Dr Thomas Dixon is the presenter of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship‘ on BBC Radio 4 and the Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. In this blog post he reflects on the history and ideology behind the idea that we can choose our friends.

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On Christmas Eve, 1902, a Northamptonshire newspaper carried a satirical selection of revised proverbs, twisting old sayings into modern shape. These jolly festive gems included, ‘Many are called, but few get up’,  ‘People who live in glass houses should pull down the blinds’, and ‘God gives us our relatives – thank God we can choose our friends.’

The idea that we can choose our friends, but not our families, had become a commonplace by the early twentieth century, but in earlier periods it would not have made much sense. Prior to the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distinction between friends and family was pretty blurred. One’s ‘friends’ were a supportive and interconnected web of close relatives, workmates, and neighbours – indeed any particular friend could quite easily be all these things at once.

Katherine Philips

The modern celebration of specially chosen friends supposes two things that only became widely available much more recently: education and leisure. Select, emotional friendships used to be the preserve of an educated elite – they required a refined sensibility and the spare time to indulge it. Such relationship also relied on being able to read and write – whether letters of friendship of moral and religious treatises on the subject. This was the kind of friendship engaged in by Erasmus and Thomas More in the sixteenth century, and by a remarkable woman called Katherine Philips who conducted a philosophical ‘Society of Friendship’ through letters from her home in the Welsh town of Cardigan in the seventeenth century.

In a society like ours, in which a large proportion of the population go to university, and can enjoy an extended, educated, leisured period of adolescence, this kind of friendship has become the norm rather than a minority pursuit. The coffee-drinking, wise-cracking ‘family of choice’ idealised in the hugely popular American sitcom Friends, first broadcast between 1994 and 2004, is a modern descendant of the friendships of choice celebrated by Renaissance humanists.

And the world of the globally marketed and highly successful commercial product, Friends, brings us to the final ingredient of the modern friendship of choice: consumerism. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, the great prophet of the free market in the eighteenth century, put rational individual choice at the heart of his philosophy in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s other great work was his Theory of Moral Sentiments, which explained the centrality of affectionate relationships to human society. But even in that work, Smith emphasised that the ‘prudent man’ would choose his friends not of the basis of ‘giddy admiration’ but by the ‘sober esteem of modesty, discretion, and good conduct’. It is to Adam Smith that we owe the idea that we are consumers in the emotional as well as the economic realm.

Today our public profiles on Facebook or Twitter are like shop windows, displaying our wares in search of friends or followers, and we speak about choosing our friends as we might choose our toothpaste, a new phone, or which newspaper to read. Online display and branding seem to be as important for socialising as for selling.

But in reality, how many of us actually make new friends in this way? Even in our highly connected age, family, neighbourhood, education, and work provide our closest friends in the vast majority of cases. It seems to me that there is still much truth in what the social critic John Ruskin wrote in Sesame and Lilies, in 1865: ‘granting that we had both the will and the sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power! or, at least, how limited for most, is the sphere of choice!’

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Dr Thomas Dixon is the presenter of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship‘ on BBC Radio 4 and the Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London. In this blog post he reflects on the powerful emotions of friendship experienced in childhoods past and present. 

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Inevitably in making a series covering five hundred years of friendship in short fifteen-minute episodes, there were many examples and illustrations of the changing contours of friendship over the centuries that I had to leave out. I found myself thoroughly sympathizing with the author of a lovely Victorian book called Golden Friendships: Sketches of the Lives and Characters of True and Sincere Friends, published in 1884. The Preface to that book starts: ‘The difficulty in selecting illustrations of friendship has not lain in finding, but in choosing, examples.’

My own copy of Golden Friendships seems to have been presented to a diligent Victorian student as a reward for her academic efforts. It is inscribed: ‘Miss Mogford. 1^st Class Prize for English. August 1888’. I do not know who Miss Mogford was, nor about her own experiences of friendship, but there is no doubt that Victorian classrooms and playgrounds reverberated with ideas of friendship. Episode 7 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’ opens with a reading from Benjamin Disraeli’s 1844 novel Coningsby, reflecting this:

At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after-life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and devotion; what illimitable confidence; infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart and whirlwinds of the soul are confined in that simple phrase, a schoolboy’s friendship! ‘Tis some indefinite recollection of these mystic passages of their young emotions that makes grey-haired men mourn over the memory of their schoolboy days.

This image of grey-haired men mourning over the lost emotions of their schooldays is a poignant one – and puts me in mind of the Simon and Garfunkel song, written over a century later, ‘Old Friends’, including the line ‘Can you imagine us years from today sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy.’

But one of my favourite stories of a Victorian friendship, although one with a tragic ending, comes not from the records of Victorian schooldays, but instead from the experiences of a young boy whose greatest friendship was with a toy horse. My own little boy, who is four years old, has a bed full of cuddly toys that he calls ‘soft friends’ – with which he formed his earliest and strongest emotional bonds, other than those with his immediate family. And so the following story had particular resonance for me.

It is a tale of Victorian love, from the memoirs of Greville MacDonald – later a noted doctor, and it is included in Ginger Frost’s book Victorian Childhoods (Praeger, 2009, p. 77). MacDonald recalled that as a boy in the 1860s he’d had a favourite wooden horse called Dobbin.

I loved it as much as any girl her doll, so that at last it must break my heart. It slept with me and fed with me, helped me to carry things away from their right places and compel them to some fairyland service…But there came a day when our nurse had to caution me to be gentler with Dobbin or I should break him. Indignant with her narrow views as to his mortality, I exclaimed, “He won’t break! He’s wood, not china!” and, to prove my claim, I threw him against the nursery wall.

Dobbin’s back was broken: there he lay in two pieces, dead for all eternity. I think I was too much amazed to weep; yet the tragedy did, I know, leave my conscience with a wound I would not touch, knowing it could never be healed. Dobbin was dead: one door into the kingdom of magic was closed for ever.

If only Dobbin had been a ‘soft friend’, young Greville could perhaps have avoided this early disaster. All of us can recognize something of the experience he recounts here of an early and in some way irreparable loss – whether of a toy, a pet, or even a loved one.

