The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham

By Paul R. Deslandes

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.”
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226805313

Book preview

Cover Page for The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain

From the First Photographs to David Beckham

Paul R. Deslandes

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-77161-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80531-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226805313.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Deslandes, Paul R., 1965– author.

Title: The culture of male beauty in Britain : from the first photographs to David Beckham / Paul R. Deslandes.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010997 | ISBN 9780226771618 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226805313 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Masculine beauty (Aesthetics)—England. | Beauty culture—England.

Classification: LCC HQ1090.27 .D485 2021 | DDC 155.3/320941—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010997

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jeff

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

PART ONE   Setting the Stage: The Foundations of Modern Male Beauty

CHAPTER 1   Physiognomists and Photographers

CHAPTER 2   Beauty Experts and Hairdressing Entrepreneurs

CHAPTER 3   Artists, Athletes, and Celebrities

CHAPTER 4   Poets, Soldiers, and Monuments

PART TWO   Men on Display in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

CHAPTER 5   Brylcreem Men, Cinema Idols, and Uniforms

CHAPTER 6   Teenagers, Bodybuilders, and Models

CHAPTER 7   Youthful Rebels, Gender-Benders, and Gay Men

CHAPTER 8   Insecure Men, Metrosexuals, and Spornosexuals

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Archival Collections Consulted

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.1   Drawing of the Cockney from a chapter by Douglas William Jerrold, in Heads of the People or Portraits of the English, vol. 1 (London: Robert Tyas, 1840)

1.2   Drawing of the Midshipman from a chapter by Edward Howard, in Heads of the People or Portraits of the English (1840)

1.3   Illustration titled Malignity from Thomas Woolnoth, The Study of the Human Face: Illustrated by Twenty-Six Full-Page Steel Engravings (London: William Tweedie, 1865)

1.4   Physiognomic and phrenological portrait from Frank Ellis, Key to Heads, Faces, and Hands (Blackpool: Ellis Family, 1902)

1.5   Charles Keene, Artful!, Punch, or, the London Charivari 42 (January 1, 1862)

1.6   Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Henry John Stedman Cotton (1867)

1.7   Photograph of Jabez Hogg making a portrait in Richard Beard’s studio (1843)

1.8   To secure a pleasing Portrait is everything, a cartoon from Cuthbert Bede [Edward Bradley], Photographic Pleasures Popularly Portrayed with Pen and Pencil (London: T. McLean, 1855)

1.9   John Leech, Photographic Beauties, Punch, or, the London Charivari 34 (June 19, 1858)

1.10   Photograph of the Taunt and Co. storefront, 9 and 10 Broad Street, Oxford (ca. 1870s)

1.11   Various nineteenth-century cartes de visite contrasting age and youth

1.12   Hills and Saunders, carte de visite of William Fleming Blaine (Cambridge, 1878) and carte de visite of Arthur B. Sole (Cambridge, ca. 1873–77)

1.13a and 1.13b   Hills and Saunders, carte de visite of Trinity College, Cambridge Boat Club (1875) and carte de visite of Oxford Varsity Eight (1882)

1.14   Elliott and Fry, carte de visite of John Edward Kynaston Studd, Charles Thomas Studd, and George Brown Studd (Brothers Studd) (1880)

2.1   George du Maurier engraving depicting a butcher and poulterer being photographed in front of his Christmas display (ca. mid-late nineteenth century)

2.2 and 2.3   Circulars announcing Boyd Laynards’s Secrets of Beauty, Health, and Long Life (1901)

