British Masculinity in the 'Gentleman's Magazine', 1731 to 1815

Gillian Williamson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137542335
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Gentleman's Magazine was the leading eighteenth-century periodical. By integrating the magazine's history, readers and contents this study shows how 'gentlemanliness' was reshaped to accommodate their social and political ambitions.

1

Gentlemanly Masculinity

The Gentleman’s Magazine and masculinity

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.

However, published statistics are ‘neither totally neutral collections of facts nor simply ideological impositions’, but rather ‘ways of establishing the authority of certain visions of social order, of organizing perceptions of “experience” ’. They become naturalized through repeated publication.² The magazine’s ‘facts’ were not as value-free as they seemed at first glance. All the institutions featured in the magazine, including the family in the births, marriages and deaths, were organized by gender. It was, for example, only in certain elite male fields that it marked promotions and appointments. Births almost invariably acknowledged the father and sex of the child, rather than the mother’s or child’s name, unless they were of very high status indeed. Marriages almost always began with the groom. The deaths were highly selective, as comparison with the monthly Bill of Mortality for London, also a regular magazine feature, indicates. Unsurprisingly, approximately half the dead in the Bill were female, and over 40 per cent were minors, whereas the magazine’s obituaries were dominated by adult males.³ These obituaries marked not only the death but also the ‘continuing “social being” ’ of the deceased. By differentiating one deceased person from another and the commemorated from those unworthy of record, they were contributing to the ‘continuous production of the social order [ . . . ] proclaiming the posthumous existence of certain persons and the social values they represent’.⁴ It was certain types of men and masculine values they emphasized.

Gender and, within this, masculinity are socially created and signify power.⁵ Although the description ‘gentleman’ only rarely appeared in the personal announcements, the magazine consistently, and over a very long time period, represented and reinforced the importance of normative, institutional masculinity. Where masculinity was not the overt subject of an article or letter, there was still a subtext: the abiding entitlement to speak and act of educated, gentlemanly men. The magazine embodied a characteristic repeatedly identified as a key element of superior masculinity: its omnipresent, apparently timeless, yet invisible and unspoken nature. This was often concealed behind the apparently neutral and universalizing use of ‘man’ to mean ‘human’ and the deployment of certain masculine values as the yardstick of any person’s worth.⁶

The magazine could then be read as a guide to how men were ranked as gentlemanly or not, male readers presumably expecting or hoping for inclusion. This seems to place the magazine’s gentlemanliness close to Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s model of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, that form of heterosexual masculinity which at any one time guarantees male dominance over women (patriarchy), and the dominance of some males over others.⁷ Connell is criticized for failure to recognize on the one hand multiple and competing forms of masculinity both within and entirely outside the hegemonic ideal and, on the other, that the hegemonic ideal may be just that, rather than a lived reality. However, for the purposes of this study Connell’s ‘hegemony’ is a useful reminder of the abiding power implicit in some masculinities, in this instance ‘gentlemanliness’.⁸

A closer reading of the Gentleman’s Magazine establishes that its masculinity was neither as stable nor confident as appears at first sight. Some reader contributions, especially the ‘poetical essays’ and the obituaries, betrayed a measure of private doubt amidst the public certainty, especially where the vagaries of men’s personal lives (self-esteem, love, courtship and marriage) were concerned. Success in the gentleman’s world the magazine depicted required constant effort and skilful navigation between the Scylla of relationships with women and the family (How do I know whether she loves me? Is the bachelor or the married family man happier? How can I reconcile myself to the death of my beloved child?) and the Charybdis of comparison with other men over rank, wealth, effeminacy and courage. The Gentleman’s Magazine therefore not only upheld a version of hegemonic masculinity – apparently natural and universal, insinuated into all aspects of human society – but also captured the variety of relational ‘lived experience and fantasy’ that constituted gender and masculinity in everyday life for real individuals.⁹

There was too, as Connell’s critics argue, variety in and dispute over exactly what qualities composed gentlemanly masculinity. These shifted over this study’s 84 years as new sorts of gentlemen inserted themselves and their families into the magazine’s announcements columns, measuring favourably their code of domestic respectability combined with hard-earned merit against aristocratic values. By 1815 there was a clear and increasingly self-identifying middling-sort tone to the magazine. It was a masculinity that some later used to justify claims to manhood suffrage.¹⁰ Yet, for the upwardly mobile readers of the Gentleman’s Magazine, the shock years of the 1790s and French Wars typically produced a retreat to conservatism and a defence of the constitutional status quo.¹¹ As they retreated, the magazine’s cultural pull waned. It became the creature Hazlitt gently mocked. What had seemed sturdy and manly 50 years or more previously was dismissed by Southey and Scott as ‘Oldwomania’ by ‘reverend old gentlewomen’ correspondents.¹²