Horses and donkeys, in their flesh and blood forms, were favourite objects of Victorian sentiment (along with dogs, of course, whose special status is explored in Episode 8 of the series). In Arthur Morrison’s novel, A Child of the Jago, set in the East-End slums, a young boy’s best friend is a donkey, with whom he shares his food, even when he is going hungry, as well as his tears, and his inmost sorrows.

The history of friendship is not exclusively a story of humans but also one of books, imaginary beings, toys, and animals in which people, whether children or adults, have invested some of their strongest emotions.

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Professor Mark Peel is Head of the College of Arts, Humanities and Law at the University of Leicester. He has previously held chairs of history at both Liverpool and Monash Universities. Professor Peel contributed to Episode 12 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’ and previously wrote chapters on twentieth- and twenty-first-century friendship for Friendship: A History (2009). In this post he explains the thinking behind those chapters.

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What I tried to capture in the two chapters I contributed to Friendship: A History was the escalating significance of friends for most twentieth-century people, and the ways in which friends—because they were chosen—were important companions for the more and more self-fashioned lives that people imagined and sometimes enjoyed. Of course, it is always important to think about constraints, and the horrors of the twentieth century are obvious enough. But I wanted readers to think about some of the changes that had broadened people’s experiences and life expectations, given more of us some sense of command over our destinies, decreased our reliance on family and neighbours, and allowed us to breach the boundaries that can be created by the intolerances of faith and caste. Making friends is an important part of that story, as I tried to show in the following extracts:

“In the first half of the twentieth century, a wider range of people came to regard a particular form of intimate and emotional friendship as a crucial component of a good life. More than family, kin or faith, friendship was the social glue of modernity. Friendship helped people manage, endure and even enjoy dramatic transformations, strengthened the horizontal bonds of age and shared experience, and nourished those who lived beyond sanctioned boundaries. . . Friendship was the conversation about who you had been, who you were and who you wanted to be. It was for the discussion of dilemmas and the rehearsal of new directions. Because you chose your friends, it also epitomised what was, for most people, a new degree of freedom to make their own way. What relatively few nineteenth-century people could enjoy became the realistic aspiration of many. Popular culture and popular conversation agreed on the growing significance of friends, and the importance of friendliness as a model for improving the relationships you had to have, such as those with family or neighbours. Cultural descriptions and prescriptions also focused on the links between friendship and successful selfhood: your friends, more than anyone, witnessed and assisted you develop a true sense of self. New forms of knowledge and leisure also shaped these understandings of friendship. More than philosophers and social scientists, advocates of friendship’s instrumental virtues—such as Dale Carnegie—and the producers of mass entertainment moulded the idea and the expectations of friendship among twentieth-century people.”

In a history of twentieth-century friendship, I wanted to make two other significant points. The first was to speak against the assumption that ordinary people were the victims of collapsing structures of traditional affiliation—family, community, neighbourhood, church, group or nation—and were or would end up adrift in a sea of isolation. Elites have generally seen something like this as the outcome of democratising and modernising forces that they don’t much like, largely because they assume ordinary people to be somewhat backward, under-developed and only partly educable versions of themselves. The evidence suggests that a capacity for friendship, amity and tolerance is not restricted to elites, and that the avant garde of friendship is often made up of outsiders, migrants and others.

The second was, a little boldly, to declare the twentieth century the century of female friendship:

“There was also a decisive shift in friendship’s location, as those once presumed unfit for its responsibilities became its exemplars. If heterosexual men seemed to struggle with the demands of this more intense, emotional and self-exposing idea of friendliness, women and then homosexual men became its chief agents, advocates and public performers. The idea that women possessed a special capacity and desire for befriending—whether innate, socialised or perhaps even as an outcome of patriarchal oppression—was clearly important well before the twentieth century. As Stacey Oliker argued, and as earlier chapters have shown, women’s increasing specialisation in feeling, emotional communion, sentiment and disclosure was evident well before the turn of the century. At its beginning, in 1907, one American male writer had already declared that “in the emotional region, many women, but very few men, can form the highest kind of tie”. It was an interesting prophecy, for the twentieth century was the age of female friendship, or perhaps the age when friendship became female. As the boundaries between male intimacy, male friendship and homosexuality became ever more difficult to control, women focused more and more attention on the intimacy and enclosure of ‘true’ friendship. Yet friendship among women—and among other outsiders, too—also changed its meanings and possibilities. From them came new or refreshed idealisations of inclusive friendship as a bulwark against oppression, as a crucial foundation for personal and collective liberation, and as a model for a better world. There were famous friendships of activism and mobilisation, and there were congresses promoting the friendship of nations. And there were thousands of unrecorded intimacies, moments of connection and disclosure that just as surely changed the future.”

Finally, in writing about the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, it was important to recognise and celebrate the popular culture of friendship, and the ways in which “the link between friendship and love is seen as more and more important. In the popular advice of magazine, film and television, love without friendship is an ever more brittle bond; by century’s end, as the Spice Girls sang, “if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends, make it last forever, friendship never ends”. . . Learning how to make friends was also changed by the expanding scope of vision. Twentieth-century people could see and hear much more of the world, and new or cheaper technologies of recording and sharing information—photographs, cassettes, and videos at first, and then the virtual worlds of the computer age—provided a platform for everyday intimacy over long distances. This was the crowning moment for the millions of penpals, penfriends and would-be travellers who could, as affluence increased and the costs went down, begin to visit as well as write to people and places separated by great distances. There was an increasing capacity to replay and relive the key moments of a life spent with friends, and friends were more and more likely to dominate the supporting cast in each person’s photo- or video-documentary of their lives.”

