As John Tosh observes, reputation was a pillar of an upper-class man’s masculine status. With their incomes secured by ownership of property, upper-class men did not regard hard work as a status marker. The upper-class focus on reputation placed the emphasis on sociability. This view derived in part from the need to temper the martial values of the upper class in order to avert internal conflicts like those that had erupted in the seventeenth century. Sociability among men was cemented in multiple ways, including drinking, hunting, gambling, demonstrations of sexual prowess, and a willingness to aggressively defend one’s honor.10 The focus on reputation thus had direct political consequences, fostering conviviality among the English upper class that secured their hold on political power.11
The strength of the upper-class identity, and the power that it had to shape the perception of upper-class men’s actions into the late nineteenth century, can be seen in the work of Morris Kaplan. Through his careful analysis of the public statements associated with the 1889 Cleveland Street Scandal, Kaplan shows that even when charges of sex between men were involved, the overriding public concern was their abuse of class position rather than disapproval of sodomitical acts. Kaplan’s analysis of the rhetoric associated with W. T. Stead’s campaigns in relation to both the 1885 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” stories and the Cleveland Street Scandal shows that the dominant theme in both instances was the abuse of upper-class privilege as it related to sexuality. Whether the victims were working-class girls or young men in the employ of the Post Office, the criticism by radicals like Stead, as well as by feminist and working-class allies, was directed at an upper class that made its own rules and was allowed to evade the laws that constrained people of lower classes.12
If radical, feminist, and working-class critiques of upper-class masculinity became strongest in the late nineteenth century, it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that middle-class men put forward their most sustained challenge to the norms of upper-class masculine behavior. As Linda Colley notes, even though the French Revolution did not topple the English upper class, the privileged were nevertheless affected by the pressures of a generation of warfare.13 In order to safeguard their social position, the British upper ranks, led by the example of men such as William Pitt the Younger, responded to middle-class criticism of an idle aristocracy and worked to reform the government system of sinecures and other elements of “Old Corruption”; but they did so only to improve their own governing ethic, not to replace it. Upper-class men continued to argue for aristocratic leadership on the basis that the men of the middle class, insecure in their new personal wealth, could not be trusted to govern in the interests of the society as a whole. In both their distinct political values and their assertive rejection of the middle-class values of hard work and restraint, upper-class men remained distinctly different from their middle-class rivals long after the two groups began to share political power in 1832.
Middle-class men were also confident in and assertive of their distinct form of masculinity. In response to upper-class arguments for the merit of economic independence, middle-class men countered that it was precisely because they were self-made that they were fitted to participate in running the state. Aristocratic leisure could too easily become destructive self-indulgence, and the upper-class models of patron and client could easily turn a man into a sycophant. From Thomas Carlyle’s famous critique of the 1830s dandy in Sartor Resartus to the popular celebration of distinctly middle-class masculine values in the 1850s in Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman, middle-class men prided themselves on their independence, and their criteria for success and respectability were very different from those of the upper class.14
As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have demonstrated, middle-class identity also depended on religion and domesticity, virtues that were mutually reinforcing. Stricter adherence to religious principles gave the middle class a positive means by which to define itself against a hedonistic upper class and an improvident lower class.15 In consequence, the middle class placed a greater emphasis on marital fidelity and took a far more skeptical attitude toward the pursuit of pleasure. Education was also focused on practical pursuits rather than ancient literature and other forms of high culture. For all these reasons, the cultural texts and practices available to upper-class men, the ones that with work and care a man might fashion into a limited justification of the sexual pursuit of other men, were largely absent from middle-class male identity. Although it might make allowances for the indiscretions of youth, no elements of middle-class masculine identity in the early nineteenth century could be refashioned or realigned to justify sexual desire for other men (see chapter 6).
The rigidity of the middle-class masculine code stemmed in part from its rejection of the upper-class ideal of reputation as the central pillar of masculinity and its alternative emphasis on character. Middle-class men were uneasy with the degree to which reputation rested on the opinion of others. Following the pattern of Evangelical religion, they believed, in John Tosh’s words, that “instead of being guided by the opinion of others, the serious Christian was urged to listen only to the inward monitor of conscience, and to appear to the world as he really was.”16 Such a distinction has implications for the ways a man might interpret and justify his actions to himself, including sexual acts with another man. Discretion could enable an upper-class man to avoid reproach from his peers and retain his reputation, but it was of much less value to a middle-class man in preserving a sense of his own character: for him, the most important judge of a particular action was his own conscience.
Although upper-class and middle-class masculinity were distinctly different in these ways, they were not mutually exclusive. Many of the early prominent leaders of the Evangelical movement were members of the upper class; marriages between the daughters of the upper middle class and the younger sons of the upper ranks were common; and younger sons of the upper class had long gone into business and the professions, where they mixed with middle-class men. These contacts led to the erosion of certain contrasting characteristics, although it never entirely erased them. As the nineteenth century progressed and the middle class shared political as well as economic power with the upper class, it became necessary for at least some middle-class men to enter into some of the upper-class forms of sociability.
The main sites for incorporating young men from both the middle and upper classes into the upper ranks of society were the public schools. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, there were only nine public schools in Britain, all of which were dominated by the upper class. As in the eighteenth century, the public schools existed primarily to teach the sons of the elite how to function in the world of men. The emphasis was placed not on deference to authority, as the masters were well below their pupils in social rank, but rather on the boys’ establishing relationships and reputations among their peers. The links and sociability forged in these locations carried over into men’s adult lives in politics and society, as well as into some areas of commerce associated with the upper classes, including long-distance trade, banking and finance. Even though, according to Roy Porter, many families “mistrusted the public school . . . with its diet of birch, boorishness, buggery and the bottle,” the schools were considered a critical element in the forging of upper-class masculine culture.17
The assimilation of middle-class sons into the public schools altered those institutions. Between 1830 and 1860 more than thirty new public schools were established, and reforms in the curriculum and the culture of the schools reflected a stronger focus on academics, testing, religion, and team sports. Appointed as headmaster at Rugby in 1828, Thomas Arnold instituted such reforms; he also strengthened the system of peer supervision. Arnold’s widely copied model improved the academic seriousness of these institutions, although at their core they remained fundamentally rooted in upper-class values.18
Unfortunately for the administrators, reforms in the public schools could not end their association with homosexual acts, at least at the level of innuendo, supposition, and after-the-fact memoirs. Men like Benjamin Disraeli, Thomas Carlyle, and John Addington Symonds wrote of both the intimate and the brutal contact between young men that took place in these schools, but such behavior was almost never discussed in the newspapers. A wealthy Briton living in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century wrote of allegations that had spread in the newspapers