Man's Estate: Masculinity and Landed Gentility in England, c. 1660-c. 1918

This research project will analyse practises of masculinity among landed gentry families from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. It will show how norms of masculinity changed through this period, and investigate the social mechanisms that policed and modified these norms over time. The study will contribute a timely empirical analysis of practices and norms, advancing a still emerging and highly significant area of gender history.
The project focuses on three areas of practice. Firstly, it will examine how elite masculine ideals were put into practise through social 'institutions' including the family and marriage, schools and academies, universities, clubs and societies and occupational institutions such as the Civil Service. Secondly, it will explore the subjective aspects of Gentry masculinities, focusing on lifecycle experiences of land owning men as sons, husbands, fathers, widowers or single men, and the defining impact of relationships with women. Thirdly, it will chart how much influence ideals of landed gentry masculinity retained over the formation of values of elite manliness into the modern period.
The study focuses on a long time span to interrogate the heavy emphasis in existing studies on the development of new ('middle-class') forms of masculinity during the early nineteenth century, based on self-control, seriousness and a privatised domestic life. It will assess both how far landed gentry notions of masculinity were shared with the upper sections of the middling sort before c. 1800, and whether the values and behaviour of landed and non-landed elite men converged as landed society declined from the 1870s. The study will assess whether long-term continuities within the discourses of masculinity counterbalanced changing modes of expression and intellectual fashions among successive generations in a defined social group of 11 land owning families drawn from across the country.
Landed gentry archives provide good quality primary source materials. This project will examine the perpetuation and subjective experience of masculine norms through qualitative sources produced by Gentry families and by the various institutions to which they belonged. The bulk of the research will be on manuscript diaries, journals and personal accounts of 11 land-owning families with estates in Devon, Lancashire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. Most of these archives cover the whole period from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. Correspondence relating to family life, schooling (particularly letters home), higher education, associational institutions and occupations will provide the bulk of source material about the subjective, internal experiences of elite masculinity. Sources created by Gentry-focused institutions provide the second reservoir of primary material, notably individual accounts from public schools and universities, and records of military and theological training institutions. These illustrate how external, public values were translated into private, personal identities, and how meanings changed at different points in the life cycle and between generations.
This project extends the research interests of the nominated Principal Investigator and Associate Research Fellow (1), into (respectively) the social order of early modern England, and the identity, family life and reproductive strategies of the 19th-century gentry. The main research output will be a co-authored book entitled Man's Estate: Masculinity and Landed Gentility in England 1660-1918, for Oxford University Press, submitted by Oct. 2010. Two journal articles exploring inter-generational norms, and behavioural ideal propagated by English public schools will be submitted for publication in 2008 & 2009. We will propose a special panel on British Masculinities for the International Social History Conference 2008, and organise an interdisciplinary workshop at Exeter in 2009.