Self-Fashioning, Food, and Masculinity in George III’s Monarchy

Abstract George III was a family man, a modest eater, and a thoughtful ruler who wrote about the big questions of the day, from royal sovereignty to the best methods of agriculture to feed a modern nation. His writings provide a glimpse of his version of monarchy, which placed him at the head of a national family, where he embodied the habits of self-regulation and temperance in keeping with the sensibilities of late eighteenth-century manhood. This article brings together George’s meals and his essays, considering the histories of food, masculinity, and self-fashioning, to argue that George was a monarch who embodied a new form of masculinity, as marked by his agricultural interests and insistence on a modest diet. His eating habits, along with his intellectual interests and public persona, bring us to the intersection between the private man and the public monarch. Drawing on newly digitized data, alongside contemporary caricatures and descriptions, and George’s own writing, we argue that moderation was central to George’s creation of an image that appealed to the emerging British nation of the late eighteenth century; food was central to this image, highlighting both his masculine self-control and his ability to be useful to the nation.