I

In a groundbreaking article in 1999, ‘Homo religiosus: masculinity and religion in the long eighteenth century’, Jeremy Gregory was highly critical of the secular focus of eighteenth-century historians of masculinity and of the dominant paradigm in which ‘the “godly man” of Stuart England is seen as being replaced by the “polite man”, the “sentimental man” or the “sexual man” of the Hanoverian period’.Footnote ⁶ A brief survey of some of this literature provides insight into the ways in which Christian ideals of manliness have been historiographically sidelined. In the case of politeness, Lawrence Klein, in Shaftesbury and the culture of politeness: moral discourse and cultural politics in early eighteenth-century England (1994), claimed that ‘this cultural era was … post-godly’, explaining in parenthesis that this meant ‘neither “secular” nor “secularized” but “within a regime in which religion has been subjected to new political and intellectual disciplines”’.Footnote ⁷ Although Klein claimed not to be arguing for full-blown secularization, this remained a controversial claim about religion's place in eighteenth-century culture. With regard to sentimentalism, in The culture of sensibility: sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (1992), G. J. Barker-Benfield focused on the emergence of a ‘new psychoperceptual paradigm’ and argued that ‘sensibility rested on essentially materialist assumptions’, acknowledging only that ‘proponents … came to invest it with spiritual and moral values’.Footnote ⁸ Finally, in the case of sexuality, Tim Hitchcock's English sexualities, 1700–1800 (1997) made no reference to Christianity in the body of his text, stating in the preface that such ‘limitations … are inevitable in a book of this sort, and to that extent do not warrant an authorial apology’.Footnote ⁹ Whilst Hitchcock deemed this omission ‘inevitable’, he nevertheless chose to leave out an aspect of masculinity whose significance has been underestimated by nearly all historians.

In contrast to this body of work, Davidoff and Hall's argument in relation to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries placed considerably more emphasis on religious ideals; nevertheless, religion was considered as subservient to socio-economic developments. Arguing that ‘gender and class always operate together’, they claimed that at the end of the eighteenth century ‘there was a historic break and a realigned gender order emerged associated with the development of modern capitalism and urbanisation’.Footnote ¹⁰ For them, the chief significance of Christian ideals of manliness was that they provided the ideological underpinnings of this transition. Tosh rightly criticized their reduction of gender to class, but he affirmed the strong connection between gender and socio-economic trends, and followed Davidoff and Hall's treatment of religious ideals as secondary to them.Footnote ¹¹ In recent work, he almost excluded religion altogether; he wrote that in the nineteenth century ‘manliness had much more to do with one's standing in the sight of men than with one's standing with the Almighty … Manliness was essentially a secular standard.’Footnote ¹²

In claiming that manliness was largely secular, Tosh was reacting against the religious focus of works such as Norman Vance's The sinews of the spirit: the ideal of Christian manliness in Victorian literature and religious thought (1985).Footnote ¹³ However, rather than consider ideals of manliness as either secular or religious, we should recognize the co-existence of, and interconnections between, different discourses of manliness. Whilst Vance concentrated on the Victorian period, there is no comparable work on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many earlier writers, too, saw manliness as being primarily Christian in orientation. The imitation of Christ (which will be discussed in detail in the next section) offered a Christian ideal of personhood. Codes of politeness, sentimentalism, and sexuality did not replace or subsume Christian ideals of manliness; they overlapped with them, and in much more complex ways than scholars have tended to acknowledge.

In the case of sexuality, the issue of whether Christian men should marry or remain single was, for instance, contentious. Writers who discussed Christ's life itself noted that he had not married. Rather than use this to support the single life, they presented marriage as one of a number of choices for which Christ had left no direct example, but which were permitted, and in which individuals were to act according to Christ's spirit and temper.Footnote ¹⁴ In an important study, which considered religion and sexuality together, Henry Abelove argued that far from being an unequivocal supporter of domesticity, the Methodist leader, John Wesley, promoted celibacy.Footnote ¹⁵ Other influential writers also claimed that the single life was preferable to marriage. These included the seventeenth-century Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor (though there was some ambiguity to his position)Footnote ¹⁶ and the eighteenth-century Nonjuring divine, William Law.Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, in the early nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a Unitarian in early adulthood, but liberal Anglican thereafter, strongly promoted marriage.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, in the late eighteenth century, the Calvinist Evangelical divine, Martin Madan, provoked a heated debate by controversially advocating polygamy as a solution to the problem of prostitution.Footnote ¹⁹ Christianity, sexuality, and manliness also converged in discussions of the morality of plays and playhouse attendance as critics claimed that playhouses and their performances promoted sexual licentiousness. In the Absolute unlawfulness of the stage (1726), a particularly strident critique, Law attacked the ‘impure Speeches’, ‘wanton Amours’, ‘wild Passions’, and ‘immoral Rant’ of plays, and suggested that the playhouse itself was the home of ‘Rakes, and ill Women’.Footnote ²⁰ Equally striking is that an early defender of the stage, the literary critic, John Dennis, turned such criticisms on their head by suggesting that the theatrical encouragement of promiscuous heterosexuality was to be welcomed given the recent rise in homosexuality.Footnote ²¹

