Manly men and angelic women: Gender and nostalgia in George Elgar Hicks’s watercolour The Sinews of Old England (1857) and in an advertisement for Cadbury's Cocoa (1886). Karen Walker

The Sinews of Old England depicts an idealised labourer and his family at the door of their cottage. Cadbury's Cocoa used a similar image for an advertisement some thirty years later. This essay argues that both images carry messages about gender, class and work; invoking an idealised British past and promoting romanticised gender roles which were used to lend strength and credibility to the growing Cadbury brand. The work of John Ruskin and Samuel Smiles taught men and women how to inhabit their proper station in life, and these two images reinforce this prevailing conservative mind-set which kept women behind closed
doors while their men dealt with public life, in whatever form was suitable for them.