2.4   Postcard of H. P. Truefitt, Ltd., Hairdressers, 13 and 14 Old Bond Street, London (ca. 1910)

2.5   Advertisement for Professor Browne’s Celebrated Hair Cutting Saloon (ca. 1850)

2.6   Advertisement for Professor Browne’s Celebrated Hair Cutting Saloon titled A Contrast Complete (ca. 1850)

2.7   Advertisement for Alex Ross’s hair preparations, Ross’s Monthly Toilet Magazine 2, no. 12 (1863)

2.8   Advertisement for Eau Lodois (1883)

2.9   Advertisement for Pear’s Shaving Soap (ca. 1886)

2.10   Advertisement for Cadbury’s Cocoa, Illustrated London News (August 29, 1885)

2.11   Advertisement for Capsuloids (1907)

3.1   Frederic, Lord Leighton, An Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877)

3.2   Gillman and Co.’s photograph of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas (1893)

3.3   Photograph of Henry Scott Tuke with Tom White on Newporth Beach (ca. early twentieth century)

3.4   Photograph of unidentified male nudes on the beach (ca. early twentieth century)

3.5   Photograph of Francis Brewer, Joseph Parker, and Jim Preece (ca. early twentieth century)

3.6   Henry Scott Tuke, Noonday Heat (1902–3)

3.7a and 3.7b   An Attitude of Mental and Physical Weakness and An Attitude of Self-Possession from Gustavus Cohen, True Manhood: A Book Specially Designed for Young Men (London: Office of the Practical Christian, 1885)

3.8   Portraits from Eugen Sandow, The Construction and Reconstruction of the Human Body: A Manual of the Therapeutics of Exercise (London: John Bale, Sons and Danielson, Ltd., and Francis Griffiths, 1907)

3.9   Some Sons of the Empire, Sandow’s Magazine 16, no. 18 (May 3, 1906)

3.10   Photograph of Apollo [William Bankier], from Ideal Physical Culture and the Truth about the Strong Man, 3rd impression (London: Green and Co., 1900)

3.11   Photograph from Arthur Thomson, Handbook of Anatomy for Art Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896)

3.12   Mary Catherine Rees (née Dormer), caricature of Sir Rajinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, Vanity Fair (January 4, 1900)

3.13   Postcard of Lewis Waller (1903)

3.14   A Lady Artist and Her Handsome Model, Illustrated Police News, no. 1782 (April 9, 1898)

4.1   Rupert Brooke in uniform at Blandford, Dorset (1914), portrait by W. Hazel, Bournemouth, UK

4.2   Sherrill Schell, portrait of Rupert Brooke (1913)

4.3   Memorial card for Geoffrey Harold Spencer (died September 25, 1915)

4.4   Photograph of Private John A. Harris (died September 9, 1915)

4.5   Photograph of Lieutenant Ronald Duncan Wheatcroft (died July 2, 1916)

4.6   Unidentified postcard sent to Reverend J. A. Douglas

4.7   A quick shave (ca. 1914–18)

4.8   Lieutenant C. V. Smith (ca. 1918)

4.9   Lieutenant C. V. Smith (1920)

4.10   Roundel with a silhouette of Captain B. B. Green (ca. 1919)

4.11   Rupert Brooke Memorial in the Rugby School Chapel (completed 1918–19)

4.12   Sculptor Michael Tombros with a plaster cast of the male figure for the Brooke Memorial on Skyros (1930)

4.13   Associated Press photograph of the unveiling ceremony of the Rupert Brooke Memorial on Skyros (April 1931)

5.1   Image titled Daddy, I’m ’fraid, from the Health Doctor, Health Beauty: A Practical Text-Book on How to Guard Family Health and Preserve Beauty (London: Lever Brothers, Ltd. [ca. 1920–29])

5.2   That Calm Unruffled Feeling, Tit-Bits, no. 2531 (May 3, 1930)

5.3   Are You Too Thin?, Tit-Bits, no. 2014 (May 20, 1920)

5.4   Advertisement for Jantzen two-piece swimming suit, Harrods News (May 14, 1928)

5.5   Photograph detailing Harrods’s male hairdressing clients receiving treatments (ca. 1907)

5.6   Photograph of the new Gentlemen’s Lounge at Harrods (1930)

5.7   Photograph of new men’s hairdressing saloon at Harrods (1930)

5.8   Portrait of Laurence Olivier, Film Stars of the World (London: Amalgamated Press, 1938)

5.9   Close-up of rower H. R. Pearce, no. 38 in the W. A. and A. C. Churchman’s cigarette card series Kings of Speed (1939)