As in the case of sexuality, Christian ideals of manliness interconnected with politeness and sentimentalism. In Men and the emergence of polite society, Britain, 1660–1800 (2001), Philip Carter convincingly argued that polite and sentimental ideals of manliness should not continue to be conceptualized as separate since there was no clear-cut shift from one to the other;Footnote ²² moreover, Carter was strongly critical of scholars for suggesting that the rise of politeness depended partly on a decline in the church's influence. Much evidence can be found to support his claims that there were connections between politeness and religion, and that the relationship between sociability and Christianity was enhanced by the emergence of sentimentalism.Footnote ²³ Indeed, in a recent historiographical review, drawing on Isabel Rivers's work, and quoting from the Latitudinarian divine, Edward Fowler, Klein himself acknowledged that ‘To an extent … the language of mainstream Anglican religion came to overlap with that of the polite courtesy book. Christ himself becoming susceptible to representation as “of a marvellously conversable, sociable and benign temper”.’Footnote ²⁴ Particularly striking, though, is that key proponents of politeness emphasized that it ought to be understood within a Christian framework, thereby inverting Klein's notion of ‘polite religion’.Footnote ²⁵ For instance, the Anglican divine and educationalist, Vicesimus Knox, delivered an entire sermon on the theme of ‘Christian Politeness’ in 1792, in which he argued that true politeness was not only compatible with, but also founded on, Christianity. He wrote: ‘It is then the purpose of the present Discourse, to recommend the practice of politeness, on the principles of Christianity; to evince indeed, that he who possesses the genuine virtues of the Christian religion, must be, in the best and truest sense of the word, polite.’Footnote ²⁶ Other Christians sought to single out politeness as inimical to Christian manliness. Law and the Calvinist Methodist leader, George Whitefield, for example, both attacked politeness in critiques of contemporary recreations. In the Absolute unlawfulness of the stage, Law asked why ‘People of Fashion and Quality’ who ‘have great Advantage above the Vulgar’ were so immoral; he blamed the ‘Politeness of their Lives’.Footnote ²⁷ In similar vein, Whitefield gave an entire discourse on The polite and fashionable diversions of the age, destructive to soul and body (1740).Footnote ²⁸

There was also overlap between sentimental and Christian ideals. A number of writers, and not just Latitudinarians,Footnote ²⁹ encouraged male weeping and pointed to Christ's having wept over the tomb of Lazarus.Footnote ³⁰ In 1750 the Dissenting divine, Philip Doddridge, gave a sermon on the death of Samuel Clark entitled Meditations on the tears of Jesus over the grave of Lazarus.Footnote ³¹ In a sermon ‘On Sensibility’ (1777), the moderate Church of Scotland theologian, Hugh Blair, singled out Christ's weeping and argued that it should be taken as a general encouragement to male sensibility. He wrote: ‘How much this temper belongs to the perfection of our nature, we learn from one who exhibited that perfection in its highest degree … Jesus wept.’Footnote ³² In an essay ‘On shedding tears’, first published in 1790, Knox complained that ‘To shed tears is considered, in modern times, as unmanly’; he countered: ‘Jesus wept’.Footnote ³³ Finally, in his exemplary biography of 1838, it was observed of the leading Evangelical layman, William Wilberforce, that following the death of Marianne Thornton he had remarked: ‘It is true indeed, some tears of mortality will fall, when we see a friend descending into the dark valley … “Jesus wept”, and He will allow His people to weep also.’Footnote ³⁴ The compatibility of sentimentalism with Christianity was, however, also challenged by some writers, particularly from the late eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁵ Coleridge made a lengthy attack on male ‘sensibility’ in his devotional manual Aids to reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality, and religion (1826), particularly highlighting the failure of its practitioners to exercise the virtue of benevolence.Footnote ³⁶

When historians have considered Christian ideals of manliness, they have tended to misconstrue such ideals by adopting church-party approaches, partly due to a failure to engage with revisionist scholarship on eighteenth-century religion.Footnote ³⁷ It is now evident that older views of the eighteenth-century church as decrepit were largely products of the nineteenth-century Evangelical and High Church revivals which presented themselves as rejuvenating a religious life in decline.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, a consensus is also beginning to emerge that church-party divisions and rivalries were largely nineteenth-century phenomena, and that it is inaccurate to view the church before the rise of the High Church Oxford Movement in the light of fiercely opposed groupings.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, Peter Nockles has argued that numerous churchmen active in this period defy neat church-party categorization.Footnote ⁴⁰

