Joanne Begiato's Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 breaks new ground in exploring manliness in Britain as an expansive body of gendered meanings that was most fully elaborated by representatives of the middle class but was also deeply resonant with the working class. It may seem surprising that a work with such an agenda could be commended for its originality. But despite its extended scholarly pedigree, the historical treatment of manliness has been lopsided. Beginning in the 1980s it was the obvious point of entry into the history of masculinity, for manliness was so frequently invoked during the nineteenth century (though the differences between the two terms were overlooked). But since then, most research on manliness has been confined within a specialist frame (particularly applied theology and pedagogic principle), losing sight of its social and cultural permeability. That Begiato succeeds in correcting this tendency is due in the first place to her phenomenal command of the primary sources, embracing not only a variety of print culture but also visual materials and material culture; the references alone are an invaluable resource for further research.

The main thrust of this book is that manliness was central both to class identity and the pattern of relations between classes. It fulfilled this role because manliness drew the physical and the moral together in a powerful composite. The intellectual basis of this coupling has been emphasized before. But Begiato demonstrates that the effectiveness of manly discourse hinged on the deployment of emotional responses, typically admiration and desire. Thus, the ideal worker who combined an upstanding physique with a face that disclosed his moral qualities was the subject of admiration and even desire. It is good to see the history of emotions brought into play here, even if Begiato overstates her case with the claim that “feeling is central to the formation of gender identities” (15). She gives due recognition to the late George Mosse for tracing the origin of the valorization of the manly body and mind in late eighteenth-century neoclassicism. But Mosse's book The Image of Man (1996) had only a muted impact on historians of manliness in Britain, and he did not look beyond the cultural elite. By contrast, what interests Begiato is the way in which concepts of manliness were central to the cultural exchanges between classes. In a barrage of polemical and prescriptive writing (notably the temperance journal the British Workman) middle-class writers and artists put forward for working-class consumption idealized images of the family man, the potential soldier and the worker, glossed as everyday heroism in the case of the fireman and the life boatman.

The main body of the book begins with a chapter on the male body as the object of desire. The second chapter examines the bodily manifestations of unmanliness. The next three chapters constitute the heart of the book, looking in turn at the military, the domestic, and the workplace as contexts for the performance of manliness. It is in the last of these that the appropriation of middle-class manliness by spokesmen of the working class is most fully developed. A brief conclusion suggests some continuities with the culture of masculinity today. Throughout, visual sources are given as much weight as written ones—a welcome development, given the distinctly cerebral cast of previous scholarship on manliness.

But the book goes beyond documenting the construction of working-class manliness from above. The idealistic manliness projected onto the working class also served to reinforce adherence of these same values in the middle class. In addition, many of these nostrums were open to appropriation by working-class writers and creators of material culture because, fundamentally, they expressed a conception of masculinity that transcended class. The argument is well made in relation to the material culture crafted by working-class people, such as pottery, quilts, and toys. Established painters like Joseph Wright depicted the brawn and muscle of workers in glowing colors; but so, too, did the designers of trade union banners. Begiato comes close to maintaining that instead of being a superficial gendering of status difference, manliness expressed a common core of physical vigor, self-assertion, self-discipline, and independence that transcended class identities.

Begiato's book describes a wider arc of social inclusion than does any earlier study of manliness, but it is not fully comprehensive. The texts and images addressed to the working class assumed a commitment to respectability. For the writers cited here, the dissolute and aggressive habits of the “rough” placed him beyond the pale of manliness. But it is important not to reproduce that rejection in the characterization of manliness in historical work. For the rough laboring class the very attributes that condemned them in middle-class eyes corresponded to the criteria of manliness in their own lives, from the variants of early nineteenth-century plebeian masculinity described by Anna Clark to the fighting prowess of the “hard men” who feature in Andrew Davies's work on late nineteenth-century Manchester. The opening pages of Begiato's book display one dimension of manliness that was strongly associated with the lower working class. This was pugilism, all the more interesting in that it brought together plebeian and patrician in a common appreciation of the fighters’ strength, courage, and sheer physical appeal. Equally, the conventions of domestic patriarchy, on which middle-class writers pronounced so confidently, followed a different trajectory lower down the social scale where the enforcement of household authority was more unyielding and more punitive. These were not transgressive lapses from a common code, but aspects of a rougher manliness, foreign to most of the writers and artists who dominate this book

Overall, this is a virtuoso deployment of three interlinked strands in the new cultural history: the somatic, the material, and the emotional. That conceptual range has made possible a book on manliness unrivaled in its contextual range and its interpretive insights.