This chapter considers how schools defined, measured, and cultivated accomplishment in the performing arts through an analysis of pedagogical repertories associated with Mr. and Mrs. Perwich’s school in Hackney, John Maynard’s “School of St. Julian’s,” a music school in Aberdeen, and the famous boarding school at Chelsea, run first by Jeffrey Banister and James Hart and later by Josias Priest and his wife Franck. Sources associated with these institutions preserve traces of more intimate sorts of performance instruction in early modern English schools, cultivated in lessons between a student and teacher. These pedagogical approaches, the repertories produced, and the performing bodies involved, were sometimes captured in printed images, written descriptions, and musical notation, allowing those beyond the school to avail themselves of the same instruction in the privacy of their domestic spaces. In this way, the boundary blurred between schoolroom and domicile, as students at schools learned skills to provide entertainment at home and those at home played music by celebrated school-based instructors. The dissemination of pedagogical repertories also facilitated the effacement of gendered expectations about performance, for musicians of both genders read about and emulated the feats of accomplished musical women and performed repertories created for the opposite sex.

This essay explores father figures who meditate on their relation to a dominant late nineteenth- early twentieth-century construction of active masculinity, or figures who often find themselves uncomfortably far from the era’s gender ideals. Seeing their own lives as “limited” and constrained, or akin to the era’s fears of masculine “overcivilization,” these figures find solace in an imagined trajectory of masculine accomplishment.  Their sons, however, appear to them as promising to restore the family’s depleted vigor, for the younger generation appears as more self-determined and more manly, especially in professional matters. Such meditations on manhood lead to a belief in the developmental potential of the next generation, which promises to supply a long-absent manliness. Not only are the young more active men, engaged in innovative fields that were not available to their elders, but they also seem poised to recover the kind of familial masculine distinction that their elders fear that they forfeited, both for themselves and for their families.