This essay examines the history of the safety razor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it explores male shaving practices and the male investment in physical appearance in the age of industrial capitalism. In highlighting the history of a single material artifact to showcase the relationship between masculinity, good grooming, personal success, and notions of self-improvement, this essay also underscores the growing influence of American products in British life, the intricacies of the consumer economy, and the increasing sophistication of advertising practices.

As the primary means through which academic success was measured and professional credentials were established, competitive examinations for university degrees and civil service appointments became a frequently discussed topic among the Victorian and Edwardian elite in Great Britain. Students and dons (the term for college fellows with teaching and pastoral responsibilities) at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a whole range of outside observers, regularly commented on the importance of these exercises during the seven decades that passed between the curricular and administrative reforms of the 1850s and the conclusion of World War I, years in which these ancient institutions achieved their modern form and functioned, in the words of Jan Morris, as “power house [s]” and “conscious instruments of Victorian national greatness.” In an 1863 Student's Guide to the University of Cambridge, for example, J.R. Seeley, a famous Cambridge don and historian, celebrated the invigorating, youthful, and competitive nature of the Tripos (or Honors) examinations in a lengthy discussion of academic life: “Into these [examinations] flock annually the ablest young men … who during their University course have received all the instruction that the best Tutors, and all the stimulus that a competition well known to be severe, can give…. The contest is one into which the cleverest lads in the country enter [and] it may safely be affirmed that even the lowest place in these Triposes is justly called an honour.” By the 1860s, when Seeley first penned these comments, competitive examinations had become, in the words of one contemporary observer, “matters of … much interest and importance not only to those whose future success in life depended upon them, but to the public in general.” Public interest was further fueled, throughout this period, by numerous articles in the periodical press that discussed and debated the general value of competitive examinations and by the regular publication of test results in widely circulated, national newspapers such as the Times.

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.