Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction: George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope 9781472445575, 9781315593401

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Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction

Focusing on works by George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, Alice Crossley examines the emergence of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period to suggest that it may be viewed as a distinct form of experience. Adolescence, Crossley shows, appears as a discrete category of identity that draws on but is nonetheless distinguishable from other masculine types. Important more as a stage of psychological awareness and maturation than as a period of biological youth, Crossley argues that the plasticity of male adolescence provides Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope with opportunities for self-reflection and social criticism, while also working as a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, and the possibilities of self-creation. Adolescence emerges as a crucial stage of individual growth, adopted by these authors in order to reflect more fully on cultural and personal anxieties about manliness. The centrality of male youth in these authors’ novels, Crossley demonstrates, repositions age-consciousness as an integral part of nineteenth-century debates about masculine heterogeneity. Alice Crossley is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University of Lincoln, UK.

The Nineteenth Century Series

Series Editor: Joanne Shattock, Professor Emeritus, University of Leicester, UK

The series focuses primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other nineteenth-century British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography; journalism; periodical literature; travel writing; book production; gender; non-­ canonical writing. Recent in this series: Life Writing and Victorian Culture Edited by David Amigoni Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities Edited by Amelia Yeates and Serena Trowbridge Thackeray in Time History, Memory and Modernity Edited by Richard Salmon and Alice Crossley The Philosophical Mysticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins Aakanksha Virkar-Yates South Seas Encounters Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America Edited by Richard Fulton, Stephen Hancock, Peter Hoffenberg, and Allison Paynter Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope Alice Crossley

Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope Alice Crossley

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Alice Crossley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-472-44557-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-59340-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For my parents

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Note on textual editions

ix xi xiii

1 Introduction 1 2 The Bildungsroman and advertising: Thackeray’s Pendennis novels

31

3 Manly conduct: Meredith and the culture of improvement 68 4 Investments in youth: speculation and liberal adolescence in Trollope 103 5 The language of filial dialogue in Meredith 139 6 Aberrant youth: the dandy, the wild man, and the deviant 174 Conclusion 219 Bibliography Index

225 239

List of figures

1.1 Illustration from Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town, [W. M. Thackeray], Punch, 16 (1849). Personal copy owned by the author 17 1.2 Illustration from Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town, [W. M. Thackeray], Punch, 17 (1849). Personal copy owned by the author 18 1.3 Henry Wallis (1830–1916), Chatterton (“The Death of Chatterton”) (1856). Image reproduced with permission from the Tate Gallery/Digital Image © Tate, London 2018 22 2.1 Image of ‘The Newcomes Advertiser’, No. II, November 1853 (p. 2). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 49 2.2 Image from ‘The Newcomes Advertiser’, No. II, November 1853 (p. 8). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 52 2.3 Image of the ‘Pendennis Advertiser’, No. VII, May 1849 (p. 4). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford 53 6.1 Illustration from Pendennis, by W. M. Thackeray, ‘Pen pursuing his law studies’. Personal copy owned by the author 186 6.2 Illustration from Pendennis, by W. M. Thackeray, ‘Pen hears himself in print’. Personal copy owned by the author 187

Acknowledgements

Immense gratitude is due to a number of individuals and organisations for their valuable assistance during the preparation of this book. W ­ riting Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Literature has, as with all such projects, been an inevitably lengthy process; each of the people (and bodies or institutions) mentioned below have facilitated the work for this volume in one way or another – so thank you, one and all. First, I would like to express my appreciation for the time and therefore opportunity to complete my manuscript following my appointment at the University of Lincoln. I have also benefitted from the supportive scholarly environment created by my colleagues in the School of English and Journalism. I am also grateful for early support from the School of English, University of Leeds, where I completed my doctoral thesis from which this book has developed. In particular, Richard Salmon consistently offered indispensable advice and guidance on this venture and others, including collaborating on the essay collection Thackeray in Time (2016), which was inspired by a mutual interest in Thackeray’s writing. I remain grateful for his continued support. More personal thanks are due to James Eli Adams, Susan Anderson, Owen Clayton, Holly Furneaux, Francis O’Gorman, Matt Rubery, ­Valerie Sanders, and Jennifer Sarha for reading portions of the book in various stages of completion, and for their excellent advice. Other friends and colleagues have of course been instrumental in the completion of this project along the way, allowing me space and opportunity to talk about my writing and research: Louisa Hodgson, David Ibitson, Felicity James, Cassie Ulph, Vanessa Graham, and Sarah Gardner deserve special mention for their willingness to listen, critique, and engage in reflective discussions that have helped further my thinking about youth and gender in Victorian literature. I am also delighted to have benefitted from co-organising the first international conference on George M ­ eredith in 2015 with Claudia Capancioni, as it provided a forum through which to share my work on Meredith with fellow scholars working on the author and his circle. Joanne Shattock, one of the general editors of the Nineteenth Century Series, was particularly encouraging in the early stages of this project, and I would also like to thank Ann Donahue, Timothy

xii Acknowledgements Swenarton, and all the editorial staff at Routledge who have worked toward the publication of this book. Early iterations of parts of this book were published as articles. ‘The Rising Generation: Male Adolescence in Victorian Literature and Culture’ was published in Peer English 7 (2012), and has been expanded into part of Chapter 1. The first section of Chapter 6 was published as ‘The Performance of Privacy: Dandyism in W. M. Thackeray’s Pendennis’ in Victorian Network 3.2 (2011). Finally, parts of Chapter 2 were expanded and reworked from an article in Victorians: Journal of Culture and Literature 120 (2011) entitled ‘Bildung by Numbers: Serialisation, Readership, and Narrative Form in Thackeray’s Pendennis Novels’. I am grateful to all of the publishers for their permission to reproduce these materials here. The staff of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Library at the University of Lincoln; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the ­Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; and Special Collections at the David ­Wilson Library, University of Leicester, have all been invaluable during my research, for their knowledge and professional expertise. Finally, but by no means least, I wish to thank my parents, Gary and Yvonne Crossley, both of whom have been endlessly supportive through the entirety of the writing of this book. Their generosity, genuine interest, and enthusiasm are constant, and I am immensely grateful. This book is dedicated to you.

Note on textual editions

In this book, references to the novels are usually to critical editions of the authors’ works, or to facsimile or print-on-demand editions where critical editions are not available. This is because complete editions of these authors’ works are not readily accessible to most readers, even in institutional libraries. A decision was made, therefore, to use editions of these texts that the majority of readers will be able to source relatively inexpensively, in order to promote wider readership of fiction by ­Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope.

1 Introduction

The fluidity of adolescent identity, which itself could be viewed with anxiety or even outright suspicion in mid-Victorian society, creates fascinating and informative tensions within the novels of George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. In their fiction there is often a struggle to reconcile the transitional aspects of male adolescence with more crystallised ideals of Victorian manhood. The focus of each author on male adolescence as a transient, formative stage of development on the one hand, but as a separate masculine type or identity with its own characteristics on the other (often simultaneously), has as yet received limited critical attention despite its prominence and recurrence in their fiction. This has led to a tendency to distortion of perspectives on identity and self-presentation, sexual consciousness, and the discussion of manliness in their work. Through detailed analysis of a range of the novels written by each author, this volume establishes such issues as significant elements of their work, to suggest that each aspect is mutually constituted and as such forms part of a wider discourse about the cultural value invested in male adolescence. In doing so, Meredith, Thackeray and Trollope participate in the increasing recognition of various forms of experience which arise specifically from this period of individual development, or discrete marker of identity. At the same time, in their representations of the male adolescent, these writers negotiate various challenges necessarily involved in the prioritisation of this hitherto largely marginal figure, who still obtained a fairly liminal position (lacking agency, politically disenfranchised, financially dependent, or socially alienated), and so was not yet possessed of significant social status and cultural cachet. Bound up in the politics and psychology of identity formation, male youth in their work emerges as a legitimately complex stage of life, rather than a temporary category of maturation to be swiftly overcome or a symbol of comic ineptitude. In responding to their cultural climate, in which childhood was increasingly valorised as a markedly different form of experience from adulthood, while adolescence remained a nebulous concept not yet fully conceptualised or categorised, these authors’ work serves to invigorate the consideration of youth as a separate stage in the lifecycle. Male

2  Introduction adolescence emerges as a crucial facet of male identity. Adolescence is often constructed throughout the mid-nineteenth century by a range of discourses as a fluid period of formation, in which appropriate masculine values may (and should) be learned. Its instability, however, also features as a cause for concern as such plasticity could be conceived as either exciting or dangerous. With increasing urgency, educators, medical writers, and various ‘civilizing’ institutions and societies began to emphasise the unique role of the adolescent, who was not only the site of individual potentiality, but was also emblematic of wider national futurity (and so at once custodians of existing political and social values, as well as impending instigators of cultural change). The boy was, in popular adage, father to the man, and the individual youth represented the rising generation. Adolescence was emerging as a period of life which warranted careful guidance and surveillance for the promise that it held. The novelists examined in this book, however, are attracted to young male protagonists not only for the cultural freight with which their formation is invested, or for the purposes of retrospective personal nostalgia. Instead, in these novels Meredith, Thackeray and Trollope also attribute discrete forms of behaviour to adolescence to suggest that youth assumes its own masculine models or types, occupies its own place in the fantasies of manly achievement, and was not simply a fleeting stage. Male adolescence could be conceived in terms of failure, cast as imperfect or flawed in its inadequate performance of adult manliness. However, for these writers, this lack is often itself productive. It is therefore not only the process of formation which these three authors find so demonstrably fascinating, as they return to it so often in their writing, but also the experience of adolescence itself as a form of identity. In the negotiations of masculine identity that they enact, these figures are depicted as psychologically complex, socially significant, and aesthetically distinctive; they are therefore important on their own terms. Adolescence therefore emerges as a crucial context to the study of nineteenth century literature. These novelists also help to codify this period of growth and its popular affect during the ­Victorian period. Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope recognise the liminal status of the male adolescent, but in conducting such sustained studies of this figure it is reinvigorated; its marginalisation, oddness, and otherness are largely recuperated through their analyses of its complexity.

Adolescence in the nineteenth century The fiction of Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope often responds, openly or indirectly, to a variety of ideas about youth in circulation by mid-­ century, in their project to expose and illuminate adolescence as a significant age or recognisable stage of development. In conducting a study of adolescence in their work, this book is not concerned to date its emergence. Instead, this volume aims to reposition age-consciousness as an

Introduction  3 integral part of contemporary Victorian debates about masculine heterogeneity. Each of these three novelists draw on, or write against, dominant discourses of youth and masculine development, thus contributing to the institutionalisation of adolescence as a socially constituted stage in growth and personal experience, as each illuminates this distinct stage of development as an integral and valuable aspect of middle-class masculine identity. However, in order to establish the valence of adolescence as a concept, and the associative ideas which adhered to it in Victorian Britain, this section shows how it was popularly understood, debated, evaluated, and formulated in some of the literature of the period, as well as how recent studies on adolescence and ageing have contributed to a greater awareness of its significance in the nineteenth century. Scholarly work on intermediary stages of individual experience as determined by age has been gaining purchase in recent years, which has been a most welcome development, as academics working in the areas of nineteenth-century literature, history, and sociology have been increasingly receptive to age studies as a critical approach, and so in turn to the role that age may hold in the study of various cultural materials to include literature. As Kay Heath has observed: To exclude the concept of age is not only to ignore, but also to deny, its pervasive influence on the way culture constructs our identity as humans and by such denial to remain unconscious of and therefore vulnerable to age’s hegemonic intensity.1 While Heath’s work is restricted to exploring the middle years of adult life, and this book focuses on the earlier experiences of adolescence, the acknowledgement of the ‘pervasive influence’ of age and the processes of ageing helps to situate adolescence as a key fact of identity in relation to the discrete stages of childhood and adulthood that, in part, define the beginning and end of this stage of the lifecycle. 2 The consciousness of ageing, and the cultural significance and ‘hegemonic intensity’ that such consciousness upholds, reinforce adolescence as a crucial stage of maturation, recognisable today as being invested with a sense of personal experience overlaid with social expectation. It is this ‘essentially psychological understanding of adolescence’ that signifies its consolidation as a modern process and that is evident in the work of all three novelists examined in this book.3 For some historians and sociologists, adolescence is not just a modern construct but also an extremely recent one, with the idea becoming firmly institutionalised and a part of the cultural consciousness of Western society only, they suggest, in the twentieth century or during the fin de siècle at the earliest.4 Philippe Ariès, for example, contends that ‘awareness of youth became a general phenomenon’ only after the end of the First World War, placing the concretisation of adolescence firmly

