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This chapter examines representations of working men’s bodies. Section one explores the nobility assigned to the muscular body, interrogated through the imagined blacksmith and navvy. The second section addresses the role of heroism, another appealing quality, primarily through miners, firemen, and life-boat men. Such strong and appealing working-men offered a more comforting vision of working-class masculinity than that in which they were politically and socially dangerous. Kindness was attributed to both brawn and brave stereotypes, taming the muscular and reckless body. This was not their only function for a middle-class audience, since the same combination of alluring physical and emotional qualities also rendered the working-class male body desirable as a manly ideal. The chapter then shows that the working classes created and disseminated their own highly emotional and material manifestation of working-class manliness on the material culture of trades unions and friendly societies. However, the emotions associated with them were subtly different and deployed in different ways. For middle-class men, the attractive working man was reassuring and admirable, for working-class men he was a measure of their right to be included in the civic polity. (185 words)

This chapter demonstrates how cultural accounts of men in the home inculcated feelings that produced, reinforced, and disseminated notions of masculinity. It shows that while manly men were considered integral to its success they were nevertheless envisioned outside the home, fighting for it, defending it, or providing for it. As such, this chapter addresses men’s absence from home through the popular motifs of men leaving and returning, dreaming of home, and their ‘absent presence’ that is objects which acted as reminders of men who were away from home for long periods. When print and visual culture imagined men within the home, it was as catalysts for a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ home, predominantly fashioned through their performance of key emotions. Men could produce ‘happy’ homes through their provision, frugality, kindness, love, and affection. Or their disruptive unmanly behaviours resulted in ‘unhappy’ homes, sites of domestic violence. The chapter focuses on representations of working-class men because middle-class imaginations often scrutinised their emotional and sexual performances in the home, since it was deemed central to a successful society and nation. As such, they also functioned to remind middle-class men what they should aspire to and avoid being. (194 words)

This epilogue explores the continued resonances of emotionalised bodies and material culture for contemporary masculinities. It considers men’s ‘spectacular bodies’ in entertainment and advertising, along with their more sinister political associations and uses. Then it explores the imaginative conjunction of emotions, bodies, and material culture in formulations of military masculinity in recruitment drives, in the romanticised and politicised tropes of servicemen’s damaged bodies and minds, and in the creative projects seeking to materialise military men’s experiences. It shows how changed forms of male work, as well as unemployment, retirement, illness, and, more recently, paternal caring roles, are now configured through men’s uneasy presence in the home: an arena in which manhood is still presumed to be undermined or compromised. Finally, it shows how the emotionalised working-class male body has changed as radically as notions of class itself in the post-industrial economy of British society. There are no noble images of working-class men at their labours. Most images of working-class men are derogatory, whether they are perceived as a dangerous political threat or a redundant, residual form of masculinity. It concludes that the culture wars of late capitalism are fought over men’s bodies and emotions. (194 words)

This chapter reveals how manliness was conveyed through beautiful, virile, male bodies. Such appealing male figures and faces were associated with positive emotions that were coded as both manly and moral. This chapter explores their changing forms over time, shaped by modernity, sport, anthropometry and physiognomy, but also addresses the role of male beauty in disseminating ideals of manliness. It takes a queer history approach which deliberately makes strange the conjunction between physical beauty and masculine values. It rejects assumptions about normative masculinities and how they were created and circulated and instead adopts the techniques of scholarship that queers sexual constructions. Overall, it proposes that beautiful male forms and appearances were intended to arouse desire for the gender that these bodies bore. This nuances our understanding of the gaze. It shows that the idealised manly body was active, since it was an agent of prized gender values. Yet, it was also passive, as the erotic object of a female and male desirous gaze, and subordinate, for although some of the descriptions of idealised male bodies in this chapter were elite, many manly and unmanly bodies were those of white working-class men. (191 words)