Constructing Victorian Masculinity: The Academic Prize Book and the Etonian Leaving-Book

Abstract

This dissertation uses the academic prize book and the Etonian leaving-book as material objects by which to investigate masculine subject formation by the great public schools of the Victorian period (1837-1901). As a category, the great public schools consist of the nine public schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission in the mid-nineteenth century: Winchester, Eton, St. Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, Harrow, and Charterhouse. This dissertation highlights the prize book traditions of these schools in its study of masculine subject formation because of their acknowledged and influential role in the formation of the nineteenth-century English gentleman. The academic prize-book tradition contributed to masculine subject formation by foregrounding the materiality of the book in the gentleman’s private library as a marker of healthy Victorian manhood, thus avoiding the risks associated with an overweening intellect foretold in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Sheridan LeFanu’s short story “Green Tea,” both of which associate over-intellectualism with disease and death. In this regard, English poet Robert Southey is presented as an embodiment of Victorian manhood who successfully integrated manly ideals with intellectual scholarship. The study next examines the leaving-book custom as a gesture of male friendship. Especially popular at Eton, the custom commemorated a schoolboy’s departure by the presentation of leaving-books by other schoolboys; however, the custom became highly performative and so encumbered by protocol and ceremony that it often merely simulated close bonds of friendship. Even so, the Etonian leaving-book may still be regarded as a token of the mid-Victorian ideal of close male friendship. Finally, this dissertation considers two Victorian prizemen, Arthur Hugh Clough and Algernon Charles Swinburne, who reacted to their public-school educations at Rugby and Eton, respectively, as adults, by producing poetry containing masculine heterodoxy that refused to uphold cultural norms of Victorian manhood. Clough’s heterodoxy may be traced to the influence of Rugby headmaster Thomas Arnold, whose pedagogy has been criticized for making boys into men too soon, and Swinburne’s to his exposure to violent corporal punishment at Eton, which contributed to an arrested emotional development.