In 1829, news reverberated throughout Dublin that Monsieur Beaujeu, the man charged with teaching gymnastics at the Royal Hibernian Military School, had died in a tragic accident. Demonstrating an exercise in which one swung from one pole to another, Beaujeu lost balance, fell from a height, and broke his neck. His last recorded words, supposedly, were ‘here it is, the end of gymnastics in Ireland’.Footnote 1 As physicians and gymnasts lamented his loss, Beaujeu’s position was quickly taken by fellow gymnast Louis Huguenin, who taught gymnastics in Dublin for several decades before establishing himself in Liverpool in and around 1850.Footnote 2 Beaujeu and Huguenin represented a new kind of public health expert in early-nineteenth-century Ireland. Both men were trained gymnasts who operated public and private practices. More importantly, both established firm bonds with members of the Irish medical profession. Beaujeu’s training system was the subject of James Macauley’s 1828 tract, Observations on gymnastics, and the gymnasium, which proffered gymnastics as a solution to innumerable physical and social ailments.Footnote 3 Huguenin, on the other hand, counted Charles Edward Herbert Orpen, fellow and member of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons, as an enthusiastic supporter.Footnote 4
The Royal Hibernian Military School, where both men were employed, had been founded in 1769 to educate the children of soldiers fighting in the British army. The school was the first of its kind, although an eventual sister school was opened in Chelsea in 1803.Footnote 5 Its twofold purpose was to provide an education to the sons and daughters of soldiers and, ideally in the mind of its governors, to provide a pathway for some boys into the British military. There is some evidence of success in this latter regard, but boys were more commonly apprenticed as artisans and labourers, while girls were encouraged to take work as seamstresses or servants. Students were brought up in the Protestant faith, although testimony from the governor in 1827 hinted at some students retaining their Roman Catholicism.Footnote 6 Significant for its link to the military, the school could never be referred to as large. A period of growth from the late eighteenth century to 1830 saw the numbers move from the 200s to the 600s.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, the school’s military link meant that its funding, although meagre at times, was secure and that its composition of instructors varied between teachers and military officials.
The school reflected a broader militarism within Irish society from the late eighteenth century. As James Deery and others have made clear, Britain’s war with France created an ‘unprecedented demand’ for soldiers to fight revolutionary and Napoleonic forces.Footnote 8 Overall enlistment figures in the British military shifted from nearly 40,000 men in 1793 to over 220,000 by 1813.Footnote 9 1801 marked a particular highpoint when 469,000 men were mobilised.Footnote 10 Significantly, this demand lowered barriers for Irish Protestant and Roman Catholic soldiers to enter the military and to move up its ranks. This was certainly the case after the foundation of an Irish Militia in 1793.Footnote 11 As with other conflicts, no one single factor, ideological or economic, underpinned Irishmen’s decisions to enlist. The wars with France and Napoleon were fought on the continent, but conflict, and the danger of conflict, was brought home at several points, notably with the failed French naval effort to land at Bantry Bay in 1796 and, of course, the 1798 Rebellion.Footnote 12 As Evan Wilson’s work on British naval defences during this period notes, both naval and land-based defences were established in Ireland. War was thus prominent via newspaper stories both of continental battles but also on Irish soil and sea.Footnote 13 Thomas Bartlett has estimated that at least 150,000 Irishmen fought in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, often at critical stages.Footnote 14
War against Revolutionary and later Napoleonic France from 1793 to 1814 was fuelled by, and encouraged the creation of, new forms of military training, some of which eventually fed into the Hibernian Military School. In 1792, General David Dundas published the first official book of drill training for British troops. Dundas’s tactics established a platform for later military drills and, in essence, became the starting point for a new kind of military thinking about how to train and indoctrinate troops.Footnote 15 The next great innovation came at the turn of the century when Sir John Moore initiated a new form of holistic drill, which focused on both physical and mental training. Moore’s drill, which began with a single brigade and eventually spread across the entire British army, encouraged soldiers to be fast and pliable. Soldiers were trained to move quickly, to take positions on a variety of terrains and to march long distances.Footnote 16 Moore’s system came two decades before the British military hired a physical training instructor, but it foreshadowed new methods in the Irish and British Isles and elsewhere.Footnote 17 This was combined with a new civilian interest in physical training which deemed physical activity as a core component of education. The course of nineteenth-century physical education in Ireland and England was defined by those promoting military drill, those stressing the need for more holistic, natural movements and the majority of institutions which used a combination of the two.
