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THAIS E. MORGANThe poetry of Victorian masculinities
Representations of masculinity - what men should think and feel, how they
should look, and what sorts of work they should do - shifted several times
in Victorian England. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as
Herbert Sussman demonstrates in Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and
Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian England (1995), a discourse about
manliness was constructed in response to industrialization and changes in
the socioeconomic class system. The traditional distinction between upper-
class landowning aristocracy versus lower-class unpropertied laborers was
complicated by the rise of a middle class of industrialists, bankers,
merchants, and a variety of professionals. Historians Leonore Davidoff and
Catherine Hall point to the "delineation of gender difference" as one of the
main features of the Victorian middle class. 1 In particular, the balance
between brawn and brains in the paradigm of masculinity was transformed.
Manhood now involved work that might be more mental than physical.
Rigorous moral as well as economic self-discipline became the hallmark of
masculinity and the basis of claims to cultural authority, according to
James Eli Adams in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian
Masculinity (1995). For example, the early Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle
defined manliness in terms of strenuous effort, both in the workplace and in
the soul. His On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840)
became a guidebook for several generations of Victorian men seeking a
firm gender identity.
The other major force in the construction of the Victorian ideal of
manliness was the increasing presence of women as moral guides and
popular writers in English culture since the latter part of the eighteenth
century. Nancy Armstrong's study of novels and conduct books reveals that
"writing for and about the female introduced a whole new vocabulary for
social relations." 2 An ideology of separate spheres for men and women
took hold during the beginning of the nineteenth century. The definition of
womanliness complemented that of manliness: the true woman was
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