And in popular culture, television has to loom large:

“With its dramatised guides to selfhood, relationships, emotions and romance, and with its growing focus on talk, ‘lifestyle’, ‘reality’ and everyday living, television became the single most important place in which twentieth-century people could see how they might live, whether that meant changing or staying the same.” By the end of the century, we saw a “new wave of hugely successful performances of friendship’s pleasures, from Friends to Sex in the City and Will & Grace. If friendship’s revitalising properties seemed less certain to sociologists, philosophers and social temperature-takers, popular celebrations of enduring, intimate friends made a life without them one of the bleakest prospects that most people could imagine. These celebrations—and earlier ones such as The Golden Girls or The Mary Tyler Moore Show—also made clear the ways in which female friendships became even more central to popular as well as academic versions of ideal bonds. In movies and television shows, at least, the strongest friendships were between women and, from about the 1980s, between women and gay men. Male friendships did not completely disappear, but by century’s end, anxieties over friendlessness and the incapacity to make and keep friends seemed almost to assume that such problems mostly involved heterosexual men.”

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Dr James Ellison is Reader in International History at Queen Mary University of London. In this post for the History of Emotions Blog he explores international friendship and the history of Anglo-American relations – from eighteenth-century hostility, via the Churchillian ‘special relationship’, to the present.

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In 1927, the BBC adopted the motto: ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’. The intent to broadcast peace and create friendship between nations was of its time. In the years following the First World War, the hope in international affairs was for more friendship and less enmity. It was there in the formation of theLeague of Nations, in 1919, and, later, in the United Nations. Institutionalised friendship between peoples through diplomacy and politics was seen by progressives as the antidote to war. Of all relationships between nations in the twentieth century, claims to friendship have perhaps been made most consistently – especially after 1945 – by the Americans and the British. They even have a term for it: the special relationship.

Figuring out what has been special about the Anglo-American relationship has preoccupied commentators and historians since Churchill first coined the phrase in 1946. Friendship is certainly an element, but taking its measure is far from easy. If friendship can be defined as action without self-interest, then it does not apply. No nation speaks peace unto another nation without wanting something in return. If friendship is based on common interest, then it certainly did and does apply and, moreover, it became a political tool used to affirm and reaffirm a relationship which was of value to both sides, for similar and different reasons. It has also been used rhetorically, both to ceremonialise a strategic alliance and to camouflage differences. At different levels in the hierarchies of international affairs between the two nations, it has undeniably produced the kinds of genuine personal bonds that we associate with friendships between individuals.

It had, of course, not always been that way. Struggles for independence, such as that of 1776, do not often produce immediate friendships. Hence George Washington described the new nation’s policy as being against ‘the insidious wiles of foreign influence’ and to ‘steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world’. Isolationism had been born and the Republic’s anti-imperialism ensured that no hands of friendship would be offered across the Atlanticas the new nation evolved. And the feeling was mutual. Samuel Johnson declared in 1778, ‘I am willing to love all mankind, except an American’.

An 1898 poster promoting British-American rapprochement, showing Columbia and Britannia in the background holding flags, and Uncle Sam and John Bull in the foreground shaking hands.

The cultural ties which would breed friendships outside, and inside, governments began in the nineteenth century. Such was the interchange between elites, especially through Ivy League and Oxbridge scholarly exchanges, and between peoples as literature and science, trade and finance, drew the two nations closer. Organisations whose purpose it was to promote Anglo-American friendship grew. In 1902, ‘The Pilgrims of Great Britain’ were formed inLondon, followed six months later by a companion group inNew York. Membership was reciprocal and the Pilgrims’ aim, which remains today, was to foster fellowship between Americans and Britons and other English-speaking peoples.

Hopes for fraternity in the first half of the twentieth century were not always held in the corridors of power. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1927, Churchill told his Cabinet colleagues that ‘no doubt it is quite right in the interests of peace to go on talking about war with theUnited Statesbeing “unthinkable”’. Yet he added, ‘everyone knows that this is not true. However foolish and disastrous such a war would be … we do not wish to put ourselves in the power of theUnited States’. Being half American did not seem to incline Churchill towards theUnited Statesat the end of the twenties. Any friendship he felt forAmericaor Americans was outweighed by international rivalry and lack of common interest in international affairs. Yet in less than twenty years, all that changed. Claims to Anglo-American friendship were the result.

In his ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech delivered at Westminster College,Fulton,Missouri, on 5 March 1946, Churchill did not only talk about the iron curtain descending across the continent of Europe. The ‘crux’ of what he had travelled to the United States to say was this:

Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organisation will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples. This means a special relationship between the British and the Commonwealth and Empire and theUnited States. … Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship and mutual understanding between our two vast but kindred Systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relationship between our military advisers…

The use of the language of friendship, and of intimacy, was not employed here by Churchill for the first time to evoke, and reinforce, UK-US ties. His personal relationship with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains the most special of all presidential-prime ministerial friendships.

Roosevelt and Churchill – the most special of special relationships

It held within it the elements that would go on to build friendships between others and between the two nations: shared experience of war; common values; ease of communication; in-jokes and an affability known to a class of politicians and officials in the middle part of the twentieth century, and perhaps beyond. Churchill and Roosevelt’s alliance flowered in the letters they exchanged – running to thousands – during the Second World War, when the president used the codename ‘Former Naval Person’ when writing to the prime minister to create familiarity (Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty and Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy). Churchill’s intentions went much further. On becoming prime minister, he attempted to claim the natural friendship of the American people to engage Roosevelt alongside Britain in its darkest hour. Personal ties, however, did not convince Roosevelt to take America to war. Had it not been for Pearl Harbor, camaraderie would not have matured into military and strategic alliance. Without national interest in international affairs, friendship means little.

Nevertheless, it played its part in the protocols of statesmen and women. When Churchill learned of Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he telegraphed the president’s widow, Eleanor: ‘I have lost a dear and cherished friendship which was forged in the fire of war.’ Eleanor would herself call on the same language after the war as she became a champion of the United Nations. On 12 April 1948, she unveiled a statue of her late husband in Grosvenor Square, close to the US Embassy in London. In her speech, she invoked the purpose of the friendship between English speaking peoples as upholding freedom throughout the world. She said that she would like her husband to be known as ‘valiant for friendship,’ not just for the Americans and the British, but for all humankind to ‘break down misunderstandings and differences’ and ‘to build a world of friendship’.

Eleanor Roosevelt in London.