4  Introduction in the 1900s. 5 John Demos and Virginia Demos, in an early survey of adolescence through history, claim that: The concept of adolescence, as generally understood and applied, did not exist before the last two decades of the nineteenth century. One could almost call it an invention of that period.6 In a similar vein to this claim, Kent Baxter has more recently suggested that ‘the term had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses at the ­[twentieth] century’s beginning’.7 The term itself, Baxter asserts, was used only sporadically until the fin de siècle, although many critics are adamant that the concept was nonetheless recognised, and indeed formalised, earlier in the nineteenth century. For sociologist John Davis, changes in education and legislation of the early Victorian period mark ‘the universal institutionalization of this age grade as a major subdivision of the human life-cycle’, although its origins are clearly traced back to the institutions of the charivari and the persistence of early modern traditions of misrule.8 Social historian John Gillis cites a drop in child mortality rates, and the educational changes that extended the period of dependence, as evidence of the “discovery” of adolescence by the nineteenth-century middle classes, and literary critics Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson draw attention to the popularity of public schools, the Boy Scout movement, and the rise in juvenile literature during the Victorian era as likely causes for the formalisation of adolescence, while Stephanie Olsen draws on a wide number of groups and institutions who emerged as ‘stakeholders of youth’, from child psychologists to educators, and scientists to temperance organizations, all of whom had a hand in the way that juvenile citizenship was consolidated from 1880.9 What arises from these various contentions about dating the history of adolescence, and from the different means of justifying it as an increasingly familiar institution in the culture of the period, is less significant for the purposes of this study than what it suggests about how adolescence itself is defined, understood, and discussed. For Gillis and John Springhall, the emergence of adolescence in the mid-nineteenth century is connected to developing ideas about delinquency, for example, and Jenny Holt expands upon private education as prompting important debate:10 As the phenomenon of adolescence attracted greater discussion, middle- and upper-class boys at public school became the main focus of attention for writers, sociologists and policy-makers eager to investigate and influence this period of life.11 By isolating particular aspects of the evolving focus on youth in the nineteenth century, whether this interest is related to ‘boys at public school’

Introduction  5 or their delinquent tendencies, an understanding of the ways in which adolescence was conceptualised and defined can develop. Certain shared values or characteristics occur frequently in both the various discourses that combine to formulate the idea of adolescence in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and in the criticism that analyses those different forms of writing from a twentieth- or twenty-first-century perspective. These may be loosely separated (despite some inevitable overlapping) into the relationship between biological determination and cultural construction, the connections between sexual, social and psychological responses, and the relative values placed on adolescence as either a purely transitory period or as a distinct and significant experience in its own right. In the texts discussed in each of the following chapters, adolescence is frequently described in terms of most, if not all, of these often conflicting characteristics and forms of experience, suggesting that this stage of life could be concurrently invested with different personal and cultural significance at any one time. As Holt has surmised, ‘changing adult priorities conditioned popular views on youth’, and so adolescence may be seen to simultaneously assume numerous shapes and forms in the literature of this period.12 Adolescence was understood by some between 1850 and 1880 as a biologically determined fact of life. From a medical perspective, taken from the first lines of a work by William Acton published in 1857: The period of youth is distinguished by that advance in the evolution of the generative apparatus in both sexes, and by that acquirement of its power of functional activity, which constitutes the state of PUBERTY. At this epoch a considerable change takes place in the bodily constitution […]13 This establishes puberty as a biological fact, relative to age, and suggests that ‘youth’ [original emphasis] corresponds with this physiological change. For others, however, its cultural origins were acknowledged by comparison with earlier, less-precise experiences of youth, suggesting that the concept of adolescence was not understood simply in terms of physical development. Looking back on this period, more sophisticated attempts to understand the ways that adolescence was constructed placed a greater emphasis on its evolution as a social and cultural response rather than just a biological imperative, leading to recent observations that adolescence ‘was the response to an observable fact – the fact of a youth culture’, or that it was a ‘social role’, or ‘a socio-cultural construction’, rather than a period of purely physical change heralded by puberty and experienced in the same way by each generation.14 As with Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope, many writers on youth in the Victorian period engaged with the social and psychological characteristics of youth as an extension of, or a response to, the physiological

6  Introduction developments that occur at puberty. As such, a recognisable view of adolescence in the period is present not only in fiction, but also in the periodical press, in political discussion, and in religious tracts, and it is discussed alongside interlocking debates on topics that range from sexuality and the gendering of public and private spheres, to class and evolutionary development. Certain key aspects of adolescent experience recur as isolated features for reflection, such as the movements of youth from dependence to independence and social recognition, the gradual assumption of adult roles such as work, marriage or parenthood, sexual maturity, and the assumption of responsibility in place of ‘the innate psychological and emotional instability of the young’.15 Each of these qualities surfaces frequently in the texts that form a part of this study – from the novels of Trollope, Thackeray, and Meredith, to medical works and conduct literature – as a fundamental part of adolescent experience in the mid-Victorian period. Certain of these characteristics play a major role in the formation of adult attitudes towards this social group, and become loci of anxiety. The ‘innate […] instability of the young’ is one view of adolescence that isolates this stage of life as inherently problematic to social order as well as being disruptive to personal relationships. Fear about the challenges posed by youth towards parents or other established forms of authority led writers to express concern over potentially delinquent or criminal behaviour in the rising generation: When one unfurls the standard of Defiance to parents and guardians, he may be sure of raising a lawless troop of adolescent ruffians, born rebels, to any amount. The beardless crew know they have not a chance of pay: but what of that when the rosy prospect of thwarting their elders is in view?16 This quotation, taken from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) by George Meredith, humorously demonstrates this negative view of adolescents as ‘born rebels’ aflame at the prospect of ‘thwarting their elders’, in ‘Defiance’ of the existing social order that expects subordination from those who have not yet achieved an adult identity and earned the respect and authority commensurate to that role. Similar concerns are echoed in an 1863 article from Fraser’s Magazine entitled ‘Our Modern Youth’, in which ‘this arrogant, self-sufficient boyhood’, in whom ‘want of reverence is one of the common faults’, is a type who ‘rejects experience, relying instead on misguided self-importance’.17 The article goes on to invite readers to consider the gravity of such behaviour, and to reflect how such tendencies affect the present and the future of British society: What generous action can we hope from the riper years of one who, in the age of illusions, is given up to matter-of-fact worldliness; who,

Introduction  7 in the age of trust, is proud of being suspicious; who, in the age of inexperience, is full of self-assurance? […] What course of social or political improvement can we expect from one whose small self is his standard of human achievement – to whom the experience of age inspires no respect […]?18 This article, coupled with the extract from Meredith’s novel, accentuates the increasing tendency to view mid-Victorian adolescence as strange and unfamiliar, and as unlike the youth of previous generations. Such concerns evolved into later fears about degeneration, although the significance of youth in this period is still acknowledged as crucial, and as representative of the ‘political and social improvement’ of the future. Such fears are countered by the theory of recapitulation (the idea that individual development operates in the same way as evolution, so that each stage is re-experienced in sequence from savagery to civilization), which gained purchase in this period but found its most vociferous supporter in G. Stanley Hall, whose 1904 treatise Adolescence is ­acknowledged to have been crucial for the consolidation of adolescence in both scientific as well as lay consciousness. While Hall immortalised this idea in relation to adolescence, the concept already held currency as a popular view.19 John Morss has suggested that, for Hall, mankind was continually evolving towards a higher state so that ‘in passing into adolescence, the young person was reliving one of the most abrupt transitions of his evolutionary history’, ‘with adulthood representing a falling away, a decline into a state of rigidity’. 20 These ideas, made prominent by Hall, were nonetheless similarly articulated (albeit with less certainty and clarity) in some of the mid-Victorian texts under consideration here. Two aspects of Hall’s argument, for example, are already established as points of interest or anxiety to Victorian writers: the ‘deep national importance of the mental condition of the rising generation’, and concerns about the “storm and stress” exhibited by youth. 21 The emotional and psychological conflict displayed by adolescents in this period can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), and the transition from obedient childhood to problematic teen years, before the self-mastery of adulthood may be achieved. This lends itself to a popular form of fiction in the nineteenth century: the Bildungsroman (as examined in Chapter 2). In Émile, Rousseau suggests: As the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions announces this tumultuous change; a suppressed excitement warns us of the approaching danger. A change of temper, frequent outbreaks of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind, make the child almost ungovernable. He becomes deaf to the voice he used to obey; he is a lion in a fever; he distrusts his keeper and refuses to be controlled. 22

8  Introduction This idea is still visible in nineteenth-century fiction, and is deeply embedded in textual productions of this period that deal with adolescence. Internal conflict, ‘rising passions’, and ‘outbreaks of anger’ that combine to make youth ‘ungovernable’ are evident symptoms of this stage of individual development in, for example, Thackeray’s novel Pendennis (1850), in which the young hero Pen, thwarted in love, is seen to be ‘quivering with passion and indignation’, ‘looking death and defiance’, ‘so agitated he could scarcely speak’, and is termed ‘the young reprobate, who was looked upon as a monster of crime’. 23 These depictions of the internal friction that forms a part of adolescent experience in this period (and which is still evident today) suggest that adolescence may be shown to hold great capacity and imaginative power as a period of turbulence and rebellion. Patricia Meyer Spacks has commented that adult visions of adolescence in Victorian novels recount its sexual and emotional energy as something that has been lost: The novelists of the nineteenth century often reveal a conviction that growing up is regrettable as well as necessary, involving a discipline of the heart […], a discipline that restrains, restricts, subordinates, punishes, controls the life of feeling; that implies loss. […] The novelist recalls and fantasizes about what it feels like to be adolescent; the moralist comments on the social significance of adolescent action and inaction. 24 According to Spacks, this attitude of ‘regret’ towards, and fantasy about, adolescence, provides an imaginative correlative to the ‘social significance’ of youth for moral commentators of the period. However, a less amiable view of adolescence also emerges in Victorian literature as a stage of life in which the individual becomes a cipher, disenfranchised and generally ineffectual. This view of adolescence defines the experience of this stage as simply a transitory period of preparation for adult life and full social participation. An article of 1851 exemplifies this perspective: ­ reparation ― Youth is properly, and by natural ordainment, a season of p a sort of vestibule to the nobler temple of completed manhood. Taking this to be the case, it is manifestly desirable that the young should undergo a training or cultivation commensurate with the requirements of that maturer [sic] stage of life towards which they are advancing, and wherein they will be called upon to display their powers in active connection with the affairs and duties of society. 25 Rather than being valued as a crucial stage of individual development in its own right, with distinct experiences, adolescence here is understood in terms of ‘preparation’, an empty ‘vestibule’ ripe for ‘training

Introduction  9 or cultivation’ in the ‘duties of society’. Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope, in their fiction, represent adolescence as a significant and curiously compelling state, in which the individual must learn to accept social responsibility, negotiate social expectations, exercise self-control, and undergo a certain amount of ‘training or cultivation’ for these duties of the ‘maturer stage of life towards which [their protagonists] are advancing’. Nevertheless, youth is isolated in their novels as worthy of detailed and thoughtful study, both by themselves and their contemporary readership, as an important stage of life that resonates throughout the culture and literature of the mid-Victorian period. By focusing on the interpretations of adolescence in the work of Thackeray, a popular novelist at mid-century, Meredith, whose career as a pre-eminent literary figure began in the 1850s, and Trollope, whose prolific output led to several decades of successful authorship spanning the 1840s–1880s, this study will establish some of the ways in which this particular moment of progress and self-creation was perceived.

