History is undoubtedly weighty. But where is any height to history? Historian Matthew McCormack writes that “the history of the body posits that the cultural meanings and lived experience of bodies are contextually specific and loaded with political importance.” Surprisingly, he notes that height has played little role in such studies of the body. In fact, he argues, that even with its “strong gender associations,” height has been “striking” in its absence from many histories of femininity and/or masculinity.
And yet, consider the importance of tallness to masculinity over the last few centuries. “Tallness is part of our everyday parlance for talking about men,” McCormack points out. “This often carries implied moral evaluations, suggesting pride (to ‘walk tall’), rectitude (‘upright’) or greatness (someone to ‘look up to’).”
Napoleon Bonaparte, on the other hand, “epitomizes the negative associations of male shortness.” He’s even given his name to a complex or syndrome that describes smaller men who supposedly “overcompensate,” substituting attitude for altitude. Napoleon wasn’t actually short by the European standards of the day: at around 5′6″, he was average, and not much shorter than his great adversary, the Duke of Wellington. But in the propaganda war, the British very successfully painted Napoleon as “Little Boney,” a bantam-sized upstart of overweening ambition. The literal translation of the nickname his solders affectionately bestowed upon him, Le Petit Caporal, the Little Corporal, didn’t help. About Wellington, meanwhile, Fanny Burney wrote before Waterloo, “Since his return to military command, he has an Air the most commanding, a high, superior port, & a look of animated spirt. I think he is grown taller.”
In exploring height in definitions of masculinity in Georgian England, McCormack considers the very tall John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792).
“Sandwich was one of the most prominent statesmen of his day,” McCormack writes, “but nowadays tends to be remembered for three things: first, for the snack that he supposedly invented; second, for running the Admiralty during the disastrous American War; and third, for his scandalous lifestyle.”
Living “openly with his mistresses, one of whom was publicly murdered” by a “jealous suitor,” Sandwich’s “shortcomings as a public man were commonly related to those in his private life.” He was one of the most “caricatured people of his day.” His enemies loved to stress his height. In caricatures, he towers above the fashionable singers, akin to showgirls today, who accompany him.
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In Georgian England, height “could be associated with social status, political power, and ‘polite’ refinement.” Sandwich had all that. Those who weren’t naturally tall, however, could learn to look taller “through exercise, posture and material appurtenances.” Comportment was all; the shapely male leg was still being stressed. But there was a dark side to tallness as well: it could also be associated with “ambition, militarism, despotism, foreignness, and even castration.” Castrati, popular on London’s mid-eighteenth-century opera stages, tended to be tall and awkward: for all his vocal abilities, the famed Farinelli was a poor actor, notorious for his clumsiness. Sandwich’s enemies exploited these darker associations to the max.
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In the eighteenth century, men and women kept growing into their early twenties. Today, people are largely done “growing up”—becoming their tallest—by the ages of sixteen to eighteen. The eighteenth century also saw the rise of opprobrium for couples made of tall women and short men. Mores change, and so do bodies. The subsequent years of the reign of Queen Victoria, granddaughter of the last King George, saw major change in the ideas about and constructions of gender. Masculinity and femininity turn out to be a lot more plastic, a lot more mutable, than the supposed verities that ahistorical conservatives insist upon. For instance, high heeled shoes and riding boots, since Louis XIV fashionable footwear for men and women, became exclusively “feminine” during Victoria’s reign. They have remained so, but will they always be so from now on? The Victorian male body was supposed to be compact and muscular rather than the tall and lean of the Georgian ideal, emphasizing arms rather than legs. Tall soldiers, the pride of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century armies—and in the case of Frederick William I of Prussia’s Potsdam Giants, a virtual fetish—became a liability on nineteenth-century battlefields.
And Victorian historians looked back on the 4th Earl of Sandwich and shuddered, taking him to task for what they saw as his heightened moral and political failings—judgements not echoed by more recent historians.
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