A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England / Edition 1

by John Tosh

Overview

Domesticity is generally treated as an aspect of women’s history. In this fascinating study of the nineteenth-century middle class, John Tosh shows how profoundly men’s lives were conditioned by the Victorian ideal and how they negotiated its many contradictions.
Tosh begins by looking at the experience of boyhood, married life, sex, and fatherhood in the early decades of the nineteenth century—illustrated by case studies representing a variety of backgrounds—and then contrasts this with the lives of the late Victorian generation. He finds that the first group of men placed a new value on the home as a reaction to the disorienting experience of urbanization and as a response to the teachings of Evangelical Christianity. Domesticity still proved problematic in practice, however, because most men were likely to be absent from home for most of the day, and the role of father began to acquire its modern indeterminacy. By the 1870s, men were becoming less enchanted with the pleasures of home. Once the rights of wives were extended by law and society, marriage seemed less attractive, and the bachelor world of clubland flourished as never before.
The Victorians declared that to be fully human and fully masculine, men must be active participants in domestic life. In exposing the contradictions in this ideal, they defined the climate for gender politics in the next century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300123623
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/22/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,034,343
Product dimensions:	9.36(w) x 11.28(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

John Tosh is professor of history at the University of Surrey Roehampton.

Read an Excerpt

A Man's Place

Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England

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By John Tosh

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1999 John Tosh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14368-3

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Middle-Class Household

On 31 March 1851 John Heaton proudly noted in his diary that the census enumerator had called that day and 'our baby's name was added to the list of the population'. Apart from two-month old Helen, the other occupants of 2 East Parade, Leeds, were John Heaton himself, his wife Fanny, two female servants and a stable-boy. For a man who had not married until he was 32, it was a moment to savour. This was the house to which he had brought home his new wife barely a year before, after a prolonged and stormy courtship. Now, with a child as well as a wife, his masculine standing was secure. By the time the next census was taken in 1861 there was further evidence of Heaton's rising status. The household now included four children and as many servants; there was also a resident governess. The family no longer lived in a terraced house close by the commercial centre of Leeds, but in a substantial Georgian villa called Claremont on the edge of the town. On most days John Heaton walked from the house to Leeds Infirmary where he was physician, or to the Medical School where he was a lecturer. Having been born 'over the shop' at the bookseller's business his father owned at 7 Briggate, he was keenly appreciative of the greater gentility he now enjoyed in an elegant merchant's house, standing in its own grounds, for which he had paid the considerable sum of £2,500.'

Dr Heaton's progression from crowded street to quiet and elegance was typical of the rising middle class of his day. The comfortable domestic circumstances he enjoyed by his late thirties were testimony to both parental support and his own professional abilities. Placed at 17 by his father as an apprentice with a Leeds surgeon, he had distinguished himself at Leeds Medical School, before completing his training at University College Hospital, London. Medicine enjoyed high prestige, along with the law and the Church. Membership of these 'old' professions was often taken to confer gentlemanly status, partly because of the requirement of formal education, and partly because giving advice or service for a fee carried little of the commercial taint attached to buying and selling in the market-place. In the course of the nineteenth century other professions secured recognition too, such as accountancy, engineering, surveying and architecture. All of them depended primarily on training and expertise rather than capital and entrepreneurial flair.

