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Officers and gentlemen? Class, values, and the British Army's Officer Corps, 1871-1901

This thesis examines the values and attitudes of the British Army’s officer corps during the period from 1871 to 1901, and how these values were linked to those of the British landed classes. Through studying the memoirs and other writings produced by the officers of this period, this thesis confirms that the link between these two systems was extremely close, and that the landed classes’ ideas of what constituted ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour were vitally important in shaping army officers’ conduct. This thesis argues that the acceptance of these values by the officer corps was not merely a product of their own social origins, but that officers subscribed to these values because they believed them to be particularly appropriate to military service. This attachment to gentlemanly values produced a deeply imbalanced set of competencies in the officer corps’ members, the effects of which remained present in the institutional culture of the army well beyond the end of this period. / Graduate / 2021-08-28

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/12084
Date31 August 2020
CreatorsYoumans, Gregory
ContributorsZimmerman, David
Source SetsUniversity of Victoria
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

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