The rhetoric of Anglo-American friendship may now be as, or more, significant than the strategic partnership that joins the two nations. After all,Britain no longer wields the power that it once did and other friends have more. Yet an old and tested friendship, and the story that can be told about it, can still be reaffirming and have greater purpose.

A special relationship today? Cameron and Obama trade bottles of beer, in Toronto in 2010, to settle a bet they made on how their nations’ teams would fare in the World Cup.

To get a sense of that, consider how President Obama evoked the history of Anglo-American friendship as a political tool for today in his speech to the Houses of Parliament on 25 May 2011:

As two of the most powerful nations in the history of the world, we must always remember that the true source of our influence hasn’t just been the size of our economies, or the reach of our militaries, or the land that we’ve claimed. It has been the values that we must never waver in defending around the world – the idea that all beings are endowed by our Creator with certain rights that cannot be denied.

That is what forged our bond in the fire of war – a bond made manifest by the friendship between two of our greatest leaders. Churchill and Roosevelt … what joined the fates of these two men at that particular moment in history was not simply a shared interest in victory on the battlefield. It was a shared belief in the ultimate triumph of human freedom and human dignity – a conviction that we have a say in how this story ends.

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Deborah Chambers is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. Her most recent book is, Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In this post for the History of Emotions Blog she analyses the aspirations and anxieties associated with online friendship in the twenty-first century.

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Just before its shares were floated on the market in 2012, Facebook boasted that it hosted 125 billion total friendships. While this detail is intriguing, the figure is also totally mystifying. What does it mean? Why has the concept of ‘friendship’ been adopted by social media to describe and promote personal networks online? I explore this and related questions in my book, Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship (2013). I discovered that the choice of the term ‘friend’ to describe all social connections on social network sites is no accident. In an earlier book, New Social Ties (2006) written just before social media exploded on our global networks, I explored changing social networks through the lens of friendship. I conclude that ‘friendship’ has become a powerful emblem of interpersonal democratisation in late modernity. Relationships between intimate partners, parents and children, and wider kin are now described as informal ties: more casual, ephemeral and egalitarian.’ Friends as family’ and ‘family as friends’ signify this shift in cultural values (Spencer and Pahl 2006). Despite continuing high levels of personal commitment and social responsibility in today’s personal and family relationships, more fluid ties have become part of the popular imagination (also see Chambers 2012).

‘Friendship’ signifies something reassuring and democratic during a period when social relationships are undergoing dramatic changes. Notions of mutual trust within equal and freely chosen ties – as opposed to hierarchical ties of duty – evoke the ‘pure relationship’ (Giddens 1991, 1992). The sphere of ‘the personal’ is a vital sphere of reciprocity which is being demanded on equal terms and described by friendship. This concept of ‘friendship’ has almost exclusively positive connotations, conjuring a sense of optimism about changing personal ties in late modernity. That’s why social network sites have adopted the term ‘friendship’ to describe online contacts.

Social network sites such as Facebook realized that the apparent flexibility, informality and conviviality of ‘friendship’ are deeply admired and coveted features of personal relationships in today’s society. The positive attributes of respect, mutual disclosure and companionship crystallised in ‘friendship’ offsets the pessimistic tones of academic and public discourses that invoke a crisis in relationships spoiled by digital technology.

Yet “Friends” on social network sites differ dramatically from “friends” in the traditional sense. A unique feature of these websites is that they display and publicise: they display our personal networks and publicise our friendships. Once quintessentially private, personal and intimate, these relationships are now rendered public. They must therefore be carefully managed. We are being “judged by the company we keep” in new, highly visible ways.

Online friendships are often characterised as a feature of today’s globalised networks. Yet for teenagers, among other users, this technology is experienced in a much more local manner. Social media technologies are providing a vital cultural framework for young people to explore the sense of choice and diversity sought in personal relationships. The heightened sense of agency and personal autonomy afforded by social media allows young people to manage and navigate their personal relationships on and offline. Being the most intense users of social media, this communication technology is now embedded in young peoples’ daily lives (see for example, Ito et al. 2012 and Livingstone et. al 2011).

Teenagers are using social media to transform identities and generate new forms of self presentation, interaction, and etiquette. A new kind of online friendship ranking emerges among the young, generating a mode of hyper-friendship. The distinctive qualities of today’s mediated friendship are, then, experienced much more acutely by young people than by adults. At the level of interpersonal relations, teenagers now find themselves making moral decisions about using social media. They nurture romances online and have to deal with the often painful public nature of break-ups online (Pascoe 2010, Gershon 2010). Deciding which medium to use for developing or ending a relationship depends on moral questions rather than just technical or economic considerations,  leading to a re-socialisation of media (Gershon 2010; Madianou and Miller 2012).

Online friendships have become public displays of personal lives. Through the ritual of displaying, selecting and also ranking lists of personal connections, online Friends provide a context for self presentation by offering users an imagined audience that guides our behavioural norms (boyd 2011). Our lists of Friends become our imagined audience. Yet these opportunities for online friendship throw up serious challenges. The term ‘Friend’ is being applied to all declared connections whatever their nature or intensity. At the press of a button, strangers can become ‘friends’. Anonymized rumours can be spread, generating parental anxieties about stranger danger and the cyberbullying of children and teenagers by their peers.

Public anxieties have been prompted by the apparent lack of a sense of privacy on the internet and by a fascination with self-display by teenagers who use social media. These sites have been blamed not only for causing teenage addiction to social media but also for isolating young people from their parents. As such, new digital technology has become a major site of struggle – involving parents, teachers, the media and the state – about how young people’s use of digital technologies should be regulated.

Creating and networking online content now forms a fundamental resource for managing one’s identity, lifestyle and social relations. Some suggest these sites are structured to foster narcissistic skills of self-promotion (Buffardi and Campbell 2008). But, as with offline relationships, there are crucial checks and balances against overblown self-promotion since our offline and online communities overlap. Despite the problems associated with negotiating public and personal/private boundaries online, many internet users who share information about themselves discover benefits. People with social networking sites profiles are almost four times more likely to have been contacted from someone from their past as non-site users (Ellison et al. 2007). Social media like have become ideal tools for managing ‘personal communities’.

