CHAPTER 1 MEN AND MANLINESS IN BRITISH SOCIETY 1780-1870 What men are is often less important than what they think they are or ought to be, and what they think they are is to a large degree determined by the circumstances and prevailing ideas amidst which they are reared and live. ( H.C. Allen, Bush and backwoods: A Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States) On 16 October 1834 William Leslie, the Laird of Warthill, near Aberdeen, wrote to his son Patrick, who was about to emigrate to Australia to manage his uncle’s sheep station prior to undertaking his own venture as a pastoralist: I sit down to recall to your recollection some of the instructions which you have received during your early years and to add a few words of advice which may prove useful to you when beyond the reach of parental councils.1 After pointing out that ‘You are going … into a new world … where you will find the general standard of morality and religion at a very low ebb’, Patrick’s father proceeded to give counsel to his son to guide him through the impending moral morass and equip him for a prosperous life. The first injunction concerned religion: Never, never my Dear Boy forget or neglect the precepts of your God. He will never withhold all his powerful assistance in forwarding your progress in the paths of virtue, nor his Almighty protection in all the dangers to which you may be exposed.2 The second concerned character: The strictest honor and integrity, accompanied by a rigid adherence to the truth and straightforwardness in all your thoughts, words and actions, are not only of primary importance but of indispensable obligation … and can only be attained by accustoming yourself to habitual reflection, and to a cool and attentive application of your reasoning faculties. 3 The Laird had some advice regarding the people Patrick was likely to meet: The propriety of your own conduct and manners as a Gentleman can alone secure to you their future attentions and regard. Cautious circumspection will be necessary in your general intercourse. 1 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834, John Oxley Library, OM71-43. 2 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 3 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834 34 Be particular and select in the choice of your companions, and still more so if possible in establishing friendships. 4 The Laird clearly nursed a number of anxieties about the place to which his son was going. In William Leslie’s mind, the Australian frontier was a place of insecurity and moral danger. There were traps for novices. One of the dangers was alcohol and Patrick was admonished to pursue a course of moderation: Never allow yourself to acquire a strong taste for liquors when living alone, and in company, half a bottle of wine is fully sufficient for all the legitimate purposes of conviviality. On festive occasions you should always retire at as early an hour as propriety will permit, and invariably when symptoms of boisterous mirth or inebriety appear.5 The frontier also possessed pitfalls of a sexual nature. The maintenance of proper relations between the sexes was of utmost importance, and the consequences of laxity in this regard could be disastrous: Illicit intercourse betwixt the sexes is a vice of the most debasing nature, and of the most pernicious tendency. However little of it may be thought of nowadays, no one can read the Bible without finding it denounced as a sin of the first magnitude in the sight of God, and the perverted minds and shattered constitutions of the generality of youth bear ample testimony to its horrible effects.6 Financial propriety was as important as sexual propriety and what the Bible was to the latter, bookkeeping was to the former: Inconsiderate expenditure is also a rock on which many a promising youth has made a shipwreck of his future fortunes. Continuing the practice of keeping a regular and exact account of your receipts and disbursements, will, at all times, place in your view the proper limits to which your liberality and economy ought to be restrained.7 He should not waste time when he should be working at making himself an independent man: 4 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 5 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 6 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 7 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 35 In a young man, too, being much in company is attended with a most unprofitable waste of time which ought to be devoted to useful pursuits, besides not infrequently substituting thoughtless and dissipated habits for those of active exertion, and disease and misery for health and independence.8 Subsequently, William Leslie wrote similar letters to his two younger sons, Walter and George, when they joined their elder brother in Australia. Presumably he imparted similar written advice to his eldest son William, who perpetuated Leslie family values in Hong Kong. William Senior was not going to let his sons build their contributions to the wider Empire on shaky moral foundations. In William Leslie’s imagination the frontier was a dangerous place where young men, free from the constraints of metropolitan society, would face many temptations and destructive influences. Men like Patrick would be tested and would need all the virtues British society wanted in its men, as the frontier was an uncivilised environment where these virtues could be challenged. William Leslie’s letters to his sons, exemplified by the one he wrote to Patrick, were not unusual nor a product of a peculiar philosophy. His letters espouse most of the values the early Victorians saw as desirable not only in a gentleman, but in men of all classes. Christianity, sobriety, sexual propriety, self-reliance, and a strong work ethic: these would protect and advance a young man as he made his way in a new society. The letter evinces a set of virtues that became central to manly conduct in Victorian life, and the belief that manly virtues were universal – applicable everywhere under any circumstances. 8 William Leslie to Patrick Leslie, 16 October 1834. 36 When men such as Patrick Leslie arrived on the Queensland and British Columbia frontiers they did so bearing common experiences, values and practices regarding their masculinity. Before considering what happened to these men and their manliness in their new circumstances, it is necessary to explore the origins of these values and the forces which produced them. This chapter will argue that manliness as a central middle-class concern dates from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, with the emergence of those middle classes. The middle classes formulated an ideal of manhood which, in a number of ways, they attempted to impose upon other classes. Concomitantly with the rise of the middle class there emerged a normative and hegemonic gender order. This gender order was characterised by ‘separate spheres’ of practice for men and women.9 This chapter will firstly consider the characteristics of this gender order and men’s place in it. Secondly, the principal characteristics of the manly ideal will be identified. The dominant version of manliness embraced and promoted by the middle classes evolved 9 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall in Family Fortunes are probably the main exponents of the ‘separate spheres’ account of Victorian society, though by no means the only. See also Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 95-106; Catherine Hall, “Victorian Domestic Ideology.” In Gender and History in Western Europe, edited by Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent. (London: Arnold, 1998), 181-196; F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 197; Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid Victorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989), ix; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longman, 1989), 81; Robert Shoemaker argues that in some areas, such as within the family and home, there was a limited separation of spheres, while in others, such as work, the separation was greater. Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres (London: Longman, 1998), 144, 207; Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience Vol 3 (New York: Norton, 1986), 290; W.D. Rubenstein, Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History, 1815-1905 (London: Arnold , 1998), 319; Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 254-258; John Tosh, “Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson.” In Manliness and Morality: Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800-1940, J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 49. For arguments disputing the utility of the separate spheres model see Amanda Vickery, “Golden age to Separate Spheres?” in Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent eds. Gender and History in Western Europe (London: Arnold, 1998) and Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres (London: Longman, 1998). 37 through several iterations, each encompassing a range of virtues and behaviours.10 Thirdly, the dissemination and promulgation of the manly ideal throughout British society will be discussed. Some historians have mapped the origins of the Victorian gender order and its constituent parts from the sixteenth century or even earlier.11 While the evolution of the mid- Victorian gender order was a long-term process, it did not emerge as a well delineated social structure until the late eighteenth century.12 Therefore, notwithstanding earlier iterations of Georgian and Victorian gender regimes, this study is concerned with how relations between men and women were structured between the 1780s and the 1870s, a period in which it is possible to see the emergence, acceptance and dominance (though qualified along class lines), of a particular gender order.