Post-Napoleonic Europe had become alive to the possibilities offered by physical training.Footnote 18 Some practitioners, such as the Prussian physical educationalist, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, promoted gymnastics as a form of national redemption. As is well documented, Jahn’s fury at Prussia’s defeat to Napoleon led him to create a system of gymnastics centred on nationalism that aimed to strengthen Prussian boys and men.Footnote 19 Less militaristic systems could be found in Sweden where Per Henrik Ling devised a callisthenic system designed to build heath, massage the organs and increase vitality alongside a more robust military system.Footnote 20 In 1821, Swiss army officer P. H. Clias was appointed superintendent of gymnastics in the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In 1824, a British army officer in India, Henry Torrens, recommended a training system centred on wooden clubs as a means of improving troop discipline and health. What is important to note here is how transnational this early era of gymnastics was.Footnote 21 Beaujeu’s 1828 treatise on physical education explicitly mentioned all those innovators already noted, as well as multiple other European figures as inspiration for his practice.Footnote 22 The Irish experience of gymnastics for children was simultaneously inward- and outward-facing. This article weaves together histories of medicine, gender and transnationalism through the prism of gymnastics for children. What can be gained from a study of Irish gymnastics at the dawn of the nineteenth century, especially given the ongoing focus on Irish physical culture at the end of the same century? Put simply, it is argued here that children’s bodies became a site of intense focus during this period, one loaded with fears and societal aspirations. While the constructed nature of childhood is much-discussed in Irish historiography, the physical body is often hidden from the record.Footnote 23 Here, fears of modernity and civilisation, of devitalised genders, as well a growing effort to medically control the body, are situated as a function of childhood during the first half of the nineteenth century. As argued elsewhere, the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century was a period when physicians and educators became acutely concerned with not only childhood health but, more importantly, medicalising the child’s body.Footnote 24 Such a backdrop frames this study. The study of Irish exercise, as opposed to Irish sport, remains in its infancy, and studies from the early nineteenth century are near non-existent.Footnote 25 This also holds for medical opinions concerning the healthy body and its cultivation.Footnote 26 While the emergence of gymnastics during this period was clustered around Dublin, reporting and writing on it spread throughout the country. Seeking to do justice to this multifaceted phenomenon, the article is divided into three distinct, but overlapping, areas.
First, the article explores the transnational nature of European fitness and conceptions of childhood during this period and situates the Irish instance within that context. As the key figures from this time in Ireland, Beaujeu and Huguenin, explicitly saw themselves as part of a new generation of trainers, this section explains their broader significance and capital within Ireland. Next, the article explores the rise of exercise classes for the public in Ireland, especially for girls and boys. Finally, attention is given to the interactions between a growing number of Irish physicians and medics interested in using exercise as cure and these new civilian trainers. This story, often alluded to but rarely explored in depth, highlights the multifaceted importance of health and fitness at the beginning of the nineteenth century.Footnote 27
I
The growth of gymnastics in Ireland reflected wider medical and media trends shaped by European influences.Footnote 28 Central to the growth of gymnastics was a rising tide of nationalism alongside concerns about children’s health. These two were intimately linked. Take, for example, the German physical educationalist Johann Gutsmuth whose critical and widely read 1793 work Gymnastik für die Jugend linked strong children to stronger outcomes for the nation-state. In a highly provocative opening chapter, titled ‘We are weak because it does not enter our minds to be strong’, Gutsmuth argued that a ‘degree of bodily strength and sound health … is profitable and advantageous in the established state of society’.Footnote 29 Although written as a nationalist tract, with an intense focus on masculinity, Gutsmuth’s words were translated into English by 1800 and brought to England in the 1820s through physical educationalist P. H. Clias, who counted himself a Gutsmuth disciple.Footnote 30
This focus on the child as proxy for the future well-being of a society has been regularly discussed in the field of children studies in Ireland. Perhaps most relevant for the current study is Mary Hatfield’s ground-breaking work on middle-class childhoods in nineteenth-century Ireland, which highlights both the ideological value of children in broader societal debates but also the material culture of childhood for boys and girls.Footnote 31 Hatfield examines how the broad scaffolding of childhood in the modern age — such as mandatory education, declining labour and leisure activities — were first applied in the nineteenth century. Efforts to redefine childhood as something separate from adulthood, but also separate from the workforce, occurred alongside the rise of a new scientific impetus to ‘rationalise’ childhood. Efforts to measure and manage childhood development slowly became ubiquitous in education, parenting and medicine.Footnote 32 Childhood was, in some respects, a site of contest for ‘influence and control’ by those professionals and authorities seeking to understand and manage children.Footnote 33
Subsequent work by Hatfield on boarding schools has highlighted the constructed nature of boyhood and girlhood.Footnote 34 Institutions served as breeding grounds for gendered identities, especially when it came to the career and societal paths expected of men and women. While acknowledging children’s own agency, Hatfield nevertheless notes the importance of new philosophical and pedagogical theories in shaping children’s worldview.Footnote 35 Middle-class children during this period were often met as projects, objects to be moulded and guided into adulthood.Footnote 36 Hatfield’s work complements previous studies by Virginia Crossman and Sarah-Anne Buckley concerning the role of institutions in shaping or controlling (working-class) childhood.Footnote 37
Discipline was a given in schools and in the home, but the underlying philosophy for middle-class children prioritised development. Working-class children were likewise treated as subjects to be moulded but were often met with great suspicion and, in the case of some institutions, great cruelty. While formal schooling for all, or at least the intention of schooling for all, did not materialise until the 1831 Education Act, education before and after the act was used to train children for adulthood. Certainly the 1831 act, as Thomas Walsh has reiterated through several studies, sought to provide moral and philosophical grounds for responsible adulthood as understood, in part, by allegiance to the British Empire.Footnote 38 This was made explicit in the Royal Hibernian Military School. Physical training could be a conduit to instilling allegiance to the empire but, it is important to distinguish the kind of training found in the Military School from that prevalent in the mid to late nineteenth century. As is well established, British and Irish schools began to embrace sport from the mid nineteenth century as a means of inculcating boys with the discipline, teamwork and piety associated with an idealised form of British manliness. This ‘muscular Christian’ ethos underpinned a great deal of sporting expansion in schools and in society more generally, with follow-on effects for girls.Footnote 39 By the end of the nineteenth century, military drills and physical training were being used to this effect in schools, as well as by nationalist organisations seeking to foster a distinct Irish identity. However, earlier in the century, training for children was, at least in Britain and Ireland, largely immune from nationalist or militaristic intentions. Focus was paid more to their health and educational well-being, as well as their overall development.