John Heaton could easily have found himself on the other side of the commercial/professional divide. If his father had not been so determined to advance his son, he would have groomed him to take over the bookselling business, or else apprenticed him to a manufacturer instead of a surgeon. The professions made up one great segment of the Victorian middle class, and to the extent that their number included men of letters and journalists, their cultural impact was assured. But strength of numbers lay with the men of trade and business. It was this entrepreneurial element which increased most rapidly during the first half of the nineteenth century and accounted for the largest number of fresh recruits to the middle class. The most successful enjoyed meteoric careers: Isaac Holden, one of the foremost woollen masters in the West Riding, had been born the son of a pit headsman and had gone to work in the mill as cotton piecer at the age of ten. By 1847, before he had turned 40, he had his own woollen worsted mill in Bradford, and within ten years he was known as 'the first comber in Europe'. Such men were fabulously wealthy. They formed the provincial business elite of the country, often graced by an aristocratic-style mansion, a seat in the House of Commons, and even a knighthood (Isaac Holden secured all three). Below them were the owners of medium-size factories, the bankers, and the 'merchants', which usually denoted proprietors of wholesale and import-export concerns; these were the backbone of the commercial middle class. William Lucas took over the family brewing business in Hitchin in the 1830s; it made him a considerable figure in the town and enabled him, his wife and his nine children to live in some comfort. Such men were squarely placed in the middle ranks of the emerging bourgeoisie, and they were sometimes known as the 'middling sort'. Their counterparts in the countryside were the more substantial tenant farmers who leased extensive acreages and treated their operation as a business: they invested in agricultural improvements and looked to rising profits. In the Victorian period a middleclass dignity could hardly be sustained by men in these occupations on an income much lower than £300 per annum, and the same was true of members of the professions. Such an income could run to a commodious house and at least three indoor servants. The really successful professional or commercial man might earn anything up to £1,000 or more, in which case he was likely to maintain a horse and carriage with groom.

At the bottom came a broad base of less highly considered occupations, men usually on incomes between £100 and £300 and employing only one or two domestic servants. All of these occupations departed in some significant particular from the middle-class ideal: clerks because they were hired employees; shopkeepers because ready money passed directly between them and their customers; small workshop masters because they got their hands dirty. In the course of the nineteenth century this level of society became known as the lower middle class. It was, of course, very much bigger than the more comfortable stratum above: some 510,000 households, compared with 90,000, according to a careful computation made in 1867. The distinctions of status and wealth to be found within the middle class were greater than in either the working class or the upper class. It is misleading to think of a unified bourgeoisie, and in some ways more realistic to accept the residual implications of the term 'middle' class. All the same, the middle classes were distinguished from the aristocracy and gentry because they worked regularly for a living, and from the working class because they did not stoop to manual labour. Within the moral economy of Victorian society these were significant distinctions. Moreover such a status was all the more valued because it could not be taken for granted. Despite the unmistakable air of prosperity which hangs over the middle class, especially during the mid-Victorian plateau of the 1850s and 1860s, contemporaries were keenly aware of how precarious all forms of business were. The risk of failure during a commercial downturn could never be entirely discounted. Isaac Holden's prospects as a newly independent master were almost blighted by the recession of 1847–48; he was seriously considering emigration when another manufacturer stepped in with the offer of a partnership. The ranks of governesses in middle-class households were swelled by young ladies whose fathers had failed in business or had lacked the means to lay by a nest-egg for them. Their presence was a pointed reminder to the family employing them of the risks to which they too were exposed.

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Victorian domesticity carried such a heavy emotional load that its material prerequisites can easily be taken for granted. Yet the deeply felt appreciation of home as a place of peace, seclusion and refuge (to be explored in Chapter 2) would have meant little without certain standards of comfort, privacy and routine. Those cluttered domestic interiors for which the Victorians are so often mocked today reflect the range of activities which were now carried on in the home, each requiring its distinctive rituals and often its exclusive equipment: the daily act of worship, the instruction of young children, reading aloud at the fireside, music-making around the piano, the entertainment of friends and relatives to tea or dinner. But what these activities did not include was the production of the material surplus on which the household depended for its existence. Paid work was a prominent feature of the middle-class home: its smooth running depended on a great deal of back-breaking and monotonous labour performed by domestic servants. But the household was not, by and large, a productive unit. Its residents did not team up to provide goods or services in demand outside the home. The Victorian middle-class domestic unit represented the final and most decisive stage in the long process whereby the rationale of the Western family shifted from being primarily economic to become sentimental and emotional. More specifically, it reflected a steadily increasing separation of work from home. Today we can begin to see the reversal of this process as the electronic revolution makes it possible for more and more business to be conducted from home. But in cultural terms a physical gulf between home and work is still regarded as such a central feature of ordinary lives that we find it difficult to imagine a society where it scarcely existed.