To understand the nature of today’s online friendships, I developed a theory of mediated intimacy in my study of social media and personal relationships. Today’s online connections comprise some key features. They are being articulated through a ‘friendship’ code which forms part of a broader, personalised yet public discourse. This friendship discourse involves a wider privileging and ritualization of social ties as elective ties of reciprocity. These networks are characterised by an informal register. Mediated intimacy also entails a staging and management of the self and involves the accumulation of ‘social capital’ (Ellison et. al 2011). Mediated relationships also evoke a sense of personal choice and individual control as part of a growing demand for democratic, pure relationships. Finally, today’s online friendships are shaped by moral issues associated with choice of medium used to connect with someone according to the level of intimacy and nature of the message.

 So, within social aspirations to democratise interpersonal relationships, the concept of ‘friendship’ emerges as a powerful tool in shaping contemporary meanings of the self and social connectivity. As a symbol of the pure relationship, it requires a particular kind of ‘self’. Social network sites and online dating forums offer the perfect contexts for the continual updating of the ‘self’ required in today’s online self presentations. Today’s mediated friendship could be viewed as a form of ‘entrepreneurial individualism’ (Rose 1999). The latent colonisation of ‘friendship’ by market logic is concerning many users. It seems likely that commercialization, privacy and trust will be themes at the forefront of debates about the future of online ‘friendship’.

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References

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Buffardi, L. E. and Campbell, K.W. (2008) ‘Narcissism and Social Networking Web Sites’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (10) 1303-1314.

Chambers, D. (2006) New Social Ties: Contemporary Connections in a Fragmented Society,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chambers, D. (2012) A Sociology of Family Life: Change and Diversity in Intimate Relations,Cambridge: Polity Press.

Chambers, D. (2013) Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship,Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ellison, N., Steinfeld, C., & Lampe, C. (2007) ‘The benefits of Facebook ‘‘friends’’: Exploring the relationship between college students’ use of online social networks and social capital’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3), 1143–1168.

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Pascoe, C.J. (2010) ‘Intimacy’, in Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., boyd, d., Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, B., Horst, H.A., Lange, P.G., Mahendran, D., Martinez, K.Z., Pascoe, C.J., Perkel, D., Robinson, L.,  Sims, C. and Tripp, L. (2010) Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,  pp.117-148.

Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom,Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press.

Spencer, L. and Pahl, R. (2006) Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, Princeton University Press.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London. She is an expert on Mary Wollstonecraft and a historian of both feminism and psychoanalysis.  She is a contributor to Episode 5 and Episode 14 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’.

Her most recent book – The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times – is a personal, political and historical reflection on her own time as an asylum patient at Friern mental hospital in the 1980s. In this short extract – available in a longer version on the Guardian website – she writes about the unexpected experience of making friends with her fellow patients, including a woman called Magda.

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Friern Hospital. Photograph: Alamy

I met Magda a few days after my second admission. I was reading in the dorm when a handsome middle-aged woman presented herself to me. She was beautifully turned out in a blue-silk kaftan, with a silver-and-turquoise necklace and an armload of silver bracelets. She smiled at me warmly.

…Films and novels set in mental hospitals occasionally portray close friendships, but researchers either cannot or will not recognise their existence. Back in the 1950s an academic fashion arose for quantifying personal relationships through a method known as “sociometry” or “companion measures”. Researchers observed people whose interactions were enumerated and then displayed on graphs known as “sociograms”. The method was widely applied to asylum inmates, including by the team of social scientists hired to study Friern. One of the researchers undertook a numerical analysis of patients” conversations (an “intimacy index”). At no point did either researcher ask any of the patients how they actually felt about the other people there.

I do not want to romanticise this world. Hanging out with disturbed people can be awful. I know my friends at Friern often found me very poor company. I went several times to the patients’ coffee bar (perhaps I was one of the specimens studied by the sociologists) and found it almost unbearable. Magda, however, felt differently. She knew many people there and enjoyed catching up with them. She was especially pleased one afternoon to encounter a woman who had been a bookseller until she fell prey to chronic alcoholism. To me the woman looked like a mumbling wreck, but Magda chatted with her for a long time while I sulked in a corner. Afterwards Magda scolded me. “She is a smart, interesting person, Barbara – you need to talk to people before you judge them.” I had been told this before, in very different contexts, but this time the criticism took.

Today people with ongoing mental health problems have few dedicated social venues. The day hospitals and day centres have mostly closed, usually in the face of anguished protest. When I ask mental health managers about this, I am repeatedly told that it is not good for service users to spend all their time with other service users; they should mingle with healthy people in the “community”.

It is pointed out to me that mental illness is often episodic; that many people are unwell only intermittently and what they really need is help in utilising their capabilities during their well times instead of becoming “career mental patients” consigned to psychiatric ghettoes. There is real force to this argument. But it is also a convenient argument, legitimising yet more swingeing cuts in mental-health budgets, and one that leaves untouched the miserable isolation of many mentally ill people in the UK today, sitting alone in their flats with only a television to keep them company.

Magda suffered terribly from black depression yet nearly always she would pull herself together to be with me. Usually I did the same for her. The obligations of friendship trumped madness – and this in itself could be a form of healing.

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Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Jenna Bailey is a writer and historian whose research at the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex led to her discovery of the surviving papers of the Co-operative Correspondence Club, which is featured in Episode 13 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’.

In this edited extract from Jenna’s book about the club, Can Any Mother Help Me? (Faber and Faber, 2007), we learn about one of the members, who used the pen-name ‘Glen Heather’, and relied on the C.C.C. for friendship and support at the most difficult time of her life. 

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‘Glen Heather’

Glen Heather was born in 1903 in Winchester but grew up in Southampton. Her father was a merchant seaman who was, to all intents and purposes, absent and barely provided for the family. Glen Heather and her mother survived on the meagre wages that her mother was able to earn from dressmaking.