Work elsewhere has highlighted the multiplicity of exercise systems circulating throughout Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. While many shared an educational outlook informed by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and, to a lesser extent, John Locke, the majority traced their training knowledge, or at least their inspiration, to individuals like Jahn, whose Turneverin system was one of the most popular in existence.Footnote 40 Others cited P. H. Ling, whose Swedish method encompassed several systems aimed at different populations (soldiers, children, men and women).
By the 1820s and 1830s, the aforementioned two high-profile gymnastic instructors, Monsieur Beaujeu and Louis Huguenin, were operating in Dublin. Beaujeu, whose origins remain obscure (one of the earliest mentions notes that he came ‘from Spain’), emerged in the Anglophone world in 1823 when he was employed as a fencing master in Liverpool.Footnote 41 Liverpudlian newspapers clarify that he divided his time between Liverpool and Dublin.Footnote 42 Such was the demand for Beaujeu within these two cities that newspaper articles noted that educationalists and physicians in each city sought to ‘poach’ Beaujeu from the other.Footnote 43 This eventually occurred in 1825 when Beaujeu was employed by Dublin’s Royal Hibernian Military School and tasked with leading roughly 600 boys and girls in gymnastic exercises on a regular basis throughout the week.Footnote 44 As already noted, the Royal Hibernian Military School had been established in the previous century as a place of education for the orphaned children of those whose fathers had served in the British military.Footnote 45 Given the broader militarism of many gymnastic systems, it is perhaps unsurprising that Beaujeu was offered employment. Indeed, in a later account, Beaujeu was praised for helping to inject discipline into the school through physical practices.Footnote 46 Crucially, however, Beaujeu and his wife, Madame Beaujeu, were also afforded the opportunity to run classes for the general public concurrently with his work in the school. In Beaujeu’s first public demonstration of gymnastics, he used the opportunity to petition Dublin’s elite classes to open a gymnasium, the Dublin Evening Post stating that:
M. Beaujeu’s object is, to impress on the public mind by this preliminary and gratuitous display, the many advantages likely to accrue from the formation of such an Establishment in this city; similar ones having been formed with the greatest success in London, Edinburgh, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Brussels and St. Petersburg.Footnote 47
Beaujeu himself soon opened such a space at 39 Dawson Street in Dublin.Footnote 48 Around this time, he also volunteered to teach gymnastics to boys at the Foundling School in Dublin. In a Commissioner’s Report on Education in Ireland, John Pomeroy, one of the Foundling School’s governors, noted that Beaujeu’s time at the school had been short-lived and was merely an experiment to see if gymnastics would improve the health and morale of the children.Footnote 49 Interestingly, the commissioners contrasted Beaujeu’s charges at the Military School with his former pupils from the Foundling School, concluding that the health and strength of the Military School pupils was far superior.Footnote 50
The following sections will discuss Beaujeu’s system and schooling in greater detail. Here, it is suffice to stress that Beaujeu considered himself as one of many transnational gymnastic teachers. In 1828, Beaujeu and Madame Beaujeu (daughter of the architect Gabriel Murphy) published A treatise on gymnastic exercises, or calisthenics, for the use of young ladies, this being one of the first published works on callisthenics for women.Footnote 51 Within the opening pages, they situated his book, not in Ireland, but in Europe. They cited John Locke’s philosophical musings on the tabula rasa that had inspired a generation of physical educationalists and gymnastic experiments in Switzerland, Saxony, Prussia and Paris. Beaujeu praised ‘Mr. Tissot … [whose] excellent work … inspired Gutsmuths and Salzmon at Schnepfental in Saxony, Pestalozzi at Iverdum, Fellenberg at Hofwil, Amoros at Madrid and Clias at Berne’.Footnote 52 Were Beaujeu’s references comprehensible for his Irish audiences? There is some evidence to suggest that they were. In a 1834 article in the Dublin Penny Journal, Philip Dixon Hardy argued that ‘Gymnastic exercises are now so generally recommended by physicians and are at once so agreeable and beneficial to the bodily frame, that we feel we could not offer the generality of our young friends any thing more to their mind’.Footnote 53 Hardy went on to note the rise of gymnastics in Germany (‘the first country that attempted the revival of these ancient and manly sports’), Berlin, Denmark, and London.
Beaujeu clearly envisioned himself as part of a transnational profession and positioned himself accordingly. While his work in Dublin prevented him from working elsewhere, there is evidence that he again sought to divide his time between Dublin and Liverpool in 1827.Footnote 54 Owing to the Beaujeus’monograph and position within Irish society, more is known about them than their contemporaries, but it is clear that fellow gymnastic instructor, Louis Huguenin, as well as a steady stream of dancing and comportment instructors who included gymnastics among their services during this period, likewise capitalised on the social capital of their European heritage and attained a great deal of patronage during this period: many even titled themselves ‘Professor’ or ‘Monsieur’.Footnote 55 Huguenin leveraged his contacts following Beaujeu’s death to secure Beaujeu’s former post at the Military School where he taught for several decades before moving to Liverpool. Also echoing Beaujeu, Huguenin’s later monograph on physical training quoted liberally from Tissot and Saltzmann to stress his connection to the European awakening to physical training. Irish interest in gymnastics, or callisthenics, was thus not unique, nor was it inward facing. It was treated by many in the press, education and medicine as an exciting system which had the potential to cure a variety of ills.