Victorian masculinities: youth and cultural expectations In recent decades, much has been done to establish masculinity as a multiform construct that shifts and changes in response to cultural and historical expectations of maleness. Masculinity studies within Victorian literary criticism has sought to emphasise, Herbert Sussman suggests, ‘the plurality of male gender formations [as] crucial not only to counter the still pervasive essentialist view of maleness, but also to deconstruct the monolithic view of masculinity’. 26 Given the tendency outlined above to conceive of adolescence as a state of potentiality, as well as an identity in its own right (as the three authors studied here contend), this ‘plurality of male gender formations’ is crucial to understanding male adolescence in the mid-Victorian period. Male adolescence reflects this lack of single identification. In the literature under discussion within this book, the analysis of male adolescence parallels debates about ‘male gender formations’, in that both are revealed to be unstable, fluid, and responsive to shifting argument about what constitutes appropriate private and social behaviour. These discourses of age and gender are often mutually constituted, as they impact closely on one another, so that the performance of particular types of manliness, for example, is often linked to maturity, or age-specific behaviours and activities. Michael Roper and John Tosh, in Manful Assertions, have observed that: The passage from boyhood to manhood has traditionally been bound up with expectations of and fantasies about power, not only in the home but in the workplace, politics and sport. Despite the myths of omnipotent manhood which surround us, masculinity is never fully possessed, but must perpetually be achieved, asserted, and renegotiated.27

10  Introduction Male adolescence in particular reflects this process of constant realisation and re-enactment, as its focus as a transient stage of life is often outlined as one of continuous development and progress towards a fixed goal, measurable through the cultivation of masculine attributes equivalent to character formation and emotional fulfilment. Samuel Smiles, writing in Life and Labour (1887), declared that: The seeds of virtue sown in youth grow into good words and deeds, and eventually ripen into habits. Where the mind and heart have not been duly cultivated in youth, one may look forward to the approach of manhood with dismay, if not despair.’28 This emphasises the reciprocal dependence of ‘youth’ towards ‘manhood’, and identifies the formation of ‘habit’ and ‘cultivat[ion]’ as processes central to both manliness and adolescent development. The experiences of adolescence that combine to produce this cultivation facilitate the ‘approach of manhood’ and the assumption of a full masculine role in society. Male adolescence may also be constructed as possessed of its own form of valuable experience and so be considered as a masculine type in itself, to be grouped with similar varieties of masculine identity in this period, such as the typological constructs of the male writer as professional, the father, the bachelor, or the gentleman. Each of these figures, including the male adolescent, must attempt to resolve their own and others’ ‘expectations and fantasies about power’ in the public and domestic spheres and also in male-associative arenas. Adolescence, then, holds both significance as the place where masculine traits and values may be learned, and forms its own masculine type. If adolescence, in the Victorian era, may be seen as a part of wider cultural concerns, the gendered experience of adolescence may be similarly bound up with other anxieties or assumptions about masculinity. It exploits, as well as informs, cultural concerns informed by narratives of manliness related to conventional masculine ideals such as the gentleman or the hero, to the roles that men could expect to play (or the roles that society might expect men to play) in political improvement, changes to social welfare, or even the pursuit and consolidation of Britain’s empire. While adolescence is by no means an exclusively male experience, the formation of the nineteenth-century concept of adolescence is more readily understood in relation to similar ideas about manliness and other types of male experience. Jenny Holt has indicated that ‘It was predominantly male, middle-class, public-school educated writers, sociologists and educationalists who developed ideas of “normal” adolescence and who fashioned it in their own (retrospective) image’. 29 Holt’s thesis, which stresses the importance of educational practice and perception in relation to ideas about masculinity and male adolescence, suggests that those dominating popular discourse on this subject fashioned

Introduction  11 adolescence in a partly self-reflexive exercise. This idea accords with Spacks’s contention that adolescence ‘becomes a version of the self’, that it ‘was something adults had lost’; their implied status as adults who had undergone a similar experience domesticated the ‘strangeness’ of the adolescent.30 If general theories about adolescence in this period are more closely related to specifically male experience, or are fabricated from a typically male perspective (as identified by Holt, in her emphasis on public school, or for Gillis and Springhall, who associate adolescence in this period with crime and delinquency), it would nonetheless be misleading to suggest in any way that male adolescence in this period could be seen as a synecdoche for adolescence in general, as pointed out by Crista DeLuzio in her book Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought. DeLuzio does admit, though, that adolescence was ‘initially conceptualized as a masculine construct’, and that in the nineteenth century it was produced as a ‘category that privileged maleness, whiteness, and middle-class status as its normative characteristics’. 31 She goes on to demonstrate, however, that discussions of female development must not be dismissed, and so her project takes a different direction to this study, which explores the formation of masculine identity in youth. Christine Griffin has also noted that ‘the “discovery” of adolescence coincided with ‘the emerging cult of heterosexual masculinity; with the determined avoidance (especially by elite males) of all things “feminine”’. 32 By choosing to define their young male protagonists in relation to ‘the emerging cult of heterosexual masculinity’ and in conjunction with or against ‘all things “feminine”’, Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope, in the novels under consideration here, narrate contemporary perspectives of specifically masculine identity. However, male adolescence, when considered as an example of incomplete or imperfect masculinity, or of manliness that has not yet been achieved, is often defined in close relation to femininity. Youth can therefore also be distinguished by a productive gender mis-identification, so that an initial feminine stage must be passed through before masculine identity can be affirmed, which is evident within Meredith’s novels in particular. 33 The tensions between masculinising imperatives or discourses on the one hand, and more fluid impetuses depicted as part of the adolescent state on the other, mean that adolescence is constructed as a complex mode of identification. Male adolescence is established across and between assumed boundaries of gender and sexual orientation. This book therefore involves a reassessment of the work of these three authors who, as established novelists, repeatedly chose male adolescence as a primary subject. It explores how their ideas reflected and informed contemporary ideas about youth, individual development, sexuality, and the recreation of masculine experience and formation. In doing so, their writing reinvigorated social commentary on these issues.

12  Introduction Male adolescence, as both a means to an end and as a crucial moment in life, is frequently problematic. Spacks has identified this as an inevitable result of the fact that, in the period under discussion, ‘the individual has developed full sexual capacity but has not yet assumed a full role in adult society’.34 From Spacks’s perspective adolescence is fundamentally sexual, whether evidence of that sexuality is provided by the adolescent subject, or if sexual knowledge and desire are imposed on youth by adults. This characteristic can be seen in, for example, both Thackeray’s Pendennis and Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, in which the erotic urges of the male protagonists are considered on the one hand to be an expression of natural desire, and on the other provoke an anxious reaction from parents and guardians as an example of either precocity or as a challenge to the exclusive power and knowledge of those authority figures. The vigorous sexual identity of these male adolescents becomes alluring, yet also dangerous and subversive. The training of youth in appropriate masculine practices echoes this contradiction so that, according to James Eli Adams, the sublimation of sexual energy – as well as the rigorous regulation and control of other aspects of behaviour – enables ‘an ongoing regimen of aggressive self-mastery’, recognisable in typical Victorian figures of exemplary masculinity, such as the dandy, soldier, priest or gentleman.35 According to Adams: Each of these models is typically understood as the incarnation of an ascetic regimen, an elaborately articulated program of self-­ discipline. As such, they lay claim to self-discipline as a distinctly masculine attribute and in their different ways embody masculinity as a virtuoso asceticism.36 The view of this process of ‘self-discipline’ as a ‘distinctly masculine’ procedure establishes expectations about the means to assume a manly, adult identity through the successful negotiation of adolescence. It provides a clear goal or outcome, achieved by means of a continued ‘ascetic regimen’. The ability of the male adolescent to conform to this program and to regulate themselves accordingly is, however, called into question by the supposedly inherent instability of adolescence. This regime conflicts with the pursuit of independence, experimentation, and the emotional turmoil supposed to belong to the adolescent, all of which implicitly resist not only self-control, but also social regulation and external authority. John Tosh, in Manliness and Masculinities, has emphasised this: In most societies the energy of young men who are physically mature but not yet in a position to assume the full duties or privileges of an adult is combustible, to say the least. […] Since the heyday of the disorderly apprentice, young men have been a by-word for brawling, drunkenness, sexual experiment and misogyny […].37

Introduction  13 The instability of character and identity for male adolescence lies in the inherent contradiction of youth’s ambiguous social position. Being ‘physically mature’ but still denied full masculine authority as a social participant, the male adolescent occupies the uncomfortable position of moving away from the enclosed domestic sphere, without having been accorded compensatory privileges in the ‘masculine’ public domain. The young man, not fully independent yet in a position to begin consolidating his social status, is often enabled as a member of the patriarchal hierarchy by means of integration within homosocial institutions such as public schools or universities and gentlemen’s clubs. These allowed for fraternal bonding, and to establish masculine credentials. Such male-­ associative arenas helped to mutually cement the ‘duties and privileges’ of middle-class, elite young men as they matured and gained authority. While the pursuit of manliness, and masculine recognition, form a significant part of these writers’ novels, the narratives are also preoccupied with the corresponding struggles against charges of effeminacy or of overtly aggressive displays of masculinity, the efforts to achieve autonomy, and the pursuit of both social recognition and independence from the previous ties of childhood. These processes of maturation are crucial in the consideration of Thackeray’s texts as Bildungsromane, Meredith’s allusions to the restrictive structures of conduct literature and the negotiation of filial expectations, as well as to Trollope’s view of the immature hobbledehoy’s extended period of self-cultivation or the need for young men to exert self-control to check potentially aggressive, antisocial behaviour. Each author’s view of male adolescence, as both a communal identity and an individual experience, tends to be sympathetic to such efforts towards forging male adult status. Young Pendennis, for example, is described indulgently by Thackeray, and is seen to be ‘charmed and exhilarated’ upon arriving in London, ‘whither he goes once for all [sic] to face the world and make his fortune’, and which prompts the young protagonist to reflect ‘I have been a boy and a dawdler as yet. Oh, I long, I long to show that I can be a man’.38 Similar sentiments upon the charming enthusiasms of male youth for the apparent adventures that their adolescence will bring during their progress to manhood, may be found in Meredith, who writes in Rhoda Fleming (1865): Adolescents, who have the taste for running into excesses, enjoy the breath of change as another form of excitement: change is a sort of debauch to them. They will delight infinitely in a simple country round of existence, in propriety and church-going, in the sensation of feeling innocent. There is little that does not enrapture them, if you tie them down to nothing, and let them try all. 39 These rather sentimentalised views of male adolescence, which is conceived here as both naïve and precocious, provide examples of an

14  Introduction idealised, almost sanitised representation of the experiences of youth narrated in these novels. The harmless longings of Pen to demonstrate to the world his capacity for adult manliness highlight the instability of both adolescent identity and masculinity, as this suggests that being ‘a man’ is something that can be ‘show[n]’ or performed with ease, but is full of potential without being a stable or intrinsic identity. Meredith’s expression of sheltered adolescence is juxtaposed with ‘excess’, ‘excitement’, and ‘debauch’, indicating an anxious awareness of the less ‘innocent’ aspects of male adolescence. As his novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel suggests, and as is also made evident in Trollope’s fiction such as Can You Forgive Her? (1865), male adolescence is inherently labile; as an exploratory form of identity it highlights the degree to which the individual must participate in the process of negotiation and investment as part of the process of cultivation. Notions of agency identified as adult and masculine attributes, and the move away from passivity and dependence, are key features of male adolescence in mid-Victorian literature. In Anthony Trollope’s 1864 novel The Small House at Allington, he delineates what he describes as an especially ineffectual adolescent, whom he viewed as characteristic of the period as an example of a particular type: There is a class of young men who never get petted, though they may not be the less esteemed, or perhaps loved. They do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease […]. Social meetings are periods of penance to them, and any appearance in public will unnerve them. They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy.40 These characteristics, such as shyness, awkwardness, and embarrassment, determine the youth or ‘hobbledehoy’ as lacking in confidence, authority, and the will to independent action. In contrast, other types of adolescent are ostensibly more effective in their striving to achieve or even to emulate manliness – even while the degree of their success may remain equivocal. This conscious pursuit of affirmative masculine identity suggests active will and intent as a significant part of male adolescent experience for these authors, as this cohort or social group in their texts must negotiate between what Martin Danahay has termed ‘repressive and enabling forms of masculinity’.41 The young men in the fiction examined here, from Arthur Pendennis, Philip Firmin, and George Vavasor, to Johnny Eames, Harry Richmond, and Evan Harrington, reflect their society’s ideological

