and buildings.35 The creation of such urban centres was a spatial expression of the power of the new middle-class urban élites, intended to provide, in the words of Simon Gunn, «a symbolic centre at the heart of an emptied public space as well as to affirm the collective power and presence of the provincial bourgeoisies».36 The masonic halls in the midst of these civic centres, devoted to secret ceremonies performed by lodges whose membership was in principle open to all respectable men of the town but in practice carefully controlled, powerfully symbolised the nature of these new élites.
Gender Issues, Masculinity and Emancipation Space as an expression of power and hierarchy is a prominent theme in modern scholarship to which the study of freemasonry has much to contribute. Masonic halls and civic centres were masculine spaces, distinguished from the other major development of the late Victorian city, the department store, seen as a largely female space.37 The analysis of Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff tracing the emergence in the 18th and 19th centuries of separate spheres for different sexes has influenced much recent work on social history, and provides another powerful interpretative framework for masonic history.38 This is shown by the works of Robert Beachy, who has recently discussed how masonic apologetic writings of the late 18th century helped popularise stereotypes of differences between men and women,39 and Mark Carnes, who has analysed how the rituals of fraternal societies shaped middle-class views of masculinity in 19th-century America.40
35 Simon Gunn, “The Middle Class, Modernity and the Provincial City: Manchester c. 1840-80” in Alan Kidd and David Nicholls (eds.), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain 1800-1940, Manchester: Manchester University Press 1999, pp. 112-127; Andy Croll, Civilizing the Urban: Popular Culture and Public Space in Merthyr, c. 1870-1914, Cardiff, University of Wales Press 2000, pp. 36-61. On the Sheffield masonic hall, see Appendix, Document No. 6, below, and also Clarke, op. cit., pp. 36-7, 87-8; Binfield, Hey et al., op. cit., 2, p. 57. In Monmouth, for example, the local masonic lodge took over in 1841 a theatre in the centre of the town, which received a facade similar in style to that recently added to the town”s methodist church: Kissack,
op. cit., p. 259. 36 Ibid., p. 123. 37 Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective, Berkeley: University of California Press 1996; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, “The Architecture of Public and Private Life: English Middle-Class Society in a Provincial Town 1780-1850”, in: Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (eds.), The Pursuit of Urban History, London: Edward Arnold 1983, pp. 326-45; Christopher P. Hosgood, “Mrs Pooter”s Purchase: Lower-Middle-Class Consumerism and the Sales 1870-1914”, in: Alan Kidd
and David Nicholls, op. cit., pp. 146-63. 38 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. The perceptive short discussion of freemasonry on pp.
425-8 of this book has been generally overlooked. 39 Robert Beachy, “Masonic Apologetic Writings and the Construction of Gender in Enlightenment Europe”, paper at the 2002 University of Sheffield conference “Lodges, Chapters and Orders: Fraternal Organisations and the Shaping of Gender Roles in Europe 1300-2000.
Abstract available on-line at
www.shef.ac.uk/~crf/news/besantconf/
beachy.htm. 40 Mark Carnes, “Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions
of Masculinity in Victorian America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1990, pp. 37-66; Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, New Haven: Yale University Press 1989.
107
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