Yet broadly speaking this was the situation until the end of the eighteenth century. One can detect indicators pointing towards the modern pattern a century or more before that. For example affluent merchants in London had long shown a taste for country residences, but these were second homes to which they only repaired at weekends and in slack seasons. London also boasted a rising number of men who worked in government departments or large capitalist enterprises and had no reason to mix home and work in their elegant West End residences. But London was exceptional in both its employment patterns and its wealth. Life was different in the provincial towns (and indeed in the less sought-after areas of London). Whether in trade or in one of the professions, middle-class men usually conducted their business and domestic life under the same roof, with no clear division between the two. In a town like Colchester, for example, traders, manufacturers and professionals lived in what one historian has called 'the business household', where the divide between working and domestic arrangements was minimal. Customers were seen, and deals struck, in the front parlour; apprentices slept in the upper storeys, sometimes alongside bedrooms converted into workshops; goods were stored in the basement and cellars. The pattern in the countryside was similar. The farm was managed from the farmhouse; the commercial side of the business was conducted in the parlour; a whole range of agricultural produce was finished or processed in the farmhouse; servants lived under the farmer's roof and ate at his table. The contrast between mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century must not be exaggerated, and variations of region and occupation need to be borne in mind. Nevertheless the dominant tendency is unmistakable. From being a site of productive work, the household was increasingly becoming a refuge from it.

The pattern of labour use is perhaps the most striking indication of the fusion of domestic and business worlds in pre-Victorian society. Masculine self-respect certainly demanded that a man provide for his family, and great shame was attached to one who 'failed'. But the requirement to provide did not carry the same exclusive connotations as the more modern notion of the breadwinner. In the eighteenth century men of the middle rank did not usually carry the burden of earning single-handed, nor did they think that they should. The typical bourgeois household comprised man and wife, children, and a range of subordinate non-kin, including apprentices, labourers and servants. The line between domestic work and business or professional work was blurred. Women were involved in production for the market, just as men took some interest in domestic matters. Women who contributed no labour to the household business, like wealthy leisured wives, attracted censure precisely because they were a deviation from the norm. The bourgeois wife often acted as her husband's junior partner in his business — working alongside him at the shop counter, for example, or during harvest time. The contemporary term which best summed up the wife's economic role was 'help-meet'. Often she had sole responsibility for some crucial aspect of the business, like the accounts book in a merchant concern, or the dairy and the poultry yard in a farm, or buying in raw materials for a manufacturing workshop. Widows sometimes took over their husbands' businesses, and it is clear that many were well qualified to do so through having shared so much of the work in a conjugal partnership. Children formed part of the family pool of labour too. They were at the beck and call of both father and mother to run errands and perform sometimes monotonous tasks. As for apprentices, they were attracted by the prospect of learning a trade, but there was usually nothing in their contracts to prevent them being set to housework, particularly when they were placed under the day-to-day care of the mistress.

This type of working household had characterized the middling sort for some two or three hundred years. It was still widespread at the close of the eighteenth century, and it features very widely in the childhood memories of middle-class people who grew to maturity in the early years of Queen Victoria. John Heaton of Leeds recalled how he had been brought up in family accommodation adjacent to his father's bookshop, with a storage room for secondhand books and servants' quarters above. Edward Benson, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, had begun life in a house within the chemical works managed by his father. Neither Heaton nor Benson idealized their childhood circumstances, but more sentimentalized memories appealed to a widespread sense of loss. In the 1880s Charlotte Sturge recalled how, early in the century, her father had bought a tannery on the edge of Coggeshall in Essex. It came with an adjoining 'good, old-fashioned, red-brick house' covered in climbing roses, and a kitchen garden which produced superb fruit. Father had time to teach his sons to swim and his daughters to ride, as well as pursue his business as a tanner. That vision of the home as the site of work, nurture and leisure in a semi-rural setting recurs again and again in novels of the period, like George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Dinah Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). Victorian nostalgia was fed by many social and cultural changes, but none was more poignant for them than the transformation in the nature of home from a hub of integrated activities to a place of refuge. They expressed their ambivalence about up-to-date notions of family propriety and comfort by idealizing the domestic past.