II
As is well established within Irish historiography, overt efforts have long been made to teach children how to become boys and girls, men and women, through education, sport, medicine and general leisure.Footnote 56 What is missing from these discussions is the role that the body had within this process. This is not a physical body adorned with jewellery, clothing, or cosmetics but rather one shaped by posture, strength and sinew.Footnote 57 It is clear that Beaujeu, Huguenin and their many supporters believed in the value of training for children’s socialisation into functional forms of masculinity and femininity. For boys, training under either system was linked to upstanding moral character, strength and the ability to take orders. Conversely, training was understood to keep girls slim and robust while averting excessive brain fatigue from too much study. Boys were envisioned as conquerors, girls as caretakers. The marshalling of the body was at the centre of such debates and while Ireland did not display the same fetishisation of posture as a marker for discipline that George Viagrello has found elsewhere, the ability to train the body was a marker of achieved gender status.
Training differed for boys and girls, a fact represented by the ubiquitous contemporary terms gymnastics and calisthenics. According to Gustavus Hamilton, a physical trainer from this period, gymnastics focused on ‘every vigorous exertion of the muscles’, and encompassed some form of walking, balancing, vaulting and climbing. It involved the use of vaulting horses, parallel bars, ropes, poles and ladders. Callisthenics (as Hamilton was keen to stress) derived from the Greek words for beauty and strength.Footnote 58 These were the characteristics he wished to instil through his system. Both systems shared some of the same exercises, although boy-specific and girl-specific movements did exist. Jan Todd’s work has made clear that the primary distinguisher for many trainers in the early nineteenth century was the intensity of exercise used for both sexes.Footnote 59 Boys were encouraged to exercise and train far more vigorously than girls. Such programmes, as Patricia Vertinskyhas shown, were largely influenced by gendered ideas about what was safe for women.Footnote 60 One of the century’s most popular fitness writers, Donald Walker, warned girls and ladies against vigorous activity (including running), lest it harm their ability to reproduce or raise children.Footnote 61 There was some debate however, since a minority of trainers promoted more vigorous physical activity for girls.
Beaujeu and Huguenin taught exercises to adults and children of both sexes. Beaujeu, whose wife taught gymnastics with him and independently, was a forthright supporter of vigorous physical activity for girls. In his position at the Military School, Beaujeu taught boys and girls gymnastics, whereas as a private instructor at his Dawson Street establishment, he both taught men and women. While the fees for his private gymnasium were never printed, repeated mentions of the nobility, gentry, gentlemen and ladies, were found in his advertisements.Footnote 62 Likewise, Beaujeu’s list of patrons, many of whom were well-respected physicians and educators, gave a certain prestige to his practices. Despite the classed differences between the predominantly working-class girls Beaujeu attended to at the school, and the middle- and upper-class clientele at his gymnasium, Beaujeu nevertheless found a commonality in the physical weaknesses from which he believed all Irishwomen suffered.
In his 1828 monograph, Beaujeu wrote that the ‘want of bodily exercise for young ladies, especially in schools, has long been felt and lamented’.Footnote 63 This resulted in a situation wherein even individuals in seemingly good health were nevertheless suffering from visible weaknesses: ‘few individuals possess good equilibrium when walking.’Footnote 64 The reason for this was simple. Although callisthenics was being readily taught to men, no one had ‘adapted to the capacity and wants of the female sex and brought within their reach this … indispensable art’ (physical training). Beaujeu sought to challenge this situation and to ‘tear the rising generation from our voluptuous habits, from the effeminacy of our degenerate manners, that we may, thereby produce “souls of fire in iron hearts”’.Footnote 65 These were powerful words for the time, although Beaujeu was not unique in blaming modern society, and its sedentary nature, for enfeebling women. There was a concern that modern life had made women inactive and, even worse, that the push for women to educate themselves had led to a privileging of learning to the detriment of their health. In some contemporary writings, it was declared that an imbalance between physical health and an overabundance of learning was at the root of nervous disorders suffered by girls and adolescents. Beaujeu taught a combination of callisthenic movements, including movements akin to pull-ups and dips, and exercising using gymnastic apparatus.Footnote 66
What Beaujeu and others often failed to appreciate was the physical demands of working-class women in cities and rural areas whose work was often very intensive. Returning to Donald Walker, his 1837 monograph chided upper-class women for allowing their servants to do all the manual labour of the house, thus depriving themselves of valuable exercise.Footnote 67 Where Beaujeu distinguished himself from others was in the exercises he prescribed for this supposed ill. Todd cites Beaujeu as one of the few instructors during this period with a truly revolutionary perspective on women’s physical capabilities. Tracing the rise of British and American physical training for women in the early nineteenth century, Todd notes two schools of thought concerning the training of women.Footnote 68 One, inspired by French philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau, stressed the need for gentleness in training. There was an assumption that women presumed that physical frailty (when compared to men) necessitated less intense activities. This could lead to farcical claims: in 1837, Donald Walker advised women against running or leaping least it damage the pelvis or those areas ‘peculiar to their sex’.Footnote 69 The other school of thought, to which Beaujeu subscribed, believed in equal physical training for men and women.
