We are all familiar with the persistent metaphor that links colleges and universities to an ivory tower. The comparison distances the academic experience from what are supposed to be the more practical institutions of life. Such representations have a great deal of cultural currency. Who has not heard students speak of that time in the future when they will finish their undergraduate career and enter that ever-elusive “real world?” In Oxbridge Men, Paul R. Deslandes explodes these myths as he explores the correlation between undergraduate life at Oxford and Cambridge universities and the articulation of a British masculine identity capable of governing the nation and its empire in the period from 1850 to 1920. In Deslandes's argument, Oxford and Cambridge were isolated “Little Worlds” in which British male identity was constantly constructed through the institutions of university life, but the strength of this argument is Deslandes's insistence that Oxbridge masculinity was drawn against a larger context, that it never fully operated in isolation from the “cares, status anxieties, and social dislocations and conflicts of Britain's modern industrial society” (47).

Central to Deslandes's argument is the mythic image of the Oxbridge Man and his concomitant supremacy atop the British national and imperial worlds from the last half of the nineteenth century through the Edwardian era. Deslandes details the construction of the Oxbridge Man, and he argues that this construction was premised on the exigencies and needs of the broader nation and empire. Set against the background of substantial social changes that spanned the last half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth—changes that included educational reforms, imperial growth and instability, mounting demands from feminists that women be permitted to study at and then take degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, and an influx of students from throughout Britain's empire—the process of defining the Oxbridge Man was driven by an urgency, a need both to distinguish the Oxbridge Man from the rest of British and British imperial societies and to bolster the Oxbridge Man's preeminent place within both.

The success of Deslandes's argument rests in his innovative use of source materials. Oxbridge Men is a cultural history that focuses its attention on the young men who found themselves making their way through Oxford and Cambridge rather than on the institutions themselves. Using sources that range from student magazines to newspapers and reviews, Deslandes is able to delve into what he calls “the inner lives of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates” (12) and to detail the ways in which this community of undergraduates was able to construct, sustain, and transmit a vision of British masculinity not only within the university setting but also as part of the broader national landscape. This approach is made possible and successful, as Deslandes acknowledges, because of his interdisciplinary approach and his debt to scholars from outside the field of history.

Oxbridge Men is a coming-of-age narrative designed to reflect the way that students at Oxford and Cambridge viewed themselves. For Deslandes, this process was always performative, and the halls of Oxbridge were the ideal space in which white, male, British masculinity could be isolated and honed as a concrete identity vis-à-vis the wider challenges facing it. The Oxbridge setting isolated would-be Oxbridge men from the rest of society, literally marking them with the cap and gown regalia of higher education. The universities made men out of boys in a disciplined environment in which students saw exams as military skirmishes, athletics as a test of virility and fortitude, and public events like boat races as a chance to put their world on display to family and friends from the outside.

Oxbridge men delineated an identity for themselves as a group apart, and they did so at precisely the moment when outside forces were challenging the stability of their community. Deslandes argues that an undergraduate's family could be one such force. Mothers were a particular source of tension for many undergraduates, especially those mothers whose behavior infantilized their sons. Fathers too were problematic figures. Most Oxbridge undergraduates relied on their fathers to pay their way, and this financial dependence was a mark of dependency for undergraduates attempting to assert a claim to independence and manhood. One might argue that such conflicts between an undergraduate and his parents were to be expected as the final growing pains of late adolescence, but Deslandes saves himself from such a critique through his insistence that these internecine feuds were substantial components in the construction of Oxbridge masculinity.

Deslandes's argument is strongest when he turns to the challenges presented by feminist demands that women be admitted to take degrees at Oxford and Cambridge and to the increasing presence of students from throughout the British imperial world at Oxbridge. Oxbridge undergraduates were adamant in their resistance to those communities that would turn the two universities into a “hermaphrodite compound” (207) or “a Colony of Bombay” (220). Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates vehemently defended their separateness because they felt they had to so as to buttress their own status as the singular community with the requisite ability to manage and sustain the British nation and its empire.

In Oxbridge Men, Deslandes offers sophisticated and important insights into Oxbridge life. We see that being an “Oxbridge Man” was not something that was forced on these undergraduates but rather that it was an identity that they actively took part in creating. But the construction of “the Oxbridge Man” did not take place exclusively within an ivory tower. Oxford and Cambridge were intentionally defined as worlds apart, but they could not produce men capable of governing the nation or managing the empire in isolation. The Oxbridge world was always linked with and responsive to the vicissitudes of Britain's domestic and imperial history. Oxbridge Men is a substantial study of two very important British institutions that is augmented by its reading these institutions against broader domestic and imperial concerns to show the resonances that existed between empire and nation as categories on the one hand and Oxford and Cambridge on the other. Most important, it is a significant achievement because it opens our eyes to the lived experience of Oxbridge undergraduates who found themselves making their way through the halls of these two important institutions and living at the intersection of these domestic and imperial issues.