Nevertheless, scholars of ideals of manliness have tended to adopt church-party approaches. A distinct set of ‘Latitudinarian’ ideals of manliness was identified by Ronald Crane in his ‘Suggestions toward a genealogy of the “man of feeling”’ (1934), which drew attention to Latitudinarianism as a context for the emergence of the ‘man of feeling’. He argued that between the Restoration and the early eighteenth century a small group of Cambridge-educated Latitudinarians promoted benevolence, good nature, and tender sentimental feeling.Footnote ⁴¹ Whilst Crane's account was extensively criticized by Donald Greene in the 1970s,Footnote ⁴² John Sheriff and Barker-Benfield have restated the connection. Whilst agreeing with Greene that Latitudinarian divines did not promote ‘good nature’ at the expense of orthodox doctrines such as original sin, Sheriff unconvincingly claimed that Crane's and Greene's arguments were ‘not necessarily contradictory’ because the former was chiefly concerned with tracing the origins of the fictional ‘man of feeling’, whereas the latter was interested in religious ideals more generally.Footnote ⁴³ However, it remains the case that Crane's analysis gave a distorted impression of eighteenth-century religion. Barker-Benfield agreed with Sheriff's claims with regard to Latitudinarianism, though he added a further church-party dimension by arguing that Methodists later developed the Latitudinarian emphasis on feeling.Footnote ⁴⁴ Scholarship on politeness by J. G. A. Pocock and Klein has similarly argued for its origins in ‘Latitudinarian’ sociability.Footnote ⁴⁵ The intellectual value of isolating ‘Latitudinarian’ ideals of manliness, however, remains highly questionable. Greene rightly argued that the qualities which Crane associated with Latitudinarianism had been upheld by Anglicans for many years. John Spurr's work has further demonstrated the affinities between Latitudinarians and other Anglicans; indeed, he argued that notions of Latitudinarian exceptionalism need to be tempered by an acknowledgement that the label ‘Latitudinarian’ emerged in nonconformist attacks on anti-Puritan adherents to the church.Footnote ⁴⁶

Despite an attractively nuanced understanding of church parties, a church-party approach is also evident in Vance's Sinews of the spirit, which included discussion of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Vance argued that the ideals of manliness propagated by his central characters, Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, often misleadingly termed ‘muscular Christianity’, were strongly influenced by ‘liberal religion’, and especially three earlier theologians: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, F. D. Maurice, and Thomas Arnold. Vance used the phrase ‘liberal religion’ on the grounds that categorizing such divines as belonging instead to a ‘Broad Church’ party was anachronistic,Footnote ⁴⁷ but his identification of ‘liberal’ religious influences remains problematic, for the mid-Victorian emphasis on Christ as exemplarFootnote ⁴⁸ was clearly shared with a wide range of Christians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

More than any other church party, a connection has been drawn between Evangelicals and ideals of manliness. Alongside Davidoff, Hall, and Tosh, scholars who have considered ideals of manliness in relation to particular areas, including domesticity,Footnote ⁴⁹ education,Footnote ⁵⁰ recreations,Footnote ⁵¹ and also death,Footnote ⁵² have also argued for the transformative role of Evangelicalism. However, John Walsh's work in the 1960s on the origins of the Evangelical Revival suggests as misplaced the whole notion of a distinctive set of ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness. In the ‘Origins of the Evangelical Revival’ (1966), Walsh depicted a multifaceted movement which stemmed from many different tributaries; Evangelicalism was not simply a revival of seventeenth-century Puritanism, but was rooted in the vitality of contemporary piety, particularly High Church devotion.Footnote ⁵³ Taken together with broader revisionist critiques of eighteenth-century religion, Christian ideals of manliness are thus more accurately appreciated from the starting-point of recognizing that there was a considerable degree of commonality.

Whilst Gregory did not make commonality a central feature of his argument about religion and masculinity, he drew on evidence ‘from across the whole range of the religious spectrum’ and observed that ‘the choice of role models for true male religious behaviour … could transcend denominational and sectarian boundaries’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Writers converged to discuss aspects of manliness which were of shared concern, and there was little sense in which individual positions followed church-party or denominational lines. Indeed, it has not been recognized that non-partisanship itself was often held up as an ideal. It was particularly common for contemporary biographers to emphasize that their exemplary subjects were attached to no party, but that of Christ, and that they were on friendly terms with those who did not share their beliefs. For instance, Doddridge's biographer included an entire section on ‘His Catholicism, Moderation and friendly Behaviour to Persons of different Sentiments and Persuasions’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Attempts to associate individuals with particular church parties were rebuffed. For example, Tillotson's biographer complained that ‘The moderation both of his temper and principles very early occasioned him, as well as Mr Chillingworth, and others … to be rank'd among those Divines, who were stigmatised with the name of Latitudinarians.’Footnote ⁵⁶

