Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century

Erin Mackie explores the shared histories of the modern polite English gentleman and other less respectable but no less celebrated eighteenth-century masculine types: the rake, the highwayman, and the pirate. Mackie traces the emergence of these character types to the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when traditional aristocratic authority was increasingly challenged. She argues that the development of the modern polite gentleman as a male archetype can only be fully comprehended when considered alongside figures of fallen nobility, which, although criminal, were also glamorous enough to reinforce the same ideological order. In Evelina's Lord Orville, Clarissa's Lovelace, Rookwood's Dick Turpin, and Caleb Williams's Falkland, Mackie reads the story of the ideal gentleman alongside that of the outlaw, revealing the parallel lives of these seemingly contradictory characters. Synthesizing the histories of masculinity, manners, and radicalism, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century aristocratic male.

Author: Erin MacKie
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 04/01/2014
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.55d
ISBN: 9781421413853

About the Author

Erin Mackie is a professor of English at Syracuse University. She is author of Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," also published by Johns Hopkins, and editor of The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from "The Tatler" and "The Spectator."