Introduction  15 constructions of typical masculinity, or representative categories of ­masculinity – through both adherence to and rejection of the type as the case may be. To an extent, male adolescence in these novels is provided with opportunities in both private and social life (and especially spaces of allmale association) to strive for the simultaneous possession of different constructions of masculinity, both the ‘repressive and enabling forms’. As disenfranchised, subordinated youth, some measure of self-discipline is practised to maintain this position. On the other hand, the move towards an adult masculine role often facilitates the development of independence and what Tosh terms ‘rugged individualism’.42 In each novel under discussion here, different models, ideals and types of masculinity are put forward for consideration. The majority of these masculine roles, each indicative of a distinctive type of manliness, are revealed as unstable, corresponding with the adolescent characters who strive to adopt such roles in their pursuit of masculine validation and acceptance. Figures such as the husband, father or son, dandy, gentleman, gambler, bachelor, or lover, become fragmented, and interrupt the supposedly linear development of masculine affirmation and adolescent progress towards stability. This facilitates the move towards understanding male adolescence as its own category or masculine role, as adolescent identity is similarly incomplete and contradictory. These authors’ depictions of male adolescence therefore expose the practices and performances of masculinity itself, by highlighting the vulnerability of established masculine roles in Victorian society and demonstrating the difficulties of inhabiting those roles.

Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope: novelists of male adolescence The term adolescence has its etymological origins in the Latin adolescere, which means simply “to grow up”. This basic understanding of adolescence, as just a stage of development that relates to a move away from childhood towards adulthood and old age, is incorporated in the modern, more sophisticated understanding of the concept in the Victorian period. This linear progression is, however, often subverted, and youth is frequently conceived with reference to both the past and future of collective as well as individual experience: I retain always a warm tender recollection of old kindness, old days, old youth – now gone whither? Are we young people still walking about at this minute with your dear mother, or sitting round the old supper-table? […] So we all hold on by love to the past, and by just a little turn of the circle, it becomes the future. […] The have been is eternal, as well as the will be. We are not only elderly men, but young men, boys, children.43

16  Introduction For Thackeray, the remembrance of ‘old youth’ disrupts the linearity of progress and experience.44 The memory of history is established as an integral part of both the present and an imagined future, suggesting that the ‘tender recollection’ of ‘old youth’ can offer comfort and stability. The permanence implicit in such an idea of simultaneous experience, however, dismantles conventional assumptions about time as linear, choosing instead to understand adolescence as somehow cyclical rather than progressive, and thus making the representation of this stage in life even more fluid. Nostalgia and personal recollection are therefore important for Thackeray’s depictions of adolescent behaviour in his novels. W. M. Thackeray is perhaps best known for his early novel Vanity Fair (1848), although The History of Pendennis, written later, was similarly popular and influential to his career as a writer of fiction. Pendennis helped to consolidate Thackeray as a renowned author (most of his previous journalistic writing had been written under a variety of pseudonyms), and by the end of his career (as a novelist and also as the founding editor of the Cornhill Magazine) Thackeray’s status as a literary figure of some celebrity drew comparisons with his acquaintance and rival Charles Dickens. In many of his novels, such as The Luck of Barry Lyndon (1844) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), Thackeray charted and evaluated the development of young men from boyhood to adulthood, through their negotiation of increasing independence, masculine status, and transformation into members of a social community. This is especially true of the novels under particular consideration in this volume, Pendennis, The Newcomes (1855), and The Adventures of Philip (1862).45 Within each of these Pendennis novels, male adolescence becomes, for Thackeray, a means of studying the broad cultural significance of youth, as well as reflecting on adult attitudes towards the creation of masculine identity on a personal as well as social level. Thackeray’s writing about male adolescence is frequently self-reflexive, drawing upon the experience of his implied readers, as well as his own knowledge of youth, prompting introspective reading and forming a cyclical narrative of maturation. The depiction of the literary profession in Pendennis, for example, and similar aspects of Philip, have led critics to consider these novels as semi-autobiographical fiction, reflective of the author’s own experiences as a professional man of letters. His other literary productions reinforce this self-referential reflexivity, such as Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town (1849) published in Punch during the serial run of Pendennis, which includes an illustration of a ‘young man’ lounging on a sofa reading a copy of Pendennis (see Figure 1.1), and a picture of ‘Mr. Brown’ himself, clearly recognisable as Thackeray who was both writer and illustrator for this and many of his other works (see Figure 1.2). By means of an evocation of adolescence

Introduction  17

Figure 1.1  I llustration from Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town, [W. M. Thackeray], Punch, 16 (1849). Personal copy owned by the author.

as cyclical and developmental, and through constant self-reference and an implied communal past shared with his readers, the three novels primarily under consideration here move beyond a semi-autobiographical mirror of real experience, to narrate multiple subjective interpretations of male adolescence. This is achieved through the criticism of ideologies that create and sustain such interpretations, and analysis of developing (and conflicting) cultural perceptions of male adolescence, as well as his reconstruction of literary forms related to youthful development in fiction, such as the Bildungsroman, and cultural forms which contributed to self-cultivation and presentation, such as advertising. Thackeray frequently employs the figure of the male adolescent in order to interrogate the maturing body of the young man, and his liminal social position and semi-independence, professional reputation, or sexual impulses and marital status. To disregard or overlook the impact of age dynamics for such adolescent figures in Thackeray’s oeuvre is to neglect the imaginative significance that Thackeray invests in his male adolescent protagonists. By bringing such figures to the forefront in some of Thackeray’s

18  Introduction

Figure 1.2  I llustration from Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town, [W. M. Thackeray], Punch, 17 (1849). Personal copy owned by the author.

texts, this book also repositions Thackeray’s writing in relation to the study of Victorian masculinities, as his representation of male adolescence as a masculine type draws on other typologies such as the dandy or gentleman, bachelor, celebrity, or literary hack. The representations of male adolescence found in his work can be both sentimental and ridiculous, emotionally intense or transparently self-seeking, but ­Thackeray’s frequent reversion to the figure of the male adolescent in novels such as Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Philip not only indicates a conviction that such a type holds a place in the cultural consciousness of mid-Victorian Britain, but also that youth holds a personal significance for the author as both sympathetic memory and as an impetus to creative energy. Of the three authors considered here, Anthony Trollope is by far the most prolific novelist. As with Thackeray, for Trollope male youth also functions as a repository for personal memory, but in addition the adolescent for Trollope signifies possibilities of social redemption, consolation, and recreation. Not only in his fiction, for example, does Trollope

Introduction  19 provide a humorous yet wistful vision of the awkward, socially inept, inelegant hobbledehoy, possessed of gangly limbs and dubious acquaintance. As an elderly man, writing his Autobiography (1883), which remained unpublished until after his death, Trollope reverted to this figure as the epitome of his own youth. He writes regretfully but also resentfully about the poverty, lack of affection, and general inadequacy of his own upbringing, which led to a misspent and graceless youth as a clerk at the General Post Office on minimal pay and without proper adult guidance – a period of ‘suffering, disgrace, and inward remorse’ which the author relives in the first three chapters.46 Trollope paints a rather sentimental picture of the myriad ways in which he was made to feel an outcast during his boyhood and youth: I fear that my mode of telling will have left an idea simply of [the] absurdities [of the first twenty-six years of my life]; but in truth I was wretched, – sometimes almost unto death, and have often cursed the hour in which I was born. There had clung to me a feeling that I had been looked upon always as an evil, an encumbrance, a useless thing, – as a creature of whom those connected with him had to be ashamed. And I feel certain now that in my young days I was so regarded.47 The ignobility and marginalisation which the author ascribes to the young Trollope functions, as Peter Allen has observed, as part of the narrative of professional success which the author carefully constructs for his younger self: ‘a self-help story is clearly in the offing’ within this wider framework of ‘unpromising origins’, in which the central figure is eventually elevated to literary celebrity and financial prosperity.48 Much like the male hero of the Bildungsroman, young Trollope in his Autobiography overcomes early adversity and an inauspicious start in life, and by dint of hard work and application is able to succeed in life. However, Trollope’s retelling of his own past is certainly subjective, and his adolescent years are clearly pressed into service as a crucial part of the wider narrative of self-help and upward mobility. The fictional hobbledehoys of his novels, such as Johnny Eames and Charley Tudor, do function as figures of some catharsis, but their significance also speaks of a wider cultural discourse about the potential opportunities and responsibilities of adolescence, and the development of manly character during youth. In such young men, Trollope moves beyond the purely personal to envisage a peculiarly positive, reiterative, slowly-generative type of masculinity that he viewed as unique to the hobbledehoy – a figure who emerges in his writing as possessed of largely unrecognised social and cultural value. In writing such characters, Trollope emphasises the length, tenor, and presumed ineffectuality of adolescence. Such failure could be seen to render the male youth as unmasculine through a combined lack of

20  Introduction assertion, positive direction, and resolve. However, Trollope’s writing frequently uses the metaphor of slow-ripened fruit, and of financial as well as cultural investment, both of which, his novels (and Autobiography) indicate, reap the greatest rewards of moral character and manliness in the long run. In doing so, he places himself at odds with the great physical pleasure of his life: the hunt, in which the final moments of the experience are the most crucial: To finish well is everything in hunting. To have led for over an hour is nothing, let the pace and country have been what they might, if you fall away during the last half mile. Therefore it is that those behind hope that the fox may make this or that cover, while the forward men long to see him turned over in every field. To ride to hounds is very glorious; but to have ridden to hounds is more glorious.49 While featuring prominently in Trollope’s novels, and often functioning as a social microcosm, metaphor for courtship, or means of displaying a character’s skill, daring, energy, or manliness, Trollope’s hobbledehoy at least partially negates such qualities by suggesting that, in fact, ‘to finish well’ provides only a small part of the valuable experience of youth. The courage and self-awareness cultivated in the field – the acquisition of cultural capital accrued over time during adolescent development – are themselves intrinsic to the experience. While completion of this stage of life is therefore desirable, those who may not ‘finish well’ should not necessarily be diminished, as the equivocal successes of his young male characters attests. The hobbledehoy, who may seem at first as a rather simple caricature of graceless youth, is in fact a subtle and complex figure of male psychological development. Meredith’s investment in male adolescence through his fiction is perhaps less personal and introspective than that of Thackeray and ­Trollope, although the relationships that he constructs between his young male protagonists and the private and social world that informs their development provide sustained, critical commentary on youth and masculinity as sites of cultural anxiety. George Meredith became a literary figure of note to his Victorian readership, writing ­critically-approved poetry and fiction, although his early work in particular lacked commercial viability. His long career as an author spanned some six decades, from the publication of early works such as Poems (1851), The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), and Farina (1857), to his death in 1909, having been elected President of the Society of Authors, and awarded the Order of Merit in 1905 in recognition of his contribution to literature. Meredith is often considered by recent critics as a very ‘modern’ writer, whose interest in gender equality, female suffrage, and radical politics, as well as his frank, incisive treatment of sexual desire both

