Manliness was the central educational ideal of the Victorian and Edwardian British public school. This study traces its creation in the early years of the nineteenth century, its fullest realisation in practice at Edward Thring's school at Uppingham, its distortion through the cult of athleticism in the second half of the century, and its perversion by the militarists in the years before the Great War. Thring's ideal survived in the progressive school movement, its legacy permeated all good schools after the Second World War, and eventually flourished as the holistic ideal of wholeness.