Epater-le-bourgeois - Book review

Andrew Varley reviews A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, John Tosh, Yale University Press.

John Tosh has written an elegant and perceptive examination of the Victorian middle-class male and his relationship to the domestic environment. The subject is one worth serious analysis, not least because the Victorian home and all the attitudes which informed its ethos have entered popular mythology and still affect our conduct. The literature and art of the time, the pronouncements of public men, the sermons of clergymen (seized on by inexplicably enthusiastic and apparently undiscriminating publishers), the "home life of our own dear Queen" all seemed to conspire in the propagation of the domestic Ideal. But the Victorian home was not a moral construct. Certainly, it reflected an outlook on life and was in many ways a showpiece for a particular - perhaps a peculiar - set of values, but its origins, as Professor Tosh convincingly argues, lay in economic forces which had been at work during the reign of George III and the young Queen's far from "Victorian" uncles.

Professor Tosh shows how the separation of home and work led to the development of a new kind of household and, perhaps with greater significance, a new rôle for women. Wives changed from help-meets to homemakers. The home became a refuge from work rather than a central part of an economic unit. The more successful elements of the middle-classes removed themselves geographically from the sources of their wealth. Suburbs burgeoned, villas proliferated, and front-doors closed. There were psychological costs: no sooner had the Victorian male withdrawn into his domestic fastness than he wanted to escape. Of course, there were thousands of men in the period who did live out an idyll within their homes, all sorts of Pooters who sincerely believed in the saccharine sentiments of "Home Sweet Home" samplers. Nevertheless, there were clearly plenty more who failed to conform to the claustrophobic mores of the hearth, or else why was it necessary for so many writers to inveigh against profligate gadding about? As early as 1828, with the reprobate George IV still on the throne, John Angel James felt the need to lament that "it is a sad reflection upon a man when he is fond of spending his evenings abroad. It implies something bad, and it predicts something worse." The bad was drunkenness, the worse, presumably, sexual debauch. To Victorian moralists, abuse of alcohol led to further degradation. There was no political divide in this viewpoint. The radical William Cobbett regretted the habit of men frequenting ale-houses (and coffee-houses, for that matter): it was "a profligate abandonment of their homes."

It was acute sensitivity to the distinctions of class which drove the respectable bourgeois man away from taverns some time before the temperance movement sprang up. The family which had risen from the lower orders to the rapidly expanding middle-classes, says Professor Tosh, was primarily concerned with maintaining and emphasising its often precarious position. One means was the physical appearance and display of the home itself, another was the "public re-moralisation of men's leisure." Taverns were associated with crude manners and "lowness" and so avoided. The common sight of groups of thirsty tourists looking for a watering-hole in Belgravia or Bloomsbury is an enduring testimony to the absence of pubs from the newly-developed residential areas of Victorian London. Not until the growth of of the grander music halls at the end of the nineteenth century was it possible for the middle-classes to drink in public. Professor Tosh makes the point that until then consumption of alcohol was confined to the home or had to be abandoned altogether. The latter course was given considerable impetus by the growth of Nonconformity.

The antithesis of the home was the gentleman's club. There the married man, surfeited with domestic bliss, could revert to bachelor ways. The clubs grew out of drinking and dining fraternities. The grander, aristocratic institutions, such as White's and Brook's in St James Street, were raffish places for deep drinking and profligate gambling and maintain something of that atmosphere to this day. More middle-class establishments, like the Reform or the Travellers, catered for City merchants, lawyers, men-of-letters, the higher clergy. They might not be so louche but they performed the same essential service: they excluded wives and let members enjoy exclusively male company over a convivial decanter. London clubs were replicated in the provinces. Manchester, Sheffield, and Leeds all had their own versions, usually with carefully graded social distinctions. Professor Tosh perhaps lays too little emphasis on the importance of drink. In his club a gentleman could soak in a way which at home was inappropriate. Indeed, for the middle-class man, it was one way of laying claim to gentle status. "As drunk as a lord" was an ambition not a warning. In the Sheffield Club, a captain of industry might have to be better behaved than a marquess in White's but it was only a matter of degree. It was equally comforting to stand in the window, glass of claret in hand, and "watch the damned people get wet."

Professor Tosh's is a considerable achievement. Historians, of course, have a duty to shatter the myths their predecessors have erected and replace them with something more realistic. An historian who has complete command of his material and who is also an accomplished writer frequently provokes in his readers the exclamation, "Of course, how obvious, now I come to think of it!" Almost every page of A Man's Place elicits this response. Professor Tosh allows us to see our Victorian grandfathers, not as stern, emotionally stultified patriarchs, but as men. Whilst throwing invaluable light on domestic life in the last century, he has moved that vogue subject, the history of masculinity, towards its proper respectability. He shows just what the Victorian middle-class man got away with and we, stranded on a more rational shore, can only sigh.