Lifestyle Gurus. Chris Rojek
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at the hearth about how to be, and how to live with others, are the keystones of moral perfectionism. Equivalent respect for the virtues of time management is to be found in Isabella Beeton’s, Book of Household Management (1861). For example, in her advice to the ‘Mistress of the Household’, she writes:
Early rising is one of the most essential qualities which enter into good Household Management, as it is not only the parent of health, but of innumerable other advantages. Indeed, when a mistress is an early riser, it is almost certain that her house will be orderly and well managed. On the contrary, if she remains in bed till a late hour, then the domestics who, as we have before observed, invariably partake somewhat of their mistress’s character, will surely become sluggards. (Beeton 1861: 2)
The authority in Beeton’s system of moral perfectionism plainly rests in the hands of ‘the mistress’. She assumes a clear divide between the physical and moral cleanliness of the middle-class household and the implied disorder of peasant and proletarian family conditions in the external world. Again, the intertwining of self-improvement with social progress is evident. The foundations of her system rest upon three principles of good management, which both Smiles and Beecher would have enthusiastically concurred:
1 Setting a good example and giving clear instructions to household staff as to their duties and what is expected of their moral bearing and behaviour;
2 Controlling household finances (treating the home as a ‘cost centre’);
3 Applying cleanliness, punctuality and order and time management consistently in the domestic sphere. (Wensley 2004: 67)
Beeton presents the strictly regulated consumption of meals and the management of the domestic sphere as a measure of rank. The course of progress that she sets faith by is middle class in every significant co-ordinate. Her bourgeois values and practice were set as role models against both the implied ostentatious waste of the aristocracy and the distemper of conditions on the lower ranks. ‘A place for everything, and everything in its place’ was her celebrated, endlessly adaptable, maxim (Beeton 1861: 42). The habits of household management naturally translate into the customs of bodily management and self-presentation (Beetham 2008: 393–5). As with Beecher, this is mediated through a mixture of folklore and instrumentally selected elements drawn from science, management and public life. Hence, cleanliness in the kitchen, and in one’s person, is a precondition for presenting oneself in the most favourable light in society; order and time management are the tools for success in the external world. The motivation of keeping an efficient, household that is a source of pride and admiration, is to learn and apply the characteristics required to be an effective, successful, progressive agent in general life. The immediate focus of Beecher’s work, as with Beeton’s manual of life, is self-revelation and self-transformation. However, this is also understood to be the first step in the greater goal of social progress. Already, the bourgeois philosophy of getting the most out of yourself in order to get the most out of the world is present, albeit in embryonic form. Beecher and Beeton follow on the heels of Utilitarianism in proposing that the aristocracy and the lower ranks have much to learn from them, and little to teach.
At this time it is easy to see how, and why, these interventions were so readily analysed in a framework of class struggle. The ideas of Marx and Engels emerged and developed as a sort of counter life to the monological side of bourgeois progress. For them, class struggle was the determinant of human history. They proposed that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat should end in the transcendence of class by virtue of the attainment of communism. In contrast to common perceptions today, they understood the communist society to be one that guarantees and nurtures the full and free development of the individual. However, as it turned out, the class model proved to be of limited value. It was persuasive when applied to the rising power of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Thus, Smiles, Beecher and Beeton all fit snugly into a framework that explains the methods of self-help as tools in the mission of social mobility and class domination. The model is less helpful, however, when applied to the means of persuasion and ends of lifestyle gurus today. The goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are not strictly speaking means of controlling people. Today’s lifestyle gurus do not peddle the line that lifestyle makeovers will result in a fully and finally realised individual or, still less, that they will produce a superior society (McGee 2005; Raisborough 2011). Instead, they typically operate upon a just-in-time principle that techniques of marshalling acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are only as good as the challenges presented by the present moment. Hence, the resort to ‘update packages’ and subscriptions as part of their lifestyle programme. Integral to today’s form of lifestyle management is the idea that the ‘journey’ of self-discovery is continuous and without end. The pace of social change makes life a permanent race with no final finishing line. Lifestyle management and improvement is in perpetual motion. One is only as good as one’s last makeover.
The Globalisation of Self-help
The writings of Smiles, Beecher and Beeton were immensely influential. Still, in terms of what was to come, they were more in the nature of being first runs in the territory of lifestyle architecture and engineering positive intimacy. The period from 1875 to 1914 was the epoch in which the household management and cookery book came into its own as a genuinely global phenomenon (Driver 1989: 13–14). It was also the period when women’s magazines and problem pages, in which journalists acted as counsellors for anguished individuals seeking advice, began to cater for a mass, global consumer market concerned with intimate life (Bingham 2012: 51). The first ‘Agony Aunt’ is thought to have been Annie Swan, in Women At Home (1892–1920). At the outset, these pages were coy about intimate questions. They drew upon reserves of folk ‘common sense’ to address the marital difficulties, child-rearing challenges and the veiled desires of their readers. Sexual matters were seldom referred to directly. This changed after the 1920s. Partly under the influence of the emergence of the mass sex survey and psychology, the Victorian moralism and strictures against what could be imparted in ‘problem pages’ was relaxed. In the UK during the 1930s, journalists, such as the American agony aunt ‘Dorothy Dix’ (the working name of Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer) in The Daily Mirror, and Anne Temple, in her ‘Human Case-Book’ column in The Daily Mail, began to adopt a more open attitude to issues of carnal desire, sexual problems and related topics of an intimate nature, sent in by readers (Bingham 2012; Bingham and Conboy 2015: 139–40). It was not that morals were abandoned and an ‘anything goes’ climate on sexual, emotional and other intimate matters was initiated. On the contrary, the advice given by journalists tended to reinforce moral rectitude based on the class based stereotype of behaviour appropriate to women, drawing upon inviolable Christian precepts and parable. All the same, the new media frankness about intimate and lifestyle matters signalled the growing power of women in the public sphere. This carried over into book-length works dealing with intimacy and lifestyle. For example, The Marriage Book (Various 1930), a 766-page manual published in 1930 by the Amalgamated Press included chapters on ‘Happiness in Marriage’, ‘The Love Art of the Husband’, ‘The Love Art of the Wife’, ‘Choosing a Career’, alongside more traditional chapters on ‘The Healthy Family’, ‘Cookery’ and ‘Home Dressmaking’. Interestingly, The Marriage Book was published without an identified author, as if it were a folk oracle of common sense and wisdom, liberated from the shackles of Victorian prudery.
The agony aunt, recipe aunt or marriage advice aunt, perpetuated in magazines of the interwar period established a culture of presumed intimacy and informality (Rojek 2016). It saw itself as part of what we now call, the informalisation process, loosening the reserve and hierarchy while, of course, at the same time holding true to the template of respectable society (Wouters 2007). The rise of lifestyle journalism emerged in the 1950s and 1960s when the emergence of consumer culture, coupled with increased periods of leisure time, led to a demand for information about optimal time use, not only in the area of household management, but also in respect to the general presentation of the self. During this period newspapers and magazines introduced sections dedicated to health, food and travel. This new journalistic field addressed its audiences as consumers, providing them with information and advice about