5.10   Fly with the RAF, Picture Post (January 18, 1941)

5.11   John’s head gave Joan a shock, Picture Post (June 8, 1940)

5.12   Keith Vaughan, Two Men at Highgate Ponds (ca. 1935)

5.13   Keith Vaughan, Young Man Bathing (ca. 1934–36)

5.14   Keith Vaughan, A Barrack-Room (1942)

6.1   By Jove! . . . some chaps are lucky!, Picture Post (May 18, 1946)

6.2   Both these men are 35!, Picture Post (November 22, 1952)

6.3   You’re somebody today in the Regular Army, Picture Post, (February 2, 1952)

6.4   Photograph of man having a shave and a manicure at Clifford’s Hairdressing Saloon, City of London (ca. 1950s)

6.5   Advertisement featuring Sean Connery modeling for Vince Man’s Shop (1956)

6.6   We’re being watched!, . . . Rave (March 1967)

6.7   Model Jenny Boyd in a John Stephen boutique (November 1966)

6.8   Gerry Saunders, Body Business, Picture Post (May 23, 1953)

6.9   Cover image for Man Alive: The Magazine of Britain’s Top Physique Photographers, no. 1 (1958)

6.10   Drawing of a physique model in the hand of a Greek god, Male Models, no. 5 (1961)

6.11   Winston Manyan by Scott, Man Alive: The Magazine of Britain’s Top Physique Photographers, no. 2 (1958)

6.12   Hi, Goodlooking! Or Is He?, Boyfriend, no. 61 (August 20, 1960)

6.13   Wake up, Lil—your lollie’s melting, Tit-Bits, no. 4151 (September 25, 1965)

6.14   Publicity still of designer Hardy Amies with models (September 1965)

6.15   Peter Anthony, International Model, 1959, edited by Biddy V. Martin (London: World’s Press News Publishing, Ltd., 1958)

7.1   Carin Simon, 100 Men—The Best in Britain, Honey (February 1971)

7.2   Entry for February 20, 1976, Johnny Black Diaries, Notebook 1 (March 1974–May 1976)

7.3   Dianne Robinson, Make-Up Maketh Man?, Liverpool Echo (January 21, 1985)

7.4   A group of young men in a Brixton, London, café (ca. early 1970s)

7.5   Photograph of the Man-to-Man shop, Man-to-Man, no. 2 (1974)

7.6   Cover to Him Exclusive, no. 1 (1974)

7.7   Photograph from Zipper, no. 9 (1978)

7.8   Photographs from Big, Bad, Beautiful, Zipper, no. 25 (1980)

7.9   What the Gay Plague Did to Handsome Kenny, Sunday People (June 20, 1983)

7.10   Diana, Princess of Wales, visiting with a patient at the opening of the Rodney Porter Ward for AIDS Patients, Saint Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London (December 1989)

7.11a and 7.11b   Him Gym and Sport, Him Monthly, no. 51 (October 1982), and Peter, Him Monthly, no. 61 (September 1983)

8.1   Marks and Spencer magazine advertisement for a new men’s underwear line (1994)

8.2   Photograph of Mark Foster from a Guardian article by Pete Nichols, Silver Lining for a Man Apart (July 29, 2003)

8.3   Sam Taylor-Wood (now Sam Taylor-Johnson), David (2004)

8.4   David Beckham Emporio Armani underwear campaign launch at Selfridges, Oxford Street, London, unveiling of the Beckham Billboard (June 11, 2009)

8.5   Photograph of Amy Howsam and Mark Wilson in New Faces, Scene: The Modelling Magazine (Autumn 1995)

8.6   Times Magazine cover featuring a still from a David Gandy Marks and Spencer advertising campaign (September 6, 2014) 306

8.7   Warwick University rowers in David Artavia, A Very Sexy New Year, Advocate, no. 1100 (December 2018–January 2019) 308

8.8   Photograph captioned Applying Make-Up to a Model before a Fashion Show in Manchester, 2002, from Moving Here: 200 Years of Migration to England

8.9   Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Union Jack (1987)

