This study on the formation of male gender identity among the English gentry from 1660 to 1900 is based on the manuscript correspondence of nineteen families. The investigators used digital photography to make a collection of 10,000 images, half of which were entered into a database. One family accounted for 38 percent of the images, another four families for 35 percent, and the remaining fourteen families for 25 percent. Three of the chapters are based on the correspondence of young men with their parents and their siblings, and these chapters cover their experience at school, at university, and in apprenticeships, and during educational travel in Europe, England, and India. The correspondences were equally distributed over the two and a half centuries, but within chapters the chronological incidence varies considerably, with some focusing more on the eighteenth and others on the nineteenth century. The last chapter asks how adult men's ideas about domesticity, the roles of husbands and wives, and the nature of fatherhood shaped male gender identity.

French and Rothery have gathered a considerable body of evidence. But it is not apparent how these nineteen families were chosen. It would be good to know what percentage of the surviving sets of gentry family correspondence available in public repositories for the period 1660–1900 is represented. Their laudable desire to have as evidence the actual words people wrote means that their study has to begin when boys became able to read and write. But the classical late twentieth-century studies of gender formation by John Money and others maintain that children know by two or three whether they are male or female. These first few years of life are notoriously difficult for historians to document. Still one wants to know whether there were not observations made of children's gender behavior before boys went to school. Twentieth-century gender studies are certainly based on adult observation of infant behavior: historians' evidence is of the same kind, only more difficult to come by. French and Rothery might argue that they looked for evidence of the ways in which males expressed to themselves and to others what the appropriate standards of male behavior were. But it is surely still necessary at least to ask how males had come to think that they were males in the first place.

The chapter on schools discusses how parents used a combination of larger public schools and smaller private ones, oscillating between one and the other. The discussion focuses on the nineteenth century, with Thomas Arnold's reforms at Rugby in the background. But if they had used my information from the eighteenth century on aristocratic fathers and their sons at school (based on correspondence), it would have been clearer that there was as much continuity over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as was found to be the case with domesticity. The real difference was the nineteenth-century introduction of the prefectural system; this and the eighteenth-century foundation of houses to supplement or replace the school dormitories seemed to have ended the notorious school rebellions of the eighteenth century. The enduring problem of these boarding schools has been that while they produced boys of great self-confidence, the boys did not necessarily as men have much love for themselves, because of the dynamics of adolescent attachment and separation. French and Rothery do not address this directly, but they might argue that the very interesting evidence on the range of responses by mothers to their sons' expressions of homesickness does so. Religion and health figured more prominently in the eighteenth century than they do in this chapter. “Vice” might also have been developed more: it seems to have meant drink and sex, but was the sex masturbation, sodomy, or whores? Finally there is the question of the age of puberty. Throughout the period 1660–1900 it must have started at fourteen or fifteen because choirboys' voices broke at seventeen. William Gilpin in the eighteenth century lost interest in educating boys once puberty had arrived. How do French and Rothery think puberty was dealt with?

The sections in chapter 2 on apprenticeship and early sexual experimentation with prostitutes are perhaps the most interesting. Young gentlemen found it very difficult to submit to the authority of the men to whom they were apprenticed because these men were often lower in rank. They were especially inclined to answer back when they felt that their honor had been impugned. Over the course of the nineteenth century this became less of a problem when apprenticeship was replaced by greater access to professions in law, military service, and the church, and to posts in imperial administration. Young men could not discuss with their parents the world of prostitution and venereal disease, but they wrote to their brothers and their friends about them. One elder brother helpfully explained that soaking a condom in warm water beforehand would make it tighter when used. It would be good to know whether the resort to prostitution became more frequent for young men over the course of these two centuries as a means of proving their heterosexuality after years of education in all-male institutions. The chapter on travel is full of interesting information, but it seems the least focused, perhaps because it is not based as much on correspondence between young men and their families. The last chapter, on adult men and domesticity, moves through a potential historiographical minefield with some success. It is good to have it said that the gentry (like the aristocracy) did not have to wait until the nineteenth century to find that domesticity had become central to adult male gender identity as John Tosh maintained was the case for the middle classes. My old book on the aristocratic family is described as showing its age (as its author certainly does), but its fundamental finding that eighteenth-century domesticity became central to the male gender role is upheld. Overall, French and Rothery argue for a general continuity in the development of the male gender role over these two and a half centuries.