II

As the common ideal at the heart of Christian ideals of manliness, the imitation of Christ was intensely promoted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The imitation of Christ was not in itself particularly gendered since Christ was chiefly presented as an exemplar of universal Christian virtues, thereby challenging Davidoff and Hall's claim that Evangelicalism demanded a fundamental separation between men's and women's roles.Footnote ⁵⁷ The extensive presence of the imitation of Christ in published literature has implications not only for historiography on masculinity, and gender history more generally, but also particularly for Boyd Hilton's influential work, The age of atonement: the influence of Evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865 (1988). Hilton drew a contrast between, on the one hand, the intellectual climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, characterized as an ‘age of atonement’, and a period in which Evangelical soteriological concerns were evident in social and economic thought, and, on the other hand, the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in which he identified a new-found interest in the doctrine of the incarnation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, Hilton connected this argument with the history of ideals of manliness in an article on ‘Manliness, masculinity and the mid-Victorian temperament’ (1989) in which he argued that ‘the new religious outlook of the 1850s and 1860s brought quite a different attitude. Now it was possible to shed “a manly” tear … It became “manly” … to apologise rather than call someone out to a duel.’Footnote ⁵⁹ However, contrary to Hilton's claims, articulations of the imitation of Christ indicate that an incarnational theological context existed well before the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, imitation of Christ's tears had been encouraged from the mid-eighteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the case of duelling, Donna Andrew has argued that, from as early as the late eighteenth century, Evangelicals fundamentally altered ‘secular’ critiques of duelling by attacking the code of honour as unchristian.Footnote ⁶¹ Her argument is itself, though, in need of some revision: Christian criticisms of duelling were evident even earlier in the eighteenth century and they were not confined to Evangelicals.Footnote ⁶²

The imitation of Christ was promoted by writers across the theological spectrum and in a wide variety of literature, including sermons, ‘lives’ of Christ,Footnote ⁶³ exemplary biographies and autobiographies, devotional manuals, novels, and poems; the focus here will be on devotional manuals and the closely related genre of the novel. A number of earlier manuals featuring the imitation of Christ were reprinted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Foremost among these was The imitation of Christ, which went through over 100 editions in the eighteenth century alone.Footnote ⁶⁴ The imitation of Christ was an important theme of the Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor's popular Holy living (1650) and Holy dying (1651),Footnote ⁶⁵ and was equally evident throughout the ejected minister, Isaac Ambrose's Looking unto Jesus (1658).Footnote ⁶⁶

In the early eighteenth century, the writer and philanthropist Robert Nelson, a Nonjuror, promoted the imitation of Christ in his bestselling, A companion for the festivals and fasts of the Church of England (1704). Discussing Christmas, he focused in on Christ's example and suggested that Christ ‘hath set us a perfect Pattern of all those solid and needful Virtues which he requireth from us’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The imitation of Christ also appeared prominently in William Law's A practical treatise upon Christian perfection (1726) which included a chapter entitled, ‘All Christians are required to Imitate the Life and Example of Jesus Christ’, and was an important underlying theme of his A serious call to a devout and holy life (1729) which featured fictional characters, including both exemplary men, such as ‘Paternus’, and exemplary women, notably ‘Miranda’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The imitation of Christ was also present in the well-known devotional manuals of the Dissenting divines Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge. Watts's An humble attempt toward the revival of practical religion (1731) pointed to the hypocrisy of divines, both Anglican and Dissenting, who did not practise the imitation of Christ. He asked: ‘Why do you call him Lord and Master, if you practise not the Rules of his Advice, nor imitate his divine Pattern?’Footnote ⁶⁹ In a discussion of the Christian temper in The rise and progress of religion in the soul (1745), Doddridge also explicitly invoked Christ's example: ‘The Blessed Jesus designed himself to be a Model for all his Followers; and he is certainly a Model most fit for our Imitation.’Footnote ⁷⁰

Many of the manuals discussed above were republished by John Wesley. He produced editions of The imitation of Christ in 1735, Law's Christian perfection in 1743, and his Serious call in 1744, and included editions of Taylor's Holy living and Holy dying, and Ambroses's Looking unto Jesus in his large compendium of practical divinity, The Christian library (1749–55).Footnote ⁷¹ Indeed, Wesley emphasized the importance of works by a trio of earlier writers to his own faith, recording that in 1725 he had read Holy living and dying by Taylor, in 1726 à Kempis's Christian pattern, and a ‘year or two after’ Law's Serious call and Christian perfection. Footnote ⁷² The Calvinist Methodist leader, George Whitefield, also produced an edition of Law's Serious call,Footnote ⁷³ acknowledging that ‘By means of it God worked powerfully upon my soul.’Footnote ⁷⁴