What is important to note here is that Beaujeu’s system ran counterculturally to mainstream ideas about exercise. His system, which included using equipment and cumbersome bodyweight movements, was not the norm. While others from his generation were censured for this approach, including Walker, whose gentle system of exercise was nevertheless deemed too strenuous by some, Beaujeu’s system was praised for helping to alleviate physical deformities. Commenting on Beaujeu’s successes, James Macauley, then surgeon to the Royal Hibernian Military School, noted first hand an improvement ‘in the Female department’Footnote 70 in both the physical health and the physical beauty of the girls. The greatest compliment paid to a country, according to Macauley, was to praise the beauty and physical form of its women.Footnote 71 Physical beauty and physical health, above all else, were expected of girls, and it was their duty to maintain them.
For Macauley and his contemporaries, these were matters not just of mere vanity, but concerned the future of the race itself. While not as intense as in the later decades of the nineteenth century, the fear of physical ‘degeneracy’, and beliefs around the role women played in challenging it, seeped through Macauley’s writings on Beaujeu. Macauley believed that modern conditions ‘produce a degeneracy of the human species … we therefore owe it [to children] … to leave no means untried that may assist in the promotion of feminine beauty and manly strength.’Footnote 72 Beaujeu’s monograph likewise lamented the ‘want of bodily exercise for young ladies’, which he believed had detrimental effects for future generations.Footnote 73 The message was clear. Girls, and as was made clear in subsequent writings, women, were expected to have slender figures and be physically attractive. While some of Beaujeu’s writings, as well as those of his patrons, endorsed training for women to regulate the body after too much ‘brain work’ (i.e. schooling), the largest incentive related to domesticity and the birthing of healthy children.Footnote 74 Exercising their bodies was thought the best way to socialise them for these roles.
It is worth pausing on the significance of Macauley’s writings. They included rudimentary efforts to quantify the benefits of physical activity for girls and a clear effort to connect these ‘objective’ measurements to gender.Footnote 75 Decreased incidences of illness among the Military School’s girls, as well as Macauley’s anecdotal observations about their appearance and health, were linked to his critiques of ‘sickly’ womanhood in Irish society. The girls with robust health were presented as having the potential to grow into strong women who, it was assumed, would produce stronger, healthier children. Discussions of callisthenics and, to a lesser extent gymnastics, were often linked to concerns about future generations.
Huguenin later book on physical training similarly stressed the importance of a slender physique for women as a sign of their health. Seeking to persuade women to take up physical activity, Huguenin utilised a Lamarckian theory of genetics wherein physical traits of the mother and father would be passed onto their offspring.Footnote 76 In gymnastic and callisthenic circles, a commonly used example was that of the blacksmith, whose strong and muscular arms would be passed to their offspring.Footnote 77 For Huguenin, this was a matter of genetic inheritance which impacted not just the family, but the human race: ‘Should you have nothing to bequeath your child — should you bestow on his mind but a narrow education still he will bless you if you form his body to health.’Footnote 78 Such writings were focused on women rather than men. Despite the conservative outcomes both Beaujeu and Huguenin sought to achieve from their training, they were credited with utilising rigorous training for their charges. Lesser-known instructors during this period went one step further and included callisthenics alongside dancing, drawing and deportment as part of education programmes for girls. Chris Shilling and others have persuasively discussed the role that ‘physical capital’ — that is, the kudos, prestige and value attached to certain bodies — plays within societies. Beaujeu’s contemporaries claimed the ability to identify a girl trained in callisthenics by sight alone. The way one held their body, and moved it, was presumed to betray their beauty, their ability to birth healthy children in the future and their robustness in modern life.
III
What then of boys and men? Given the martial masculinity which underpinned a great deal of early-nineteenth-century gymnastics, it is perhaps unsurprising to see that male gymnastics was likewise infused with a rigid dichotomy between effeminate or enfeebled masculinity and strong masculinity. According to such logic, modern society, but especially modern education, had inadvertently stripped boys and young men of their vitality. Boys ‘cramped’ in hot classrooms for hours at a time, men whose work was so mentally strenuous they dragged their bodies around unthinkingly, and those raised to be ‘helpless creatures in human form’ were regular examples used during this time.Footnote 79 Huguenin was particularly scathing about modern society’s influence over young men. He argued: ‘Confine a young creature in a dark dungeon, treat him as a criminal and deprive him of every youthful enjoyment, what a melancholy, gloomy and suspicious, unsocial being will he become!’Footnote 80
Rousseau’s writings about how modernity might corrupt men’s minds and bodies clearly hung in the background of such assertions. For Huguenin, exercise helped to ‘relieve the nervous matter of the brain from too great pressure’ and to restore equilibrium to the body.Footnote 81 There was a desire for men to, in the words of Rousseau, have the ‘reason of a sage and the vigour of an athlete’.Footnote 82 Physical activity for boys was taken as the most effective means of returning them to a natural, even pro-modern, state of wellbeing. Exercise could counter modern life and, thus, help preserve the natural vibrancy exhibited by men. Despite the fact that many of these systems used the same exercises as those used in the military, or by nationalist groups like Jahn’s Turnverein, gymnastic rhetoric in Ireland tended to be more subtle about the nationalist or martial connotations of training, favouring instead vaguer statements about strengthening future generations.
