In Manliness: A Lecture (1858), the minister Hugh Stowell Brown explained in great detail what constituted true manliness:

Brown spelled out that ‘virtue and manliness are identical’, telling his working-class audience that manliness ‘stands in strong and eternal antagonism to every form of Licentiousness’ (ibid.). To be ‘manly’ was an ideal and an aspiration for men of all social ranks in the nineteenth century; the adjective conveyed prized masculine values to society including virtue, piety, courage, endurance, honesty and directness.

As Brown explains, to be manly, nineteenth-century men were required to manage their bodies and emotions; left unregulated, they could severely undermine manliness. Thus, physical and emotional self-control were essential to achieving manly qualities. Historians of masculinity demonstrate that Victorian men's character was forged in independence and self-discipline (Tosh 2005: 75). These were more than abstract values, however, since their attainment depended upon hard work and a pious mind and heart. As such, manliness was not predominantly cerebral but depended upon a man controlling his body and managing his feelings. Increasingly, historians recognise the importance of both bodies and emotions in the formulation of gender ideals. Christopher Forth, for example, demonstrates that dietary practices were considered materially as well as symbolically to construct the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Western European male body; commentators envisaged food as impacting on nervous, digestive and reproductive systems, thereby to craft the materiality of manhood (Forth 2009: 582). Manliness from 1880 to 1914, Stephanie Olsen concludes, ‘represented a cluster of carefully honed, controlled and directed emotions that were to ensure the embodiment, the emotional constitution of morality’ (Olsen 2014: 13; 14; 166).