Concerning Beards

Front matter

FACIALITIES

Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England 1650-1900

Alun Withey

Part 3 Fashion and Class

9 The bearded classes: Facial hair and social status, 1700-1900 10 Cleanse, cut and control: The institutional history of facial hair Part 4 Commodification, Consumption and Personal Grooming

11 The commodification of shaving, 1650-1850 12 Selling shaving in the age of the beard: The market for shaving products c. 1850-90 xiii

267 309 viii

5.1 6.1

12.2

12.3

12.4

12.5

12.6 12.7

Illustrations

Figures

Jost Amman, a barbershop, undated

Richard Livesay, “William Hogarth making a drawing of his companions and himself as they shave and take their breakfast, 1781 Julia Margaret Cameron, portrait of Henry Taylor, 1864

Sir Joshua Reynolds, self-portrait, 1780

Sir Joshua Reynolds, a man’s head, c. 1771-3

Balthasar Denner, ‘Alter Mann (old man), 1726

‘Frequencies of Whisker Forms, 1842-1972’

Number of brands of shaving pastes in British newspapers per decade, 1830-99

Number of advertised shaving soap brands per year in British newspapers, 1830-99

Number of advertised shaving soap brands per year in British newspapers per decade, 1830-99

Average yearly numbers of shaving soaps advertised in British newspapers per decade, 1830-99

Advertisement for Williams’ shaving soaps, Illustrated London News, 15 October 1898, 573

Number of branded razors advertised in British newspapers, 1850-80

Number of patent applications lodged for shaving-related products, 1850-80

252 254

9.1 9:2

Illustrations

Tables

Facial hair styles in British prisoner photographs, 1856-76

Facial hair styles in the total sampled British prisoner photographs, per decade of age

Proprietary razor manufacturers in British newspaper advertisements, one year per decade, 1750-1860

Abbreviations

Archives BL British Library WL Wellcome Library NA National Archives Publications

HC The Hairdresser’s Chronicle

Note: Newspaper advertisements are used throughout the book and are cited by the maker/seller/product name/title, newspaper, date and, where possible, page number, rather than using ‘advertisement’ in each case.

xii

Acknowledgements

Concerning Beards has been a long time in the making, and in the course of researching and writing, I have accumulated many debts of gratitude. First, Iam extremely grateful to the Wellcome Trust who have supported each stage of my academic career from my PhD research on early-modern Wales in 2006, to the three-year postdoctoral fellowship upon which this book is based. Second, I have been incredibly lucky in having Professor Jonathan Barry as a mentor and friend, a huge influence on my work and a constant source of help, advice and encouragement. His kindness, generosity and patience, particularly in shepherding me through the transition from research fellow to senior lecturer, are hugely appreciated, and it is no exaggeration to say that I owe him my career. Margaret Pelling has been another huge influence, both professionally and personally, supporting my work since the early years of my PhD, guiding my research and suggesting source materials, as well as providing some (often much needed) tea and sympathy. This book owes much to her generosity and also her vast reservoir of knowledge about early-modern medicine and practitioners, and particularly barber-surgeons. I must also thank the History Department and College of Humanities at Exeter, who have been immensely supportive in so many ways.

I offer my grateful thanks to the many academic colleagues (and the massive online community of ‘twitterstorians’) who have generously shared, or alerted me to, references and source materials, which have often proved invaluable in the process of writing this book. Time and again they have come up with the perfect nugget with which to illustrate a point. Special mentions are due to Patrick Wallis, Sara Pennell, Peter Tydesley, Justin Bengry, Joseph Harley, Andy Burn, Thony Christie, Ismini Pells, Charlotte Young, Henry French, Judy Stephenson, Sarah Murden, Michael Saunby, Jessica Clark, Jane Hamlett, Rachel Herrmann, Will Pooley, Jennifer Bazar, Victoria West, Katherine Allen, Janet Few, Sarah Ward Clavier, Helen Rogers, Annie Gray, Charlotte Mathieson, Lucy Hilliar, Bethan Jenkins, Dolly Jorgenson, Sarah Toulalan, Liz Oakley-Brown, Lee Jackson, Katherine Foxhall, Renée Salhany, Freya Gowrley, Clodagh Tait, Sarah Bull, Jennifer Evans, Sarah Murden, Eleanor Rycroft, Sara Read, Thony Christie and Katie Barclay.