Introduction  21 within and beyond the confines of marriage, designate him as a writer opposed to convention and custom. As such, the discussion of gender in his novels tends to focus on his portrayal of women and feminine roles, as well as the inadequacies of social assumptions about the social position and capacity of women in the Victorian era. 50 However, male adolescence remains a prominent feature of his novels, and as this book demonstrates it deserves greater sustained critical attention. By choosing to focus on Meredith’s novels published between the 1850s and late 1870s, this study isolates contemporary Victorian views on both youth and masculinity in circulation at the time that Thackeray and ­Trollope were writing, spanning the 1840s to early 1880s. Each novelist responds to their cultural climate and to popular discussions about what constitutes appropriate male development in the period. Meredith’s novels discussed in this book, which include more popular texts like The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), and The Egoist (1879), as well as his less well-known fiction such as Evan Harrington (1861), Sandra Belloni (initially published as Emilia in England, 1864), and Rhoda Fleming (1865), prioritise male adolescence as a developmental, transitional stage, as well as a valuable period of social assimilation and personal growth. Meredith’s texts claim this experience for his young male protagonists as crucial to their move towards the formation of desirable masculine identities. However, this experience is also figured as exploratory, odd, and ­unsettled – and also as potentially queer. Male adolescence in these novels is conceived as an integral part of both private and social experience for the mid-Victorian man. The complex reflections on male adolescence in Meredith’s fiction are also raised in his private papers and correspondence. Elements of his private life, however, such as concerns over his son Arthur’s manliness, anxieties about inter-generational conflict and his performance as a father, or his belief in evolutionary progress as translated into society’s obligations to youth, all find fuller presentation in his novels. In particular, Meredith’s concerns about the male adolescent reflect a tendency to view the transition from vivid youth to fixed maturity in either pessimistic terms, or as an impossible conversion. Several of his young male protagonists, such as Richard Feverel, or Sir Willoughby Patterne of The Egoist, are seen to fall short in some way of their adult responsibilities to self and society. Nevil Beauchamp, too, is quite literally denied complete development through his death at the end of the narrative of Beauchamp’s Career (1875). For Meredith, death and youth are frequently firm associates. This can be a positive association, however, that demonstrates the cyclical promise of life: I think that all right use of life, is to pave ways for the firmer footing of those who succeed us; as to my works, I know them faulty, think them of worth only when they point and aid to that end. Close knowledge of our fellows, discernment of the laws of existence,

22  Introduction these lead to great civilization. I have supposed that the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural history of man, may help us to such sustaining roadside gifts. 51 This extract from one of Meredith’s letters acts as a reminder of his own mortality, and recognises the obligation of the individual to look after the future of society through the proper cultivation of the next generation. His accentuation of adult responsibility towards youth echoes the personal significance that adolescence holds in his novels. As a young man, Meredith himself modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, in a portrait of the ‘marvellous boy’ Thomas Chatterton, an ­eighteenth-century poet and forger who committed suicide aged seventeen (see Figure 1.3).52 The painting depicts Meredith, as Chatterton, recumbent on a bed in his garret room, next to an open chest full of scraps of writing paper, having poisoned himself with arsenic. First displayed at the Royal Academy in 1856, the painting places the young Meredith in a static, vulnerable position, so that, for the author, this image may be seen to offer a perpetual reminder and valorisation of the fragility of youth. Meredith’s wife subsequently eloped with Wallis, providing an association of youth with loss that can be traced through his writing.53 Meredith’s novels frequently involve a similar process of youthful exposure or defeat, as an integral part of the struggle towards socialisation and independence, so that adolescence is both celebrated and lamented in his work.

Figure 1.3  Henry Wallis (1830–1916), Chatterton (“The Death of Chatterton”) (1856). Image reproduced with permission from the Tate Gallery/ Digital Image © Tate, London 2018.

Introduction  23 Meredith’s appreciation for the potential of the male adolescent, and of his role as a masculine type, prioritises youth as a literary and cultural symbol of progress. According to Franco Moretti: Youth is “chosen” as the new epoch’s “specific material sign”, and it is chosen over the multitude of other possible signs, because of its ability to accentuate modernity’s dynamism and instability. Youth is, so to speak, modernity’s “essence”, the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past. 54 Moretti’s insistence upon the significance of youth in the novelistic tradition tracing individual development echoes Meredith’s insistence, in his own work, on the cultural investment – and the value of such ­investment – as a means of the ‘right use of life’ and his apparent belief that ‘the novel, exposing and illustrating the natural history of man, may help us to such sustaining roadside gifts’. Meredith claimed in his Notebooks that ‘Society must consent to see its members laid bare if it has the will to improve’.55 The representations of male adolescence in his novels provide a means of imagining this process, in which the individual is often reconstructed after a series of nonetheless valuable false starts through a dialogic process – a form of haphazard development and abortive progress that is also a prominent feature of Trollope’s hobbledehoys. As a reputable novelist, Meredith draws on not only his own private perceptions of youth and cultural constructions of masculinity, but also contemporary debates that informed dominant ideas on these subjects, from medical writing, to educational reforms, to conduct books. Like Thackeray and, to a degree, Trollope, Meredith’s focus on the development of young men in his fiction is predominantly confined to middleand upper-class experiences. Each writer constructs the male adolescent as a figure who serves to remind his readers not only of the potential located within, but also the instability of, youth and of masculinity. This book begins its analysis with a discussion of Thackeray’s treatment of male adolescence, and his evocation of youthfulness as relative to literary form in the three Pendennis novels. These narratives are connected not only by their reiteration of adolescent experience but also through the fictional person of Arthur Pendennis, who returns after The History of Pendennis in The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip as both character and retrospective narrator. This creates an illusion of cyclical development in these texts, and a sense of familiarity for Thackeray’s readers, who are complicit in the growth of the protagonists and are encouraged to reflect upon this in their own literal maturation over the course of the serial run of each novel. As Bildungsromane, the temporal elongation of these serialised texts is paralleled by the bildung of each central character, and mirrored by the implied bildung of the reader. This chapter focuses on the distortions of linear time and growth within these three Bildungsromane, as the implicit achievement of adult identity

24  Introduction offered by the conclusion of each text is subverted by the cyclical effect of repetition in the serialised tripartite (and therefore extended) narrative. While accretive, such progress, Thackeray suggests, is also fragmented. Each serial number of the novels is accompanied by advertisements promoting various kinds of self-improvement, and notices of other serial novels of development being published simultaneously. Thackeray’s audience is invited to consider the texts themselves as material objects among a host of commodities. The process of identification within a commodity culture is also made a significant part of the young male protagonists’ development; in a world in which items are carefully marketed through advertising (in the pages of the serial instalments themselves, and within the fictional world of each novel), and such commodities generate a value or status linked to their visibility, these aspirational young men must also learn to position themselves within a wider network of social advancement predicated in part on the status, professional reputation, and manly character each is able to cultivate. Self-advertisement becomes a correlative to self-development. Chapter 3 focuses on the fiction of George Meredith. The form and narrative trajectory suggested by the Bildungsroman in the previous chapter are similarly touched on here, as an established method for marking individual maturation through social conduct and integration. However, Meredith’s texts are explored in relation to another genre which, at first glance, might seem distant from both the cohesive momentum implicit in the ideal of bildung, and also the dense, obscure style of Meredith’s writing: advice literature. Many advice texts contributed to the creation and perpetuation of dominant ideas about manliness, outlining the proper sphere for masculine work, sanctioning and explaining masculine experience, and defining manly behaviour, both in relation to other men and in opposition to women. Meredith parodies extensively the truisms, aphorisms, and examples popular within the pages of nineteenth-century conduct manuals which offered behavioural templates for young men to follow. His writing about the experience of male adolescence, however, in his fiction and personal correspondence, distorts but also self-consciously imitates the dissemination of advice in self-help texts. His novels therefore call into question the hackneyed simplicity of such works, while also appreciating the cultural project that such guidance for youth entails. As a result, Meredith’s revisions of the self-help ethos are dynamic and suggestive, even while iterating a type of manly character formation that rests on the position of assumed inferiority which youth is seen to occupy. Male youth in his work is disadvantaged through its immaturity and inexperience, and therefore in need of responsible guidance from an older generation. Nonetheless, the ability of adults to impose or imprint an ideal manliness on the young men of Meredith’s fiction is limited – especially when the advice being provided is overly proscriptive and inflexible. His fiction explores the limitations

Introduction  25 and merits of masculine development through parallels in both style and content of the conduct book. The fourth chapter takes as is its subject the type and level of investment required for responsible, successful adolescence in Trollope’s fiction, which is conceived as an important facet of male identity formation. Trollope’s most famous awkward and ineffectual adolescent type – the hobbledehoy – is brought to the fore, as a figure of peculiar affection for the author. Drawing on his own personal history to construct the hobbledehoy, Trollope is invested in demonstrating the benefits reaped by the young man whose progress is slow, haphazard, and equivocal, rather than swift and smooth. In figures such as Charley Tudor and Johnny Eames, Trollope proposes a reiterative, productively open-ended masculinity which provides opportunity for the reflective accretion of cultural capital as the youth matures and gains self-­confidence. The process of development that Trollope advocates is aligned with practices of financial, as well as cultural, investment, and is set at odds with the more high-risk, immoral transactions of speculation or gambling. Adolescence in Trollope’s novels requires some kind of individual as well as social outlay, in order to guarantee a positive return. However, the perilous gaming, betting, and involvements in unsound stock-exchange ventures undertaken by several of Trollope’s young men demonstrate that the repeated overreliance on swift but hazardous – or even easy – return, is morally suspicious and therefore detrimental to male character formation. This is set in opposition to the halting progress of the hobbledehoy, whose eventual effort towards self-improvement underpins ­Trollope’s belief in male adolescence as productively elastic, and a positive, responsive type of masculinity. As with Trollope, who values a measure of autonomy in adolescence that must, however, still fall short of aggressive individualism, Meredith similarly considers on the one hand the need for balance between a healthy respect for the father, mentors, or similar authority figures, and on the other hand increasing independence during youth as a crucial part masculine formation. In the next chapter, the figure of the father is isolated as a model for the young men in many of Meredith’s works, although the strained, broken, and often destructive relationships between father and son in his work indicate that the process of mentoring is neither straightforward nor even, in some cases, mutually supportive or beneficial. This is particularly true in the range of overly bombastic, garrulous, and obstructively self-obsessed fathers, such as Sir Austin Feverel or Richmond Roy, who prove inadequate in the paternal role, and who fail in their responsibilities as parents towards their sons. This lack of sensitivity towards the emotional and psychological needs of the young men they have in their charge is often charted through the language that they use, and their coercive patterns of speech in which they seek to dominate over youth, rather than enabling these young men to find the appropriate means of articulating themselves as they grow towards manhood.

26  Introduction The final chapter draws together the work of all three authors, to consider in detail one type of male adolescent made prominent in a single text by each novelist. The three types isolated here – the dandy in ­Thackeray’s Pendennis, the aggressive, violent, and anti-social George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope, and the sexually-labile, eponymous hero of Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel – all indicate the largely progressive attitudes of the three authors. Adolescence emerges as a distinctly separate category of age, which is nonetheless unsettling in its oddness and difference. Its instability is cautiously embraced, or at least male youth in these novels is afforded the space in which to experiment with methods of self-presentation, effective methods of self-control, and sexual identification. Male adolescence emerges as a curiously labile experience, in which codes of manliness are often drawn on during this period of formation, but which may be rejected or lost during the struggle to achieve socially-acceptable masculinity according to limiting extant definitions. Instead, the adolescent pushes the boundaries of acceptable behaviour – not necessarily successfully perhaps, but the experience and difficulty of the process for Arthur Pendennis, George Vavasor, and Richard Feverel, draws attention to the restrictive means of identification available to respectable young men in this period. In Thackeray’s novel the figure of the dandy, and an emphasis on fashion and appearance as indicators of youthful autonomy and declarations of selfhood, are conceived as typical means of masculine performance for the male adolescent in Victorian society. The increasing occasions for self-presentation which Thackeray creates for Pendennis as he becomes more independent are represented as opportunities for the invitation of the public gaze, and also to provide a means of deflecting attention onto Pen’s dandified appearance rather than his interior, emotional, vulnerable self. Male adolescence is thus conceived in this novel as both conforming to prejudices about the pride and egotism of youth and as an epoch of unprecedented freedom, suggesting that splendid attire and a superior attitude may be reconstructed to become a method for maintaining a private self in public spaces. The male adolescent occupies a tenuous position in relation to private spaces and the public arena, and redirects unwanted attention at a susceptible period in individual development when masculinity is still being negotiated and asserted. The style of masculinity inhabited by Trollope’s protagonist Vavasor also involves a negotiation of privacy and public behaviour which, unlike the positive discretion made available through dandyism in Thackeray’s novel, is unsuccessful as it finally erupts into brutality and a loss of manliness as Vavasor becomes an outcast with ruined reputation. Vavasor underscores the need for constraint as a part of adolescent development, and proper socialisation for positive psychological stability. Meredith’s own apparent scepticism in The Ordeal over contemporary arguments for external, social controls over sexual instinct in young

Introduction  27 men, as well as the need for self-discipline and regulation, reveals a conviction that the emotional, sexual, and impulsive responses of youth have an intrinsic value that ought to be guided and provided for, but ought also to be appreciated and savoured rather than repressed and extinguished. Meredith in particular emerges as a writer invested in adolescence as capable of an irregular style of manliness that should be celebrated. Male adolescence, in The Ordeal, is constructed as a flexible, permeable state of erotic potential. Despite the outrage the novel itself provoked on its initial publication, Meredith’s modern understanding of adolescent ­gender-identification and porous sexual desire corresponds with his tolerant, inclusive attitude towards the construction of male identity. The work of Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith therefore displays an insistent preoccupation with the complications associated with male adolescence during this period. Each conceives of male adolescence in a distinct light, as suggested by each of the chapters which follow. Their depictions of masculine formation, or the creation of masculine identities in their work as fraught yet socially valuable processes, demonstrate that male youth remained a subject of fascination for all three novelists. Ideas about youth and manliness emerge as central to their treatment of adolescent experience, which is constructed as a correlative to representations of mid-Victorian masculinity in their novels, so that the two forms of identification (as adolescent and as male) become mutually constituted.

