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Throughout this carefully expressed description of the lives of clerical daughters,

Yamaguchi frequently cites individual experiences as detailed in primary sources—let-
ters, sketches, and photographs—as evidence for her claims. She also pays attention to
how experiences differed for evangelical and High Church daughters, and how the rise
in economic difficulties and the declining attractiveness of a clerical life over the course
of the nineteenth century meant that, by the end of the century, the sons of clergy were
less likely to be ordained, and fewer daughters of clergy became wives of clergy.
Yamaguchi situates her work in the context of the ongoing argument over whether
the feminization of religion over the course of the nineteenth century empowered or
trapped women. While she certainly understands the arguments of scholars on both
sides of the debate—including those made by John Tosh, M. Jeanne Peterson, Amanda
Vickery, Carmen Mangion, Leonore Davidoff, and Catherine Hall—she never clearly
states her conclusion. Based on the evidence in this book, one could argue for either
side. Yamaguchi shows that some women found fulfillment and empowerment in per-
forming parish duties, while others used the skills they learned to embark on a fulfilling
secular career. Yet she also shows how the demands of parish work and a precarious
economic status could confine a woman to her father’s home even after she became an
adult. The evidence seems slightly in favor of the religious life providing women with
skills and opportunities to perform fulfilling work, but of course, this is most obvious
at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when the
attraction of the religious life was declining and when women were more likely to take
on secular roles.
My only other criticism of the book is a minor one about its organization. The choice
to structure the argument so that it follows the chronology of a woman’s life can mean
that different aspects of a single woman are discussed in different chapters. It therefore
takes a while to develop a coherent picture of individual women. For example, Margaret
Fountaine is first introduced as a woman who failed in love, then as the long-term partner
of a Syrian dragoman, Khalil Naimy, and finally as a butterfly hunter and breeder. This
approach demands that the reader be patient with the somewhat fragmented unfolding
of these women’s histories, but this patience will be rewarded as one realizes the signifi-
cance of this group of women who have been hiding in plain sight.
Carol Engelhardt Herringer
Wright State University

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.36

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel,  by

Karen Bourrier; pp. viii + 174. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015, $65.00,
$35.00 paper.

“The idea of the gentleman,” Karen Bourrier writes, depends “on the existence of a phys-
ically or morally weaker person on whom he can lavish his gentleness” (66). The exciting
contribution Bourrier’s The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-
Victorian Novel makes to the study of midcentury masculinity is that this “weaker person” is

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not necessarily the distressed damsel or impoverished waif we might expect to find at the
receiving end of gentlemanly beneficence. Rather, she argues, the mid-Victorian novel
frequently paired its strong, active heroes with disabled male friends. In their physical
weakness and sympathetic sensitivity, these disabled men and boys could encourage the
development of their stronger companions’ best selves. And in addition to serving as a
moral prosthesis for the robust hero, the disabled companion carried the power to speak
for his friend. As a focalized character or even stand-in for the narrator, the physically
weaker member of these masculine dyads, even when confined to the margins of a story’s
plot, moved to the center of the reader’s experience of masculine heroism. In these ways,
Bourrier argues, “weakness and disability served a necessary function in shaping narrative
form, and in forming ideals of Victorian manhood” (24).
Drawing from disability studies the insight that shifting constructions of disability
are always relational, Bourrier contends that normative representations of manliness in
midcentury fiction relied on figures of illness, invalidism, and disability in ways that man-
ifested in recurring constellations of character types. The pairing of strong and weak
men can thus be understood as a consequence of the growing emphasis in discourses of
manliness on ideals of vigorous activity and physical health. In Thomas Carlyle’s stirring
gospel of work, Samuel Smiles’s ethos of tireless self-help, and the muscular Christians’
injunction to strive for moral justice on this side of the grave, midcentury men were
repeatedly reminded that a capable body was a necessary vessel to reach their virtuous
goals. Yet as Bourrier shows, novelists who responded to the new prominence accorded
to manly health did not simply surround their heroes with enervated or maimed foils who
could set off more starkly the protagonists’ robustness. Instead, the intense, often eroti-
cally charged friendships Bourrier finds in midcentury fiction operated through a logic
of complementarity. These dyads staged and tried to resolve deep tensions in emerging
masculine norms, such as tensions between physical strength and moral purpose, labor
and domesticity, restrained taciturnity and emotional volubility, and instinctive rectitude
and thoughtful self-scrutiny.
Bourrier’s first two chapters lay out her case for the pairing of strong and weak men
in the novels of the 1850s. Chapter 1 reads Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853)
alongside Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857) to argue that
these writers’ ideals of Christian chivalry are realized by strong heroes who care for dis-
abled friends, and who may suffer physically themselves on their path of moral develop-
ment. The second chapter is dedicated to Dinah Mulock Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman
(1856), which Bourrier regards as “perhaps the paradigmatic example of the friendship
of the strong and weak man”; certainly it is the novel that most fully integrates the whole
array of elements—thematic, narrative, and cultural—that structure Bourrier’s claims
(52). Here we turn from ideals of Christian chivalry to the valorization of the self-made
man, and the novel’s titular hero, strong and silent, embodies all the familiar middle-class
virtues of rigid self-discipline and indefatigable industry. Yet it is only through John’s
tender relationship with the invalid Phineas, Bourrier argues, that Craik can allay con-
cerns about the self-made man’s ascent to wealth. Phineas, moreover, provides a neces-
sary supplement to his friend’s demanding code of manliness; as the novel’s narrator and
“affective center,” Phineas is permitted by his invalidism an emotional expressiveness that
is forbidden to the laconic John, and he uses it to praise the heroic man of business (53).

