British Masculinity in the Gentleman�s Magazine, 1731 to 1815 by Gillian Williamson

Author:Gillian Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

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Gentlemanly Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1790 to 1815

Introduction

The final chapter begins in the heady early days of the French Revolution, covers the long years of the French Wars, and ends in July 1815, a month after the decisive Battle of Waterloo. The Gentleman’s Magazine in the ‘Historical Chronicle’, special news sections and excerpts from the Gazette gave regular coverage to revolutionary affairs across the Channel and, from 1793, to Britain’s renewed world-wide military engagements. At war’s end in June 1815, Wellington’s dispatch from Waterloo filled ten pages, seven of them a doleful list of killed, wounded and missing officers.1 Private soldiers were accorded only a summary total (5,087 unnamed rank-and-file on 18 June, for example) at the end. The effect was to highlight and personalize the selfless sacrifice of so many gallant gentlemen. Palpable relief on home soil was evident in correspondent M. (Mason jun.) Chamberlin’s poem, ‘On the Victories of the Duke of Wellington’, the final line of which looked to a new age, ‘When Wars and Tumults shall no more prevail’.2

The triumphant mood continued into July, the final sampled issue of the magazine. There were further extracts from Wellington’s dispatches and more patriotic poetry from readers. William Thomas Fitzgerald Esq. (1759–1829, a regular contributor noted, like many of the magazine’s poets, for ‘enthusiasm more pronounced than his talent’) praised Wellington and three high-ranking officers (the Duke of Brunswick, Sir Thomas Picton and Sir William Ponsonby) who ‘join’d in death THE GALLANT and THE GREAT’. Other poets extended their praise to Pitt, Captain Broke and Vice-Admiral Alexander Cochrane, two naval officers who had served against America. The poem to Broke was composed for a public dinner in his honour at Ipswich. Publication in the magazine therefore united officers from the frontline, a grateful home front and the wider nation.3 Waterloo was also literally at the forefront of the magazine in the 1815 Preface, composed at the end of the year but, in the binding process, inserted at its beginning.

Victory at Waterloo therefore took its place in the pages of the Gentleman’s Magazine as the culmination of 22 almost-uninterrupted years of war. War had both filled a substantial proportion of the news sections of the magazine and thrown up not only the aristocratic Wellington as a template of the military hero, but also the more middling-sort Admiral Nelson. This chapter therefore reopens the problematic relationship between polite, civilian gentlemanly masculinity and the potentially unruly masculinity of the soldier. The readers’ relationship with Nelson, captured through representation in news stories, letters, poetry and other forms of commemoration, is used to demonstrate their ongoing interest in restraint, sensibility and domestic propriety as key qualities of the gentlemanly hero.

It was not ‘total war’, however. French-born American Louis Simond commented on a curious phenomenon during his visit to war-time England: that although there was an expectation of ‘dreadful crisis’, yet Britons went about their business unconcerned.4 Indeed, despite the war conditions, most of the magazine’s content continued as before, especially that supplied by the readers.

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