Plates

1   P for Publican from William Nicholson, An Alphabet (London: William Heinemann, 1898)

2   Advertising card for Doré and Sons, Ltd., London (1906)

3   Henry Scott Tuke, Boys Bathing (1912)

4   Sir Leslie Ward, Men of the Day—no. 584. Mr. Charles Burgess Fry, Vanity Fair (April 19, 1894)

5   Parliamentary Recruiting Committee poster (1915)

6   W. D. and H. O. Wills Association Footballers cigarette card series (1935)

7   Henry Lamb, Portrait of Trooper Owen, Fortieth Battalion, Royal Tank Regiment (1941)

8   February 1978 entry, Johnny Black Diaries, Notebook 3 (November 1977–March 1979)

9   David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust during a concert at Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall, London (May 12, 1973)

10   Terrence Higgins Trust, Sex: Free Leaflet (ca. late 1980s)

11   Poster for the Choose Safer Sex campaign (ca. 1985–92)

12   Cover image for Zed Nelson, Make Me Perfect: How Far Would You Go to Get the Body You Dream Of?, Guardian Weekend (May 16, 2009)

13   Advertisement for Hugo Boss, Observer Sport Monthly, no. 112 (June 2009)

14   Photograph of David Gandy taken by Mario Testino for Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue campaign (2016)

15   Paul Reiffer, photograph of Sam Kneen (Mr. Gay UK, 2011)

16   Advertisement for the Soho bar Circa during Pride Celebrations (June 28, 2014), QX Magazine, no. 1007 (June 2014)

Introduction

In 1906, Cambridge students crowned Mr. Charles Mountfort the University Adonis following the conclusion of a Handsomest Man in Cambridge contest.¹ Three years later, in the seaside resort of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, a beauty show for men was held, with five thousand in attendance and six popular actresses serving as judges who pronounced on the handsomest and the ugliest alike.² In 1950, a Mr. Apollo contest was hailed as an opportunity to view fifty of Britain’s most gorgeous men,³ while, in 1971, a female photographer was sent out on an assignment to document the one hundred best-looking men in Britain for the young woman’s magazine Honey.⁴ Similar attempts to measure attractiveness and judge it as an attribute that could be assessed through some sort of objective lens continued into the later decades of the twentieth century. As their culture became more visible and more tolerated, gay men held contests in which nearly nude men were judged on the basis of their sexual desirability. One was hosted by the pornographic magazine Him Exclusive and held in London’s Fulham Town Hall in 1975.⁵ Less than a decade later, in 1982, a national Mr. Hardware contest began to be held annually to determine the sexiest and most attractive gay man in Britain.⁶ The mania for judging continued into the twenty-first century with the ITV show This Morning hosting a Find a Male Model contest, which led to the discovery of David Gandy in 2001.⁷

This book is about the complex cultural and historical context out of which this penchant for measuring, judging, and displaying attractive men emerged in Britain over the span of two centuries. It begins with the rise of photography as a new mode for representing the human face and form in the 1830s and 1840s and ends, in the epilogue, with reflections on the internet. At its core is an assumption that the subject of male beauty is worth pursuing over a sustained period. Rejecting notions put forward by some, including historian Arthur Marwick, that discussing male beauty in the manner in which female beauty had always been discussed is, of course, in large measure unique in the modern, post-1960s evaluation of beauty,⁸ this book charts the complex history of the masculine relationship to personal appearance in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Starting in the nineteenth century is not meant to suggest that this was the first time that Britons pondered the topic of male beauty. The admiration of one of James I’s favorites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, extended to reflections on his comely legs.⁹ The so-called macaronis of the eighteenth century achieved notoriety, and were occasionally disparaged, for the impressive amount of time they spent on their grooming rituals.¹⁰ And, in the early nineteenth century, the fashionability of George Bryan (Beau) Brummell—epitomized by his highly stylized neck cloth—was both celebrated and lampooned.¹¹