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The last two chapters chart the decline of this midcentury masculine dyad. Chapter
3 examines The Mill on the Floss (1860) to demonstrate that George Eliot, in her pursuit
of realistic representations of sympathy, challenged the trope by which strong and weak
men were harmoniously paired. With an inspired comparison to Thomas Hughes’s Tom
Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Bourrier emphasizes Eliot’s doubt that the brief schoolboy
friendship between the dynamic Tom Tulliver and the kyphotic Philip Wakem could ever
flourish. Identifying such “somatic limits of sympathy” between men, Bourrier offers an
enlightening addition to studies that have foregrounded Eliot’s concern about sympa-
thy’s ability to bridge boundaries of class, gender, or race (100). By the time of Henry
James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81), the fourth chapter argues, Eliot’s skepticism
about friendships between strong and weak men had given way to James’s view that the
two need have nothing to do with one another. In the figure of Ralph Touchett, James
presents observation and connoisseurship as activities through which a sensitive invalid
might become, in a sense, a self-made man in his own right.
Of course, James’s novels were hardly regarded by late-Victorian consensus as
arbiters of proper manliness, and Bourrier’s implication that James can stand for the
cultural attitudes of the 1880s hints at a more general limitation of her approach: by
concentrating on the evolution of a literary device, the study gives relatively little atten-
tion to extraliterary cultural developments of this period, and to the complicated his-
torical context of competing and changing masculinities. Similarly, one wishes that
the book did more to relate the conventionalized representations of male disability
in novels to the lived experience of disabled men; the question of how the fictional
production of this particular fantasy of dyadic dis/ability affected people other than
novelists deserves more attention. Still, such reservations might be regarded less as
shortcomings in Bourrier’s project than as signs that much more scholarship might
be undertaken along the lines she has drawn. As an illuminating and original study
of the neglected intersections of disability and Victorian manliness, Bourrier’s book
contributes a significant chapter to the history of midcentury middle-class masculinity.
It may become even more important as an encouraging example of what future studies
in these fields may yet teach us.
Bradley Deane
University of Minnesota, Morris

doi:10.2979/victorianstudies.59.1.37

Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature, edited

by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge; pp. xii + 251. Aldershot and Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2014, £65.00, $109.95.

Queer studies inconsistently informs the essays collected in Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities:

Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature edited by Amelia Yeates and Serena
Trowbridge. This theoretical irregularity weakens the critical currency of the book,
despite the rigor of archival and other research data gathered in its pages. Readers who
are interested in William Bell Scott’s marginalization in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.