Yesterday we were introduced to ten of Britain’s dukes, their fortunes, their family history, and their personal claims to game. But, let’s see how they stack up against their Edwardian counterparts, with a little help from Wikipedia, John Bateman’s book, The Acre-ocracy of England, and a 1907 edition of the Royal Blue Book.

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From the Daily Mail:

The assembled: (from left to right) 1. James Graham, 8th Duke of Montrose; 2. David Manners, 11th Duke of Rutland; 3. John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset; 4. Ralph Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland; 5. Andrew Russell, 15th Duke of Bedford; 6. Edward Fizalan-Howard, 18th Duke of Norfolk; 7. Torquhil Campbell, 18th Duke of Argyll; 8. Maurice FitzGerald, 9th Duke of Leinster; 9. Murray Beauclerk, 14th Duke of St Albans; 10. Arthur Wellesey, 8th Duke of Wellington.

Dukes are just one rung down from royalty in the social pecking order and enjoy a special status way above the rank and file of the aristocracy. As peerages go, it’s the jackpot.

Today, there are just 24 non-royal dukes in existence, down from a total of 40 in their Georgian heyday. And it’s fair to say that no modern monarch or government is likely to create any more.

So, to celebrate its 300th birthday, Tatler magazine decided to invite this dwindling band of mega-toffs to a ducal lunch. The result was the largest gathering of dukes since the Coronation of 1953.

Some were too frail to attend. Some live abroad. But ten of them gathered for oysters and Dover sole in London’s clubland. And the result is this intriguing study of 21st century nobility.

‘After 300 years, we wanted to recapture the spirit of the original Tatler, and what better than a room full of dukes,’ says Tatler editor Catherine Ostler.

Once, the holders of these titles would have been the A-list celebrities of their time. Today, most people would be pushed to name a single one of them.

With hereditary peers cast out into the political wilderness, dukes might seem little more than a comic anachronism in modern Britain. While they retain their rank and social clout, their only power is financial.

In the case of, say, the Duke of Bedford, this amounts to £500million in art, London property and a large slab of Home Counties commuter belt. As for the Duke of Leinster, whose grandfather ran a teashop, it is next to nothing.

Yet many dukes still play an active part in public life. The Duke of Norfolk, as hereditary Earl Marshal, is still responsible for organising the State Opening of Parliament and any coronations which should occur.

The Duke of Northumberland runs several public bodies across the North East while his wife is the local Lord Lieutenant.

The very first dukedom was a royal affair. In 1337, Edward III created his son, the Black Prince, the Duke of Cornwall. The title derives from the Latin dux – leader – and, throughout history, fewer than 500 British men have held the rank of ‘Duke’.

The last non-royal dukedom was created in 1900 for the former Earl of Fife, who was upgraded to Duke following his wedding to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter.

There might have been a new one in 1955 when the Queen offered one to Churchill, but he declined, preferring to die a commoner.

The only non-duke at the Tatler gathering was historian Andrew Roberts, invited to chronicle the event.

‘They’re all related and they all stick up for each other,’ he recalls.

But he fears that dukes could become an endangered species. ‘Not long ago, two important dukedoms – Newcastle and Portland – became extinct,’ says the historian.

‘So, my parting plea to the dukes was simple, even if it startled some of them. I simply said: ‘Keep procreating!’

Read more HERE

In the summer of 1885, Karl Pearson founded The Men and Women’s Club with the aim to discuss “all matters…connected with the mutual position and relation of men and women.” Pearson drew his members from middle-class liberals, socialists, and feminists, and over the lifespan of the club (1885-1889), discussions ranged from sexual relations in Periclean Athens to the position of Buddhist nuns, to sexuality and its relation to marriage, prostitution, and friendship. In essence, The Men and Women’s Club existed to challenge the long-held norms for male and female interaction as well as notions of “proper” sexuality. In late Victorian England, where sexuality was seen by many as “base” and “animal” and ignorance of women’s bodies and all things concerning sex was widespread, discussion of such issues was indeed radical.

In 1885 Karl Pearson was twenty-eight, and an ardent eugenicist who believed that women were the key to national progress. In the club’s inaugural paper, “The Woman’s Question,” he reflected on what changes would occur should women gain access to education, professions and political representation. His treatise was ironically reflected in the make-up of the club, for many of the women felt themselves to be intellectually inferior to the men, who were of Pearson’s background: “radical liberal or socialist in their politics, and employed as lawyers, doctors, or university lecturers. They shared similar public school and Oxbridge backgrounds and were further linked through membership of the same West End men’s clubs: the Saville, the National Liberal Club, the Athenaeum.” Although a number of the female members were economically independent as teachers, writers or journalists, only one had been to university, and all but two were single.

