Pooterism or partnership? Marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 291-321

  Hammerton, A James ^a  

^a LA TROBE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FAMILY; HISTORY; HUMAN; HUMAN RELATION; LEGAL ASPECT; MARRIAGE; MASCULINITY; MEN'S HEALTH; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL STATUS; SPOUSE; UNITED KINGDOM; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

FAMILY; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HUMANS; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; MARRIAGE; MASCULINITY; MEN'S HEALTH; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; SPOUSES; WOMEN'S HEALTH;

EID: 60950076568     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/386196     Document Type: Review

References (147)

1. "The Diary of a Nobody," Punch (17 November 1888), p. 233
2. the entire serial, with some additions, was reproduced in George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (1892; reprint, London, 1965). The dates given in the diary were earlier than the actual dates of appearance in Punch.
3. The series, "Is Marriage a Failure?" in the Telegraph ran from 9 August to 29 September 1888.
4. For discussion, see Judith Knelman, "She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not: Trends in the Victorian Marriage Market," Journal of Communication Inquiry 18, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 80-94
5. John M. Robson, Marriage or Celibacy? The Daily Telegraph on a Victorian Dilemma (Toronto, 1995).
6. George Grossmith, Piano and I: Further Reminiscences of George Grossmith (London, 1919), pp. 198-201.
7. For example, H. G. Wells, Kipps (London, 1905)
8. The History of Mr Polly (London, 1910)
9. The Wheels of Chance (London, 1896)
10. Love and Mr Lewisham: The Story of a Very Young Couple (London, 1900)
11. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London, 1910).
12. The two classic pioneering texts were David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (London, 1966; rev. ed., Oxford, 1989)
13. Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870-1914 (London, 1977).
14. Other significant early texts are Gregory Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester, 1976)
15. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz Gerhard-Haupt, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London, 1984)
16. Michael Winstanely, The Shopkeeper's World: 1830-1914 (Manchester, 1983).
17. More recently Chris Hosgood has produced valuable cultural analyses of different white-collar occupational groups, esp. ' 'The 'Pigmies of Commerce' and the Working-Class Community: Small Shopkeepers in England, 1870-1914," Journal of Social History 22 (1989): 439-60
18. " 'A Brave and Daring Folk': Shopkeepers and Associational Life in Victorian and Edwardian England," Journal of Social History 26, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 285-308
19. "The 'Knights of the Road': Commercial Travellers and the Culture of the Commercial Room in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England," Victorian Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 519-47.
20. The social and cultural world of London clerks is explored in Susan Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889-1914: Labour and Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London, 1995).
21. Hugh McLeod, "White Collar Values and the Role of Religion," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 61-88.
22. Dina Copelman, London's Women Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism, 1870-1930 (London, 1996)
23. Arlene Young, "Virtue Domesticated: Dickens and the Lower Middle Class," Victorian Studies 39, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 483-511, uses literary analysis to explore class and gender associations in the early Victorian lower middle class.
24. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870-1930 (Chicago, 1997), pp. 39-58.
25. The seminal work on all these issues is Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle-Class, 1780-1850 (London, 1987).
26. On middle-class masculinity, see John Tosh, "Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class: The Family of Edward White Benson," in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London, 1991), pp. 44-73.
27. On working-class masculinity and femininity, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995).
28. John Tosh, "What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?" History Workshop 38 (1994): 191-93, discusses lower-middle-class masculinity in terms of their enthusiasm for imperialism and patriotism.
29. In a sociopolitical analysis, Arno Mayer speculates on the reasons for neglect of the lower middle class and suggests that academics have avoided dealing with the class from which so many of them originated "and from which they seek to escape." Arno Mayer, "The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History 47, no. 3 (September 1975): 409-36.
30. On distinctions between the "classic petty bourgeoisie" of small shopkeepers and businessmen and salaried white-collar workers, see Geoffrey Crossick, ' "The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class in Britain, pp. 11-60.
