ABSTRACT
An air of confident British masculinity is one of the most readily apparent features of the Golden Age - and it was a complacency stemming from male perceptions of linkages between the increasing levels of individual and national success in the period. Employing historical contexts for such lessons was not new: history was, stereo typically, a powerful didactic medium. In commercial terms, biographies provided one of the staple assets of any publishing list in this period. The Religious Tract Society (RTS) commented on the 'appetite for biography'. By the mid-century, those considered as being most in need of such education as biography could provide were, for a variety of reasons, also believed to be largely out of the reach of formal schooling, while being possessed also of dangerous amounts of leisure time. The impact such life-stones were intended to have upon their readership was emphasized by featuring these exemplars in collections.