The club’s constitution declared that it would meet monthly, consist of no more than twenty members, and be composed of equal numbers of men and women. They met in each others’ homes, although generally at the house of a male member, with half of the club’s thirty-six meetings taking place at the house of club’s President, Robert Parker, a barrister living in Brunswick Gardens, Kensington, the heart of respectable London. Once at the meetings, the men and women found it difficult to reconcile their gender privileges and marginalization, particularly on the subjects of the role of religion, emotion, and a woman’s individual rights and social obligations.

The club’s most famous female member was Olive Schreiner, a missionary’s daughter whose fictionalized account of her life in South Africa, The Story of an African Farm, made her a celebrity overnight. Schreiner was vocal in her challenge of commonly-held conceptions of female sexuality. Her belief that women experienced sexual pleasure intrigued the male members and horrified the female members. Pearson did propose that sex, even among animals, was never solely for procreation, but was also a “physical pleasure like climbing a mountain, but his support of uninhibited female sexuality fell short: like most “New Men,” who criticized and heralded the end of the patriarchal era but looked with fear towards the new feminist order, and was terrified and disoriented by any signs of female sexual agency in the flesh. Another bone of contention between the men and women was the former’s avoidance of taking responsibility for male sexuality vs the women’s attempt to encourage accountability. Not surprisingly, club members were not sexually adventurous and showed little enthusiasm for free-love doctrines.

The Men and Women’s Club disbanded in 1889, mainly due to the dissatisfaction of the men in the women members. In the eyes of Pearson and his peers, the women proved incapable of the level of scientific work the men demanded, they were serious but did not go very deep, and they were frustrating adversaries. By the end of the club’s existence, club meetings became increasingly deadlocked and stalemated, and neither side found satisfaction in the tone and objective of discussions. While most of the group drifted apart, crossing paths due only to their common social and political circles, Pearson went on to become the premiere voice on the “Woman Question” during the 1890s. His writings were read in Britain and America, and feminists on both sides of the Atlantic viewed him with much respect, using much of his rhetoric to push for legislative reform for women. Despite the short-lived club, its very existence was radical and startling, and very much a product of the late nineteenth century, a time when long-held assumptions and social norms were being challenged by men and women of all walks of life. The topic of female sexuality and gender roles remain today, but for this time, it was extraordinary that a small group of men and women could come together for four years to shatter norms.

Further Reading:
Science, feminism and romance: The Men and Women’s Club 1885-1889 by Judith R. Walkowitz
The real facts of life: feminism and the politics of sexuality, c1850-1940 by Margaret Jackson
City of dreadful delight: narratives of sexual danger in late-Victorian London by Judith R. Walkowitz
Banishing the beast: feminism, sex and morality by Lucy Bland
The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 by Roy Porter & Lesley A. Hall
Scandalous Lovers by Robin Schone

For the unmarried gentleman of high society, the world was his oyster. At no other time in history was bachelordom such a widespread, and pleasurable, pursuit. As the turn of the century dawned, the “Marriage Question” began to shift from the issue of surplus women, but on why men refused to marry! Certainly England’s system of primogeniture pushed penniless second, third, fourth, and beyond sons out into the far and wide outreaches of the British Empire, but that failed to explain why eligible men who remained at home were content to dash from cricket match to club to house party to hunting grounds with nary a thought to acquire a spouse.

In his text, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture, Howard P. Chudacoff argues that the bachelor subculture grew from the growing spaces created specifically for the consumption and entertainment of men–bars, taverns, barber shops, clubs, et al. I would add that men became more entrenched in their bachelordom in reaction to the increasing independence of women (the Bachelor Girls of next week’s post), which poked holes in the “normal” gender interaction of previous generations. The more women moved into traditionally masculine spheres, such as higher education, medicine, law, and other white-collar positions, which also thrust these marriageable women beneath their noses, the more men retreated behind barriers which would relieve the pressure of buckling gender barriers. Now men had to navigate social interactions with intelligent, independent and unmarried (and ostensibly unprotected females who would have formerly been considered fair game) women, yet social norms maintained the thought that women needed the protection and security a husband would provide. With a female coworker of marriageable age and reasonable attractiveness at the next desk, males no longer had the buffer of “work” to separate them from the proscribed times for courtship.

