The Ideal of Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham

Martin Crotty (School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia)

History of Education Review

ISSN: 0819-8691

Article publication date: 2 October 2017

134

Citation

Crotty, M. (2017), "The Ideal of Manliness: The Legacy of Thring’s Uppingham", History of Education Review, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 238-239. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-06-2017-0011

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited


A long-time Master at Uppingham and educational authority in other roles, Malcolm Tozer has long idealised and lauded Thring’s influence on the Uppingham School. He does so not without reason, for Thring took charge of a small and failing school, imbued it with an ethos of Christian manliness, and took it to a position as one of England’s leading public schools in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has maintained its position ever since.

Tozer explains how all this took place. He shows how Thring’s imbibing of romantic authors such as Walter Scott, his experiences at Eton, his Christian conviction and other influences shaped his thinking and his educational ideology. Thring then took a school that was in such dire straits that he had licence to innovate and experiment, gave it the trappings of the late nineteenth-century public school system, and anchored it to his convictions about the education of the mind, body and soul.

If Tozer’s aim in writing this book was to ensure that Thring received his dues as an educational pioneer, he has, however, fallen short of the mark. Hagiography is a self-defeating enterprise, and there are enough curious statements and omissions throughout this study to cast doubt on Tozer’s ability to present a well-rounded and fair vision of Thring. If Thring was such an admirable character, why did he marry the woman his brother was desperately in love with, after meeting her when he had been sent to persuade him of the ill-advised nature of the match? Why is there almost no account of unsuccessful innovations? Why is there no criticism of some of Thring’s Spartan excesses and needless discomfort that this subjected his charges to? And how can it be said that “Thring’s own education in manliness was now complete” (p. 117) when the man was only 32?

Thring, Tozer is at pains to reiterate, advocated “true manliness” – all else was corruption of a pure ideal. The constant idealisation of Thring and his beliefs and methods is closely mirrored and reinforced by Tozer’s condemnation of all that came after. As the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian, the mid-nineteenth century to the late nineteenth and early twentieth, Tozer’s ideal world, inside and outside of the public school, gave way to something altogether more crass. Christian manliness was usurped by athletic and militarised hyper-masculinity, the old ideal of the gentleman was corrupted by the nouveau-rich, and Thring’s Uppingham was bastardised, if not fatally, by his more athletically and militarily minded successors.

Remarkably, Tozer also condemns the years of hyper-athleticism for encouraging homosexual practices and attributes this to decline of the mid-nineteenth-century emphasis on morality. Even laying aside the illiberal condemnation of homosexuality implicit in his remarks, it defies any common sense to suggest that there was not illicit sexual activity in the public schools before hyper-athleticism, including during Thring’s era. And in as much as boys are involved, “homosexuality” is hardly an appropriate term – sexual assault and paedophilia might be more to the point.

Similarly, Tozer laments the tragedies of imperialism – not for the evils and injustices that they inflicted on colonised peoples, but for the fact that it brought the great powers into conflict. He is likewise blind to or at least silent on the questions of privilege, conformity, cruelty to children and anything else that might undermine Thring or the world in which he operated. This is a book written from inside Thring’s world. But that world has gone, and we need to understand Thring from where we now are. Tozer, alas, does not really get us there.

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