We have come to see the long eighteenth century as a period during which older models of social interaction and gender relations were replaced by a new regime based on binaries of biological sex and sexual identity. Writers such as Michel Foucault (1976), Alan Bray (1982) and Thomas Laqueur, (1992), all describe a radical shift in how people thought of themselves as men and women, of their sexual identity, and of their place in a society whose very foundations were being rewritten in the years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. England’s commercialisation and the emergence of a new public sphere brought about new ideals of civility and sociability (Carter, 2001). New notions of masculinity and femininity, the one being established as firmly opposed to the other, put new boundaries on men and women’s everyday interactions. It became crucial for men to practice a form of civility that steered clear of any suggestions of effeminacy. My thesis seeks to bring to light a more fine-grained picture of eighteenth-century masculinities by looking at contemporary practices and ideals of friendship. Rather than writing yet another book about the shift from an older model of homosociality to modern forms of friendship, I hope to find a variety of competing models of friendship, many of which will turn out to incorporate older practices of friendship. What is exciting about approaching issues of gender and masculinity from the angle of friendship is friendship’s transgressive potential. I believe that the ideals, practices, anxieties and prohibitions surrounding friendship provide interesting insights into an era’s major anxieties. Thus, in the eighteenth century, anxieties surrounding (failed) masculinity overlap with questions of the nature of loyalty, civic duty, distribution of family ressources and inheritance. One example is the anxiety aroused by scenes of men kissing and embracing. As early as the 1670s, in the comedies of Etherege, this level of physical intimacy between men is portrayed as problematic. Nonetheless, in Smollett’s novels Roderick Random (1748) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) we meet with a dazzling array of embracing, sobbing and trembling men, whose intense emotional investment in each other far surpasses any scenes of married life. To uncover a more complex picture of eighteenth-century homosociality, I will be looking at a variety of texts - the novels of Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne, as well as pamphlets and periodicals, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, and the political writings of David Hume and John Locke.