Notes 1 Kay Heath, Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian ­Britain (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 4. 2 Although retaining some flexibility of usage, ‘Youth’ will generally be used here to refer to age and immaturity as a biological fact, as well as acknowledging the long history of the term’s usage as a period distinct from adulthood. ‘Adolescence’, throughout this study, denotes a more precise and complex definition, encompassing psychological, emotional and social elements in its construction, and considered variously as a reaction to the physiological changes of puberty, a process of individual development signified by “storm and stress”, a search for stable identity, and sexual maturation without full social participation. 3 John Davis, Youth and the Condition of Britain: Images of Adolescent Conflict (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 29. 4 For many writers, the work of G. Stanley Hall on adolescence, and primarily his lengthy two-volume work Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904), are central to its institutionalisation or even its “discovery”. 5 Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) [1962], p. 28. 6 John Demos and Virginia Demos, ‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 31 (1969), 632–8 (p. 632).

28  Introduction 7 Kent Baxter, The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2008), p. 3. 8 Davis, Youth and the Condition of Britain, p. 28. 9 John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), p. 98; p. 105; Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and ­British Society, 1859–1950: The Age of Adolescence (New York and ­London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–6; Stephanie Olsen, Juvenile Nation: Youth, Emotions and the Making of the Modern British Citizen, 1880–1914 (­London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 21. There are, of course, various other developments and changes listed by critics and historians, which are used as reasons for the emergence of a concrete understanding of adolescence in this period, in addition to those outlined here. A fuller account of this history, with differing emphases on period and nation, may be found in, for example, Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); John Neubauer, The Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Jon ­Savage, Teenage (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007). 10 See John Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986), pp. 13–37. 11 Jenny Holt, Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), p. 2. 12 Holt, Public School Literature, p. 8. 13 William Carpenter, cited in William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life. Considered in the Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations (­London: John Churchill, 1857), p. 6. 14 Demos and Demos, ‘Adolescence in Historical Perspective’, p. 638; Holt, Public School Literature, p. 8; Springhall, Coming of Age, p. 8. 15 Holt, Public School Literature, p. 9. 16 George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ed. and intr. by Edward Mendelson (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 249. 17 ‘Our Modern Youth’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 68:403 (July 1863), 115–29 (p. 129; p. 116). 18 ‘Our Modern Youth’, p. 129. 19 For a fuller account, see John R. Morss, The Biologising of Childhood: Developmental Psychology and the Darwinian Myth (Hove and ­L ondon: Lawrence Erbaum Associates, 1990), chapter eight on ‘Adolescence’, pp. 151–71. 20 Morss, The Biologising of Childhood, p. 34; p. 35. 21 ‘Our Modern Youth’, Fraser’s Magazine, p. 115. 22 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. by Barbara Foxley (London and New York: Everyman’s Library, 1963), p. 172. 23 William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, ed. and intr. by John Sutherland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 173, p. 174. 24 Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 206. 25 ‘Youthful Culture’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 380 (April 12, 1851), 234–7 (p. 234).

Introduction  29 26 Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: ­Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8. 27 Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. by Michael Roper and John Tosh (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 1–24 (p. 18). 28 Samuel Smiles, Life and Labour; or, Characteristics of Men of Industry, Culture and Genius (London: John Murray, 1897), p. 81. 29 Holt, Public School Literature, p. 3. 30 Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, p. 195; p. 6. 31 Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830– 1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 5. There have been several studies focusing explicitly on female adolescence in the nineteenth century, such as Sarah Bilston, The Awkward Age in Women’s ­Popular Fiction, 1850–1900: Girls and the Transition to Womanhood ­(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), Katherine Dalsimer, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections of Works of Literature (New Haven and ­London: Yale University Press, 1986), Crista DeLuzio, Female Adolescence in ­A merican Scientific Thought (2007), Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), Phyllis C. Ralph, Victorian Transformations: Fairy Tales, Adolescence, and the Novel of Female Development (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1989). Gendered experience of this stage of life has already attracted some attention from literary critics, then, and Jenny Holt’s Public School Literature and Stephanie Olsen’s Juvenile Nation stand out as two of the few recent studies to deal exclusively with male adolescence in the literature of this period, although Holt’s work focuses predominantly on the treatment of male adolescence in relation to education and Olsen examines a slightly later period, from the fin de siècle. 32 Christine Griffin, Representations of Youth: The Study of Youth and Adolescence in Britain and America (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 12. 33 See, for example, Claudia Nelson, Boys Will be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991) and Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). 34 Spacks, The Adolescent Idea, p. 7. 35 James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9. 36 Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 2. 37 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 42–3. 38 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 352; p. 349; p. 350. 39 George Meredith, Rhoda Fleming (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010 [1865]), p. 37. 40 Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, ed. and intr. by Julian Thompson (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 35. 41 Martin A. Danahay, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 6. 42 John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), 455–72 (p. 458).

30  Introduction 43 W. M. Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, in Four Volumes, coll. and ed. by Gordon N. Ray (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), Vol. II, ‘To John Frederick Boyes’, 10–19 March 1861, pp. 224–5. Original emphasis. 4 4 For more on the use of temporal dislocation and the use of memory for constructing childhood and youth in Thackeray’s work, see my essay ‘­Nostalgia and Jam Tarts: Memory and Childhood in Thackeray’s Roundabout ­Papers’, in Thackeray in Time: History, Memory, and Modernity, ed. by ­R ichard Salmon and Alice Crossley (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 123–37. 45 Although Thackeray narrates adolescent development in several of his novels, this study focuses on the three Pendennis novels, as each represents male youth in either the Victorian present or in an immediate rather than a remote past. Novels such as Henry Esmond or Barry Lyndon, set at such a temporal distance, complicate further the mid-Victorian representation of adolescence and masculinities. 46 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 60. 47 Trollope, An Autobiography, p. 60. 48 Peter Allen, ‘Masculinity and Novel-Writing in Trollope’s An Autobiography’, Prose Studies, 16.2 (2001), pp. 62–83 (p. 69). 49 Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn: The Irish Member, ed. by Jacques Bertoud (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 223. 50 Such readings focus on, for example, Emilia in England (1864), Rhoda Fleming (1865), The Egoist (1879), Diana of the Crossways (1885), and The Amazing Marriage (1895). See Janet Horowitz Murray, Courtship in the English Novel: Feminist Readings in the Fiction of George Meredith (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1987), and Richard C. ­Stevenson, The Experimental Impulse in George Meredith’s Fiction (Lewisburg: ­Bucknell University Press, 2004). 51 George Meredith, Letters, Vol. II, July 22 1887, to George Pierce Baker, p. 876. 52 William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, seventh edition, Vol. II (New York and ­London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000 [1962]), ed. by M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, pp. 280–4 (p. 282). 53 For a more detailed analysis of the painting, and the circumstances surrounding its production and reception, see The Pre-Raphaelites (The Tate Gallery: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 142–4. Thomas Chatterton became symbolic of wasted youth and genius, and a subject of various poems and paintings during the nineteenth century. 54 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 5. Original emphases. 55 From Meredith’s ‘Maroon Notebook’ (c. 1857–1862), part of the Altschul Collection held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Also see The Notebooks of George Meredith, ed. by Gillian Beer and Margaret Harris (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983). From the Maroon ‘P’ Notebook, IV, 3, vi, p. 43.

2 The Bildungsroman and advertising Thackeray’s Pendennis novels

William Makepeace Thackeray’s Bildungsroman Pendennis, published in monthly instalments from 1848 to 1850, emerged concurrently with Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50). With The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–7), Dickens had consolidated serialisation as a highly popular form of publication. For Dickens and his contemporaries, the serial became ‘perhaps the most distinctive hieroglyph for the commodification of Victorian literary culture’.1 This ‘hieroglyph’ successfully launched Dickens’s prominence as a novelist at mid-century. Serial publication also served to establish Thackeray’s reputation, so that the simultaneous appearance of Pendennis and David Copperfield encouraged comparison of these two part-issue works in the Prospective Review. In evaluating the relative merits of each novel, the reviewer drew attention to the modernity of serial publication as a commodity form: He who has the instinct to pour forth such multitudinous and multiform images of a man’s life, and in such prolific haste as Dickens and Thackeray, must have his veins full to bursting with the life of his own age, […] and we think that such a man will take his general forms as the spirit of his time puts them into his hand. 2 This critic ascertains serialisation as a form appropriate to ‘the spirit of [the] time’. Dickens and Thackeray are represented as serial novelists ‘bursting with the life of [their] own age’, able to translate this impetus into a structure appropriate for ‘the spirit of [their] time’. Characterised by energy, immediacy, and ‘prolific haste’, there is a relationship effected between part-issue publication, and these two Bildungsromane, which both ‘pour forth such multitudinous and multiform images of a man’s life’. Serialisation, in this context, is uniquely appropriate, as it captures over time the myriad experiences of the young men whose development is the focus of each narrative. Although these Bildungsromane find an analogue in the ongoing, developmental process of serial publication, the reviewer states an intrinsic antipathy to the vagaries of such periodical emergence of literature: The serial tale […] is probably the lowest artistic form yet invented; that, namely, which affords the greatest excuse for unlimited

32  The Bildungsroman and advertising departures from dignity, propriety, consistency, completeness, and proportion. […] Nine-tenths of its readers will never look at it or think of it as a whole.3 Of particular concern here is the fragmented structure, which fails to create unity as ‘a whole’ in this critic’s eyes. Instead, the serial novel takes ‘departures from […] consistency, completeness, and proportion’. This accords with Henry James’s assessment of serial novels such as Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1853–5), which he famously termed ‘large loose baggy monsters, with […] queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary’.4 James agrees retrospectively with the earlier critic from the Prospective Review. The move away from ‘consistency, completeness and proportion’ that caused such anxiety for the contemporary reviewer of Pendennis, may, however, also be viewed in a more productive light. The fragmented serial formats of the Bildungsromane Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Adventures of Philip (1861–2), which are each linked by the inclusion of young Arthur Pendennis as a primary character, allow for dynamic intersections between periodical publication over several years to impact on the stories of adolescent development that each narrative encapsulates. The awkward, elongated proportion of Thackeray’s serial novels emphasises the ‘multitudinous and multiform images of a man’s life’ that they illustrate. 5 The complex world that Thackeray succeeded in creating in his novels provided an opportunity for a sense of vicarious community to be experienced by contemporary readers. The fictional world of which Thackeray wrote in much of his work became a familiar environment to his audience; an amalgamation of the immediate present and recollected past, peopled by characters recognisable across several texts. This is particularly true of Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Adventures of Philip. These three novels create a tripartite narrative in which this fictional world is stitched together with increasing dedication, and in which both the novelist and his readers appear communally invested. A re-evaluation of generic form – and of the novels as Bildungsromane in particular – emerges as a broader textual project throughout the books. In this framework, where each novel of masculine development encapsulates its own story and yet where all three are inherently connected, Thackeray is able to outline and then reiterate an increasingly complex representation of individual male experience. This is amplified further by the serial frameworks of these texts. The temporal elongation applied to each serialised novel inevitably creates additional tension on the plot and the structure of each, as both the process of writing and the experience of reading extend to several months or even years.6 Nonetheless, it also creates vital opportunity for a deeper sense of community to develop between text, narrator, and reader, although the serial reader is simultaneously reminded of the

