Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (37 page)

1
I am siding with the fourth of Alun Withey’s suggested explanations for the triumph of shaving, namely that beards were rejected because they “came to symbolise an opposing model of roughness and rugged masculinity.” See Withey, “Shaving and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain,”
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
36 (2013): 231.

2
Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon,
Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon
, vol. 3, trans. Bayle St. John (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), 21.

3
John Woodforde,
The Strange History of False Hair
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 15.

4
Samuel Pepys,
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, vol. 3, part 2, (New York: Croscup and Sterling, 1893), 302 (entry for 30 October 1663), Hatitrust Digital Library.

5
Ibid., 306 (entry for 4 November 1663).

6
Ibid., vol. 6 (1895), part 2, 233 (entry for 31 March 1667).

7
For a discussion of the social significance of wigs, see Michael Kwass, “Big Hair: A Wig History of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France,”
American Historical Review
111 (June 2006): 643.

8
Quoted in Maria Jedding-Gesterling, “Baroque (ca. 1620–1715),” in
Hairstyles: A Cultural History of Fashions in Hair from Antiquity to the Present Day
, ed. Maria Jedding-Gesterling, trans. Peter Alexander and Sarah Williams (Hamburg: Hans Schwarzkopf, 1988), 105.

9
Bulwer devotes a chapter to beards in his book surveying human customs around the world. See John Bulwer,
Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: Or the Artificiall Changling Historically Presented
(London: W. Hunt, 1653), 193–216.

10
Poet John Hall, who supported Parliament, referred to royalist clerics as “distinguished by their Beards and Cassocks.” Quoted in Nicholas McDowell,
Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 162.

11
Georg Caspar Kirchmaier,
De Majestate Juribusque Barbae
(Wittenberg: Christiani Schrödteri, 1698), 2.

12
Boni Sperati [Samuel Theodor Schönland],
Barba Defensa, sive Dissertatiuncula de Barba
(Leipzig and Dresden: Christophor Hekelium, 1690), 30 (trans. J. Holland).

13
Ibid., 31.

14
Ibid., 47.

15
Johann Freidrich Wilhelm Pagenstecher,
De Barba Prognosticum Historico-politico-juridicum
(Burgo-Steinfurt: Arnoldinis, 1708), 6–7.

16
Quoted in Donald B. Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt,
The Amish
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 34.

17
Richard S. Wortman,
Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:44.

18
Lindsey Hughes, “‘A Beard Is an Unnecessary Burden’: Peter I’s Laws on Shaving and Their Roots in Early Russia,” in
Russian Society and Culture and the Long Eighteenth Century
, ed. Roger Bartlett and Lindsey Hughes (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), 22. See also Paul Bushkovitch,
Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 204.

19
Quoted in Hughes, “Beard,” 22.

20
Bushkovitch,
Peter the Great
, 207.

21
Hughes, “Beard,” 24.

22
John Perry,
The State of Russia under the Present Czar
(London: Benjamin Tooke, 1716), 196.

23
R. Atorin,
Problema bradobritiia v pravoslavnoi traditsii
(The Problem of Beard-Shaving in the Orthodox Tradition) (Moscow: Arkheodoksiia, 2009), chap. 4 (trans. Anjelika Gasilina, 2012).

24
Hughes, “Beard,” 28.

25
Ibid., 26.

26
Atorin,
Problema
, chap. 4.

27
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, ed. A. S. B. Glover (New York: Heritage Press, 1955). Rousseau’s original phrase is “J’étois ce jour-là dans le meme equipage négligé qui m’étoit ordinaire; grande barbe et perruque assez mal peignée.” See
Les Confessions
, vol. 2 in
Oeuvres de J. J. Rousseau
(Paris: E. A. Lequien, 1872), 155–56. Another English translation renders “grande barbe” as “a beard of a few days’ growth,” which is a reasonable interpolation. See Rousseau,
Confessions
, vol. 2, ed. P. N. Furbank (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 28–29.

28
Withey, “Shaving and Masculinity,” 225–43.

29
In addition to those discussed, a notable contribution to beard literature is the posthumous publication of German physician Christian Franz Paullini’s
Tractatus de Barba
, within Wilhelm Friedrich von Pistorius,
Amœnitates historico-ivridicæ
(Frankfurt and Leipzig: A. J. Felssecker, 1731). Another notable work is Francis Oudin, “Recherches Sur La Barbe”
Mercure De France
, March–April 1765.