Yet, the two centuries that form the core of this book’s chronological focus witnessed a number of distinctive changes. Intellectual shifts associated with the Enlightenment came to fruition in the nineteenth century as people in the West placed a higher premium on individuality, the relationship between outward appearance and inner identity, and the idea of human perfectability.¹² Other shifts make the years explored here particularly valuable ones for studying the history of masculine attractiveness. Novel technologies of documentation and representation as well as a flourishing consumer economy resulted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in a new kind of cultural obsession with the beautiful male face and body.¹³ In the nearly two centuries of history chronicled in these pages, Britain’s modern visual culture—characterized first by the rise of the photograph and cheap illustrated periodicals during Victoria’s reign, by the development of film and glossy celebrity magazines in the twentieth century, and, more recently, by the advent of documentary and reality television—emerged.¹⁴ Accompanying this shift was an increased emphasis, by the late nineteenth century, on the clean-shaven face and the athletic body, recurring themes that ebbed and flowed, but never disappeared, with the passage of time.¹⁵ This period also witnessed a growing emphasis on appearance as a marker of success and celebrity.¹⁶ As such, it qualifies as a distinctive epoch: a historical moment when modern conceptions of what is beautiful and handsome (and what advantages accrued to those who possessed these attributes) came into sharp relief.

Some of the developments discussed in the pages that follow have been scrutinized by historians interested in how men consumed fashion in the past,¹⁷ developed their bodies,¹⁸ experienced injury,¹⁹ or articulated same-sex desires.²⁰ In what follows I bring these topics—and a host of additional developments—into conversation, highlighting causality and points of intersection in unraveling a distinctively British culture of male beauty. This culture of male beauty entails not just masculine dress, grooming, or attempts to alter or improve appearance. It also encompasses the ways in which people, as historical actors, have engaged with products, ideas, and representations of the male face and body.²¹ In considering issues of representation in this book, though, I am not simply referring to the ways in which, as historian George Mosse once noted, modern masculinity defined itself through an ideal of manly beauty that symbolized virtue.²² Representations of beautiful men clearly served important symbolic roles in British culture including the articulation of racial difference and the encouragement of national pride. They were also, however, the standards against which men measured themselves and assessed their level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their faces and bodies. They functioned not just as symbols but as touchstones that had a profound impact on how men understood masculine identities, gauged their physical developments, and performed and fashioned gender for themselves.²³

The varied nature of this culture of male beauty is reflected in the terms employed throughout this book. While the word beauty, when used alone, sometimes conveys individual qualities, it is most often used to refer to ideals and idealized depictions of the male face or body. Beauty also frequently precedes the words culture or industry to convey the commercial peddling of goods and services. Terms like attractive, good-looking, and handsome tended to be more common in everyday parlance. Frequently these were (and are) the words most used by individuals as they discussed either their own traits or those they admired in others, with the words beauty or beautiful being reserved for particular exemplars like Rupert Brooke or, in the early twenty-first century, David Beckham and David Gandy. Attractiveness is often employed either by me or by my subjects to convey a set of qualities that made someone appealing. But, sometimes the use of the term implied admiration. And, occasionally it was meant to convey qualities that did not rise to the level of the beautiful but, nonetheless, reflected something that drew the viewer’s attention. Desire was conveyed in a variety of ways, occasionally with the same words that have already been described. Following the Second World War, discussions of sexiness and sex appeal became more common, especially from the 1960s on.²⁴ Developing a rigid lexicon of beauty is impossible (precisely because of the kind of overlap I discuss above), but these brief observations on terminology are worth keeping in mind as we move forward.

Situated specifically within the British Isles (when possible, paying attention to the regional variations and the national differences between England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), this is also a narrative with broader global significance. The British did not, of course, invent male beauty.²⁵ Nonetheless, the position of Britain internationally for much of this period, as well as the dominance and global reach of British culture, meant that British visions of masculine attractiveness often captured very wide audiences indeed. The country’s economic prominence allowed for great technological innovations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that transformed how people maintained and altered their appearance and chose to have their faces and bodies recorded and represented, both locally and globally. Hairdressers, perfumers, barbers, and quack doctors, all part of a flourishing consumer and entrepreneurial culture in London and other urban centers beginning in the nineteenth century, sought to ameliorate various appearance-related ailments including baldness, skin disorders, or excessive fatness or thinness.²⁶