The Bildungsroman and advertising  33 self-conscious fictionality of these novels by means of advertisements surrounding the letterpress. While the apparent unity of the novels, held together by the fictional Arthur Pendennis, remains intact, these advertisements interrupt the narrative literally and figuratively. They thereby intrude on the textual cohesion of the narrative with insistent mention of commodities from the real world. The three narratives under consideration here isolate and then complicate the adolescent development of Arthur Pendennis, Clive Newcome or Philip Firmin as each matures and adapts to society. In doing so, Thackeray’s young protagonists are following the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman. This narrative form had emerged with Johann ­Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6), but Thomas ­Carlyle’s influential 1824 translation into English generated an increased awareness, and broadened the British reception and appropriation of this novel of development. The Newcomes, and most particularly Pendennis and The Adventures of Philip, have all been frequently discussed in relation to the Bildungsroman form and traditions.7 These novels loosely yet recognisably follow the process of bildung as identified by various sources, from Karl von Morgenstern, who wrote in ‘Zur Geschichte des Bildungsromans’ (1824) that ‘we may call it the Bildungsroman, first, and primarily, on account of its content, because it represents the Bildung of the hero in its beginning and progress to a certain stage of completion’, and Wilhelm Dilthey’s comment that the Bildungsroman offers a ‘“conscious and artistic presentation of what is typically human through the depiction of a particular individual life”’.8 While the novels undoubtedly share elements frequently associated with bildung, and the discussion of male experience in the texts may be seen to forge a happy relationship between literary form and cultural content in this context, the term itself is becoming increasingly difficult to define. ‘As soon as one ­ edfield takes a serious look at the notion of the Bildungsroman,’ Marc R has noted, ‘it begins to unfold such extravagant aesthetic promises that few if any novels can be said to achieve the right to be so defined’.9 There remains in the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman in particular, however, a narrative impetus towards completion, or an end point to the progress of maturation. There ought, after all, to be an ideal state towards which the protagonist is striving, or heading, against which he is able to compare himself. According to Wulf Koepke, however, most Bildungsromane: do not seem to believe in perfectibility. This involves a contradiction: Bildung is a process, and there should be an end, a goal, a telos to such a process, which these novels deny as much as they point to it.10 One of the most essentially problematic aspects of the Bildungsroman is therefore the question of the ending, for if the apparent “goal” of

34  The Bildungsroman and advertising bildung has not been achieved it might suggest failure on the part of the adolescent concerned.

Bildung: conclusions and continuations At the root of this concern about the conclusion of male formation lies a tension between the Bildungsroman as a process of realising potential and the text as an exercise in disillusionment. Thackeray’s three novels under consideration here maintain elements of both. In Pendennis the eponymous young hero appears at one moment to have a whole host of unnamed experiences before him, and an array of opportunities to embrace: He has left the home-nest in which he has been chafing, and whither, after his very first flight, he returned bleeding and wounded; he is eager to go forth again, and try his restless wings […] The young man’s life is just beginning: the boy’s leading-strings are cut, and he has all the novel delights and dignities of freedom.11 Such a description isolates the inherent potential of the Bildungsroman protagonist, whose entry into society is recently attempted and whose ‘life is just beginning’. The possibilities appear endless for Pen at this stage in his development. Later, however, this potential becomes more constrained, by means of Pen’s trajectory and the choices that he has already made. The conclusion of the novel, in which Pen marries his mother’s ward Laura Bell, may fail to convince readers of Pen’s maturity, or of any significant achievement in his life. While marriage, as the concluding event of Pendennis, reflects a recognisable novelistic tradition in ­nineteenth-century fiction, Thackeray nonetheless succeeds in undermining the security of marriage both as an institution and as a narrative device. This places a question mark over the function of marriage as indicative of the achievement of manhood or the conclusion of successful bildung. The use of marriage as symbolic of successful maturation in the ­Bildungsroman therefore becomes ironic and even unrealistic. Thackeray exposes as foolish the hopeful tendency to offer marriage as an idealised resolution prevalent in much popular fiction of his day. This is a topic of interest in many of his novels. In Vanity Fair (1847–8), he had already raised marriage as a narrative tradition that ought to be subject to interrogation: As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then: the doubts and struggles of life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleasant there: and wife and

The Bildungsroman and advertising  35 husband had nothing to do but to link each other’s arms together, and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy and perfect fruition.12 In particular, Pendennis reflects this convention of ‘drop[ping] the curtain’ once the ‘matrimonial barrier’ has been gained, despite revealing some slight implication that connubial life may not always be ‘green and pleasant’. The success and happiness of Pen and Laura’s marriage is hoped for rather than assured, however. While it functions as an idealised conclusion to the narrative, their marital life appears to be more realistic: ‘And what sort of a husband would this Pendennis be?’ many a reader will ask, doubting the happiness of such a marriage and the fortune of Laura. The querists, if they meet her, are referred to that lady herself, who, seeing his faults and wayward moods – seeing and owning that there are men better than he – loves him always with the most constant affection.13 Despite the appearances of literary tradition in this conclusion of plot in the form of a marriage, the reader of Pendennis is nonetheless left with the rather dutiful assurances of the ‘constant’ Mrs. Pendennis. This draws attention to marriage as a frustrated conclusion to Pendennis rather than providing a satisfactory resolution. For Thackeray, marriage does not provide a successful finale to bildung and therefore adolescent development. In the two subsequent Pendennis texts, these implications are no longer the subject of subtle hints; rather, the problems of and anxieties about marriage in Victorian society are held up by Thackeray as a thematic difficulty reflected in his fictional world. Few if any marriages are conceived of as ideal in The Newcomes or in Philip. Lady Ann Newcome, for example, admits to her daughter that she married ‘From duty’ rather than love, as did Madame de Florac. Warrington married for infatuation, and lived to regret his decision ever after. Of Clive’s marriage to Rosey, we are told that ‘They were not made to mate with one another. That was the truth’, and Sir Barnes and Lady Clara’s wedded life is full of ‘his cruelty and her terror.’14 Dr. Firmin and his wife (or wives, to include the Little Sister, whose courtship by Philip’s father had been documented in Thackeray’s unfinished A Shabby Genteel Story c. 1840) are highly incompatible. Even Charlotte is depicted as a strain on Philip’s financial resources as ‘Poor Charlotte does not understand about business’, and she is regularly excluded from much of the public side of her husband’s life.15 It is unsurprising that the problems of wedlock and the allure of supposed conjugal bliss should have exerted such a force over Thackeray, as

36  The Bildungsroman and advertising his own marital situation proved to be full of disappointment, anxiety, and loneliness. Thackeray married Isabella Shawe in 1836, and their marriage appears to have been reasonably affectionate, as Thackeray frequently and fondly referred to her as ‘my dearest little woman’ in his letters. 16 After their third child was born, however, Isabella became increasingly withdrawn and depressed, and on one occasion in November 1840 attempted to drown herself, displaying symptoms of what we might consider today to be clinical depression or schizophrenia.17 ­Thackeray dedicated himself to finding a cure for his wife, whose initial display of ‘languor and depression’ rapidly progressed to ‘absolute insanity’ and even occasional ‘violent’ behaviour, prompting Thackeray to travel intermittently around Europe to different medical, ‘hydrosudopathic’, and psychiatric institutions.18 He subsequently lived most of his married life in a manner similar to that of a bachelor, or as a single father like Colonel Newcome or Mr. Firmin. Thackeray is evidently aware of the seductive and comforting quality of courtship fantasies for his readers, although the use of such romantic trajectories in his novels is not without its frustrations. Rather, he allows some sentiment and romance to develop, while acknowledging that the mundanities of ‘real’ life inevitably detract from the fairytale ideal of the conventional marriage or courtship plot. Other Bildungsromane published at this time similarly engage in the discussion of such fantasies and their impact on young men. The subject emerges in D ­ avid Copperfield through David’s unsuccessful marriage to Dora S­ penlow, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) with Richard and Lucy’s damaged union, or through Pip’s fascination with Estella in Great Expectations (1860–1), for example. In Pendennis, the swift and often spontaneous emergence of strong emotional attachments to the opposite sex, not infrequently aimed at an inappropriate young woman (as demonstrated by Pen’s infatuation with the actress Emily “the Fotheringay” Costigan), therefore forms a recurrent episode in the bildung of young fictional heroes. By asking questions about male instinct, agency, and susceptibility, the problems of adolescent courtship are woven into Thackeray’s fiction. If Pendennis, the first in these three connected novels, ends in a somewhat contrived and optimistic conclusion with Pen’s marriage to Laura, then the following two texts discuss marriage with even less confidence. In The Newcomes, questions about the outcomes of marriage, ranging from increased wealth, to unhappy imprisonment, to blissful unity and happy families, are raised for the reader to reflect upon, both through the plot and characters’ opinions, as well as through Pendennis’s narratorial, retrospective viewpoint. Thackeray by no means rejects marriage as a central focus of these texts, however, although such idealisation of love and marriage is treated with increasing scepticism and lack of conviction. In The Newcomes, Clive adopts the role of lover to please his

The Bildungsroman and advertising  37 father, and so makes a match with the sentimental, rather limited Rosey Mackenzie. Clive, however, implicitly allies himself with his cousin Ethel after Rosey’s death, which indicates that acting on such impulses when marrying can still end with harmonious closure. Nonetheless, such a suggestion is tenuous, and the unreality of such idealistic assumptions is highlighted by the deliberate fairytale conceit of the conclusion, which questions the very statements that it seems to make so that ‘the poet of fable-land […] makes the hero and heroine happy at last, and happy ever after’ and, as the final lines of the novel are written, ‘Pendennis and Laura, and Ethel and Clive fade away into fable-land’.19 The self-­ referential fictionality of the finale draws attention to its status as a text. In the third novel, Philip Firmin does marry his love interest ­Charlotte, although it is unusual in this text that Philip’s marriage occurs at such an early stage in his development, which disrupts the conventions of the Bildungsroman. This provides another example of Thackeray’s willingness to experiment with the form. In so doing it offers increased flexibility in reader-identification, so that the reader’s own marital history can form a part of their reading experience. Rather than marriage occurring at the final stage of Philip’s maturation, his marital life forms part of the everyday struggles that he must learn to embrace. It is as a husband and even as a father that Philip completes his bildung, by working to make his marriage a success and forging a place for himself in society. Through Philip in particular the occasion of marriage provides the greatest opportunity for Thackeray to engage with the boundaries between public and private, and to find a hypothetical balance between independence and socialisation: two key concerns of the typical ­Bildungsroman of this period. That Thackeray’s subject matter revolves around the experiences of young men suggests that it might also be young men in particular whose reading of these three texts will be the most productive, suggesting that these novels could form part of some informal instruction on the part of the reader. 20 Thackeray appears to be treading a middle-line between entertainment and some kind of moral edification in his Bildungsroman, as he has indeed in Pendennis and The Newcomes: Philip has all its author’s characteristic excellencies, and, though not without an occasional sarcastic cynicism, is unmistakably a fine, healthy, clear-hearted, and manly book. One feels better for reading it; and that, after all, is no more a bad test for a book than for a meal.21 His treatment of marriage at an early age, which is seen here to form part of a male adolescent’s development, invites debate about the relative values of marital life as well as financial independence. It also highlights the difference that setting up one’s new family home has on