30
Giuseppe Valeriano Vannetti,
Barbalogia: Ovvero ragionamento intorno alla Barba
(Roveredo: Francescantonio Marchesani, 1759), 6–7 (trans. Daniele Macuglia, 2010).

31
Ibid., 111–12.

32
Augustin Fangé,
Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire de la barbe de l’homme
(Liege: Jean-François Broncart, 1774), 52.

33
Ibid., 52–62.

34
Jacques A. Dulaure,
Pogonogogia, or a Philosophical and Historical Essay
(Exeter: R. Thorn, 1786), iv.

35
Marcellin Boudet,
Les Conventionnels d’Auvergne: Dulaure
(Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1874), 40–41.

36
Dulaure,
Pogonogogia
, 9.

37
Ibid., v–vi.

38
Ibid., 11.

39
Ibid., 141.

40
Jean-Joseph Pithou,
The Triumph of the Parisians
(n.p., 1789), quoted in Antoine de Baecque,
The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800
, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 139.

1
Daniel A. McMillan, “Energy, Willpower, and Harmony: On the Problematic Relationship between State and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in
Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History
, ed. Frank Trentman (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003) 181. See also Heikki Lempa,
Beyond the Gymnasium: Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany
(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 78–85.

2
Hans Ballin, “Biographical Sketch of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,”
Mind and Body
1 (October 1894): 3. See also Lempa,
Beyond the Gymnasium
, 87.

3
Frederick Hertz,
The German Public Mind in the Nineteenth Century
, trans. Eric Northcott (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), 37; Asa Briggs,
The Nineteenth Century
(New York: Bonanza Books, 1985), 157.

4
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn,
Deutsches Volksthum
, in
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Werke
, vol. 1, ed. Carl Euler (Hof: G. A. Grau, 1884), 293 (trans. David T. Barry, 2014).

5
Horst Ueberhorst,
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and His Time
, trans. Timothy Nevill (Munich: Moos, 1982 [1978]), 51–58.

6
Ibid., 63.

7
J. C. Flügel,
The Psychology of Clothes
(London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 74–76. See also Philippe Perrot,
Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century
, trans. Richard Beinvenu (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 30–32. See also Christopher E. Forth,
Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body
(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 48–55.

8
Victor Hugo,
Les misérables
, trans. Julie Rose (New York: Modern Library, 2009), 574.

9
Victor Hugo to Theophile Gautier, 1845, in
The Letters of Victor Hugo
, vol. 3, ed. Paul Meurice (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 36. Hugo does not say that he wrote the article praising beards, but his phrasing strongly implies it.

10
Ibid., 37.

11
Theophile Gautier,
Histoire du romanticisme
, 2nd ed. (Paris: Carpentier, 1874), 101.

12
Hugo,
Les misérables
, 905.

13
A. J. S.,
Histoire des moustaches et de la barbe
(Paris: Hernan, 1836), 12. See also Maxime du Camp,
Recollections of a Literary Life
(London: Remington and Co., 1893), 1:35–36.

14
Clara Endicott Sears,
Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 54. See also Stewart Holbrook, “The Beard of Joseph Palmer,”
American Scholar
13 (Autumn 1944): 453–54.

15
Sears,
Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands
, 67.

16
[William Lloyd Garrison], “Reform Extraordinary,”
Genius of Universal Emancipation
4 (2 October 1829): 30.

17
“Beard, Whiskers and Moustaches, Etc.,”
Southern Literary Journal and Magazine of Arts
4 (December 1838): 411.

18
Quoted in Joachim Wachtel,
Das Buch vom Bart
(Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1981), 63 (trans. Daniel Koehler, 2006).

19
Mark Girouard,
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 90–93.

20
Ibid., 112.

21
Quoted in Stanley Weintraub,
Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert
(New York: Free Press, 1997), 78.

22
Quoted in Weintraub,
Uncrowned King
, 88.

23
Robert Spencer Liddell,
The Memoirs of the Tenth Royal Hussars
(London: Longmans and Green, 1891), 75.

24
Aubril,
Essai sur la barbe et sur l’art de se raser
(Paris: E. Dentu, 1860), 44–45.

25
Liddell,
Memoirs
, 75.

26
Nevil Macready,
Annals of an Active Life
(London: Hutchinson & Co., 1924), 1:258.

27
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin Marbot,
The Memoirs of General Baron de Marbot
, trans. Arthur John Butler (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), 1:42–43.

