The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

From the First Photographs to David Beckham

Paul R. Deslandes

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226805313
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A heavily illustrated history of two centuries of male beauty in British culture. Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, this book traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in "looking good."

[PART ONE]

Setting the Stage: The Foundations of Modern Male Beauty

[ CHAPTER 1 ]

Physiognomists and Photographers

. . . A good complexion is a paramount condition of beauty, and beauty a sign of loveableness, because it indicates normality, and thus purity.

ALFRED T. STORY, The Face as Indicative of Character: Illustrated by Upwards of One Hundred and Twenty Portraits and Cuts (1890)

The portraits taken by this means are really extraordinary as likenesses; they are true to nature, for nature here is her own delineator. The features are admirably marked out and delineated, and the likenesses at first sight are so extraordinary, that they are really startling.

Morning Chronicle (March 20, 1841)

In the decades between the 1840s and the beginning of the twentieth century, a broad range of technological, scientific, and intellectual changes produced a veritable obsession with the human face and body as an object of close scrutiny.1 This scrutiny was especially grounded in the popularization of physiognomy—a set of ideas that assumed that faces could be read to determine essential character traits and predilections—and the rise of photography. Collectively, these developments encouraged new ways of seeing and produced a vocabulary of beauty that, while not entirely separate from earlier precedents, was really quite distinct. The popularization of physiognomy among the Victorians created a unique language of assessment, a means of identifying the good and the bad as well as the beautiful and the ugly by literally “reading” faces and, to a lesser extent, bodies.2 Similarly, embedded in the new technology of photography were assumptions that beauty could be recorded and retained for posterity. In this context it became an identifying attribute, a measure of worth in an expanding capitalist economy, and a commodity. It was also something that could be classified, celebrated, and collected in the form of periodical publications, pamphlets, how-to manuals, small photographic portraits, and albums.3

These outlooks and perspectives were accompanied by several broader cultural shifts that also profoundly influenced how male beauty was understood in the nineteenth century and beyond. Among the most prevalent was the Victorian emphasis on the visual. The ability to see and draw conclusions about the world and the people who inhabited it through careful looking and the critical deployment of vision was central to nineteenth-century worldviews.4 The growth of magazines like the Illustrated London News (which was first published in 1842) and a host of other visually oriented publications punctuated by drawings and, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, photographs transformed popular culture and the ways in which ideas and knowledge were transmitted.5 The ability to view, engage, and consume pictures was a cornerstone to what it meant to be a “modern” Briton in the nineteenth century.6

This expansion of visual culture led to a growing faith in the individual’s power to discern the beautiful and the ugly or the real and the fabricated. As art historian Jordan Bear has noted: “a primary feature of the development of modern society was the dramatic expansion of an audience empowered to judge the reliability of its own visual experience.”7 While many possessed a strong belief in the faithfulness of the photographic image and, increasingly, its value as a form of evidence, photographs were not always understood as unmediated or unadulterated depictions.8 The individual’s power to think for him- or herself, a legacy of the Enlightenment, meant that the authority of the photograph and other forms of representation could always be scrutinized by a discerning eye.9 The multiple meanings that might be assigned to images produced by a camera were nicely captured by one 1865 contributor to the Glasgow Herald, who rightly highlighted the ability of photographs to excite the emotions, classifying them “as works . . . in which science and art are happily and beautifully combined.”10

A final development was the growing obsession, particularly in the late Victorian period, with physical or body-oriented conceptions of masculinity. In part a reaction to more cerebral conceptions of manliness in the early part of the nineteenth century that focused, particularly for the middle and upper classes, on gentility and moral self-control, the growing emphasis on robustness, physical fitness, and assertiveness that characterized the years after 1850 resulted in an unparalleled obsession with the male body.11 Combined with the new ways of seeing and assessing ushered in by popular physiognomists and photographers, this growing emphasis on the physical manifestations of masculinity meant that nineteenth-century Britons encountered discussions of male beauty frequently. This tendency was, of course, exacerbated by imperialism and reactions to the changing status of women in the later nineteenth century, both of which required strong, assertive male bodies that could dominate colonized peoples, “inferior” Europeans, and the “weaker” sex.12 In this context, White, British male beauty was understood in contrast to either the admired attributes or the deficiencies of women, people of color, and other ethnic groups.