While German, French, and American eugenicists, imperialists, and racial scientists also ruminated on human beauty, the simple reach of Britain’s Empire (and by extension British thought on these subjects) meant that these ideals garnered special attention.²⁷ In the twentieth century, the preeminence of British and Commonwealth doctors in the development of plastic surgery techniques for repairing injured faces during the First World War,²⁸ the importance of British actors in the emerging film industry, and the global appeal of British celebrities in the years after the Second World War ensured that British standards of attractiveness retained both national and international stature.²⁹ Finally, in recent years two terms used to convey male attention to grooming and the cultivation of the body—metrosexual and spornosexual—were both coined by a British man (Mark Simpson) using, frequently, British examples even as he noted the transatlantic dimensions of these phenomena.³⁰

Aside from narrating the rich history of the male face and body, this book puts forward a number of overarching arguments to establish, as a range of aesthetic philosophers and fashion critics have noted, that beauty, quite simply, matters.³¹ Following the lead of some who have shown that men were more active consumers and concerned about dress much earlier than previously thought, it illustrates that there was a sustained engagement with beauty culture—writ large—over the entire time span covered in these pages. Rather than perpetuating a sort of separate spheres view of the world, which assumed preoccupations with or anxieties about appearance were a particular, and socially imposed, preserve of women, this book reveals that the investment that men had in the modern culture of beauty was very significant indeed.³² That investment in beauty for men in a capitalist economy was, as we shall see, crucial to how commercial and professional advantages were understood and how the ability to succeed was measured. Good looks were cast as a particular kind of asset that, depending on time period, marked one’s health, one’s suitability to represent a business, or one’s capacity to perform. Looking at how men engaged with capitalism through beauty consumerism also highlights the masculine investment in ideas of redemption and transformation.³³ While this was often cast in the form of self-help in the nineteenth century,³⁴ in the twentieth it came to be characterized more as a form of self-fulfillment, a realization that investing in good looks and good grooming was the way to best develop one’s potential.

This book also reminds us that the personal relationship to standards of attractiveness, understandings of personal grooming, and ideas about sex appeal were central to what some have referred to as the emergence of the modern psychological self.³⁵ While ideas that we might recognize as the promotion of self-esteem or self-realization emerge in nineteenth-century advertisements and other sources, over the course of the twentieth century the connection between psychological well-being, a pleasing appearance, and the ability to attract others grew in complexity and frequency.³⁶ Depictions of beautiful men played a central role in helping Britons become sophisticated consumers of theatrical and cinematographic images, photographs, and advertisements, particularly in the years after 1900. The ability to discern masculine attractiveness or ugliness and enjoy the pleasures of a beautiful male face and body was, for many, vital to the acquisition of modern visual literacy. Viewing and commenting on attractive men was also vital to the formation of sexual identities and the visual sexualization of British culture, particularly as these processes became more pronounced in the middle decades of the twentieth century.³⁷

Finally, this book illuminates how Britons referenced and assessed male beauty to make sense of the competitive impulses that were so central to British culture and the formation of the British state.³⁸ Granting privileges to the beautiful and rewarding those whose personal attractiveness was judged to be extraordinary revealed the extent to which outward appearances were increasingly used as measurements of worth. Similarly, discussions of men’s faces and bodies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were central to the valorization of youthfulness, bodily fitness, Whiteness, and able-bodiedness, aesthetic attributes that were crucial to the culture of male beauty.³⁹ While in many instances, these celebrations reinforced hierarchies of age, race, gender, and sexuality, the traditional order was occasionally subverted. This was especially apparent when the margins informed the mainstream, as they did at different points in British history when same-sex-desiring or openly gay artists, designers, and entrepreneurs led the way in defining who and what was attractive.⁴⁰