31. Copelman, London's Women Teachers, pp. 34-36, discusses class heterogeneity. Most work on white-collar workers has been London-based, and as yet there is no clear foundation for establishing regional differentiation, especially in relation to gender and cultural differences.
32. For an early text on Liverpool clerks, see B. G. Orchard, The Clerks of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1871).
33. See Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 91-97.
34. Joan W. Scott, "The Evidence of Experience," Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 779-80.
35. By 1898, e.g., one of the Daily Telegraph's regular correspondence series, running from 13 August to 13 September, was titled "Should Wives Work? Partners or Lovers?"
36. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, 1991), p. 8.
37. Town Talk (3 December 1887): 4-5
38. Peter Bailey, "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday: Comic Art in the 1880s," History Workshop 16 (1983): 13
39. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), pp. 43-44.
40. Town Talk (3 December 1887): 4-5.
41. Trollope traces the disreputable risks facing youthful clerks through the career of Charley Tudor. Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks (1857; reprint, Oxford, 1989).
42. Town Talk (3 December 1887), pp. 4-5.
43. See Bailey, "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday," p. 9.
44. Tosh, "What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?" p. 191
45. see also John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770-Present (New York, 1981).
46. Peter Bailey, "Conspiracies of Meaning: Music Hall and the Knowingness of Popular Culture," Past and Present, no. 144 (August 1994), p. 164.
47. W. S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan, Iolanthe (London, 1882), act 1.
48. Meta Zimmeck, ' 'Jobs for the Girls: The Expansion of Clerical Work for Women, 1850-1914," in Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800-1918, ed. Angela V. John (Oxford, 1986), pp. 153-77
49. Jane E. Lewis, "Women Clerical Workers in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in The White Blouse Revolution: Female Office Workers since 1870, ed. Gregory Anderson (Manchester, 1988), pp. 27-47.
50. For a vivid example of the complex meaning of white-collar work for lower-middleclass women, see Tierl Thompson, ed., Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women, 1897-1917 (London, 1987).
51. There is a vast literature in these areas, but on suburban development, see H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (London, 1966)
52. Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900-39 (London, 1973). On consumerism, see the discussion below.
53. For example, Douglas Jerrold, "Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures," Punch, vols. 8-9 (1845).
54. Little Dorrit (London, 1857), Charles Dickens portrayed lower-middle-class male pretentiousness, at least, in ways that more closely foreshadowed Charles Pooter
55. see Young, Virtue Domesticated 483-511.
56. Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody, pp. 45-46, 200, 220.
57. Pain moved in a close-knit circle clustered around Jerome K. Jerome, J. M. Barrie, and Robert Barr, all regular contributors to Jerome's increasingly risque literary periodical of the nineties, The Idler. Pooterism was a prime target for such groups, as it was on the stage generally, because of its seemingly bogus assumption of modern lifestyles, its inherent gender ambiguities and the potential for mock inversion of gender roles. Grossmith, Pooter's creator, played some of the best comic roles in Gilbert and Sullivan's operas and was a popular solo piano entertainer; see Tony Joseph, George Grossmith: Biography of a Savoyard (Bristol, 1982).
58. Barry Pain, Exit Eliza, in his Eliza Books (London, 1931), p. 196.
59. Barry Pain, Eliza's Husband, in ibid., p. 116.
60. Pain, Eliza, in ibid., p. 67.
61. For a useful discussion of the gendered associations with modernity that are inverted here, see Felski, The Gender of Modernity, pp. 1-5.
62. Pain, Eliza, p. 11.
63. For a similar turn of the century satire, also modeled on The Diary of a Nobody, which explicitly parodied the "dismal and dreary solitude" of lower-middle-class suburbanism, see R. Andom, Martha and I: Being Scenes from Our Suburban Life (London, 1898).
64. C. F. G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), pp. 80-94.
65. For discussion of the range of attitudes to suburbia among satirists and novelists of the period see, Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914 (London, 1991), pp. 319-29.
