| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Paul R. Deslandes. Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 319. $45.00.

Few institutions can match England's ancient universities, Oxford and Cambridge, in laying claim to having shaped their nation's history as incubators of its values, visions and leaders. As Paul R. Deslandes notes, an astonishing forty out of the fifty-three prime ministers who have governed since Robert Walpole in 1721 were educated at these two institutions (p. 233). Histories abound of the universities and their constituent colleges, but Deslandes is the first to focus on undergraduate masculinity in relation to class, race, and national and sexual identities. He draws heavily on several hundred periodicals and magazines, most ephemeral effusions such as Snarl: An Occasional Journal for Splenetics (1899), along with more familiar and long-lived productions such as Oxford Magazine. While it will come as no surprise to most readers that Oxford and Cambridge were bastions of elite, white male heterosexual privilege, Deslandes's Oxbridge is neither serenely self-satisfied nor isolated from broader social and cultural debates. He identifies four competing male undergraduate personae—the aesthete, the athlete, the reading man, and the aristocratic blood—recognizable by the way they furnished their rooms, the organizations they joined and supported, and the networks of sociability they constructed. Deslandes's male undergraduates—"gentlemen professionals" (p. 38)—are a feisty lot who fret about examinations as manly combat and wage "miniature rebellions" (p. 97) against dons, deans, and proctors over curfews, dress codes, sex, and the numbers of guests permitted to enjoy supper in their rooms. They also wrestle with weightier issues such as the status of women and growing numbers of non-British and nonwhite students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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