After attending Southampton Girls’ Grammar School, at the age of sixteen Glen Heather found employment as a clerk. Her future husband, Don, lived in Southampton and worked as a clerk at a local grammar school. The pair met, fell deeply in love and married in 1928. After Glen Heather’s difficult childhood, she felt Don was her saviour. Once married, they had Marilyn in 1930, Coral in 1933 and Ralph in 1934.

The family was separated for some of the war when Glen Heather and the children were evacuated. For part of this period Glen Heather worked as a billeting officer for Marilyn’s school in Somerset. Don remained in Southampton for the duration and was employed as a government officer.

Following the war, Glen Heather found work as a school secretary and Don became chief clerk of the Southampton Education Department. They occasionally took groups of young people on camping trips to the New Forest, as they shared a passion for exploring the countryside. Eventually the family moved to the New Forest, where both Don and Glen Heather spent much of their spare time gardening and walking.

Glen Heather was one of the least formally educated members of the CCC, but she was well liked by the other women for her warm personality. It is possible that when writing to the CCC she romanticised parts of her life. She was best known amongst the women in the group for the passionate love that she shared with Don, a love that perhaps came at the expense of her relationship with her children.

Glen Heather sent this article to the group in July 1958, immediately after Don had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. At the time, their children Marilyn (nicknamed Bunty), Coral and Ralph were twenty-eight, twenty-six and twenty-three, respectively. Marilyn had already married David and Coral had recently married Tex.

July 13, 1958

My Dear AA,

I remember starting a letter to you but I was removed to bed or something in the middle of it. Now, however, I’ve been doped to sleep and have far better command. The Staff nurse on Don’s ward fobbed me off with some technical information which was true but incomprehensible to me, she hoped. So she told Ralph, but they don’t realise that the layman is not so ignorant on these things nowadays. When Ralph went to see the hospital doctor he told me that they wanted it to dawn on Don slowly to avoid adding to the post-operative shock, so that he would recover enough to be sent to a ‘convalescent’ home or even home.

He would, therefore, not be told unless I wished differently. I knew very well I could never keep up a pretence of lies etc. for a fortnight. Besides it is not our way of meeting catastrophe. I decided to tell him. The children agreed. It was hard, but I managed to do it and he was absolutely wonderful and has decided to do all he can to keep calm and get ready for home. The doctor does not give him long. It’s advanced in stomach and liver and he’s awfully tired. But he’s determined to beat it as long as possible, he says. I don’t think he realises it’s only months. His only worry is the pain and whether I can bear to see him in it, but the doctor assured Ralph that the drugs will be available, so I am longing to get him home.

Coral is packing to begin her new life with Tex in London. It seems incredible that mine with Don is ending, it only seems five minutes ago we began.

I know you’ll be thinking of me. GH.

We are indeed thinking of you, Glen Heather dear, and hoping that things will be as easy as possible for you. All love. (Barnie)

1958

Dear CCC,

I seem to have written to you more in the past fortnight than for ages. Don is asleep and I can’t settle to anything and as you are my solace I write to you. Yesterday turned out to be a bad day but the early morning was beautiful, tho’ the tax it made on my heart strings was more than I could bear.

I didn’t know what date it was, hardly the day, but when I went into Don’s room at 6 a.m. he said, ‘Darling, there’s just a little parcel for you in that drawer. Of course, I’ve had to have accomplices.’ I found it and, puzzled, opened the note. I can’t disclose to you now what was in it but it was our wedding anniversary and there were little roses and lace handkerchiefs and perfume. How could I bear it. The tears rolled down my face and for the first time Don covered his face and wept. The arduous task of nursing I seem to manage and I stay with him every minute possible, but the pain in my heart seems unendurable. It’s indeed a high price to pay for our closeness all these years but I wouldn’t have it otherwise.

Poor CCC, I ought not to torment you too. The children have been truly wonderful, but Coral now has joined Tex in London and there is only Ralph, who is away all day. Coral and Tex were always here. Coral living and Tex from Friday to Monday morning early. The house was full of young people at weekends and often evenings. I miss them all but even they don’t understand quite the bond between Don and me as CCC does.

Bunty has been coming down at weekends and Coral and Tex will take a turn I know when they return from Spain, where they’ve gone for a belated honeymoon. Don insisted that they go having arranged and paid for everything in advance. They were dubious but he persuaded them. It’s such a pity this should have happened just now to cloud their happiness when they are starting their own home in London. But they’re young and it’s bound surely to leave their minds for quite appreciable periods. I hope so.

Thank you so  much those of you who have written to me.

I know just how you feel. Whether to or not, and whatever to say. But I did find something in receiving them and I am grateful from the bottom of my heart for your allowing me to share my pain with you, for I can’t seem to see any hope in the future just now. All I can do is to get thro’ the present.

At night I worry about the future, but at that time it’s probably all exaggerated and unreal. If only I could reach out and find normality somehow or another for just a little while. Ralph is very strong-minded and makes  me behave normally when he’s here. But there’s a difference in going] thro’ the motions and actually feeling stable. I’ve talked about myself and nothing about the others’ sorrow or Don’s troubles. Oh dear, it’s dreadful to think that my nursing, however devoted and expert, can do absolutely nothing.

Well, not nothing because he is comforted, but there’s no point in talking of his trouble.

I wish I could come and cry in each of your arms! Here I have to be constantly dry eyed and brave for the sake of Ralph and Don and to repay the kindness of my friends, but dear CCC doesn’t call for such control.

Thank you all again for writing to me. I seem to have no faith in anything, nor see any purpose in anything. Then a letter comes and somehow it takes the place of my ‘safety valve’ a little (which is just one of the hundred things Don has been to me).

Agony to read this. (Roberta)

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Follow Jenna Bailey on Twitter: @jenna_e_bailey

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Michael Kay is a historian of science and technology at the University of Leeds, where he is completing his PhD thesis on the early social history of the telephone in Britain, as part of a collaborative project between the University and the BT Archives in  London. In this post, in connection with Episode 12 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’ on BBC Radio 4, Michael explores some of the early uses of the telephone in Britain and asks whether and when it became a technology of friendship.