28
“Military Moustaches” (letter to the editor),
Times
, 23 May 1828, 3. See also Henry Sutherland Edwards,
Personal Recollections
(London: Cassell and Co., 1900), 3.

29
Girouard,
Return to Camelot
, 112.

30
Quoted in Girouard,
Return to Camelot
, 115.

31
A. J. S.,
Histoire
, 9. See also “Histoire de la Barbe en France,”
Magasin Pittoresque
1 (1833): 158.

32
Quoted in Scott Hughes Myerly,
British Military Spectacle from the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 149.

33
Fernando Diaz-Plaja,
La vida española en el siglo XIX
(Madrid: Prensa Española, 1969), 155.

34
Charles Mackay,
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions
(London: Richard Bentley, 1841), 353.

35
Terrell Carver,
Friedrich Engels: His Life and Thought
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 14–15.

36
Quoted in Iorwerth Prothero,
Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830–1870
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 197.

37
“Ireland,”
Times
, 5 October 1843, 5.

38
Paul A. Pickering, “Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartists Movement,”
Past and Present
112 (1986): 160.

39
Richard Mullen and James Munson,
The Penguin Companion to Trollope
(London: Penguin, 1996), 36.

40
Elizabeth Davis Bancroft,
Letters from England, 1846–49
(New York: Scribners, 1904), 177.

41
Richard S. Wortman,
Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1:401–2.

1
Arthur Schopenhauer,
Essays and Aphorisms
, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2004), 223.

2
Paul F. Boller Jr.,
Presidential Anecdotes
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 125.

3
Quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Team of Rivals
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 258.

4
Quoted in Abraham Lincoln,
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 4:130.

5
Ibid., 4:129.

6
“Editorial Correspondence,”
Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal
, 1 June 1864, 86.

7
Donald B. Kraybill,
The Riddle of Amish Culture
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 63–65.

8
William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik,
Abraham Lincoln, the True Story of a Great Life
(New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1909), 2:197–98. See also “Abraham Lincoln’s Beard,”
New York Times
, 5 November 1876, 8.

9
Napoleon described these events in a letter quoted in Henry Walter De Puy,
History of Napoleon Bonaparte
(New York: Hurst & Co., 1882), 242–44. See also Pierre Hachet-Souplet,
Louis-Napoleon, prisonnier au Fort de Ham
(Paris: E. Dentu, 1893).

10
Hachet-Souplet,
Louis-Napoleon
, 215.

11
Guy de Maupassant,
Les dimanches d’un bourgeois
, in
The Life Work of Henri René Guy de Maupassant
(London: M. Walter Dunne, 1903), 15:2.

12
Henry James,
A Small Boy and Others
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 317.

13
Edmund Yates, “Bygone Shows,”
Fortnightly Review
, n.s. 39 (1886): 641.

14
Albert Smith,
The Story of Mont Blanc
(New York: G. P. Putnam & Co., 1853), 189.

15
Ibid., 190.

16
The Musical World
38 (14 January 1860): 28.

17
Walter Goodman,
The Keeleys on the Stage and at Home
(London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1895), 229; Peter H. Hansen, “Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain.”
Journal of British Studies
34 (July 1995): 300–301.

18
Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
(Brooklyn, 1855), 26. All Whitman quotes are taken from pages 26–30.

19
“Walt Whitman and His Poems,”
United States Review
, September 1855, 205.

20
“A Few Words upon Beards,”
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
19 (October 1852): 611–14.

21
[Henry Morley and William Henry Wills], “Why Shave?”
Household Words
13 (August 1853): 560–63.

22
“The Beard and Moustache Movement,”
Illustrated London News
24 (4 February
1854): 95. See also “Beard and Moustache Movement,” cartoon in
Punch
25 (1853): 188.

