Muscles, symmetry and action: ‘do you measure up?’ defining masculinity in Britain and America from the 1860s to the early 1900s

Two approaches inform the modern world's thinking about ‘the body’– that which predominates in the biological sciences (the body is a ‘machine’ that is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry) and that which has become of increasing interest to scholars in the social sciences and humanities (the body is substantially a neutral surface upon which social and cultural values are imprinted). Although what occurs deep within the body's structures is vitally important, it is anatomical form that commands our attention. The mesomorphic forms that presently pervade the media insistently proclaim that muscularity defines what it is ‘to be a man’. This is by no means the first time that such a message has been heard. Among the better educated, by the 1860s the icon of the well-muscled male – and all that this implied – was rapidly replacing the eighteenth-century ideal of manliness as one defined by proper stances, gestures, and countenance. In what has been described as Charles Kingsley's first muscular novel Two Years Ago (1857), broad-shouldered Tom Thurall is contrasted with the fragile and affected Elsley Vavasour. Muscles found particularly powerful expression in new forms of athletics and the concept of ‘athleticism’ that emerged in England and quickly made its way across the Atlantic. The Illustrated London News depicted sturdy gentlemen oarsmen and runners engaged in events such as the 1866 Oxford-Cambridge athletics meeting. A montage in Harper's Weekly (a popular American publication) in 1869 contrasted a handsome and muscular young oarsman with a bespectacled, wizened youth; many other publications offered similar messages. Anatomical form was given added emphasis in the rising interest in anthropometry, and by such things as contests designed to identify the ‘most physically perfect male’ that were held at a number of colleges.