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…it was not until I put the conductor to my own ear, and heard the unmistakeable tones of his voice… that I quite believed I was not the victim of some delusion.

– Phebe Lankester, October 1882[1]

Alexander Graham Bell’s early telephone, known as the ‘butterstamp’ telephone, which acted as both transmitter and receiver.

For Victorians towards the end of the nineteenth century, the telephone was a marvel of modern science and technology. First used commercially in Britain in 1878, and with the first exchanges opened in autumn 1879, many found it very difficult to believe until they heard it with their own ears. Although the telephone was promoted primarily as a tool for business correspondence in the workplace, and for household management in the domestic sphere, it was used for many other purposes as well. One of them, as newspaper columnist Phebe Lankester discovered in October 1882, was in maintaining friendships.

Phebe Lankester

Lankester, a writer on botany and health, had been invited to lunch with a friend in Kensington, London. After the meal her friend went to the telephone, fixed to the wall, summoned the operator, and asked to be connected to a mutual friend of theirs called James. James had broken his leg and was unable to leave his chambers. It took Lankester a few minutes to really believe that she was actually speaking from Kensington to Temple Bar. His laugh when she offered to send him some blackberry jam certainly convinced her.[2] Lankester had realised that the telephone could also be valuable for facilitating sociability in situations where it might otherwise have been difficult to communicate.

It’s unlikely, however, that this would have been possible over intercity distances until well into the next century. The trunk line network connecting towns and cities grew from the mid-1880s onwards – although London itself was not connected to the Midlands and the North until 1890 – but the construction of the trunks made it impossible for most subscribers to use them from their own offices or houses. If they wanted to speak across the country they needed to visit special call offices. It was also very expensive. Nevertheless, telephones were very useful over shorter distances for talking to those people such as James who were unable to leave their homes.

Nowhere was this more appreciated than in cases of infectious diseases. In August 1879, Eva Lükes, the Lady Superintendent at the Hospital for Sick Children in Manchester, wrote to the Bell Telephone Company’s local agent to express the gratitude of the hospital for the supply and installation of telephones within the building: “It is of the greatest value in connection with the Fever Ward, enabling me to always be in communication without risk of infection. I expected it would be useful, but I had no idea that it would prove the real comfort that it is. Already we begin to wonder how we managed before, and we would not be without it again on any account.”[3]

At this time speaking tubes were the main existing method of spoken communication within buildings. However, the benefits of using telephones instead were quickly recognised: whereas a speaking tube allowed the breath to pass through from one speaker to another, the telephone enabled the personal touch of a direct conversation without the danger of spreading disease. In December 1885 the medical journal the Lancet recommended its installation in sick rooms in private houses: “All of us must have felt the heartaching anxiety of longing to hear the voice of a dear friend when either ourselves lying on, or the friend being confined to, a bed of sickness. The comfort of hearing the voice, with all its intonations, in such a case does not need to be described in words.”[4]

In November 1887, at the height of a scarlet fever epidemic in London, the Lancet again commented on the telephone, noting its usefulness in isolating fever patients. It also again noted that enabling friends and family to speak with patients so safely and easily could potentially come with its own medical advantages. Talking to a friend directly, even at a distance, was comforting and curative, and the telephone was making such friendly communications possible where they had not been before.[5]

When Lankester used the telephone to speak to James it was an exchange connection which allowed them to converse. Lükes and the Lancet, on the other hand, referred largely to the use of shorter telephone lines within buildings. These latter were probably the more common means by which the telephone would have impacted on friendships in the late nineteenth-century. At this time, not only was exchange telephony not widely used in private houses, but it was not marketed in terms of sociability at all until well into the twentieth-century.

One of the reasons for this was that subscription rates were originally, and for many decades, flat rate. This meant that telephone companies tried to encourage people to keep conversations short because they gained nothing from longer conversations which kept lines engaged and kept the operator occupied constantly checking to see if the line was free yet. This did not change until 1921, when the introduction of measured rates meant that the Post Office – which acquired the British telephone system when it was nationalised in 1912 – could benefit financially from increasing the number of social calls. In addition the increasing number of automatic exchanges after World War One meant that the time of the operator was not such a concern.

However, historian Carolyn Marvin has noted that telephone promoters and the press believed that telephones definitely were being used for social conversations during the 1880s and 1890s, and that this should be discouraged as an impediment to the telephone’s ‘proper’ use as a serious business or household management tool. The perpetrators of this chattiness, according to these male observers, were, not surprisingly, women.[6] Although this was almost certainly based on Victorian gender prejudices, such concerns provide a window into debates around the question of what telephones should rightly be used for. And, for telephone promoters and business users in the late nineteenth-century, sociability was not the answer.

Further reading:

Claude Fischer, ‘”Touch Someone”: the telephone industry discovers sociability’, in Technology and Culture, vol. 29 no. 1 (January 1988)

Claude Fischer, America Calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940 (University of California Press, 1992)

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1988

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Dr Santanu Das is Reader in English Literature at King’s College London, and the author of Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. In this blog post he explores the unique kind of male bonding that occurred in the trenches, confounding all our usual emotional and social categories.

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In the trenches of World War I, the norms of tactile contact between men changed profoundly. Mutilation and mortality, loneliness and boredom, the strain of constant bombardment, the breakdown of language and the sense of alienation from home led to a new level of intimacy and intensity under which the carefully constructed mores of civilian society broke down. As historian Joanna Bourke has documented in her exciting work on First World War and masculinity, men nursed and fed their friends when ill; they bathed together; they held each other as they danced, and during the long winter months, wrapped blankets around each other.

These moments were often grounded in experiential reality, the nature of these encounters – men on the verge of death, under fire, or being ill – giving them an emotional nakedness and intensity that not only outlive their contingent nature but that continue to grow in emotional value and resonance. It is debatable whether these relationships were those of “comradeship” or personal “friendship” or trench “brotherhood”: each of these relationships had its particular nuance and value, though it is difficult to straitjacket human relationships and feelings, especially in times of physical and emotional extremity. Moreover, they were all forms of male intimacy during crisis with inevitable overlaps or continuity at times and touch seems to have cut across the range of these relationships.