In the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson'sFootnote ⁷⁵ novels Clarissa (1747–8) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4) both promoted the ideal of the imitation of Christ. John Dussinger has previously drawn attention to the ideal's significance for Clarissa. The novel's heroine can be seen as an imitator of Christ, whilst the male villain, Lovelace, can be viewed as a male anti-type of this ideal.Footnote ⁷⁶ The hero of Grandison can also, like Clarissa, be viewed as an imitator of Christ. Indeed, both Clarissa and Grandison contain references to devotional manuals, and sermons, which dealt with the imitation of Christ. The imitation of Christ and Taylor's and Nelson's manuals are referred to in Clarissa,Footnote ⁷⁷ whilst Richardson wrote to one of his correspondents, Lady Bradshaigh, that Clarissa deserved ‘a Place with your Taylor's Living and Dying’. Footnote ⁷⁸ Richardson ended Grandison with a quotation from a sermon by Tillotson, ‘Concerning our Imitation of the Divine Perfections’, in which he had written: ‘there is no manner of inconvenience in having a pattern propounded to us of so great perfection, as is above our reach to attain to; and there may be great advantages in it’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Readers of the novel certainly saw Sir Charles as an imitator of Christ. For example, the Methodist Arminian Magazine for 1790 printed a letter of 1782 from Miss A. Bolton to Wesley in which she wrote that ‘the great character, there delineated, leads to a much higher one … the lovely Jesus’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Devotional manuals published later in the eighteenth century also encouraged the imitation of Christ. Wilberforce presented it as an aspect of the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘nominal’ Christians in A practical view (1797). He wrote of ‘real Christians’ that ‘the example of Christ is their pattern … “they are gradually changed into the image of their Divine Master”; and they dare not allow themselves to believe their title sure, except so far as they can discern in themselves the growing traces of this blessed resemblance’.Footnote ⁸¹ Strikingly, whilst criticizing novelists for not promoting Christianity, he noted that ‘No exceptions have fallen within my own reading, but the writings of Richardson.’Footnote ⁸² The imitation of Christ was also promoted by Wilberforce's fellow Evangelical, Hannah More. In Practical piety (1811) she declared that Christianity ‘is being like-minded with Christ’, whilst in Strictures on female education (1799) she recommended Law's Serious call, although criticizing aspects of his theology.Footnote ⁸³ Equally, manuals by Evangelicals were commended by High Churchmen. For instance, in his A guide to the church (1798), an exposition of High Church theology and ecclesiology, Charles Daubeny commended Wilberforce's attempts to promote ‘vital religion’ and hoped, in common with the High Church periodical, the British Critic, which he quoted, that many would read A practical view. Footnote ⁸⁴ The imitation of Christ featured in early nineteenth-century devotional manuals, too, such as Coleridge's Aids to reflection in the formation of a manly character (1826), which insisted that the one ‘essential of Christianity’ was ‘that the same spirit should be growing in us which was in fullness of all Perfection in Christ Jesus’.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the close of the work, Coleridge even admitted that he had read Serious call, despite seeking to distance himself from Law's mysticism.Footnote ⁸⁶

III

As Coleridge's attitude towards Law indicates, although the imitation of Christ was articulated by a range of writers, important differences subsisted regarding the theological frameworks within which the ideal was understood. These included differences not just over the acceptability of mysticism, but also over the relationship between faith and works, and the emphasis which should be placed on the former, and over the meanings of baptism and whether it was necessary to salvation. Disagreements over theology and over the strictness of ideals of manliness were such that they led to accusations that some neglected or undermined Christian conduct. The Anglican clergy as a whole were accused of ‘moralism’ – of paying little attention to Christian doctrines and of effectively promoting a lax, heathen code of morality. Attacks on ‘moralism’ originated in the later seventeenth century as part of Dissenting attacks on Restoration Anglicanism.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the early eighteenth century, the Methodists made similar charges,Footnote ⁸⁸ though the accusation of ‘moralism’ became widespread in the 1790s and early 1800s which saw a spate of bishops' Charges on the theme.Footnote ⁸⁹ By contrast, the charge of ‘enthusiasm’ had its roots in attacks on the seventeenth-century Dissenting sects. Klein has argued that the critique of ‘enthusiasm’ contributed to the rise of politeness as ‘enthusiasm’ lost its technical sense of counterfeit inspiration and came to denote unsociability.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, it was also bound up with Christian ideals of manliness. Evangelicals, especially, were accused of being ‘enthusiasts’. They were charged not simply with unsociability, but with teaching justification by faith alone and neglecting Christian morals. A particularly vicious assault on ‘enthusiasm’ was the bishop of Exeter, George Lavington's The enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists, comapar'd (1749–51). He was clear that ‘Enthusiasm being … by no means Inconsistent with Immorality … another Effect of Methodism, [is] its Tendency to undermine Morality and Good Works.’Footnote ⁹¹ Later in the century, ‘enthusiasm’ came to incorporate Evangelicals more widely. Although Daubeny commended Wilberforce's Practical view,Footnote ⁹² he controversially complained that his ‘mode of expressing himself on this delicate subject [of faith] was ‘calculated to promote … the cause of enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁹³ Furthermore, and rather incongruously with such charges, ‘enthusiasts’ were also accused of teaching an impossibly strict code of conduct. This line of attack was principally articulated by the High Church divine, Joseph Trapp, in The nature, folly, sin, and danger of being righteous over-much; with a particular view to the doctrines and practices of certain modern enthusiasts (1739), which was targeted at the Methodists, as well as Law, whom Trapp regarded as their spiritual father.Footnote ⁹⁴

