Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century by Robert Hogg (review)

Robert Hogg’s book is a study of the adaptation of the mid-Victorian idea of manliness to the colonial frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia. Hogg asserts that by the mid-nineteenth century a pervasive discourse of manliness had developed which permeated the working, middle and upper classes of Great Britain, emphasising the virtues of courage, self-control, perseverance, temperance, thrift and hard work. Drawing on both published and unpublished autobiographical sources, Hogg aims to “illustrate the manifold ways that men experienced the frontier and manhood” (4). Central is the notion that “[t]here was a deep paradox in the Victorian ideal of manliness that made it impossible to achieve.” Living conditions on the frontier— isolation, a pervasive White homosocial society, alcoholism and intimacy with Indigenous women—all worked to threaten or undermine the performance of manliness.

Over the course of seven chapters, Hogg elaborates how the nascent colonial societies of both Queensland and British Columbia were especially shaped by gentlemanly emigrants who were compelled to quit Great Britain by straitened economic circumstances. These men’s accounts garner the primary attention of Hogg; they characterised their relocation to the frontier as an act of manly vigour and the frontier itself as both a testing ground and a site of economic opportunity. A key theme for Hogg, then, is how the class stratification of Great Britain was recreated in both Queensland and British Columbia, as colonial gentlemen formed an exclusive masculine caste even as they lost many of the metropolitan signifiers of their elite status. Hogg also makes explicit the connections between the performance of muscular virtues and the work of British colonialism. Discourses of manliness were discursive weapons that encouraged the pervasive use of violence and provided a justification for the subordination and confiscation of Indigenous territory.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this solid book is that it effectively compares and contrasts how British men enacted and performed mid-Victorian discourses of manliness in two colonial locales. In this way, Hogg’s book confirms an observation made by Adele Perry in 2001—that British Columbia had much in common with other settler colonies such as New Zealand and Australia.¹ Part of the rationale for this study is that both Queensland and British Columbia share parallels in their historical development. Both colonies were located on the Pacific Rim, were originally charted by James Cook, featured gold rushes and the influx of considerable numbers of settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, were home to significant Indigenous populations and featured a considerable amount of interracial violence. But looking to Penelope Edmonds’ recent comparison of colonial British Columbia and Victoria as a pertinent example, it is evident that most settler colonies feature historical parallels that invite comparative analysis.² The value of Hogg’s study is not that it reveals Queensland and British Columbia to have had the same history but that it gestures towards the unity of the British world in the mid-nineteenth century in its study of the lived experiences of British men across the Empire. As such, Hogg’s book is a valuable contribution to the historiographies of Australia, Canada and the British Empire.

Men and Manliness on the Frontier draws on a rich vein of scholarship that has prioritised the study of the sexual and gendered identities of men. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes and John Tosh’s A Man’s Place are touchstones for this study in their analysis of the middle-class gender order in nineteenth-century Great Britain. ³ Likewise, through its comparative agenda this study is also a complement to the New Imperial History that has prioritised the cross-connections between class, race and gender in the making of both metropolitan Great Britain and colonial projects across the Empire. This book is particularly indebted to Perry’s book On the Edge of Empire. Perry’s study was groundbreaking because it revealed the fragility of the colonial...