The conditions of trench life dictated that there could be moments of perilous intimacy between relative strangers: the trench journal Poil et Plume (October, 1916) records an incident where a severely wounded man fell on an unknown stretcher-bearer and said, “Embrace me. I want to die with you”. On the other hand, W. A. Quinton recalls how one night, as he lay shivering, “old Petch put his overcoat in addition to my own over me, taking care to tuck me in as a mother would a child.” A. F. B. notes, in The Third Battalion Magazine, that Smalley was the great favourite of the Third Battalion for “his heart was as big as his body – his strength like a lion’s – his touch to the wounded as a woman’s.” A new world of largely non-genital tactile tenderness was opening up in which pity, thrill, affection and eroticism are fused and confused depending on the circumstances, degrees of knowledge, normative practices, and sexual orientations, as well as the available models of male-male relationships.

Many returned soldiers carried with them photographs of their dead comrades or small items that belonged to them; men such as Ivor Gurney remembered the voices of the men in his company, the “roguish words by Welsh pit boys”.  And yet, the most intimate moments with the comrades were those of actual body contact. These soldiers are often haunted by the feel of their comrades’ bodies as life ebbed out and the warm mutuality of the embrace was lost forever. The most immediate and yet the most evanescent of human senses, touch could only be preserved in memory and through language. Consequently, there is the urgent need within war writings to remember and re-present these moments, to evolve a literary language around touch.

The writings of the soldier-poets may be regarded as a phantasmatic space where they would resurrect their dead comrades through language, infusing them with the warmth they had once known: “I clasp his hand”, “For a moment the touch/Of a warm hand” and “I had clasped warm, last night”. War literature is haunted by the sense of touch, from Rupert Brooke’s “linked beauty of bodies” to the “full-nerved, still-warm” limbs of Wilfred Owen’s dying boy and from Siegfried Sassoon’s “my fingers touch his face” to Robert Nichols’ more sentimental “My comrade, that you could rest / Your tired body on mine.” Remarque inAll Quiet on the Western Front distils all the poignancy of Freundschaft into a single, silent gesture: “Kat’s hands are warm, I pass my hand under his shoulders in order to rub his temples with some tea. I feel my fingers becoming moist.” Sherriff’sJourney’s End, one of the most popular war plays, culminates in a similarly intense scene of tactile tenderness: “Stanhope […] lightly runs his fingers over Raleigh’s tousled hair.”

If shell shock had been the body language of masculine complaint, the poetic efflorescence of the 1920s was the celebration of what the Lawrentian hero Mellors famously describes as the “courage of physical tenderness” forged among men in the trenches: “I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them.” Whether or not there is any conscious or unconscious erotic investment in these moments, they indicate a new level of intensity and intimacy in male-male relationships. Above all, these moments of physical bonding and tactile tenderness during trench warfare require us to reconceptualize masculinity, conventional gender roles, and notions of same-sex intimacy in postwar England in more nuanced ways than have been acknowledged in the criticism of war culture, studies of gender and sexuality, or the more general histories of the body, intimacy, and gesture.

In the trenches, the male body became an instrument of pain rather than of desire. World War I lasted over four years and claimed nine million lives; an average of 6,046 men were killed every day. In such a context, same-sex intimacy must also be understood in opposition to and as a triumph over death: it must be seen as a celebration of life, of young men huddled against long winter nights, rotting corpses, and falling shells. Physical contact was a transmission of the wonderful assurance of being alive, and more sex-specific eroticism, though concomitant, was subsidiary. In a world of visual squalor, little gestures – closing a dead comrade’s eyes, wiping his brow, or holding him in one’s arms – were felt as acts of supreme beauty that made life worth living. Although these acts may overlap with eroticism, such experiences should not simply be conflated with it – or, for that matter, with the repression or sublimation of sexual drives.

Consequently, in order to discuss intense same-sex relations during war, we must introduce a different and less distinctly sexualized array of emotional intensities and bodily sensations, a fresh category of nongenital tactile tenderness that goes beyond strict gender divisions and sexual binaries. The need for such an approach becomes particularly evident when examining representations of the dying kiss in World War I literature.

The Reverend Okeden writes to his wife: “I’ve got a little secret […] One dear lad very badly wounded […] said, ‘Hello Padre old sport’ and then ‘Come and kiss me Padre’ and he put his arms round me and kissed me.” Similarly, when his close friend Jim dies, a grief-stricken Lance-Corporal D. H. Fenton writes to his mother, Mrs Noone that ‘I held him in my arms to the end, and when his soul had departed I kissed him twice where I knew you would have kissed him – on the brow – once for his mother and once for myself’. The recurring, almost ritualistic phrase, “mother’s kiss”, suggests a powerful reconceptualization of both masculinity and male-male bonds through an assumed maternal impulse of security and tenderness, a moment of “perilous intimacy” to borrow a phrase from Lawrence.

It is a great irony that the world’s first industrial war, which brutalized the male body on such an unprecedented scale, also nurtured the most intense and intimate of male bonds. The myth of strong, invincible masculinity fostered through the works of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, later advocated by men such as Hulme, Lewis and Pound and finally embodied in the stolid figure of General Haig, exploded in the mud and blood of the Western Front. A very different order of male experience, one that accommodated fear, vulnerability, support and physical tenderness, sprang up in its place. What challenged heterosexuality in post-War England was not sexual dissidence but memories of such relationships. These were neither of romantic love nor blokish bonding nor homoerotic frisson: with each of these elements, there is a distinct overlap and, yet always, a distinct difference. Eroticism might occasionally have played a part, but it was not the founding impulse. Sexuality had not yet hijacked an intimate history of human emotions. “Frightful intimacy” is as far as language can go: the dying kiss was perhaps its true sign, the mouth filling the gap left by language.

Listen to Episode 10 of Five Hundred Years of Friendship: A Battalion of Pals

[This post was first published as ‘The Dying Kiss: Gender and Intimacy in the Trenches of World War I‘ by Santanu Das licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales]

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