23
FUM, “Letter to the Editor,”
Home Journal
, 14 January 1854, 414.

24
Boucher de Perthes,
Hommes et choses: Alphabet des passions et des sensations
(Paris: Treuttel et Wurtz, 1851), 3:335. A contributor to a Cincinnati newspaper offered a typical formulation: a man’s throat, neck, lips, cheeks, and nostrils “are all filled with many smaller or larger glands of secretion, in which some of the most important processes of the system are carried on,” and to guard against a cold or inflammation in these glands, it was necessary to shield them from extremes of hot and cold, wet and dry. See “Wearing Nature’s Neckcloth,”
Christian Inquirer
[from the Cincinnati
Columbian
] 8 (31 December 1853): 1. Physicians reported clinical evidence of this theory. See Mercer Adam, “Is Shaving Injurious to the Health? A Plea for the Beard,”
Edinburgh Medical Journal
7 (1861): 568.

25
“The Uses of Hair,”
Lancet
76 (3 November 1860): 440. See also “Plea for Beard,”
Medical and Surgical Reporter
5 (1 December 1860): 234.

26
“The Effects of Arts, Trades and Professions, and Civic States and Habits of Living on Health and Longevity,”
Edinburgh Review
111 (January 1860): 5.

27
“Wearing the Beard,”
American Phrenological Journal
20 (August 1854): 37.

28
Auguste Debay,
Hygiène Médicale des Cheveaux et de la Barbe
, 3rd ed. (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1854), 200.

29
“Topics Astir,”
Home Journal
11(11 March 1854): 422.

30
Alexander Rowland,
The Human Hair, Popularly and Physiologically Considered
(London: Piper, Brothers & Co., 1853), 106.

31
Léon Henry,
La barbe et la liberté
(Niort: H. Echillet, 1879), 9.

32
Thomas S. Gowing,
The Philosophy of Beards
(Ipswich: J. Haddock, 1854), 17.

33
“The Beard,”
Westminster Review
, n.s. 6 (1854): 67.

34
John Tosh analyzes the problem of domesticity for men in
A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 145–69. See also Tosh,
Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Harlow: Pearson, 2005), 61–82.

35
“Concerning Beards,”
Every Saturday
, 15 July 1871, 66

36
Morley and Wills, “Why Shave?” 562. Other examples include “Wearing Nature’s Neckcloth,”
Christian Inquirer
[from the Cincinnati
Columbian
] 8 (31 December 1853), 1.

37
Artium Magister,
An Apology for the Beard, Addressed to Men in General, to the Clergy in Particular
(London: Rivingtons, 1862), 70.

38
Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion
, 23 April 1853, 268.

39
“Human Hair,”
Quarterly Review
(April 1853).

40
Sean Trainor, “Fair Bosom/Black Beard: Facial Hair, Gender Discrimination, and the Strange Career of Madame Clofullia, ‘Bearded Lady,’”
Early American Studies
12 (Fall 2014): 550.

41
Morris Robert Werner,
Barnum
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1923),
205–7. See also Neil Harris,
Humbug: the Art of P. T. Barnum
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 67.

42
Times
, 12 November 1889, 7.

43
Leslie Fiedler also makes this point in
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 31.

44
Theorist Judith Halberstam argues that the uncertain boundaries of male and female help propel the cultural effort to confirm and harden gender binaries. See Halberstam,
Female Masculinity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 27.

45
Plym S. Hayes,
Electricity and the Methods of Its Employment in Removing Superfluous Hair and Other Facial Blemishes
(Chicago: McIntosh Battery and Optical Co., 1894), 33–34.

46
Times
(London), 7 January 1899, 6. See also Fiedler,
Freaks
, 15.

47
Karin Lesnik-Oberstein, ed.,
The Last Taboo: Women and Body Hair
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 1–17. Modern bearded lady Jennifer Miller has fought this taboo in feminist-themed sideshows and circus acts, asserting with her words and body that facial hair is normal for women and does not represent any sort of masculine distinction or privilege. See Rachel Adams,
Sideshow U.S.A.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 219–28.

48
Quoted in Y. Michael Barilan, “The Doctor by Luke Fildes: An Icon in Context.”
Journal of Medical Humanities
28 (2007): 63.

49
Barry Milligan, “Luke Fildes’s
The Doctor
, Narrative Painting, and the Selfless Professional Ideal,”
Victorian Literature and Culture
44 (2016).

50
L. V. Fildes,
Luke Fildes, R.A.: A Victorian Painter
(London: Michael Joseph, 1968), 121. See also David Croal Thomson,
The Life and Work of Luke Fildes, R.A.
(London: J. S. Virtue, 1895), 30.