Vibrant men would aid the nation-state. Macauley, who presented his writings as being informed by his medical credentials, longed for a nation replete with ‘manly strength’ whose offspring would be ‘a stout and hardy race’.Footnote 83 Gymnastics was not an optional activity but rather something necessary to bring the ‘energies of our youth into action’.Footnote 84 Within such texts, an uneasy tension existed between those gymnastic systems inspired by Rousseau and those informed by military men. Rousseau’s work was hostile to Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the nasty, brutish and short lives of ‘natural’ men, yet those attempting to join Rousseau with the nation-state often attempted to promote gymnastics as a salve for modernity’s corrupting influence while simultaneously situating it within nationalist ideals one step removed from conflict. Macauley was not alone in this regard, as in London P. H. Clias and others continually wrote of the nation-state in relation to children’s gymnastics.
For Macauley and others, gymnastics also served a more moralistic purpose: ‘Gymnastics comes into its own in getting boys off the streets … where associated with their equals, no evil communications would be likely to take place, enjoying a healthful and certain and satisfying species of exercise.’Footnote 85 This came several decades before the muscular Christian movement, which was likewise originally cultivated among the upper-classes, justified sport and exercise through the maxim mens sana in corpore sano or a healthy mind in a healthy body.Footnote 86 Typically cited as a mid-nineteenth-century public school phenomenon in Britain, the muscular Christian ideal came to be a defining one in boy’s education. The disciplining of the body through sport and/or exercise was thought by schoolmasters, journalists and charitable institutions to inculcate civilised values into charges. In 1833, an unnamed journalist for the Dublin Penny Journal claimed the ‘ancients’ used gymnastics to prepare for war, whereas modern trainees needed to be fit for the rigours (both mental and physical) of modern life.Footnote 87
What use was success for young men, asked Macauley, if one possessed ‘a dyspeptic, enervated, broken up and sometimes consumptive habit of body’?Footnote 88 Much like discussions on femininity, there was, of course, a class element to this. Beaujeu, although primarily advertising himself as a trainer of women and girls, actually predominantly trained boys and men. As a large portion of the children at the Royal Military School were working-class, Beaujeu faced some opposition from the board of governors for teaching them gymnastics.Footnote 89 As Macauley recalled, some questioned the validity of teaching such boys to climb ropes and poles as these exercises would only serve to make them better criminals. However, as reported in The Kaleidoscope in 1827, fears were allayed when Beaujeu’s charges began to display improvements in ‘bodily health and character’ which fully satisfied his governors.Footnote 90 Owing to his employment, Beaujeu was more capable than others of displaying his results for the public. One such instance came during a event in the Phoenix Park, in Dublin, where 400 of Beaujeu’s male students gave a gymnastic demonstration in front of 1,500 spectators.Footnote 91 Showing their ‘skill and ability’, the boys’ ‘bodily powers’ was praised in the press and later contrasted with those boys unfortunate enough to live an ‘enfeebled’ existence.Footnote 92
For those who both promoted and enjoyed gymnastics, dedicated training of the body was presented as a salve for men suffering through modern society. Like Rousseau, whose influential book Emile promoted a ‘noble savage’ ideal for men, the instructors discussed here subscribed to the idea that society was stripping men of their innate physicality.Footnote 93 Gymnastics and callisthenics could help restore equilibrium between mind and body and, in some cases, push men towards their presumed innate nature.
Such thinking revealed multiple fault lines in how some conceived of their masculinity. Clerical work and studies were devitalising, society deprived men of their physicality, and enfeebled men existed everywhere. This rhetoric came to be particularly powerful in the later decades of the century, but they took hold in writings from the early 1800s. A clear argument put forth by gymnastic instructors, the press and their admiring cohort of medics was that health was a core basis of gender. Strong and powerful bodies were presumed to represent disciplined and vitalised men while slender and physically attractive women promised the birthing of stronger offspring. Such gendered ideas existed elsewhere in Dublin society, but the primacy on the physical body in these discourses signalled it as unique in this world.Footnote 94
IV
In a study of eighteenth-century Irish medicine, Toby Barnard stressed the influence that physicians seemed to exert over wider Irish society.Footnote 95 While the institutionalisation and regulation of medical practices in Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been well documented, Barnard’s work peered outside of these frameworks to examine the philosophical and social capital which Irish physicians seemed to exert during this period.Footnote 96 These ‘wider cultures’ of medicine centred on a new public place for physicians. Many physicians now commented on areas adjacent to, or completely different, from medicine. Physicians could parlay their medical knowledge into new and diverse fields.
Many physicians thus inserted themselves into debates about gymnastics in Ireland despite their often simplistic understandings of the subject. Physicians were also being integrated into both institutional and civilian efforts to improve public health more broadly. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century saw an expansion of both state intervention in matters of health and, more importantly for this article, deep ruminations about the health of Ireland’s poorer classes.Footnote 97 The larger context, in a British and Irish sense, was a medicalisation of deformities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alun Withey’s work on eighteenth-century discourses concerning physical deformities outlines an ill-thought-out but pervasive societal concern that physical deformities (ranging from excess weight and short stature to spinal curves and gait impairments) necessitated intervention.Footnote 98 While some private entrepreneurs advocated the use of new technologies — available for a price — a growing number of physicians turned to physical activity.