Eighteenth-century masculinity

Eighteenth-century British commentators recognized that Enlightenment thinking and the new social groups created by burgeoning commercialization had an impact on gentlemanly masculinity. The traditional gentlemanliness of the nobility (160 lords temporal who sat in the House of Lords) and gentry (‘some 15,000 further landed families [ . . . ] lordlings, combining local clout and office with – for some at least – national stature as the backbone of the backbenchers’) was based on inheritance and landed property.¹³ Their position was justified as part of a divinely ordained patriarchal pyramid. God as the supreme father granted authority for analogous rule over their people by kings, and over their families and households by fathers. The system was upheld through a code of male honour, in which the control of female sexuality was key and the duel the ultimate sanction.¹⁴

From the seventeenth century this model was undermined as Enlightenment empiricism demanded a reasoned, scientific explanation of mankind’s place in the universe that in this context can be termed ‘modern’. John Locke (1632–1704) took anatomists’ nerve theory, which privileged individuals’ feelings and experiences, and applied it to government and education. If each person was subject to unique sensations, then the mind of a child might be conceived as a blank slate upon which good or bad upbringing formed the man (and Locke was thinking of men rather than women).¹⁵ Locke was widely read throughout the following century (a collected volume published in 1714 was in its 13th edition by 1824). It was familiar to and admired by some Gentleman’s Magazine correspondents.¹⁶

Locke’s theory did not shake to the ground the concept of patriarchy. Rather, it relocated its justification in the individual and his family.¹⁷ It opened to all, even those born well below the nobility and gentry, the possibility of attaining gentlemanliness and the power it conferred through education and socialization. This was attractive to the new social groups found in London and other growing cities and towns. Their occupations included finance (stockjobbers, bankers, speculators), the professions (lawyers, doctors) and trading in goods, especially new luxuries. Traders included both the great merchants and the many middling-sort retailers and shopkeepers.¹⁸ These were occupations in which mental prowess and what we would call a ‘client-facing’ manner had greater value than physical masculinity: the aristocrat’s libertinism and duelling or the manual worker’s raw strength.¹⁹

In the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729) provided guidance in the Tatler and Spectator to the requisite new behaviour: politeness a conversational ease in the company of strangers as well as family and friends. Both remained in print during the century as collected volumes that were regularly cited. Politeness could, then, be acquired, was accessible, and introduced new worlds of possibility for aspirational members of the new professional, commercial and even artisan classes. By mid-century, the period covered by Chapter 4, it was more or less synonymous with gentlemanliness.

Among historians of politeness, Philip Carter draws on a rich variety of material, including conduct literature, periodicals (especially the Tatler and Spectator), drama and the lived experience of individuals taken from published diaries, memoirs and letters. He concludes that polite masculinity was largely defined through social performance and against other men rather than women, and that restrained ‘gentlemanly’ conduct was the hegemonic norm with effeminate foppishness operating as a warning against exaggerated politeness rather than sexual orientation.²⁰ Some recent scholarship counsels against over-identification of politeness with the eighteenth century and masculinity. To be sure other forms of masculinity existed, but politeness remains a useful concept because it encompasses some of the key social and cultural changes of the period.²¹ Analysis of the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1731–56 goes beyond Carter because it reveals some of the ways in which polite ideals were transmitted to a broad national audience.

The process of self-education also produced fresh anxieties over both social origin and gender. Superficial politeness might conceal underlying vulgarity.²² And politeness was not restricted to men. The civilizing influence of female conversation in mixed gatherings – at the tea table, in assembly rooms, public walks and gardens – was crucial. Yet too much frivolous interaction with women and the worlds of fashion and shopping associated with them could feminize a man. Such anxieties often lay at the heart of popular contemporary drama and fiction throughout the century, portrayed through stock characters, from the nouveau riche merchant Sterling and his sister Mrs Heidelberg in George Colman’s and David Garrick’s play The Clandestine Marriage to the malicious fop Mr Lovel in Frances Burney’s Evelina.²³ These potential pitfalls are also examined in Chapter 4.

Chapter 5 begins in 1757 in order to capture an alleged ‘gender panic’ at the start of the Seven Years’ War, when some contemporaries blamed the adverse effects of politeness for Britain’s poor military performance. The key contemporary source for this interpretation is polemicist John Brown’s popular Estimate of 1757 which attributed defeats to an effeminacy that had sapped men’s military courage.²⁴ The Gentleman’s Magazine responded immediately to Brown with excerpts and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgement
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Introduction
• 1. Gentlemanly Masculinity
• 2. The History of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1815
• 3. Readers and Contributors
• 4. Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1756
• 5. Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1757 to 1789
• 6. Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1790 to 1815
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Births, Marriages and Deaths
• Appendix 2: Magazine Titles before 1731
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index