The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham

Abstract

tions and judgements on the man’s moral standing and the circumstances surrounding his life’s end. Hence, the book reveals much about journalistic framing and the nature of nineteenth-century society itself. Galpin acknowledges that her departure from broad sociological survey approaches risks overlooking changing attitudes across the century, and the book does tend to skim over fluctuating attitudes across an expansive time period. Nonetheless, Male Suicide and Masculinity in 19-Century Britain provides a thorough, and important, exploration of the socio-cultural circumstances that encouraged men to consider taking their own life, and the centrality of gender to how we should understand suicide.