Many colleagues have also generously given up their time to read draft chapters of this book, and their excellent and insightful comments have been invaluable in writing the book. I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Barry, Margaret Pelling, Joanne Begiato, Chris Evans, Henry French, Louise Falcini, Justin Bengry, Karen Harvey, Jessica P. Clark, Kathryn Woods and Peter Elmer. Any errors that remain are my own.

I have also been lucky in having so many good friends, both within academia and outside, who have contributed in so many ways, as well as patiently helped me through the trials and tribulations that always accompany writing a book. Here special mentions xiv Acknowledgements are due to Chris Evans, Andy Croll, David Turner, Andy Mardell, Ali Haggett, Ross McFarlane, Phoebe Harkins ... and to Andrew Phillips for keeping me fit and healthy.

But perhaps most of all I thank my family for their unstinting love and support through all the ups and downs of life with a befuddled academic. So, to the two most important women in my life, my wife Suzanne and mother Pat, my father Rob, and stepmother Alison, and my son Morgan, all of whom probably feel they know more about the history of facial hair than they ever wished or needed to, my love and grateful thanks always. It’s been quite a journey hasn't it?

Introduction

Many want the long beard, many the beard cut half way, some in two parts, rounded, shorn, with the moustaches, without moustaches, who shaved below, who on top, on the scruff of the neck, beneath the throat, and other bizarre things. Young people all keen on having a beard shave themselves often. Old men have their beards dyed to look and feel young.'

So speaks Anima, the barber, in Anton Francesco Doni’s sixteenth-century play I Mondi, responding to a question about what he thinks of the world given that barbers claimed to know so much about people and their characters.” His answer, drawing on the common literary trope of the beard in Renaissance drama, is partly a metaphor for the diversity found in humanity and everyday life, alongside the care taken by men in cultivating their beards and the panoply of beard and moustache styles worn by them. It also speaks to another truth. For each individual man in Anima’s list and indeed for men through time, facial hair has involved choices: whether to wear or not wear facial hair, what style or length of beard or moustache and even whether to change its colour. Informing these choices were many factors, including age, location, social status, culture and fashion. But perhaps even more importantly, facial hair has also always been closely bound up with prevailing ideas about the body, health and medicine.

The period between 1650 and 1900 saw many important changes in conceptions of facial hair. First were fundamental shifts in ideas of its physical nature, generation and origins within the body. Second were changes in fashion, with the bearded seventeenth century supplanted by virtually 150 years of preference for the clean-shaven face, until the mid-Victorian ‘beard movement’ revived the fashion for effulgent facial hair. Third were shifts in the relationship between facial hair and prevailing concepts of masculinity. At some points beards symbolized virility, generative power and innate masculinity; at others a more rough and ready manliness. Fourth, this period brought deep changes to the material culture and associated practices of facial hair and shaving, to the practitioners involved and to who ultimately had authority for

' Patrizia Pellizzari (ed.), Anton Francesco Doni, I Mondi e gli Inferni (Torrino: Einaudi, 1994), 113. See also Douglas Biow, ‘Manly Matters: The Theatricality and Sociability of Beards in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio and Sixteenth-Century Italy, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40:2 (Spring 2010): 331.

fashioning the male face. But despite all of this, still relatively little is known about the significance, context and meanings of facial hair or its relationship to health norms, medical practice, material culture and consumption, technology, self-fashioning and, more broadly, its place within shifting conceptions of male bodies through time. What has largely been missing in previous studies is the lived experience of facial hair and shaving, particularly at different levels of society. Recovering this experience is the central purpose of this book.

On first reading, facial hair might appear to offer little as a lens through which to view the history of the body. And yet beards, whiskers, moustaches and even clean-shaven faces all offer unique opportunities to explore various corporeal contexts, including medical, social, cultural, gender and sexual, and, more broadly, to map the changing concepts of male appearance and the fashioning of men’s bodies through time. Providing a new understanding of the complex meanings and motivations behind the wearing of beards, moustaches and whiskers, their associated practices, practitioners and material culture, Concerning Beards provides an important new long-term perspective on health and the male body in Britain between 1650 and 1900. It demonstrates not only the central place of facial hair within the shifting landscape of masculinity but also the importance of the male face more broadly as a site where bodily health, power, sexuality and control were constantly challenged and remade.

