Lunchtime Lectures: Shoes and the Georgian Man

Shoes are everyday objects but they are loaded with meaning. In this talk, Matthew McCormack explores the topic of his new book, Shoes and the Georgian Man. Footwear impacts the body and its movements, and therefore social and occupational roles. As such, shoes tell us about gender relations and how these changed over the course of the eighteenth century. In this research, Matthew thought about shoes as material objects, and studied many examples in museum collections to think about their physical properties and what they would have been like to wear. Worn shoes preserve traces of the wearer’s body in their indentations, scratches and scuffs, providing a unique primary source about their wearer. They therefore tell us a lot about what it meant to be a man in the eighteenth century.

 

Matthew McCormack is Professor of History at the University of Northampton. His previous books include The Independent Man, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England and Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928. He is President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.