Medical endorsements of gymnastics emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as some high-profile British physicians, such as George Cheyne, explicitly wrote on physical activity and health. It was more common, however, for physicians to simply endorse gymnastic texts and to rely on gymnastics instructors for guidance.Footnote 99 Enda Leaney’s work on phrenology in Ireland during this period provides one answer as to why some high profile physicians became so invested in exercise during this period. The now debunked race science emerged in Ireland in the mid 1810s before becoming a more serious talking point in the 1820s and 1830s. As research elsewhere has shown, phrenology was the perfect foil for gymnastics during this period as it seemed to suggest that physiological changes could be passed down through generations and, more importantly, that physiological changes could indeed help in ‘civilising’ certain groups.Footnote 100 As childhood became medicalised, a thing to be studied, observed and quantified by doctors,Footnote 101 gymnastics offered a quantifiable activity whose effects could be studied and evaluated.
The excitement about gymnastics among some of the country’s leading physicians benefitted those instructors seeking to legitimise their craft. Beaujeu and Huguein’s supporters attempted to provide scientific reasoning for their systems’ efficacy. Macauley’s 1828 work, Observations on gymnastics, and the gymnasium, marks the first published recording of evidence-based research into physical activity in Ireland. Macauley claimed that Beaujeu would ‘always heed’ his advice on safety and health, and his work provided both generic medical opinions on the value of exercise, as well as quantitative evidence on its impact over children. Noting that no injuries were incurred under Beaujeu’s watch, Macauley discussed the hospitalisation rates of the female students at the Military School to show Beaujeu’s impact on their health. From October 1820 to October 1824, 1,994 girls were admitted to hospital due to a variety of what Macauley deemed to be low-level and preventative illnesses. From October 1824 to October 1828, the period during which Beaujeu led gymnastics at the school, the same figure had decreased by nearly 400 admissions.Footnote 102 Macauley presented this as conclusive proof that gymnastics assisted in strengthening one’s health.
Next, he moved to more generic observations based on his role as a medic for the school. Students under Beaujeu’s instruction were said to have presented with far better digestion and mental resolve than those who failed to attend classes or did so without exerting the requisite effort. Mental fatigue was said to have decreased within the school. Thus, Beaujeu had created students ‘firm in both body and mind’.Footnote 103 The goal, as Macauley made clear, was to return the ‘animal functions’ of children, by which he meant basic digestive and breathing functions, to their ‘primitive’ state.Footnote 104 Macauley, and many others in Ireland, were greatly influenced by the writings of J. J. Paris, a dietetic practitioner in London, whose 1826 Treatise on diet helped legitimise the notion of exercise as medicine for some of his colleagues. He had deep links with Beaujeu and Macualey, even going so far as to invite Beaujeu to give demonstrations in his London institute of dietetics. Paris’s message about the value of nature over modernity echoed the arguments of those who pushed for the return to a ‘natural/pre-modern’ state for children. If nature was ‘abandoned’,Footnote 105 it was because ‘civilisation’ had divorced man from their natural vibrancy.
Interestingly, Paris’s work mentioned Ireland, claiming: ‘In Ireland, where, from the bad quality of the food, the lower classes are greatly infested with worms, a draught of salt and water is a popular and efficacious anthelmintic [antiparasitic medicine].’Footnote 106 This was a period marked by intense reflection and critique concerning public health, the quality and accessibility of medical care, and the stark differences in health outcomes between wealthy and poor populations.Footnote 107 Paris’s work not only informed Macauley’s understanding of how and why exercise was important, but also many contemporaries within the press as well. Macauley’s book ended with a soliloquy about the value of physical exercise and its centrality for children ‘as Doctor Preventative is better than Doctor Cure — if by other means we can avert any one of the many thousand ills which “flesh is heir to”, it will be doing some good to our fellow creatures.’Footnote 108
While Macauley was unique in writing a book on the subject, many other physicians lent their names to letters of endorsement for the new generation of gymnasts and instructors. Beaujeu’s book included a long line of certificates from surgeons and physicians imploring the public to take this matter seriously. Philip Crampton, surgeon general to the armed forces (and several times president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland), praised Beaujeu for creating a system founded ‘on the best principles of the animal economy’, which he believed increased muscular power without endangering health. James MacCartney, then professor of anatomy and surgery at Trinity College, Dublin, praised a system which he believed gave ‘perfect command’ of the muscles. Beaujeu’s system was a ‘very rational object in education’, and one which would prove the ‘most effectual means of preventing and correcting deformities’. Robert Bell M.D. noted the many good effects he witnessed in Beaujeu’s clients and admitted that he too had used Beaujeu’s system to strengthen himself. The final note came from Macauley who spoke about the girls in the school whose ill-health he ‘attributed to their not taking exercise after the school business was over’. Beaujeu had helped to change this situation and improve their health.Footnote 109 Such endorsements stressed a fear of future generations’ potential weakness and the need for direct intervention.