The historiography of facial hair

The place of facial hair as a masculine emblem has long been debated, as has its relationship to male (and female) physiology amidst long-term changes in concepts of the body for centuries. At some points, such as the eighteenth century, facial hair has fallen dramatically from favour. At others, beards have represented the very summit of manliness. Mid-Victorian men lauded their beards and whiskers, regarding them variously as God-given symbols of male authority, natural protection against the elements and public symbols of strength, marital and martial authority. If facial hair has at times been (un)fashionable, it has certainly been cyclical, with particular styles emerging and disappearing, often in response to changing ideals of male appearance and other sociocultural stimuli. At all points, however, it has reflected prevailing ideals of and ideas about the male body and men’s appearance, whether as an intrinsic and vital component part of the corporeal fabric, a point which has itself been debated at various points in time, or as a supposed visual manifestation of masculine traits. It is a signally important element in the history of the body. And yet, in historiography, it is a relative newcomer. Even into the first decade of the twenty-first century, facial hair was still largely overlooked by academic historians. Aside from a few studies exploring facial hair in specific and generally narrow contexts, beards and moustaches have been more the stuff of popular histories of beard fashions, famous wearers or outlandish styles.

Recent years, however, have brought growing interest in the history of facial hair, with particular focus upon the early modern period and upon England. The variety of potential approaches and possibilities for future directions in the study of facial hair have been highlighted by the contributions to a recent essay collection edited by Jennifer Evans and myself, incorporating academics and practitioners from various disciplines and spanning topics from portraiture and travel texts to theatrical beards and moustache combs.’

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship between facial hair and constructions or representations of masculinity has been a dominant historiographical theme. Mark Albert Johnston’s deconstructionist analysis of the semiotics of facial hair in early modern Britain, for example, has revealed the many and complex meanings carried by facial hair. For Johnston, beards were simultaneously part of the natural body and important signifiers of sex and gender. As much as they embodied strength, virility, mental capacity and health, they could also suggest vanity and both physical and moral weakness.’ Attempting to address such contradictions, philosophers and medical authors tried to ‘fix’ the nature of the beard by emphasizing its centrality to the male body and sexuality. As such the beard represented a proxy phallus and was also a synecdoche for the male body.° Will Fisher’s study of beards in early modern literature and culture similarly reveals contemporary concerns surrounding the meanings, symbolism and functions of beards. For Fisher they simultaneously constituted and reflected manliness, representing both ‘a component of manhood [and] a means through which manhood was materialized.° Rather than a synecdoche for the male body, therefore, facial hair was here seen as an enabler of masculinity, something that was both a ‘morphological reality’ and a cultural artefact.’ In general, the beard was deemed a ‘natural’ ensign of a healthy male body and one that spoke of characteristics including sexual potency and martial strength. Most recently, Eleanor Rycroft has explored theatrical representations of the beard. Rycroft notes the multiple meanings carried by facial hair (whether as a ‘thing, commodity, object or ornament’) and the ways in which it blurs the boundary between ‘subject’ and ‘object. Here, the beard both reflected early modern culture, but also bore important value and meaning for men. It was a symbol of sexual difference and also, to some degree, of the supposed superiority of men’s bodies over those of women.’ Overall, then, as an outward manifestation of the reproductive capacity of the individual man, the beard bore strong symbolic significance. The ability to grow one was a clear line of demarcation between masculine and effeminate men.

A second strong theme has been the place of facial hair within the humoral body and, in particular, its relationship to catamenia and the expelling of excess bodily fluids.’

Jennifer Evans and Alun Withey, ‘Introduction, in Evans and Withey (eds), Framing the Face: New

Perspectives on the History of Facial Hair (London: Palgrave, 2018). Part of this historiographical

discussion is adapted (with the permission of Dr Evans) from the introduction to this volume, 2-4.

+ Mark Albert Johnston, Beard Fetish in Early Modern England: Sex, Gender, and Registers of Value (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 43-6.

Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2006), 99.

Ibid.

Eleanor Rycroft, Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity (London: Routledge,

° Johnston, Beard Fetish, 43-6, 48-50; Fisher, Materializing Gender, 102-3, 108-9; See also Patricia

Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge a x o

As Fisher, Johnston and others have identified, facial hair was regarded (and described by contemporaries) as a waste product or excrement resulting from heat caused by the production of sperm in the reins, or lower abdomen. As this heat rose upwards through male bodies, it emerged and coagulated through the skin of the head and face.” Some limited attention has also been paid to the effects of humoral balance upon the colour of hair and beards and its role in assessing individual humoral complexion." Further work is being done in this area, including efforts to gain a deeper understanding of how venereal disease and other afflictions of the male sexual and reproductive organs were caused and were in turn revealed through the visible loss of facial hair.’