66. For an extended treatment of Crosland's writing in the context of satirical criticism, see A. James Hammerton, "The English Weakness? Satire and 'Moral Manliness' in the Lower Middle Class," in Gender, Culture and Identity: The British Middle Classes, c. 1780-1940, ed. Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (Manchester, in press).
67. W. Sorley Brown, The Life and Genius of Thomas William Hodgson Crosland (London, 1928), pp. 33-36.
68. Texts like Max Nordau's Degeneration (New York, 1968), translated from the German in 1895, had a powerful influence on fin de siecle ideas of physical decline, which could easily be linked to eugenic and other ideas focusing on racial and social deterioration
69. see J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York, 1985), chap. 9.
70. Thomas Crosland, The Suburbans (London, 1905).
71. For some brief references to Thomas William Hodgson Crosland's work, see Crossick, The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class 32
72. Richard N. Price, "Society, Status and Jingoism: The Social Roots of Lower Middle Class Patriotism, 1870-1900," in Crossick, ed., The Lower Middle Class, pp. 93, 101
73. Arlene Diane Young, "Class, Domesticity, and the English Novel" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1994), pp. 189-90.
74. Crosland pursued the same themes in a succession of books, organized around categories of ethnicity and gender, esp. The Unspeakable Scot (London, 1902)
75. The Egregious English (London 1903)
76. Lovely Woman (London, 1903)
77. The Lord of Creation (London, 1904)
78. The Wild Irishman (London, 1905)
79. Taffy Was a Welshman (London, 1912).
80. Some of these were first serialized in the Gentlewoman. For a satirical response to Crosland, see George E. Farrow, Lovely Man (London, 1904).
81. Crosland, The Suburbans, pp. 138-39. Crosland's depiction of the early-nineteenthcentury domestic idyll closely resembles in outline Davidoff and Hall's elaboration of the idea of the middle-class home as refuge from the workplace.
82. Crosland, The Suburbans, pp. 69-70
83. Lovely Woman p. 26.
84. Crosland, The Egregious English, pp. 42-61
85. The Suburbans p. 55, 69.
86. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, pp. 63-74.
87. This is evident even in those cases where the husband escapes from his wife's hostility, as in Mr. Polly's desertion of Miriam, who symbolizes the narrowness of his shopkeeper's world. See Wells, History of Mr Polly.
88. Daily Chronicle (29 September 1898).
89. Pierre Coustillas reproduces the letter to the Chronicle and its leader, and lists the contemporary reviews, in George Gissing, The Town Traveller, ed. P. Coustillas (Brighton, 1981), pp. 315-18, 321-24.
90. The most famous are Wells's Kipps, Mr Polly, and Mr Lewisham and Forster's Leonard Bast; see Wells, Kipps, History of Mr Polly
91. Love and Mr Lewisham
92. see Forster, Howards End.
93. See especially the wide social spectrum of characters evident in a recent collection of Gissing's short stories; George Gissing, The Day of Silence and Other Stories, ed. Pierre Coustillas (London, 1993).
94. For further elaboration, see Copelman, London's Women Teachers, pp. 34-36
95. Pennybacker, A Vision for London.
96. On the other hand, a minority of those who experienced a socialist upbringing, like Malcolm Muggeridge, could be brought up to scorn their own lower-middle-class suburban origins as "mean and foolish, like the Pooters in The Diary of a Nobody.
97. See Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Part I: The Green Stick (London, 1972), p. 21.
98. Robson, Marriage or Celibacy? discusses the social context of these Telegraph debates in a detailed analysis of an early one in 1868.
