From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

[1] I would like to acknowledge my debt to my former tutor Professor Gash. His comments on beards, in his book on the novelist R. S. Surtees, first alerted me to a pre‐Crimean surge of interest in men’s whiskers.

[2] The occupations of bank clerks, business men, barristers and, especially, clergymen continued to be regarded as incompatible with the wearing of facial hair according to Dr G. Sexton in his 1858 Lectures on the Hair and Beard and Diseases of the Skin. In 1862 “Artium Magister” addressed the particular prejudice against beard‐wearing clerics by his claim of divine authority for facial hair as provided by man’s Maker.

[3] An article in the 1890s asserted that only middle‐aged and old men now wore beards (Price 6). By 1922 beards were treated as suitable for humorous treatment in John Kettelwell’s Beaver.

[4] Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers [1857] II, 113: Mrs Proudie’s dislike of Bertie Stanhope is prompted partly by his long, “apish‐looking” beard; C. M. Yonge, The Clever Woman of the Family [1865], 83: the elderly Mrs Curtis comments that Col. Keith “is a very good man, I dare say, and quite a gentleman all but his beard”. In her biography of Trollope (264), Victoria Glendinning, recounts how the author and traveller Arthur Smith was blackballed by the Garrick Club in 1855 due to his beard.

[5] The reviewer was James Hannay, with the last four paragraphs of the article written by the editor himself, John Chapman (Wellesley Index).

[6] Other specialised works on nineteenth‐century masculinities which have provided the wider background for this article are those by James Eli Adams, Michèle Cohen, Joseph Kestner, Herbert Sussman, and John Tosh listed below.

[7] Written by Andrew Wynter, a physician who wrote articles for various periodicals on medical and scientific subjects (Wellesley Index and DNB).

[8] Recent cultural historians have continued to use Joseph Flugel’s term “The Great Masculine Renunciation” to describe the adoption of plain, dark‐coloured clothing by English men in the early nineteenth‐century: what David Kuchta calls the “ideal of inconspicuous consumption” to denote manliness in contrast to an “unproductive, feminized sphere of consumption“(167). John Sutherland credits Bulwer Lytton’s novel Pelham (1828) for setting the fashion for unpadded, dark clothes for men (577). See also: Michèle Cohen’s analysis of the development of taciturnity in men as part of the “reform of manners” which saw men assume sober dress; Brent Shannon’s examination of the period from the 1860s when “middle‐class masculinity had become a highly contested area whose parameters weren’t always as restrictive and reserved as the conventional image of sober, black frock‐coated, stovepipe‐hatted Victorian manhood suggests” (599).

[9] “Atrium Magister” is quoting from another article by Andrew Wynter, “Mortality in Trades and Professions” (Edinburgh Review CXI, 1860), both written a few years after the start of the “social agitation” for the beard.

[10] An unlikely anecdote from the Spectator, 18 Mar. 1854, is quoted by many of the mid‐century writers on beards: a firm in Preston allowed male employees to wear moustaches in private so long as they removed them during business hours.

[11] Although the verb describes the action of grasping an opponent’s beard and can be done by an unbearded person, the meaning rubbed off onto the “beard” as noun, giving beards themselves a forceful connotation.

[12] It is relevant to my argument that exemptions to these rules were held by soldiers celebrated for their valour: beards could be worn by “pioneers” fighting on the North‐west frontier of India (Skelley, 358) while the Hussars, noted for their dashing horseback tactics, were allowed to wear moustaches.

[13] Paul Laity has a useful introductory chapter on the pre‐1870 period.

[14] Peter Sinnema’s recent book provides an in‐depth exploration of the significance of the death of Wellington in the shaping of national consciousness.

[15] See Myna Trustram for the reforms already being carried out before the Crimean War whereby the army took better care of its regimental “family”, whereby men were housed in purpose‐built barracks and provided with medical and educational facilities. These developments also promoted an enhanced view of the nature of military life.

[16] Punch XXVI Jan.–Jun. 1854, 30: one ragged man says to another: “My eye, Tom. What a ’orrid bore it must be for the horficer swells, now we’ve taken to wearin’ our moostarshers. The gals can’t tell hus from them now!”—a typical example of the Beard and Moustache cartoons which began during the Chobham Camp but continued into 1854.

[17] Charlotte Yonge exhibits the new attitudes of the 1850s when she describes the fictional Louis Fitzjocelyn’s response to French threats in the late 1840s: “There was a fervid glow within him of awe, courage, and enterprise, the outward symbol of which was that infant yellow moustache” (Dynevor Terrace, 82).

[18] Both I. F. W. Beckett and H. Cunningham testify to the extent to which this was a movement forced onto the authorities by an extra‐parliamentary media campaign.