Again, with a strong focus on the early modern period, the role of barbers in shaving, as well as broader social and cultural symbols in their own right, has attracted recent study. Margaret Pelling’s landmark work on barber-surgeons revealed the suite of corporeal tasks undertaken by barbers, as well as their position within structures of civic hierarchy and urban life. As well as shaving, these included bloodletting, tongue-scraping and ear cleaning. As Pelling argues, of all practitioners, it was barbers and barber-surgeons who managed bodily surfaces and regulated the body’s noisome emissions and excretions.'* Outside England, Sandra Cavallo has charted the functions of the barber in early modern Italy, revealing the close associations between the hygiene practices of the barber and the ‘medical’ function of the surgeon." The status of early modern barbers as literary and cultural stereotypes has also been highlighted by Eleanor Decamp, whose Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England explores the semiotics of barbering practices, tools and working spaces, alongside the importance of shaving as a key function of the barber. Decamp also discusses the troubled relationship between barbers and surgeons and the importance of terminology in negotiating occupational boundaries.'* Little work has yet focused on barbers during and after the eighteenth century, however, and particularly on how the decline of facial hair and rise of self-shaving affected the nature and status of the relationship between men and barbers.

Alongside the early modern period, Victorian England has also proved fruitful for historians of facial hair. Christopher Oldstone-Moore and others have explored

University Press, 2013), 27-30; Jennifer Jordan, ‘“That ere with Age, his strength Is utterly decay”: Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood, in Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (eds), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Palgrave, 2011), 35-7.

Johnston, Beard Fetish, 44-5; see also Simons, The Sex of Men, 27-30; Jennifer Jordan, “That ere with Age, 35-7.

Johnston, Beard Fetish, 44-5.

Jennifer Evans, Mens Sexual Health in Early Modern England (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).

Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998), 209, 242.

Margaret Pelling, ‘Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body and Disease, in A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis: London, 1500-1700 (London: Longman, 1986), 91-5.

5 Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy: Identities, Families and Masculinities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), ch. 2.

Eleanor Decamp, Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England: Performing Barbery and Surgery (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

a z z a the Victorian ‘beard movement. Here, a new climate of ideas in the mid-nineteenth century surrounding male identity and corporeality, and in particular a new focus upon the physicality of the male body, saw beards and moustaches return to prominence as key signifiers of masculinity, after virtually 150 years of beardlessness.'’ As John Tosh suggests, a combination of factors acted to sharpen gender distinctions and remodel concepts of masculinity and manliness. Among these were the physical and emotional challenges faced by men of adapting to a newly industrializing society and an increasing focus upon and valorization of work emphasizing men’s role as the domestic breadwinners.” In addition was the increasing scrutiny of male authority, both in the workplace and at home. Tosh argues that men were forced to modify their behaviour and self-presentation in attempts to reassert authority over home and hearth, as women increasingly claimed dominion over the household economy.” A third factor was the apparent polarization of male and female bodies. On one level, this broad new emphasis upon the sexual ‘otherness’ and bodily difference of women led to the privileging of gender-specific bodily characteristics. It also encouraged a spectrum of male stereotypes which, at one extreme, manifested in fears about weak, effeminate and homosexual men. These were amplified by claims of the physical and moral laxity of the male population in the mid-century.” At the other extreme, however, was a new stereotype: the ultramasculine, heroic soldier. The 1840s saw new respect for martial values and, in particular, for soldiers as exemplars of ideal masculine characteristics.”

The themes addressed by historians of facial hair, in particular the symbolism and sociocultural meanings of facial hair, are echoed in the works of scholars investigating other types of head and body hair. Hair has become an emerging category for historical study in its own right. Recent works have mapped the cultural history of hair and the diverse contexts through which it can be understood from premodern to modern, including religion, fashion, production and practice, gender, race, sexuality, class and health.” Susan Vincent's illustrated study of hair also provides a broad survey of the various meanings, practices and practitioners linked to hair through time.” Other studies have focused on specific themes. Malcolm Baker’s study of eighteenth-century portrait busts argues that representing hair was a key means through which sculptors could demonstrate their skill, since most men during this period were clean-shaven.”

