Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2016. Pp 283. £44.99 (hardback), £18.99 (eBook), ISBN 9781137542328. Review by Julie Peakman.
As part of our mission to promote women’s and gender studies, we are always happy to publish reviews of key texts in our field – especially those produced by our members. Here, Julie Peakman discusses Gillian Williamson’s important book on the Gentleman’s Magazine, an essential read for anyone interested in magazine culture and gender in the long eighteenth century.
***
The Gentleman’s Magazine ran from 1731 right up to 1907 and is one of the longest running gentleman’s magazines. In this neatly researched book, Gillian Williamson’s aim is to examine the Gentleman’s Magazine for ‘its construction of British gentlemanly masculinity’ (p. 2) between 1731 and 1815, a period which saw the emergence of a new public identity and ideology in ‘a new gentlemanly masculinity of merit achieved through industry and self-restraint’ (p. 3). In doing so, she sheds light on a particular area of literature which has not been explored before in any great depth.
Williamson sees the magazine as ‘a key medium through which middling-sort and ambitious artisan men first acquired politeness’ (p. 181) and as part of the creation of a new gentlemanly status. Readers were not simply passive participants, but took an active role in contributing in the form of letters, prose, poems and obituaries. The magazine covered all sorts of diverse topics including divinity, history, literature, geography, philosophy and scientific discovery. Debates between readers often stretched over months of the periodical.
The book is divided into four parts with six chapters. First is a general historiography providing an overview of eighteenth-century gentlemanly masculinity. Second is a history of the Gentleman’s Magazine, its owners, editors and writers. Third is an examination of the magazine’s readers and their contributions. The final three chapters provide an in-depth analysis of gentlemanly masculinity in the magazine divided into time periods: 1731–1756, 1757–1789 and 1790–1815.
In her examination of the magazine’s readers, Williamson attempts to assess the types of readers through their contributions. It is evident that those who wrote in with submissions often used pseudonyms or initials, so it is impossible to track all of them, and many contributed multiple times. Those that were traceable included the gentry and the middling sort, though as Williamson points out, these are difficult categories to define, but among them were clerics, academics, teachers and lawyers. If the content is anything to go by, there is also evidence that some contributors were ‘men of learning’ and ‘educated men’, sending in Latin poems, maths problems and debates on theological matters and domestic topics such as marriage and the education of children. At 6d an issue, the magazine was accessible to a broad span of readers.
Since self-improvement was the key to becoming a gentleman, this topic was also aimed at the lower-class artisans who would have found the publication of educational value. The reader numbers gleaned from the circulation figures were around 9,000 in 1734, rising to 12,000 by 1748, but Williamson estimates a readership of five times that much, of about 50,000 readers. One copy might go through the hands of many other readers, not just the subscribers, as they would have happened upon the Gentleman’s Magazine in inns, taverns, clubs and coffeehouses, as well as numerous people reading it at one household.
Women were both readers and contributors though the image of women was the conventional one of being subordinate to men. The Gentleman’s Magazine attacked those who behaved like men: for women, there should be no whistling, laddishness, striding around the room or making the first move in courtship. But women could be brave, as seen in the coverage of the female soldier Hannah Snell who was lauded for rescuing a girl from the unwanted attention of a sergeant. However, the magazine still managed to make a salacious story out of her, pointing to her close female friendships,
her cross-dressing, her enforced bed sharing with men and undergoing half-naked floggings as a punishment. An ideal woman was important as a wife to support her husband’s gentlemanly role, but anxieties over possible discord were voiced.
In the early Gentleman’s Magazine of the 1730s, the image of the ideal gentleman is seen as rooted firmly in the private sphere of industry and respectability. He was depicted initially as a temperate Christian Hero, a construct disrupted somewhat by the intervention of the odd unruly wife and the alternative masculinities of libertines, fiery soldiers and their like.
Masculine vices threatened this ideal of the polite gentleman which came in the form of the abusive husband or the fop, characters that were both criticised by the magazine’s authors. The drunk, the gambler, the seducer or spendthrift were gradually all overshadowed by the upstanding gentleman of family values and hard work, buttressed by his self-restraint and benevolence. Generally, in the obituary sections, the industrious man was being praised.
By 1760, benevolence to women, children, servants, the poor and dumb animals were part of the moral values necessary to fit the ideal image of the gentleman in the magazine. This was part of a refocus of gentlemanly traits within the home and family, turning inwards towards the private rather than outwards to his public persona. By now, the magazine was placing marriage above male friendship in importance and, according to its poems and obituaries, the ideal woman was designated to the positions of nurturing mother and dutiful daughter. The turning point of the Gentleman’s Magazine, argues Williamson, came in 1768, a time when it began to challenge the elite, with attacks on the ruling class calling for reforms of property law and taxation.
During the period from 1790 to 1815, the Gentleman’s Magazine was regularly covering the French Revolution and Britain’s war with France, right up to the Battle of Waterloo (1815). Another turning point was not so much the loss of America, but the monitoring of the French Revolution and fears that an uprising might erupt in Britain. Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) had lit a fuse, igniting a challenge to the entire political and social system. A state of solidarity emerged between the gentleman and the elite in the face of this potential social upheaval.
Curiously the violence of masculine idols such as Captain James Cook and Horatio Nelson was blotted out, with accounts showing only the benevolent and moral aspects of their personas as middling-sort heroes. After the Battle of the Nile (1798), for example, Nelson was depicted as a man of sensibility, praised for his virtue of piety – rather a challenging view considering his long-term affair with Emma Hamilton, someone else’s wife.
During this period, the more militant readers of the magazine fell away, and circulation dropped, leaving two sorts of readers: those reminiscing about the landed squire versus those supporting self-advancement and punishment for the idle.
In the end, the overall mission of the Gentleman’s Magazine was to entertain with doses of humour, science and literature, as well as to provide information to broaden the horizons of its readers. The magazine was recognised for its educational value, and even used as a reference, as Edward Kimber compiled the first index in 1753 covering twenty volumes to 1750. Bound volumes would eventually become worth a lot of money – 50 guineas in one case. While luxury editions might appear to be targeted at the nobility and gentry, Williamson has found evidence that the magazine’s success was based on a readership from the middling sort of professionals and tradesmen, and even among men from lower down the social scale. The Gentleman’s Magazine was often read from adolescence to the grave.
Overall, Williamson’s study gives us an accessible yet scholarly overview of the development of the magazine and its depictions and image of the quintessentially British gentleman. Assessing the authors of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the contributions of its readers and their obituaries, she is able to paint a picture of what made up the Gentleman’s Magazine idea of the ideal gentleman. Her case studies provide thumbnail sketches and give added insight into her findings. In all, Williamson’s in-depth analysis of the Gentleman’s Magazine provides us with a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century magazine literature and adds another layer to our understanding of the history of masculinity.
***
Dr Julie Peakman is an historian, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Honorary Fellow at the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a prolific author in the areas of eighteenth-century culture, history of sexuality and social history. Recent books include Libertine London and Licentious Worlds.
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 