Victorian masculinity drew out the (“harder”) quality of self-command that had also been present but subsumed within in codes of politeness.
On the other hand, the broader social meaning and esteem accorded to the core values of landed masculinity transformed. While the book is an internal study of landed masculinity--its content and lived experience--an external consideration of this (how it was viewed and valued) warrants closer attention. Work by Margaret Hunt, among others, has shown that gender identities in this period (notably of the middling sort) were developing in reaction to traditional landed ideals, and that in many circles those landed ideals were of diminishing social, cultural, economic, and political value. The authors touch on this at the close of the book in a brief discussion of the early twentieth century, but the tremendous recalibration of cultural, economic, and political power among ranks/classes throughout this period--and the way that this story interacts with masculine identity in particular--is missing from the study. French and Rothery have produced a very important and thoroughly researched study of one form of elite masculinity. It is now up to other historians to analyze different forms of masculinity and in so doing to assess both the relative value and distinctiveness of the core values of landed masculine identity. Man’s Estate provides a valuable model for how this should be done.
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Citation:
Karen Harvey. Review of French, Henry; Rothery, Mark, Man's Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660-1900.
H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2013.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=36829
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