Physiognomy and the Vocabulary of Beauty

Physiognomic descriptions of the human face provided Victorian and Edwardian Britons with a conceptual framework for assigning value to personal attractiveness in men and women alike. It also emphasized the degree to which noses, chins, foreheads, cheeks, and ears were thought to reveal essential elements of human character. More crucially, nineteenth-century versions of physiognomy resulted in the creation of a value-laden vocabulary of masculine attractiveness that linked facial and bodily beauty with admired, and frequently racialized, national attributes.13 Physiognomy like photography also produced a cultural preoccupation with physical appearance, a point reiterated in countless periodicals and newspapers that discussed physiognomic perspectives, reviewed books on the topic, and weighed in, on one occasion, on the differences between the English and the American face.14 Indeed, faith in the ability of individuals to read and interpret the human face was extensive. As one contributor to Jackson’s Oxford Journal noted in 1858: “The human face is a marvellous book. . . . Time hath its tale in each wrinkle and nook; Life hath its legend in every look.”15

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As a way of seeing and thinking, physiognomy was of course not new in the nineteenth century. Ancient in origins, with precedents in the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, this approach to reading faces resurfaced periodically throughout the history of the West.16 By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, physiognomy was on the rise again. Writers looked to an ancient treatise titled Physiognomonica, reputedly by Aristotle, to explore the relationship between character and physical appearance. An individual’s physiognomy was, according to this treatise, “conversant with the natural passions of the soul,”17 a point that was picked up by the eighteenth-century popularizer of the physiognomic perspective—Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss pastor and theologian.

In a series of essays on the subject published first, in German, as Physiognomische Fragmente and later, in English, as Essays on Physiognomy, Lavater outlined his methodology and highlighted the superiority of humans among “earthly creatures.”18 He also observed that the tendency toward physiognomic judgment was a universal human trait.19 Most important was how he distinguished between the sexes in both emotional and physical terms. In keeping with the theories of other eighteenth-century thinkers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau,20 Lavater assumed that the male and female inhabited distinct, but interrelated, spheres. He also offered qualitative assessments of physical difference by formulating a series of word equations that asserted “Man is the straightest—woman the most bending. . . . Man is rough and hard—woman smooth and soft. . . . The hair of man is more strong and short—of woman longer and more pliant. . . . [and] Man is most angular—woman most round.”21 In so doing, Lavater offered assessments of male and female beauty that remained influential into the twentieth century.

Physiognomy entered the popular British imagination in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the translation of Lavater’s writings into English and through the work of novelists, who utilized physiognomic concepts in developing characters.22 Appearing in sentimental novels like Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), physiognomic descriptions were employed in a variety of ways, sometimes satirically, sometimes to convey virtue or the lack thereof. In the nineteenth century, novelists like George Eliot and Charles Dickens employed descriptions of the human face to reveal character and explicitly invoked the language of physiognomy to showcase the cultural prominence of this particular mindset. Dickens referred to physiognomy, as well, in some of his nonfiction writing. In an 1856 piece that appeared in Household Words, he commented specifically on the appearance of the defendant in a poisoning case: “The physiognomy and conformation of the Poisoner whose trial occasions these remarks, were exactly in accordance with his deeds; and every guilty consciousness he had gone on storing up in his mind, had set its mark upon him.”23

Nineteenth-century Britons did not have to rely on the works of Lavater or the character descriptions of popular novelists alone to learn about physiognomy. They had access to many sources that employed the physiognomic worldview in outlining key attributes of the attractive man. New printing techniques that made it possible to cheaply reproduce etchings, line drawings, and, more gradually in the 1840s and 1850s, photographs added substantially to the ability of artists and photographers to harness the symbolic power of the beautiful (and occasionally the ugly) male face in the years immediately preceding and following the Great Exhibition of 1851. This process, referred to by contemporaries and the art historian Lynda Nead as “speaking to the eye,” had a substantial impact on how Britons understood physical appearance and physical attractiveness over the second half of the nineteenth century.24

The modern discussion of male beauty originated with the Enlightenment project of linking body and spirit, male character and nature, and was firmly in place in British culture by the early years of Victoria’s reign when the broader physiognomic moment outlined here emerged.25 In this period, a number of illustrators and authors explored the links that were thought to exist between national character and physical types, a component of the grand racial projects of the nineteenth century that served a variety of ideological and aesthetic purposes. Especially important were two artists and wood engravers who contributed to the explosion of the illustrated press in the nineteenth century—Joseph Kenny Meadows and John Orrin Smith. Meadows earned his fame as an illustrator and caricaturist who produced woodcut images for various publications including the Illustrated London News and Punch. Smith, an important wood engraver, entered the London publishing world by becoming part owner of the Sunday Monitor in 1821.

Meadows and Smith were regular collaborators on several important projects, including a heavily illustrated collection of the works of William Shakespeare.26 The most notable of their collaborations was undoubtedly a series of illustrated portraits of the English, produced between 1838 and 1841. In this work, they employed depictions of the male face to represent generalized English “types,” produ...