17 See Christopher Oldstone-Moore, “Ihe Beard Movement in Victorian Britain, Victorian Studies, 48:1 (2005): 7-34; Susan Walton, ‘From Squalid Impropriety to Manly Respectability: The Revival of Beards, Moustaches and Martial Values in the 1850s in England, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30:3 (2008): 229-45; Jacob Middleton, “The Beard and Victorian Ideas of Masculinity, in Dominic Janes (ed.), Back to the Future of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 27-40.

18 John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrializing Society: 1800-1914, Journal of British Studies, 44:2 (2005): 330-1.

Tosh, ‘Masculinities, 332-3.

Ibid., 336, 338; Middleton, “The Beard’ 33; Walton, ‘Squalid Impropriety, 234.

Walton, ‘Squalid Impropriety, 235-8; Oldstone-Moore, “The Beard Movement; 11-14.

> See, e.g., Edith Snook (ed.), A Cultural History of Hair in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Margaret K. Powell and Joseph Roach (eds), A Cultural History of Hair in the Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), and other volumes in the same series.

4 Susan J. Vincent, Hair: An Illustrated History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

°° Malcolm Baker, “No Cap or Wig But a Thin Hair upon It’: Hair and the Male Portrait Bust in England around 1750; Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38:1 (2004): 63-77.

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Equally, Baker suggests that portrayals of hair were deliberately constructed by sculptors in order to reflect the status and character of their subjects.” Studies of the eighteenth century have also charted the problematic relationship between real and false hair, in the form of wigs. Michael Kwass, for example, argues that during the eighteenth century, wigs spread beyond the aristocratic elite, becoming virtually ubiquitous. As this occurred, wigs lost their association with elite luxury consumption and instead carried other meanings, such as convenience, nature and physiognomy.” A number of studies have also explored the practices, material culture and technologies surrounding the removal of hair. As Chris Evans and I have argued elsewhere, eighteenth-century razors and shaving were at the intersection between technology and culture, amidst a Europe-wide fashion for the clean-shaven face.” For the nineteenth century, Rebecca Herzig has described how home remedies for hair removal were gradually superseded by commercial, chemical commodities.” She highlights that this shift was in part connected to the centralization and mechanization of meat production that required an effective and efficient process to remove hair from animal carcasses.” Even away from academic history and perhaps encouraged by the recent global fashion for beards, a host of popular books and articles has served a niche interest in beards and facial hair styles, often playing on perceptions of the ‘quirky’ nature of the subject matter. Facial hair has long provided a ready source of inspiration and anecdote for writers, in a tradition dating back to the eighteenth century.*'! These works have demonstrated the vibrancy of the topic and its potential to reveal the ways in which the experiences of people in the past were shaped by large scale trends and processes.

Despite all of this work, however, and notwithstanding the attention paid to beards and the humoral body, there remains a general lack of understanding of the place of facial hair within broader and longer concepts of health, medicine and the body. More troublingly, some (often very basic) questions have been overlooked. How did men of different status, age or location understand or conceive of their facial hair? What

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Ibid.

Michael Kwass, ‘Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, American Historical Review, 111:3 (2006): 631-59.

See Chris Evans and Alun Withey, An Enlightenment in Steel: Innovation in the Steel Trades of Eighteenth-Century Britain, Technology and Culture, 53:3 (2012): 533-60; Alun Withey, ‘Shaving and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2 (2013): 225-43. For the aesthetic reasons driving the removal of hair, see Johannes Endres, ‘Diderot, Hogarth, and the Aesthetics of Depilation, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38:1 (Fall 2004): 17-38. Rebecca M. Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 36.

Herzig, Plucked, 44.

For some examples, see Anon., ‘Curious Remarks on Beards, New London Magazine (November 1788): 597-600; Anon., “Thoughts upon Beards, Blackwood’ Edinburgh Magazine, 34 (October 1833): 670; Richard Wright Proctor, The Barbers Shop (London: Simkin, Marshall), 183; William Andrews, At the Sign of the Barber’s Pole: Studies in Hirsute History (Cottingham: J. R. Tutin, 1904); Reginald Reynolds, Beards: An Omnium Gatherum (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950); Christopher Oldstone-Moore, Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). More recently, the materiality and style of beards has proved attractive for popular studies: Lucinda Hawksley, Moustaches, Whiskers and Beards (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2014); Rufus Cavendish, The Little Book of Beards (London: Summersdale, 2014).

