Henry French and Mark Rothery's book is a very welcome intervention in the rapidly advancing history of masculinity, providing a valuable empirical account of gentry masculine identity. Man's Estate contributes to this field in two major ways. First, it recognises the family's ongoing role as a key agent in the construction of manliness. It is organised to take the reader on a journey through a gentleman's life, moving from the ‘public’ institutions of school, university, apprenticeships and the Grand Tour, to the ‘personal’ world of matrimony and fatherhood. Yet the authors' findings belie this somewhat conventional structure, emphasising that the family pervaded all areas in which men's gendered identities were constructed.
Second, Man's Estate breaks down conventional historical periodisation to investigate continuity and change in masculinities revealed by gentry family correspondence across 240 years. Over this period, French and Rothery find little evidence of change in the central values of gentry manhood, though they recognise shifts in styles of elite masculinities. They deftly reconcile these two apparently incompatible features into an overall thesis that draws on their expertise in the histories of class and the landed gentry. Their theoretical model is adapted from Fernand Braudel's three-tiered explanation of change and continuity. At the bottom layer, over a timescale of many centuries, and displaying only imperceptible change, lie basic gender identities. These profoundly patriarchal ordering principles interacted with the societal norms, political rhetoric, economic circumstances and cultural discourses located at the second level to form gender stereotypes such as the ‘household patriarch’, ‘polite gentleman’, ‘man of feeling’ and ‘muscular Christian’. The third surface layer was the day-to-day in which individuals engaged with gender identities. Thus stereotypes could have social power that was not simply imaginary: when combined with the deep patriarchal level they could exert pressure on those who found it difficult to fit in. Nonetheless, the stereotypes could also be evaded, contested and ignored, making the existence of alternative masculinities less ‘subversive’ than they appear in the current secondary literature.
The life story of the landed gentleman begins with schooling; indeed, the role of public schools in making the nineteenth-century English gentleman is well known. Yet French and Rothery's perceptive analysis of correspondence between parents and sons innovatively reveals that ‘parents continued to assert the importance and sufficiency of familial codes’ throughout formal education (pp. 43–4). The role models paraded in front of the sons were often brothers. Crucially, mothers did not lose the power to shape their sons' masculine values during this time. All this subtly undermines the impression that public schools were all-male institutions socialising gentry boys into homo-sociability and a late Victorian ‘flight from domesticity’. Mothers and fathers sought to inculcate the same values in their sons: self-command, industry and virtue. At some level it worked, for boys claimed these qualities in their own letters. Only the style in which they did so changed over time. Sons used the rhetoric of stoicism, self-control, politeness and manners in the eighteenth century, serious academic diligence and interior rather than exterior accomplishments in the first half of the nineteenth century, shifting over to games, athletics and militarism from the second half of the nineteenth century. The dialogue between parents and children continued into the next stage of preparing boys to enter the world: university and apprenticeship. Tertiary education changed across the centuries introducing competitive scholastic achievement with examinations whereby manly qualities came to be evaluated through impersonal ‘objective’ criteria, not by personal clientage links. Yet much continuity is evident. The goal of parents and college tutors, who served as intermediaries in the process of developing masculine independence, was to develop youths' moral autonomy. If successful, young men would internalise approved values as moral armour against temptation in their travels in the wider world, the next stage of gentleman's lives.
The Grand Tour took several forms between 1660 and 1900, from the Classical European Grand Tour, through to more Patriotic and Romantic versions touring the British Isles, to imperial journeys in the later nineteenth century. However, French and Rothery do not see the changes as affecting the role of travel in cementing ideals of masculinity. All these travels were a time of learning, offering opportunities for moral and cultural improvement in unfamiliar social settings, and all tested that crucial masculine quality: self-control. Furthermore, while the style of manhood sought in these travels might seem to shift from one stereotype to another: from the polite gentleman to the muscular adventurer, Man's Estate insists that these were ‘merely the vehicles by which the deeper imperative of individual masculine authority could be realized’ (p. 169). The authors' immersion in the correspondence of young men writing home from the empire also leads them to challenge the ‘flight from domesticity’ thesis that men rejected marriage and preferred all-male environments from the 1870s. French and Rothery acknowledge that men were required to operate in all-male worlds and expressed ambivalence about entanglements with women. Yet these imperial gentlemen simply sought to reassure anxious parents that they were not about to enter unsuitable marriage. They still intended to return to Britain and enter the domestic life that they looked forward to and eventually undertook, though imperial careers did delay this process.
Indeed, French and Rothery reiterate how essential marriage and fatherhood were to masculine identity. Marriage was not simply a component of manhood that advertised maturity and adulthood; it was through matrimony that men progressed further towards the attainment and enactment of perennial adult male values. Fatherhood was also profoundly bound up with manhood. For the gentry families studied it was not merely symbolic, it was a central emotional prop to masculine identity, as well as demonstrating male authority and the capacity to be responsible for dependents. The generational transmission of masculine values became all the more crucial for these reasons. Not only did it secure future generations of sons' prized manly status, it maintained the current generation of men's identity, because the behaviour of children was seen as a reflection of their fathers' masculine identity: inadequate sons had inadequate fathers.
Overall, this is a book that persuasively explains the longevity of values. It argues that class shaped men as much as gender, thereby retarding the pace of change: since the social position of families was based on existing notions of masculinity, there was little temptation to innovate. The role of family also stabilised notions of manhood. Basic ‘ideals of male honour, virtue, reputation, and autonomy’ retained power across the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries because the landed family was a source of normative conservatism in training and values (p. 37). In short, Man's Estate is a real work-horse, essential reading for students taking a broad range of modules and a must for anyone who teaches and researches the history of masculinities, gender, class and identities.