Beaujeu’s successor at the school, Louis Huguenin, was equally adept at courting medical, and media, attention. Whereas Beaujeu limited himself to Dublin, with the occasional trip to Liverpool as part of his calendar, Huguenin expanded across the country, speaking in Belfast, Cork and other cities while simultaneously opening gymnastic schools or, at the very least, operating classes for a season. An advertisement in Freeman’s Journal in 1833 highlighted the extent of Huguenin’s gymnastic school empire. Aside from his work in the school, and in a private gymnasium in Dublin, Huguenin established schools in Carlow, Kilkenny, Cork, Waterford, Wexford and Limerick. Many of these sites were not private gymnasiums but schools like Carlow College or Kilkenny College. Dublin was unique in the depth and coverage of its gymnastic teachers, but the constant movement of Huguenin (and, earlier, Madame Beaujeu who taught in Ireland for several years after her husband’s death before emigrating to the United States) around the country supplemented the dozens of dance and gymnastic instructors working outside of Dublin. Physicians, such as a Doctor Bell (presumably the Robert Bell who endorsed Beaujeu), were also cited in Huguenin’s advertisements. Promising ‘the most perfect security, with full muscular development’, Huguenin’s Dublin facility presented itself as a hygienic and sanitary place, providing warm showers, plunge baths and other conveniences. With classes priced at £1 per child or £2 for adults, this was firmly a middle- and upper-class establishment, but one which came with a great deal of medical endorsement.Footnote 110
Surveying similar advertisements reveals fifteen different medical supporters ranging from esteemed members of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons to individual physicians. To avoid the tedium of listing each endorsement, it is better to highlight the core messages that reappear across this collection. What most concerned the endorsing physicians were the plagues of modern living which they claimed Huguenin’s system was perfectly posed to eliminate. H. Marsh M.D. noted the ‘weakness and delicacy’ of children caused by ‘the pernicious system of keeping children for many successive hours sitting over their books’. A ‘Lecturer on Anatomy and Surgery’, John Woodroffe, was more forthright, claiming that Huguenin’s system could help call forth the ‘latent power’ of the body, thereby offering a corrective to ‘debility or disease’. Woodroffe even opined that Huguenin’s system could provide ‘perfection’ of the body’s mechanical abilities.Footnote 111
His supporters also lauded Huguenin’s ‘rare expertise’. As previously mentioned, many physicians in Ireland and England proved themselves to be staunch advocates for exercise as medicine during this period, but tended to rely, sometimes problematically, on the systems devised by non-medical experts. Huguenin was referred to as the clear expert on medical gymnastics by those who endorsed him. Physician J. Cheyne said he had witnessed Hugeunin’s teaching in the flesh and recalled being impressed by his ‘great intelligence, skill and caution’. He was thus ‘perfectly well-qualified’ to teach gymnastics. His fellow physician, Robert Graves, expressed excitement that he could personally endorse Huguenin’s system for the public. One of the more well-known supporters, Charles Edward Orpen, from the Royal College of Surgeons, wanted to give his ‘strongest testimony’ about Huguenin’s system, as well as the ‘superior manner’ in which Huguenin conducted his classes relative to his colleagues.Footnote 112
Huguenin’s endorsement by the medical community marked an opening of medical doctrines to more holistic forms of health while simultaneously noting a deficit in medical background. Physicians relied on the gymnasts’ exercise systems and knowledge despite their lack of medical training. Like Macauley, many doctors sought to incorporate gymnastics into their medical practice through the study of gymnastics or by visiting exhibitions or speaking with instructors. Beaujeu and Huguenin were the two high-profile examples of their time, but they were two of several.
The distrust of modernity found in both medical and lay discourses is notable. Many physicians lamented the physical deficiencies or lethargy they associated with modern life. The chief culprits, for children, were an emerging schooling system which involved long hours of sitting within poorly ventilated spaces. For adults the conditions were largely similar, with excessive sedentary behaviour — viewed as a symptom of how society had evolved for the middle and upper classes — being entirely to blame. Valid though these concerns may have been, the way they were expressed reveal broader suspicions that had begun to creep into Irish society about bodies, adolescence, adulthood and good health. In the context of growing medicalisation of children’s health, young people, and the next generation who would be born to them, were deemed to be at risk, and physicians found in gymnastics a potential prophylactic.
V
This article has highlighted the importance of studying the physical body and substantive discourses about building its health. Children’s bodies came under scrutiny from the early nineteenth century, and increasingly physical training was seen as a response not just to personal ill-health but to larger questions as well. Monsieur Beaujeu’s untimely death in 1829 marked a significant transition in the realm of physical education. His successor at the Royal Military School, Louis Huguenin, continued his legacy for two decades before relocating to Liverpool, where he established a series of gymnasiums. Both left behind a cadre of gymnastic instructors proficient in their methods to perpetuate their teachings. The prominence of Beaujeu and Huguenin allows exploration of broader societal concerns about childhood, gender norms and the boundaries of medical science. Their influence on physical culture in Ireland was profound, shaping societal perceptions of gender and physicality. Discussions surrounding the physical training of boys and girls often reveal deeply ingrained beliefs about femininity and masculinity. There was a prevailing notion that gymnastics training was essential not merely for individual development but as a means of fortifying an Irish race which was perceived as being at risk of degeneration.
While doctors recognised the benefits of gymnastics, they also acknowledged their own profession’s limitations, allowing the gymnastic instructors to gain prominence. However, interest in gymnastics was not merely a local Irish phenomenon; it was part of a wider, global movement in which health and physical culture were intertwined. Irish physicians proved interested in both the societal and moralising benefits of physical activity and strength. The dichotomy between perceived weak, delicate physiques and strong, healthy ones became a battleground of modernity, embodying moral and physical preconceptions and ideals. The exploration of gymnastics in nineteenth-century Ireland thus offers valuable insights into historical conceptions of health, education and childhood. These discourses were intensified by the proto-eugenic zeal many expressed about the benefits of gymnastics for future generations. But while its further development in the nineteenth century saw gymnastics regularly mobilised to nationalist and imperialist ends, its promoters continued also to extol its role in protecting health (for all) in unhealthy times.
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