99. George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee (1894; reprint, London, 1994), pp. 57-61
100. on readership of the new journalism, see G. A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (London, 1978), pp. 216-21
101. Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford, 1985), p. 50
102. Matthew Engel, Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press (London, 1996), p. 52.
103. Frank T. Bullen, Confessions of a Tradesman (London, 1908), p. 78.
104. For examples, see Sidney Dark, Not Such a Bad Life (London, 1941), p. 15. Jerome, a former clerk, spoke "feelingly" of his resentment against critical reviewers who crowned their savaging of his work with the epithet, "bank-clerk"
105. see Jerome K. Jerome, "The Idler's Club," Idler 2 (August 1893): 108. The repute of the authors and publication dates of autobiographies drawn on here vary so widely that it is impossible to make reliable estimates about their intended or actual readership, but writers like Bullen, whose book appeared in Edwardian years, undoubtedly spoke of his bitter experiences to a lowermiddle-class audience, among others.
106. Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870-1914 (London, 1994), pp. 8-10.
107. For further discussion, see McLeod, White Collar Values 69-72.
108. For example, see FLWE, cases 63 and 161.
109. Ronald Carton, The Gentle Adventure: A Victorian Prelude (London, 1933), pp. 30-32.
110. Robson, Marriage or Celibacy? p. 262.
111. Ginger Frost, Promises Broken: Courship, Class and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville, Va., 1995).
112. Erika D. Rappaport, '' 'The Halls of Temptation': Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late-Victorian London," Journal of British Studies 35, no. 1 (January 1996): 58-83.
113. See also John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980 (Harlow, Essex, 1994), pp. 180-203
114. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York, 1985), pp. 18-51
115. Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1990).
116. 65Felski, The Gender of Modernity, pp. 62-63.
117. "Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 272-315.
118. Bullen, Confessions of a Tradesman, p. 101.
119. Richard Church, Over the Bridge (London, 1955), pp. 3-7, passim.
120. For a fuller account of the Church family, see A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992), pp. 139-42.
121. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 312, 367-439.
122. Lesley Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950 (London, 1991), pp. 89-138.
123. "Mrs O.J.B., South Croydon, 30 January 1925, PP/MCS/A16, "Married Love," collection of Stopes papers, Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, Wellcome Institute Library, London.
124. For some of the most innovative work on gender and the city in these terms, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight
125. Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London, 1991).
126. For discussion of the issue, see Mica Nava, "Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store," in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (London, 1996), pp. 38-76.
127. For discussion of the limits of "Chartist domesticity," see Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 248-63.
128. On violence and working-class men's difficulties in attaining the ideal, see Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, pp. 30-32.
129. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 108-13.
130. L. P. Jacks, The Confessions of an Octogenarian (London, 1942), pp. 86-94.
131. Albert Mansbridge, The Trodden Road (London, 1940), p. 44.
132. Norman Hancock, An Innocent Grows Up (London, 1947), pp. 124-27.
133. Coppard was born in 1878. See Alfred E. Coppard, It's Me O Lord! An Abstract and Brief Chronicle of Some of the Life with Some of the Opinions of A. E. Coppard (London, 1957), pp. 10-12, 23.
134. For a similar but more restrained account of clerks' street life, which attributes the writer's own "poor success" to shyness, see Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (London, 1926), pp. 48-51.
135. McLeod, "White Collar Values," p. 78.
136. ''Thompson, ed., Dear Girl, pp. 73-106.
137. McLeod, "White Collar Values," pp. 76-78.
138. Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (London, 1983).
139. Arthur Frederick Goffin, ' 'The Story of a Grey Life: Being the Autobiography of Arthur Frederick Goffin, 1879-1964," Brunei University ms collection, Uxbridge, no. 271, chaps. 6, 8, and pp. 120-21.
140. "For example, see Frank Mort, "Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Post-War Britain," in this issue100 Tosh, "Domesticity and Manliness," in Manful Assertions, pp. 65-68.
141. Richard N. Price, "Society, Status and Jingoism," pp. 89-112
142. Tosh, What Should Historians Do with Masculinity?" pp 193-94
143. Richard N. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class (London, 1972), pp. 8-10, 153, 176, 199, 228-29, 241.
144. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), p. 108.
145. Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994), pp. 233-81.
146. Alexander Chancellor, "The National Disease," Guardian Weekend (3 August 1996): 5.
147. Light, Forever England, p. 9.