Sentimentalized family histories and novels made the transformation seem more abrupt than it really was. The key change, on which so much else depended, was the shift in the focus of women's lives from the family economy to the private domestic sphere. Historians have come up with sharply varying accounts — mainly because of the wide variation between town and country, between regions, and between occupations. During the eighteenth century there seems to have been a growing tendency for wives of the middling sort to withdraw from the business activities of the household when affluence allowed them to do so. But the mid-Victorians were broadly correct in believing that their own lifetimes had witnessed a vital stage in the story. Taking the middle class as a whole, the pace of change was particularly pronounced during the first half of the nineteenth century — the period of most intensive industrialization in Britain.

However, this does not mean that the separation of work from home can be attributed directly to 'the factory'. Most middle-class men worked in occupations which had nothing to do with factories, and those who did were often in no hurry to move away from them. When Isaac Holden began looking for his own mill in 1845, he turned down a promising one at Shipley because his wife objected to the mill-house. (In Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South Manchester cotton master John Thornton also lives with his mother in the mill-house.) In fact first-generation manufacturing entrepreneurs often lived on site because they valued on-the-spot supervision of their businesses before everything else; it was the second generation which shunned the mill-house and lived in style elsewhere. The trend in favour of a separation of home and work was driven less by the factory than by the pace of economic growth in the towns generally. As more and more businesses were concentrated in the urban centres, noise, smell and other forms of pollution increased. The heart of a manufacturing town became less attractive as a place to live. Commercial land values increased at the same time, thus encouraging the sale of the remaining residential properties. In Bradford, for example, only 7 per cent of bourgeois householders lived in the town centre by 1851; most of them were to be found in quasi-suburban residential districts. On grounds of both amenity and economy, middle-class men preferred to maintain a residence away from their place of work.

Away from one's place of work might mean no more than leasing a terraced house in a square or crescent adjacent to the commercial district, as in London's ever-expanding West End. But during the decades immediately before and after Victoria's accession, it often meant a secluded semi-rural neighbourhood. In Manchester the out-of-town villa was already fashionable among the commercial classes by the 1830s. Edgbaston in Birmingham, laid out in the 1820s, was another early example. This was the suburb proper, but to begin with the pleasures of seclusion were limited mainly to people who were sufficiently affluent to keep a carriage. The real change came with the transport revolution of the early Victorian period. Railways out of the main cities were rapidly developed from the 1840s. By the 1850s the horse-drawn omnibus was responding flexibly to the commuter market, to be joined by the horse-drawn tram in the 1860s. It was these innovations which largely determined the pace and direction of suburban growth. The bus and the tram extended the social scope of the suburb to include not only the middle class but the upper reaches of the working class too. Speculative builders threw up properties within the range of every level of middle-class income: the villa for the successful businessman or lawyer, the semi-detached (an invention of the 1790s) for the large shopkeeper or accountant, the terraced house for the clerk or schoolteacher.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A Man's Place by John Tosh. Copyright © 1999 by John Tosh. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations....................     ix     

Preface to the Paperback Edition....................     xi     

Acknowledgements....................     xiii     

Introduction: Masculinity and Domesticity I....................     xiii     

Part One: Preconditions....................          

1. The Middle-Class Household....................     11     

2. The Ideal of Domesticity....................     27     

Part Two: The Climax of Domesticity, c. 1830–1880....................          

3. Husband and Wife....................     53     

4. Father and Child....................     79     

5. Boys into Men....................     102     

6. Convivial Pleasures and Public Duties....................     123     

Part Three: Domesticity under Strain, c. 1870–1900....................          

7. The Decline of Deference....................     145     

8. The Flight from Domesticity....................     170     

Conclusion....................     195     

A Note on Method....................     198     

Notes....................     200     

Sources....................     229     

Index....................     244