At the same time, there were attempts to appropriate Christian ideals of manliness for the ‘Evangelical’ party. Until the late eighteenth century, the term ‘Evangelical’ was commonly used to mean ‘of the Gospel’ and did not have partisan connotations.Footnote ⁹⁵ Central to its emergence as a party term was the Calvinist Evangelical divine, John Overton's The true churchmen ascertained or, an apology for those of the regular clergy of the Establishment who are sometimes called Evangelical ministers: occasioned by the publications of Drs. Paley, Hey, Croft; Messrs. Daubeny, Ludlam, Polwhele, Fellowes; the reviewers, &c. &c. (1801). Overton's work was a defence of Anglican divines who had been accused of teaching doctrines which were not in keeping with the Articles of the Church of England. Highly provocatively, he categorized them as ‘Evangelical’ preachers, whilst claiming that their opponents neglected the Gospel and were guilty of ‘moralism’. Additionally, he claimed that opponents undermined holy living by teaching that membership of the national church was the key to salvation. Whilst Overton cited critiques of Anglican ‘moralism’ by an array of bishops to support his case that ‘Evangelicals’ were ‘The true churchmen’, he failed to mention that the bishops, and indeed many of those he purported to defend, did not share the Calvinist theology which he placed at the centre of ‘Evangelical’ preaching.Footnote ⁹⁶

Unsurprisingly, Overton's partisan use of the term ‘Evangelical’ was challenged. His chief protagonist, the High Church divine, Charles Daubeny, countered that: ‘All ministers of the established Church are professedly Evangelical Ministers.’ He insisted that the term ‘Evangelical’ should not be confined to ‘those among the Clergy who consider certain peculiarities of opinion to constitute part of the Gospel, which others think themselves justified in considering as peculiarities not to be maintained, and not worth contending about’. As Daubeny pointed out, the ‘exclusive appropriation’ of the term was most worrying because of its implications for those who were not Evangelicals; principally that they were guilty of ‘a notorious dereliction of duty’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Another High Church divine, Edward Pearson, who was also Master of Sidney Sussex College and Christian Advocate in the University of Cambridge (whose official duty it was to respond to infidelity), similarly replied to Overton. Indeed, he also criticized the leader of the Evangelical party in Cambridge, Charles Simeon, for his partisan appropriation of the term ‘Evangelical’, regarding it as the unwarranted ‘assumption of a title which, by arrogating so much to yourselves, was directly calculated to derogate from the just claims of others’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Those historians who have argued for a distinct set of ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness have followed Overton's partisan use of that term, but Daubeny's and Pearson's protests remind us that such ideals were not the property of one party.