---

˙∙˙

The archive of male beauty spans over two centuries and is decidedly vast and dispersed, located in multiple locations around the globe. Many surprises will, I hope, appear in the pages that follow, but it is worth outlining several categories of sources that emerge with some regularity in the core of this book. Manuals, advice literature, and professional publications figure prominently in what follows. Each telling in their own right, beauty and lifestyle guidebooks, such as The Gentleman’s Companion to the Toilet, or a Treatise on Shaving (1844) and As Young as You Look: Male Grooming and Rejuvenation (1970), courted audiences of men and addressed masculine concerns, reminding us that preoccupations with male grooming, hygiene, and appearance did not appear magically on the British scene with the rise of the metrosexual. Professional manuals for photographers in the late nineteenth century, advice books, and even specialized magazines for aspiring and established models (and those looking to hire them) from the 1950s and 1960s serve as vital windows into contemporary aesthetics and the peculiarities of specific beauty-oriented professions. Similarly, periodicals directed at hairdressers and beauty specialists, such as the Hairdressers’ Weekly Journal (founded 1882) and Hairtinting and Beauty Culture (founded 1926), provide insight into prevalent styles, workplace issues, and the tremendous stock that industry insiders placed in male markets.

Many additional nineteenth- and twentieth-century magazines and newspapers, some ephemeral and some enduring, make an appearance in the pages that follow. These were directed at a variety of different constituencies with a broad range of agendas, and contributors to them spilled considerable ink discussing the male face and body. The cultivation of a fit, healthy, and attractive physique, for example, was essential to the Christian, antivice message of the YMCA’s magazine Young Man: A Monthly Journal Review (1887–1915), which placed a high premium on the relationship between moral rectitude, gender conformity, and an attractive appearance. Men’s magazines like Fashion (1898–1904) and Modern Man (1908–13) focused on cultivating male consumers by emphasizing the transformative power of both good grooming and care for one’s appearance. Moving to the mid-twentieth century, physique magazines that focused on looking at developed men’s bodies as a form of sexual pleasure (however indirect it may have been) were a vital source for understanding same-sex desire and consumer markets in that era, while, in the 1970s and 1980s, gay pornographic magazines like Him and Zipper emphasized the open and erotic aesthetic celebration of the male body as a hallmark of sexual liberation.⁴¹

Scientific and medical materials also figure into this study precisely because these disciplines concerned themselves with matters of physical beauty and ugliness—sometimes in an effort to understand evolutionary processes, sometimes to differentiate social and racial groups, and sometimes to deal with diseases or injuries that detracted from attractiveness. Especially prominent is the work of popular physiognomists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴² As figures who contributed, much like photographers did, to the vocabularies of beauty in circulation in Britain at this time, these figures produced many publications, including books and pamphlets such as A Chapter on Noses (1881) and The Face and Its Fortune in Matters of Human Love (1906). Works by figures like Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Francis Galton were replete with discussions of physical beauty and, in Galton’s case, the measurement of faces. Medical records, particularly those produced for specialized hospitals like the Saint John’s Hospital for Diseases of the Skin and, more significantly, the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup (where facially disfigured soldiers were treated during and after the First World War), provide telling insights into how the medical community thought about beauty and how patients grappled with its loss through disease or injury.

Given the nature of physical beauty, researching this book required considerable reflection on how faces and bodies have been represented and commodified in British culture.⁴³ Inspired by work in visual culture studies that places a premium on visual artifacts not for their aesthetic value per se but for their meaning as modes of making images and defining visual experience in particular historical contexts,⁴⁴ I pursued the close analysis of a variety of fascinating images, a good sampling of which is reproduced in the pages that follow. In addition to advertisements and other images from the Illustrated London News and prominent visually oriented magazines like Tit-Bits and Picture Post, I also explored countless nineteenth-century cartes de visite (small, collectible photographic portraits) and the picture archive of the now defunct Daily Herald. The paintings of Henry Scott Tuke, Keith Vaughan, and other artists; fashion photographs of John French; and the marketing techniques of Carnaby Street entrepreneur John Stephen round out this vast visual record.

Finally, in pursuing this project I knew that, when possible, I wanted to gain access to personal accounts that would give me a sense of how individuals thought about their own physical appearance and that of others. To a certain degree, this is easier said than done. But the pursuit of this was not in vain. I discovered that one way to approach this matter was to explore the lives of those who were particularly revered for their beauty. This led me, especially, to the voluminous papers of the poet Rupert Brooke and many of his associates. It also led me to the archives of actors John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Vivien Leigh as well as the highly revealing diaries of the painter Keith Vaughan and the press officer Johnny Black. Most significant, perhaps, were the materials collected by Mass-Observation (from both the 1930s and 1940s and from the 1990s and early 2000s) and the National Lesbian and Gay Survey. In the responses that hundreds of volunteers produced, they shared intimate details of their lives and offered opinions on hot-button issues of the day. They also provided invaluable reflections on dress, grooming, and body image, all of which I employ in chronicling the complexities of the twentieth century.

