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  • Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 by Paul Deslandes
  • Nicoletta F. Gullace
Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920. By Paul Deslandes. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2005.

Paul Deslandes has written a highly readable and informative book about the creation of an elite masculine culture at Oxford and Cambridge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Deslandes informs the reader in his revealing preface, this book is his attempt to “crack the code” of the elite, inside world of Oxford and Cambridge (p. ix). These institutions fascinated him as a student and his desire to understand their mystique and ineffable allure lead him to write a cultural history that moves well beyond the institutional methodology that is often employed to undertake educational studies. As Deslandes notes, “The moniker of Oxford or Cambridge man ... has provided students and former students alike with an identifiable and privileged cultural stamp that has served a vital role in demarcating and cementing their status in British society (p. xi).” Deslandes is fascinated by the way acceptance at one of the “Oxbridge” colleges becomes a passport to elite status and cultural clout. In examining the process by which a public school boy becomes and Oxford or Cambridge “man,” Deslandes unpacks the experience of belonging to one of the “great” universities and tries to explain what it meant to the young men who entered these hallowed halls. In doing so, he provides readers with a detailed account of every day life at Oxford and Cambridge and tries to account for the way this transitory experience became, for most graduates, a marker for life.

According to Deslandes, the years between 1850 ane 1920 were “a period of coalescence for Oxbridge culture (p. 7).” Traditions such as athletic competitions, boat races, Union debates, May Balls, annual degree examinations, and the Oxbridge “manner” all originated during the Victorian and Edwardian periods and were consolidated as part of the mythic “tradition” marketed by both universities. Such “traditions” – real and invented – provided continuity with the past and legitimated the status, power, and authority of the “insiders” versed in the occult rituals of this institutional elite. As Deslandes argues, “the decline of the traditional landed aristocracy, the rise of professional society, and the growth of meritocracy all meant that new elite traditions had to be created to accommodate the growing hegemony of the upper middle class” (p. 7). With this in mind, Deslandes examines undergraduate culture, focusing particularly on the rituals, opinions, desires, and anxieties of a remarkably articulate group of young men. Their abundant student publications, cartoons, doodles, and memoirs make up a rich source-base for getting at undergraduate culture during these formative years.

Deslandes study begins with an examination of the way Oxford and Cambridge became gateways to membership in a cultural elite. Subsequent chapters examine various aspects of that experience. Looking at such themes as the transition to manhood, college discipline, examinations, athletic competition, boat races, and sexual relations, Deslandes provides an intimate picture of undergraduate life. Forever beset by debts and chafing against parental and institutional constraints, the “Oxbridge” undergraduate, despite his privileged position, was not free of anxiety and constraints. The joy of being free to decorate his new rooms was invariably tempered by the costs of indulging in his tastes. Bargain hunting and borrowing became stressful necessities for undergraduates who had to cut a good figure without provoking parental ire. The “Oxbridge” undergraduates’ greatest anxiety, however, is addressed at the end of the book. In a final chapter entitled “Girl Graduates and Colonial Students,” Deslandes addresses the way feminism, the advent of women students, and the arrival of colonial male undergraduates, began to change the homogeneity of university life and to fill white, male undergraduates with a sense of foreboding. Their hostile response to female students and students of color is vividly illustrated in the book and Deslandes shows how destabilizing the advent of new groups into the training ground of the power elite felt to young men who witnessed this integration.

Some critics will no doubt fault Deslandes for eliding Oxford and Cambridge together too easily as one monolithic cultural entity referred throughout...

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