IV

The particular concepts which historians have employed in their analyses of ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness – ‘domesticity’, ‘the world’, ‘the calling’, ‘public’, and ‘private’ – also demand revision. Not only were these concepts not confined to Evangelical Christians, they were also much more complex than has been allowed. Furthermore, the significance of concepts of ‘solitude’ and ‘charity’ in discussions of Christian manliness has not been recognized. ‘Domesticity’ has been widely presented as a feature of ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness,Footnote ⁹⁹ but it was evident in writings by a range of Christians. It was also a more expansive concept than has been acknowledged; in particular, ‘the family’ could extend, metaphorically, to incorporate social relations beyond the home. At the same time, contrary to Davidoff and Hall's claim that ‘marriage … lay at the heart of notions of masculinity’,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ it should be recognized that a number of influential writers promoted the single life.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The revival of family prayers from the late eighteenth century has been regarded by many historians as one of the hallmarks of the Evangelical Revival,Footnote ¹⁰² but family prayers were encouraged by many divines, from the late seventeenth century, and alongside solitary prayer. For example, Tillotson preached a sermon in 1684 ‘Concerning Family-Religion’ which promoted not only piety in the family but also ‘Secret Prayers in our Closets’.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the eighteenth century, in A plain and serious address to the master of a family, on the importance of family religion,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Doddridge advised men to maintain a steady regard to religion ‘at home … in the family, as well as in the closet’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In the early nineteenth century, the biographer of the High Church layman, William Stevens, wrote that he had ‘uniformly read the Lessons for the Day, before he left his chamber’, though ‘As he was unmarried and a boarder merely in the house where he lived … Family Devotion could form no part of his plan: but he was pleased … so many of those families, with whom he spent much of his time, either adopted, or had persevered in this laudable practice.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Whilst Davidoff and Hall observed that ‘the family’ had a multiplicity of meanings,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ in their discussion of religious ideals they concentrated their attention on ‘the family’ of husband, wife, children, and servants, acknowledging only that church and chapel might also be seen in familial terms.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The relationship between tutors and their pupils was also, for instance, conceptualized in such terms. Doddridge's biographer recorded that he addressed pupils at his Northampton academy ‘with the Freedom and Tenderness of a Father’, and even after their leaving ‘He desired them to consider it as a Father’s House'.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Equally, the liberal Anglican divine and headmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold, evidently felt the affliction of pupils as if they were his ‘children’. He explained that on one occasion, having heard of a fault which a sixth former was supposed to have committed, ‘I felt as if it had been one of my own children.’ His biographer also drew attention to ‘the increasing circle of pupils at Universities, who looked upon him as their second father’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Furthermore, all manner of charitable relationships in society were considered in terms of ‘the family’. Wesley wrote that ‘By it [money] we may supply the place of an husband to the widow, and of a father to the fatherless.’Footnote ¹¹¹ Meanwhile, men who engaged in charity were commonly described as having acted in a paternal fashion. Stevens was unmarried, but according to his biographer ‘had a blind son, and several other children’ in a reference to the charitable provision he had made for these individuals.Footnote ¹¹²

Like ‘domesticity’, the concept of ‘the calling’ has been mishandled. Davidoff, Hall, and Tosh argued that ‘the calling’ was a key aspect of ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness; moreover, they conflated ‘the calling’ with the modern concept of ‘work’, paying little attention to ‘charity’.Footnote ¹¹³ A range of writers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries stressed that men's callings should be viewed in a religious light. An early instance is provided by Taylor's Holy living, in which he emphasized that all callings, from the plough-man to the king, were potential means for serving God. He wrote:

A particularly good example of a piece by a non-Evangelical which discussed a range of callings from a Christian perspective is Knox's Essays, moral and literary, first published in 1778 and which had reached a fifteenth, much-expanded edition by 1815. Included in the collection were an essay ‘On the choice of a profession’ as well as a number of essays entitled ‘Hints to young men who are designed for … ’; areas considered included: ‘orders’, ‘a military or naval life’, ‘the life of a gentleman without a profession’, ‘a mercantile life’, ‘the profession of physic’, and ‘the profession of the law’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Davidoff's, Hall's, and Tosh's equation of ‘the calling’ with ‘work’ has its origins in Max Weber's The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1904–5) which argued for an elective affinity between Protestant notions of ‘the calling’ and the capitalist ‘work ethic’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Scholarship by several historians, especially John Walsh, and also James Raven, Donna Andrew, and Jane Garnett, has, however, challenged Weber's neglect of Christian ethics, and especially the concept of ‘charity’, in his discussion of ‘the calling’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Charity was indeed at the heart of the imitation of Christ. None would have disagreed with Tillotson's statement that Christ's life was a pattern of ‘universal charity’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Christ himself had displayed his charity through miraculous works and had lived in voluntary poverty, but most divines emphasized that only Christ's charitable spirit needed to be imitated. However, some in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, mainly Quakers, rejected the cessation of miracles and claimed to be following Christ's example in performing them.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Furthermore, there were also those who promoted voluntary poverty, often in the context of ‘the community of goods’ exemplified by the primitive Christians in Acts 2. Voluntary poverty was advocated by Law in his later works, Wesley more consistently,Footnote ¹²⁰ and Coleridge in his utopian scheme known as ‘Pantisocracy’.Footnote ¹²¹

Whilst Christian men were encouraged to be active in their callings, Davidoff, Hall, and Tosh argued that ‘the world’ was also considered a place of danger and ‘domesticity’ a haven.Footnote ¹²² However, criticisms of ‘worldliness’ featured in literature by a range of Christians and were chiefly directed at ungodliness, which could pervade every aspect of life. Law, for instance, was very critical of ‘the world’. His Christian perfection included three chapters on the theme of ‘Christianity Requireth a renunciation of the World, and all worldly Tempers.’ He emphasized that the cares, not just the pleasures, of ‘the world’ should be subordinated to religion.Footnote ¹²³ Such was the stridency of Law's critique that Trapp cited this as an example of his ‘enthusiasm’ and accused him of sanctioning an entire withdrawal from society.Footnote ¹²⁴ In contrast to Law, in a sermon ‘On friendship with the world’, published in the Arminian Magazine in 1786, Wesley emphasized some of the spiritual benefits of connections with ‘the world’. Even more strikingly, he also suggested that family members might be of ‘the world’. He advised that ‘husbands and wives … have taken each other for better or worse’ and therefore ‘must make the best of each’ and that parents should not part with children ‘while they are young’. But, ‘as for all other relations, even brothers or sisters, if they are of the world, you are under no obligation to be intimate with them’.Footnote ¹²⁵

