Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Tosh John

Author:Tosh, John. [John Tosh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317877158
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

II

The socialization of boys and young men by their peers can take many forms. In the past it had been associated with apprenticeship, often a by-word for rowdy group behaviour of a precocious and exaggerated kind. In the late nineteenth-century urban working class, peer-group discipline was imposed in the street. But for middle- and upper-class boys school was the critical arena of peer-group recognition, and more and more the boarding public school. The overwhelming dominance of these schools over the education of boys from 'good families' was a recent phenomenon. At the beginning of the century, seven public schools had catered mainly for the landed aristocracy and squirearchy. By 1890 their number had leaped to some seventy-two, and they attracted boys from the professional classes, and a rising number from the business classes.41 The private tutor was now a rarity, and attendance at day school among the affluent middle class was the exception. For the public service and professional elites, public school had become the defining initiation into manhood. This function was directly addressed by the official ethos of the schools. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who had a huge posthumous influence on the new foundations around mid-century, aimed to push boys into moral and intellectual maturity as quickly as possible, so that they would leave school with a fully formed sense of Christian public duty and the inner discipline to fulfil it. By the 1880s the initiation was seen differently. The schools' job was to mould and direct a phase of life now seen as fundamentally healthy. Under the influence of evolutionary biology educationalists developed a new respect for the instinctual aspects of boyhood. Boys were admired for their animal spirits, their testing of physical limits, their primitive loyalties and their presumed sexual innocence. Whereas Arnold had aimed to compress the transition from child to man by forcing the pace of maturation, public-school headmasters at the end of the century thought nothing of indulging 'boyishness' until the age of nineteen or twenty. In practice this meant encouraging team games and physical toughness at the expense of intellectual and moral growth.42

But the importance of the public schools to the construction of late Victorian masculinity lay not so much in the programme of the educators as in the values instilled in each other by the boys themselves. The schools were ruled by peer-group pressure with a vengeance. A boy's standing - often his access to food and whatever physical comforts the school provided was at the mercy of his fellows. This was what explained the enduring appeal of the public schools through all the changes of fashion from the eighteenth century onwards. A middle-class father's decision to adopt the expensive expedient of sending his son to public school might be influenced by academic or professional ambitions, or by the hope that the boy would acquire the patina of a gentleman, but the bedrock of the schools' appeal was the training which they provided in self-government and self-reliance. Learning to stand on one's

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