Matthew McCormack

Dance and Drill: Polite Accomplishments and Military Masculinities in Georgian Britain

ABSTRACT Scholars have long noted the analogies between social dancing and infantry drill. This article argues that, in eighteenth-century Britain, the connections between dance and drill went further than mere analogy. As well as playing important roles in the culture of polite masculinity and the ceremonial life of the military, dance was held in high esteem by military thinkers, trainers and soldiers alike as a means to foster the bodily health, graceful deportment and synchronicity of movement that were prided on the battlefield.

Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c. 1740-1815

This article offers a critique of the methodology of military history. The question of what constitutes a ‘soldier’ is usually taken for granted, but history of Britain’s military between the wars of the 1740s and the end of the Napoleonic Wars suggests that current definitions are inadequate. By focusing on the themes of language, law and citizenship, life cycles, masculinity, and collective identity, this article proposes new ways of thinking about ‘the soldier’. In so doing, it suggests that military historians should rethink the relationship between the military and society, and engage further with the methodologies of social and cultural history.

Citizenship, nationhood and masculinity in the affair of the Hanoverian soldier, 1756

This article explores mid-Georgian debates about the nature of citizenship by focusing on a key political scandal that has hitherto been overlooked by modern historians. In 1756, one of the many Hanoverian soldiers who were stationed in England was arrested for theft in Maidstone. The subsequent efforts to release him on the part of his military superiors and the British government created a political controversy that highlighted issues such as legal liberty, the abuse of executive power, home defence policy, and the moral state of the nation. In particular, this article argues that the furore gave weight to contemporary calls to reform the militia, not so much for instrumental military reasons, but for the supposed social and political benefits of an organization that relied upon the patriotic zeal and masculine virtue of the indigenous citizen. This article is therefore a contribution to the new cultural histories of politics that emphasize the roles of nation and gender in conceptions of citizenship, and argues that the Seven Years War was in this respect a moment of crucial importance

Tall histories: height and Georgian masculinities

Height is rarely taken seriously by historians. Demographic and archaeological studies tend to explore height as a symptom of health and nutrition, rather than in its own right, and cultural studies of the human body barely study it at all. Its absence from the history of gender is surprising, given that it has historically been discussed within a highly gendered moral language. This article therefore explores height through the lens of masculinity and focuses on the eighteenth century, when height took on a peculiar cultural significance in Britain. On the one hand, height could be associated with social status, political power and ‘polite’ refinement. On the other, it could connote ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness and even castration. The article explores these themes through a case study of John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, who was famously tall and was frequently caricatured as such. As well as exploring representations of the body, the article also considers corporeal experiences and biometric realities of male height. It argues that histories of masculinity should study both representations of gender and their physical manifestations.

Supporting the Civil Power: Citizen Soldiers and the Gordon Riots

Abstract This paper focuses on the military response to London’s Gordon Riots of June 1780. It shows how soldiers worked alongside the civilian authorities to suppress the disturbances, and how the militarized response was composed of militiamen, volunteers, and vigilantes, as well as regulars. This serves to emphasize the overlaps between the military and civil spheres, and shows how the figure of the ‘citizen soldier’ had a key role in the ideology and practice of policing. This, in turn, suggests that we need to rethink how we conceive of ‘supporting the civil power’ within the English police tradition.

'Turning out for twenty-days amusement': the Militia in Georgian satirical prints

This paper will consider a key interface between the military and civilian worlds, the militia, and the ways in which this military instituion was visually represented in popular culture. The milita was a favourite subject for printmakers in the second half of the eighteenth century. The amateur soldier was undoubtedly an easy target for visual mockery, but this paper will suggest that the relationship between the satirical print and the militia was a close and reciprocal one. The classic ‘caricature’ and the ‘New Militia’ were the creation of one man, George Townshend, and their subsequent fortunes paralleled and intersected with one another. Visual representations both reflected and contributed towards the ongoing debate about the institution. Prints were a key vehicle in the agitation for militia reform and militia subjects were common during the embodiments of the American and French wars, exploring anxieties about military effectiveness, the large militia encampments and the implications of arming civilians. In particular, this paper will focus on questions of gender, exploring the various ways in which the prints insinuated that the militiaman’s masculinity was compromised: for example, he was frequently located in heterosocial quasidomesic settings or in the sexualised playground of the camp. A study of visual culture can therefore contribute to our understanding of the role of the militia in social, political and military commentary

A Man’s Sphere? British Politics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Although the study of masculinity is now well established in the discipline of history, its impact has been uneven, and historians of different periods, regions and topics have explored it in different ways. The study of masculinity in British politics from the eighteenth century onwards is a case in point. This chapter surveys work done since the 1990s, when the field was initially preoccupied with ‘separate spheres’ and methodologies associated with the linguistic turn. New cultural histories have since allowed historians to assess the role of masculinity, not just in political representation, but in fields such as the body, the emotions and material culture. This chapter uses examples from modern British politics to make a case for a gendered history of political practice.

Boots, material culture and Georgian masculinities

Abstract Writings on footwear tend to emphasize a fundamental division between those made for men and women: men’s are plain, sturdy and functional, whereas women’s are decorative, flimsy and impractical. Of all male footwear, boots are typically the plainest, sturdiest and most functional of all. In the eighteenth century they were emphatically outdoor wear, and scholars have noted their rustic and unrefined image. This article re-evaluates the elite male boot of the long eighteenth century in Britain, emphasizing its complex symbolic associations and its significance for the gendered lives of men. Boots were associated with equestrianism, social status and the military, and therefore were key markers of gender, class and national identities. Furthermore, the article considers boots as material objects, and what this tells us about their use and the impact that they had upon the bodies of their wearers. Based on research in three key shoe archives, this study uses boots to think about Georgian notions of masculinity, the body and the self.

Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland. By Catriona Kennedy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. 263 p. £55 (hb). ISBN 978-0-230-27543-0.

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The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: masculinity, political culture and the struggle for women's rightsBEN GRIFFIN

worthy in raising questions about the gender (in)equality, oppression and power relations between siblings. Johnson’s examination of personal correspondence among siblings and cousins, in particular, highlights the agency and importance of female figures in orchestrating and maintaining kinship networks for the wider family structure. This edited collection covers an impressive yet coherent range of topics, many of which have received little scholarly attention to the present date. The book offers more complex narratives of familiar historical concepts that are ripe for revision, including the transmission of inheritance, household composition, the tensions between consanguineal and conjugal family structures, and incestuous relations. Efforts to present a more nuanced history of kinship and its use as analytical concept in current debates makes this book a welcome contribution to the existing field, particularly given the paucity of research on siblinghood. The strength of this collection is that the essays, collectively and individually, coherently challenge the existing historiography by providing new and composite insights into the complexities of siblinghood and how these relationships defined, regulated and transformed broader kinship models. Whilst the editors acknowledge the need for further research on the study of kinship and siblinghood of ‘ordinary people’ in order to undertake any comparative analysis of their findings between social groups (p. 6), this absence limits the study to some extent. Such criticism is a minor point however, given the range and quality of contributions that make this study invaluable for those interested in the history of kinship and the family. This book will undoubtedly appeal to a wide readership given its broad and significant implications for scholars whose research centres on the family, marriage, transmission of inheritance, emotions, identity, and gender.