Out of this desire for a purely masculine domain first came the bachelor apartment. Prior to the 1880s, bachelorhood was regarded as “a mere temporary condition [...] a sort of interregnum between youth and sober, well-ordered manhood.” Unmarried men lived frequently in boarding houses, and not infrequently married the land lady’s daughter or the widow who sat across from him at meals. As concepts of the unmarried state changed by the end of the nineteenth century, the pressure for apartment houses built expressly for the residence of a bachelor grew, and the most luxurious apartment homes sprang up across New York practically overnight. These ran from fifteen hundred dollars per year for the most up-to-date plumbing, large rooms and meals delivered by a housemaid, to modest affairs of eight hundred to one thousand dollars (but always with plumbing!). London also joined the bachelor apartment, though on a more subtle scale, as the apartment blocks were built near or around Westminster, which was a typically masculine area of the Town. Ironically enough, the rise of the bachelor apartment ushered in a fad for dinner parties where unmarried men and women could mingle in a manner quite independent of chaperons or one’s parents.

However, the bastion of bachelordom–perhaps man in general–was the club. English clubs of course dated from the 17th and 18th centuries, but the late nineteenth century saw an explosion of gentleman’s clubs on both sides of the Atlantic (and the Channel) formed by all manners of men and groups. First and foremost were the political clubs of London: Brooks (Liberal/Whig), Carlton (premier Conservative club), Junior Carlton, and the Reform. The military, which had clubs for every branch and rank (Guards’, Army and Navy, East India United Service, etc), the artistic (Athenaeum for the literati; Garrick for actors; Authors for authors, et al), the sporting (Automobile, Royal Thames, Hurlingham, etc), and social/general clubs, the most famous being White’s, Boodle’s the Junior Athenaeum, the Marlborough (formed by Edward VII when Prince of Wales), and Travellers’.

In New York, under the aegis of J.P. Morgan, the city’s most powerful and most prominent men formed the exclusive Metropolitan Club, which, along with the Knickerbocker Club and the Union Club, were the most luxurious and coveted clubs in America. Here clubs were formed along interest lines, but unlike London society, the literati and the theater world did not mingle with the wealthy society men, and bachelors were less likely to use the men’s club as an escape from women (though this attitude declined as more English traits were adopted).

The bachelor life was most amenable to the fast-paced world centered around the theater. Gaiety girls, showgirls, chorus girls, and spectacles galore, tempted the bachelor with deep pockets and even deeper cups. In London, young bachelors–most of them military men–didn’t consider themselves men if they weren’t chucked from the Empire Theatre on Leicester Square at least once in their lifetime. Broadway was a bit more seductive, as the theater district abounded with naughty music halls and even naughtier cabarets. Here, the lobster palace society, the venue of the “butter-and-egg man” reigned supreme, and where luscious, giggling chorus girls, primadonnas, and grande dames of the stage, were wined and dined all night long. One cannot deny, however, that Paris was the destination for the bachelor who wanted to have fun with adventurous women, and among other places, such as the high-class brothels which catered to every taste, Maxim’s was the center around which Paris’s le high life formed. The food was excellent, but the service was even better, with the staff prepared for any activity in which its patrons could get into–even when Russian Grand Dukes doused the lights and began playing Russian roulette. Unlike the restaurants catering to the faster sets, Maxim’s was strictly for courtesans and gentlemen, and no respectable woman would dare enter its portals, much less recognize its existence.

The bachelor life was dangerous though, and the married men who indulged in its excesses were apt to find themselves on the receiving end of public outrage–as with the infamous Pie Girl Dinner–or, well, dead (Stanford White!). Ultimately, the life of the bachelor was so utterly sublime–girls, champagne, sports–it was a wonder why any gentleman of wealth and rank married at all! However, as worrisome as the growing numbers of bachelors were to society, the most worry was saved for that frightening, independent, “masculine” entity: the Bachelor Girl.

Further Reading:
Belle Epoque: Paris in the Nineties by Raymond Rudorff
Edward and the Edwardians by Phillip Julian
The Pursuit of Pleasure by Keith Middlemas
American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White The Birth of the ‘It’ Girl, and the ‘Crime of the Century’ by Paula Uruburu
Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York by M.H. Dunlop