Amanda Vickery and Lawrence Klein have rightly criticized the usefulness of analysing gender through a ‘private/public’ binary, whilst also indicating the range of connotations which ‘public’ and ‘private’ had for contemporaries themselves.Footnote ¹²⁶ In the case of Christian ideals of manliness too, the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ were certainly used, but their meanings were more varied and complex than Davidoff and Hall allowed. For example, they were deployed in discussions of the gentleman's calling, chiefly being used in this context to distinguish national and political from personal duties. The Evangelical layman, Thomas Gisborne, entitled a chapter of An enquiry into the duties of men (1795) ‘On the duties of private gentlemen’; he appears to have used the term ‘private’ here to distinguish those gentlemen who relied entirely on landed income, rather than the profits of office or any other employment. He further divided the duties of a gentleman into three main headings: ‘Private gentlemen may be considered … first, as land-owners; secondly, as invested with various offices and trusts of a public nature; and thirdly, as bound to the performance of numerous private and domestic duties.’Footnote ¹²⁷ Only in this last instance was ‘private’ specifically linked to ‘domesticity’, and, in any case, all of a gentleman's duties were subsumed under the label ‘private’. The terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ also featured in discussions of prayer. Men were encouraged to engage in ‘public’ and ‘private’ prayer on the Sabbath; here the terms respectively denoted prayer in church, and family and solitary prayer. For example, the Independent minister, Thomas Gibbons, wrote: ‘The Sanctification of the Sabbath lies in the publick Worship of God’; the remainder of the day was to be spent in ‘private Acts of Devotion’. He explained that ‘the Family and the Closet should be improved to water and nourish the Word we have heard in the House of God’.Footnote ¹²⁸ ‘Public’ and ‘private’ also distinguished between activity in society rather than solitude. The Anglican philanthropist and merchant, Jonas Hanway, complained in 1765 that one of ‘the peculiar misfortunes of the times’ was ‘that few persons now understand the meaning of the word private: all now is public … And so sure as great companies create dissipation, we cannot enter into the recesses of our own hearts, far enough to say we are in private.’Footnote ¹²⁹ In none of these examples were writers actively promoting a division between ‘public’ and ‘private’, and, as has been seen, different aspects of a man's life were conceptualized as intimately connected.

V

In writing about religion and masculinity in 1999, Gregory warned that ‘the history of masculinity is fast developing a periodisation, which will force studies of manliness to ape the increasingly outmoded characterisations of more traditional political and social history’.Footnote ¹³⁰ A decade later, there is little evidence to suggest that this has been heeded. In 2005, a special edition of the Journal of British Studies was devoted to the history of masculinity, edited by Alexandra Shepard and Karen Harvey, who also emphasized the importance of periodization. Unlike Gregory, they identified the key problem as being the overwhelmingly social methodology of early modern historians of masculinity as compared with the cultural bent of those working on the eighteenth century; they argued this produced different types of narrative that were hard to connect. They proposed as a solution a return to Tosh's call in his pioneering, ‘What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’ (1994), for historians to move from the study of masculinity as ‘a set of cultural attributes to consider masculinity as a social status’.Footnote ¹³¹ Whilst there is scope for more work along these lines, there remains much for both culturally and socially oriented historians of masculinity to do. In particular, there is a need to engage more fully with religion. Indeed, this is a key theme in relation to which long-term developments in the history of masculinity can be examined.

Gregory rightly argued that ‘the godly man’ of the early modern period survived into the eighteenth century; additionally, there was a considerable continuity to Christian ideals of manliness over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for they were neither revived nor reinvented with the flourishing of the Evangelical Revival. Indeed, the imitation of Christ can be traced to the Middle Ages, and scholars have pointed to its prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries too.Footnote ¹³² The particular features which Davidoff and Hall identified as characterizing the ‘new man’ could, with the revisions discussed in the previous section, also be applied to Christian ideals of manliness in the earlier eighteenth century.Footnote ¹³³ Furthermore, it is clear that the ideals promoted in the later nineteenth century were not as novel as has been suggested. Hilton's argument for a mid-nineteenth-century transition to an ‘age of incarnation’ should be tempered by an acknowledgement of the promotion of the imitation of Christ throughout the ‘age of atonement’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Furthermore, the particular ideals discussed in Vance's Sinews of the spirit might have been distinctive to the Victorian Christians he examined, but their invocation of Christ's exampleFootnote ¹³⁵ definitely was not.