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Y % w S w governed their choices about whether to style, shape or shave it? Who shaved them or who taught them to shave, and how often did they undertake this centrally important task? What materials did men own, and from whom did they purchase them?

This omission raises questions about the relationship between male bodies and concepts of masculinity through time - a theme picked up in recent historiography. As Joanne Begiato notes, the historiography of British masculinities has used established masculine ‘types’ in its periodization: the ‘man of feeling, the ‘muscular Christian and so forth.” While broadly useful they do not necessarily or uniformly capture the attitudes or experiences of individual men in different locations, or at different levels of society. Equally, as Begiato also argues, historians have tended to see embodiment and male identity as being linked only in certain periods whereas, in fact, the male body and its characteristics have always been inextricably bound.” As a key characteristic of the male body, facial hair offers the opportunity to explore these links in detail. The period between 1650 and 1900 saw a paradigm shift in conceptions of the body. As the humoral model slowly retreated, so ideas about the fabric of the body, its mechanisms and processes also changed. While the place of facial hair within the humoral body has been amply demonstrated, how those conceptions changed over a longer period, according to shifting ideas about the body through the eighteenth century and beyond, remains less clear. Equally, the nature of facial hair as a component of masculinity and manliness is far from static. At some points in history the beard has symbolized virility, authority and power: at others, the shaved face has been the acme of masculine appearance. Throughout the period of the book, it has borne close associations with life stage. The first appearance of beard hair was a key marker of the onset of adulthood. Both the colour and thickness of the beard have also been used, both medically and culturally, to represent the decline of the body through age. The ability to grow a beard, however, has remained an important signifier of masculine power. There are also issues in assuming homogeneity in any beard fashion, or in broader beliefs about the nature and status of facial hair. In exploring facial hair among men of different classes, locations and even different races, this book also moves beyond the ‘white, literate, middle-class and genteel men’ who have hitherto dominated discussions of British masculinity.”

Another area in need of deeper investigation is that of the practice, practitioners and material culture of facial hair. Again, the broad focus upon the early modern period masks a series of important shifts, which saw responsibility for shaving gradually move away from barbers and towards individual men. During the eighteenth century, fundamental changes in the structure of the barbering profession, together with the growing preference for self-shaving, had a marked effect on the haircutting trades. Nonetheless, barbers continued to be the mainstay of shaving provision for many men until the late nineteenth century. Little work to date, however, has explored the relationship between barbers and shaving over the longue durée. The grooming

* Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760-1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 5.

practices of individual men remain similarly obscure, as do even basic questions such as how men learnt to shave, leaving open questions surrounding the materials, skills and costs required, either of self-shaving or visiting the barber; the frequency of shaving; and the impact of external factors such as class and location. Still less attention has been paid to the rise of a commercial market for shaving products - an important factor in assessing the place of facial hair within discourses of masculinity, but also a missing topic from histories of consumption.

Overall, except for broad narratives of changes in beard fashions through time, there has been no diachronic analysis of the trajectory of facial hair and, in particular, its health and medical contexts. While existing studies of facial hair frequently focus upon fashion and the meanings of beards as short- or long-term assertions of masculinity within prevailing social and cultural contexts, this book takes a different approach. Viewed through the broad lens of health and medicine, facial hair can be seen as part of much broader and deeper changes in both attitudes to and concepts of the male body through time. While ‘fashion’ provides a useful framework for short-term understandings of the beard, it is only by understanding the close relationship between facial hair and the lived experience of the corporeal, physical and sexual male body that a deeper narrative becomes possible.

Running throughout the book are a number of key arguments. First is that, over time, facial hair gradually lost its medical connections and moved instead towards a less well-defined concept of corporeal hygiene and health. By 1800 facial hair had largely ceased to be a topic in medical publications and by the mid-nineteenth century had moved into lay and popular publications.

Second, the period between 1650 and 1900 brought marked change in terms of who undertook, and claimed authority over, the practice of shaving. After 1750, increasing numbers of men begin to shave themselves, rather than rely on a barber, helped by etiquette manuals stressing the ability to shave as a key gentlemanly skill. Although this was not adopted instantly nor uniformly across the social spectrum, it set in train a fundamental shift in responsibility for maintaining the male face. Again, while shaving still related to daily routines of hygiene and sometimes specifically to health, it was largely demedicalized, becoming instead simply part of the broader suite of male hygienic grooming tasks such as washing, combing and dressing.