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The story of male beauty unfolds in eight chapters that are divided into two parts. The first part, Setting the Stage: The Foundations of Modern Male Beauty, examines a series of foundational moments connected to the rise of new technologies, the growth of visual culture, and the disruptions of the First World War. Its principal goal, in examining several interrelated developments, is to set the stage for what will come in the twentieth century, when the modern culture of male beauty came into full view. Photography and popular physiognomy are explored both as sets of ideas and cultural practices that produced distinctive artifacts and profoundly influenced how Britons came to understand and talk about physical beauty. The preoccupations with beauty that photography and physiognomy fostered also led to a more conscious pursuit of beauty as a particular consumer practice evident in a variety of entrepreneurial initiatives as well as the explosion of a distinctive print culture marked by the emergence of the male beauty manual and the men’s magazine. Entrepreneurs and medical quacks were not the only ones to tackle the subject of male beauty. Nineteenth-century Britons were also encouraged by racial scientists, artists, ardent physical culturists, and entertainers to look at and valorize the athletic, White, and youthful body. By the First World War, the possession of male beauty might confer celebrity status to those graced with it, such as the poet Rupert Brooke. It was also something that could be easily stripped away by the ravages of modern, technological warfare.

The second part of the book, Men on Display in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, explores important developments from the interwar period to the present, highlighting the growth of a modern advertising industry that encouraged men seeking professional success to also pursue good grooming, the expanding importance of the male celebrity, and the sexualization of British culture. In examining the 1930s and 1940s, it explores not just popular illustrated publications but also the thoughts and actions of men who reflected on their bodies, their shaving regimens, and the meanings of personal appearance in material they produced for Mass-Observation. As the book moves into the 1950s and 1960s, the focus shifts more toward sexual identities and the ways in which various artifacts celebrating male beauty, including physique magazines and publications geared to teenage girls, contributed to the articulation of sexual identities at a moment when notions of heterosexuality and homosexuality were coalescing. Considerations of sexuality figure prominently in my consideration of the decades between the 1970s and the present. In exploring the Thatcher era, I highlight the ways in which some sought to chart new masculine paths by adorning their bodies differently or androgynously while also examining how modern gay cultures invested substantially in the ability to celebrate and enjoy beautiful (and increasingly nude) men. I conclude my examinations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by returning to displays of the male body, the influence of celebrity culture, and the various issues that modern British men encountered as they sought to live up to increasingly unattainable ideals. Throughout this book, then, attention to the aesthetics of male beauty, the dynamics of human attraction, and the culture of physical transformation and improvement are situated as central, not peripheral, concerns to historians of modern Britain and, indeed, the modern world.

[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, producing, in the process, an index of the national mind.²⁷ Among the national figures described in Heads of the People or Portraits of the English are the Stockbroker, the Lawyer’s Clerk, the Midshipman, and the Chimney-Sweep, all of whom highlighted the urban, commerce-oriented, and imperial economy of the British Isles. In producing these ethnographic sketches, the contributors hoped, through precise physical descriptions and delineations of character, to preserve the impress of the present age; to record its virtues, its follies, its moral contradictions, and its crying wrongs.²⁸ They also provide us with a useful barometer for how the male face and popular understandings of physiognomy were deployed symbolically in Victorian culture.

Even though the authors include depictions of female types (usually in ancillary and subservient roles as wives, servants, and shopgirls), their overwhelming preoccupation is with delineating a masculine vision of Englishness, a tendency that came to be amplified in the late nineteenth century by concerns about military preparedness and the valorization of the athlete. In so doing, they resorted to discourses of ugliness and beauty (both in visual and textual forms) that highlighted some of the aesthetic standards of the day. In one profile, for instance, playwright and author William Leman Rede described a managing clerk in