38  The Bildungsroman and advertising the way that a young man is perceived by his peers and society generally. This emphasis on Philip’s maturation and socialisation is not only a subject of immediate relevance to a mid-Victorian readership concerned about the education and acculturation of youth, but such a narrative is also perceived as ‘healthy’, ‘manly’, and ‘one feels better for reading it’. These are for Thackeray typically masculine concerns that reflect Philip’s charted progress to maturation in the novel as a Bildungsroman. While these anxieties are here specifically bound up with marriage, they also form part of an assumption about masculine identity. James Eli Adams has identified an ‘anxious conjunction of discipline and performance in middle-class constructions of masculinity’, highlighting the role of appearance during the formative years of male youth – and beyond. 22 Adams’s suggestion that there is visible an ‘intractable element of theatricality in all masculine self-fashioning, which inevitably makes appeal to an audience, real or imagined’, inevitably posits the private identity or condition of a young man, such as Philip, in relation to the world at large. 23 Thus the private self, which includes Philip’s identification of himself as a husband, is essentially defined against, and displayed against, an ‘audience, real or imagined’. If the journey of bildung may also be perceived as a performative exercise in the attainment of male status, then marriage forms a crucial part of the way that young men are able to proclaim themselves to the world while finding their place in society. 24 The inclusion of married life as an increasingly central theme in these three Bildungsromane might be perceived as tending towards an acceptance of linear narrative structure. The simplicity of such a straightforward domestic trajectory, however, is thwarted. While acknowledging that marriage is for the most part an irrevocable choice, both The Newcomes and Philip circumnavigate such certainties by showing that marriage is not necessarily a choice that closes a man off from other possibilities, as revealed by the noncommittal Clive – Rosey – Ethel conclusion of The Newcomes. This is also apparent in the final revelation about Mr. Firmin’s remarriage to a wealthy ­A merican widow in Philip, which supposes that this is the third such alliance he has made. At the same time, however, marriage is also displayed as a comfortable and permanent state. Pen’s own marriage for example, despite its shaky beginnings in Pendennis, provides a fixed point in the developing narratives of the subsequent two novels. Family, marriage, and friendship also provide the final note for Philip, and Pen as narrator writes that: The mothers in Philip’s household and mine have already made a match between our children. We had a great gathering the other day at Roehampton, at the house of our friend Mr. Clive Newcome (whose

The Bildungsroman and advertising  39 tall boy, my wife says, was very attentive to our Helen), and, having been educated at the same school, we sat ever so long at dessert telling old stories, while the children danced to piano music on the lawn.25 Marriage, in each of these novels, can offer stability, and provide an opportunity for the affirmation of male friendships. At the same time, it allows for the creation of new alliances, and, with a cyclical twist, enables both the continuance of a family name (such as Newcome, or Helen). It also ensures the procreation of a new generation. While ‘the night will fall: the stories must end: and the best friends must part’, the reader of The Newcomes will also remember that all stories may be claimed as old stories. 26 The narrative of a young man’s bildung therefore allows for a certain repetition of experience and retrospective nostalgia towards remembered history, as each narrative claims to provide linear structure and to culminate with a sense of individual achievement. While this sense of comfortable finality is typically evoked by means of marriage, in these three texts Thackeray intentionally confuses the supposition that marriage in the domestic literary tradition provides a conclusion to young men’s development. In doing so, he engages in a reassessment of the parameters of Victorian male adolescent experience. The problem of the unfulfilling ending of Pendennis is compounded by the existence of the two subsequent Pendennis novels. The finality of Pendennis is implicitly undermined by the continuation of Pen’s own story through glimpses into his life in his narration of The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip. Pen’s narration may be viewed as an extension of the depiction of his character in his novel, so that Clive and Colonel Newcome’s first visit to Pen’s and Warrington’s rooms in The Newcomes, for example, reveals as much about Pen as it does about Clive and his father. We are reminded of Pen’s vanity in this instance, as Clive ‘artlessly’ comments, ‘I say, Pendennis, […] I thought you were a great swell’, and while the Colonel’s evident admiration for Dr. Johnson intimates much of his own character, it may be assumed that his claim, ‘A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue’, provides Pen with a great deal of gratification, as the company has just been discussing his own book Walter Lorraine (which Pen describes immodestly to the reader as a ‘work of modern genius’.)27 The finality of The Newcomes, in an even more pointed manner than the ending of Pendennis, is frustratingly inadequate, although the permanence of death is tempered by a suggestion of famial reconciliation, and hope for the future: Among the announcements of Births was printed, ‘On the 28th, in Howland Street, Mrs. Clive Newcome of a son, still-born.’ And a little lower, in the third division of the same column, appeared the

40  The Bildungsroman and advertising words, ‘On the 29th, in Howland Street, aged 26, Rosa, wife of Clive Newcome, Esq.’ So one day, shall the names of all of us be written there; to be deplored by how many? – to be remembered how long?28 After the death of Rosa and her child, Clive and his son bond, so that a positive outcome may be found in tragedy, although the sequence continues when Colonel Newcome also dies. This cycle of life and death, magnified further by Pendennis’s musings on Rosa’s obituary in the newspaper, encapsulates the repetitive nature of, and the frustration of endings in, the three Pendennis novels. As Bildungsromane, in which the journey of bildung is supposedly recounted, the lack of certainty and of finality that is evidenced in the closing paragraphs of each text is deliberately unsettling. The reader is forced to reappraise the supposedly simple, linear structure of the Bildungsroman to acknowledge that the trajectory of bildung and of adolescence can be misleading. Thackeray disproves the assumption of a goal or finishing-post for such development in these novels. In doing so he destabilises the apparent coherence of the protagonists’ progress. For Thackeray’s readership, the lack of a concrete conclusion to each text – or, in the case of The Newcomes and Philip, an obviously contrived ending – can be aggravating. The sense of disillusionment that prevails in these novels, as both the heroes and the readers are forced to confront the fictional character of the text, in addition to their own and society’s imperfections, leads to a notional retreat from the world of fiction. As Wulf Koepke has suggested, a realisation that many ideals are unattainable in the Bildungsroman forces the reader to acknowledge that ‘we, the readers, are left with the ambiguous question of whether they were an immature illusion to begin with’. 29 Thus the allegorical realism of the text is exposed as only partially escapist, so that ­Thackeray’s Bildungsromane also function didactically. They educate the reader by providing examples of individual adolescent development and progress, although such examples remain safely removed from reality in their deliberate fictiveness, and so inevitably fail to provide real answers. 30 Readers are encouraged to sympathise with Thackeray’s young heroes, and can relate to the key decisions made by each young man as he matures. The contrived yet frustrating endings of the novels, however, thwart any attempt to apply such bildung to their own lives. On the other hand, the original reader does experience his or her own ongoing development while engaged in the reading of these novels from 1848 to 1862, although that development may not be a direct reflection of Pen’s, Clive’s, or Philip’s bildung. The reader is nonetheless encouraged to continue to reflect on the story even after its narration has been completed. Thus, rather than simply being frustrated, the reader is able to reflect on the text as a process of affirmation.

The Bildungsroman and advertising  41 The ability of the reader to identify with the text is crucial in Thackeray’s Bildungsromane. As each novel provides a history of its adolescent hero, its retrospective point of view is perhaps inevitable. It is particularly significant for the discussion of male personal experience and memory in relation to the form: Look back, good friend, at your own youth, and ask how was that? I like to think of a well-nurtured boy, brave and gentle, warm-hearted and loving, and looking the world in the face with kind honest eyes. What bright colours it wore then, and how you enjoyed it! A man has not many years of such time. He does not know them whilst they are with him.31 This extract from Pendennis encapsulates the tone that all three novels’ narrators adopt at various points in the narratives. In such appeals to the reader to ‘look back […] at your own youth’, Thackeray deliberately makes an assumption about ageing as a collective experience. The retrospective stories, and these narratorial asides, create a connection between the protagonist and the reader. While acknowledging the follies and impetuosities of youth, such reminiscence is nostalgic without being wholly sentimental. The readers are encouraged to reflect on their own youthful experiences to corroborate or validate the story, or the emotions of young Pen. Similarly in The Newcomes, which narrates Clive’s ‘youthful history’, older readers are prompted that ‘it may serve to recall passages of their early days’ and, at the same time, ‘in the story of his [Clive’s] faults, indiscretions, passions, and actions, young readers may be reminded of their own’.32 Implicit in the aside to the reader lies the simple fact of the survival of youth. By looking back on the stories of each protagonist retrospectively, we are assured of their successful negotiation of adolescence. As well as problematic endings in these three reconstructions of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Thackeray questions and contorts the significance of bildung in relation to the youthful experiences of his young male protagonists. The question of whether such development should be active or passive appears as a recurring problem. Typically bildung entails a conscious endeavour by the individual concerned, and therefore involves the active pursuit of such self-cultivation. Pen, for example, demonstrates some measure of self-reflection in his various stages of maturation. When he leaves Clavering for London, the reader is informed: He knows he is a better man than many who have hitherto been ahead of him in the race: his first failure has caused him remorse, and brought with it reflection; it has not taken away his courage, or, let us add, his good opinion of himself. 33

42  The Bildungsroman and advertising Pen not only retains his self-absorption and ‘good opinion of himself’ (which similarly characterises much of his narrative asides in the two subsequent novels), but he is also afforded ‘reflection’ and ‘remorse’ to promote his self-cultivation. Thackeray’s more passive Bildungsroman protagonists, however, engage in society vicariously as well as personally, learning primarily through the experiences of those around them and then absorbing such information, to subsequently reflect on this in relation to their own lives. In Pendennis many of the crucial acts or crises of emotion are underpinned by Pen’s new-found awareness not only of himself but also of those around him. The occasion during which Pen discovers Foker’s adoration for Blanche Amory, for example, is also the point at which he realises her blank superficiality. Similarly, his detection of Warrington’s love for Laura allows him to reassess his own attitude towards her, which then prompts his own attachment and subsequent marriage. Thackeray thereby questions assumptions that successful self-cultivation must be consciously, and exclusively, pursued. These Bildungsromane suggest that rather than active acculturation and visible endeavour, it is also the act of reflection (both self-reflection and a consideration of the actions of others) which is significant for individual development. Such an attitude seeks to find a balance between selfish introspection and social awareness, and finds its counterpart in many of the self-help works of the mid-Victorian period. It is a balance that several of the more egotistical young male protagonists of the mid-Victorian novel fail to achieve, such as Barry Lyndon (in The Luck of Barry Lyndon, 1844), Adolphus Crosbie in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1862–4), or Sir Willoughby Patterne of Meredith’s The Egoist (1879). The typical Bildungsroman tends to involve the simple recreation of a single history, and so adheres to a narrative of linear development with an implied conclusion or resolution. These three novels, however, disrupt the typical masculine narrative to create a more cyclical mode of development, in which the repetition of experience, and sustained reflection, lend a less obvious cast to the exploration of the processes of growth. Thackeray intersects the development and experience of male youth with the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman. At the same time, however, he triplicates and so distorts that structure over three novels. In doing so he creates a new platform from which any assumptions about the development of manliness, the maturation of the individual in relation to society, and the conventions of narrative strategy, all become intrinsically connected, yet also fractured and destabilised. Thus Thackeray appears to question whether bildung, or the Bildungsroman, can ever be fully completed, as the emphasis on reflection also suggests reformation, rehabilitation, and return. Even the progress of the adolescent protagonist therefore maintains an element of cyclical repetition throughout his development. The

The Bildungsroman and advertising  43 three connected Pendennis novels suggest an attempt to circumnavigate away from definite endings or resolutions. Rather than relying on the reassuring conventions of the classical Bildungsroman to provide solutions or conclusions to the vagaries of male maturation, this indicates a willingness on Thackeray’s part (and also, perhaps, by his readers,) to engage with the problems posed by the narrative of male experience.

Bildung by numbers: serialisation and advertisement The structured form of the Bildungsroman is mirrored by the textual conditions of publication, which allow the initial audience to experience their own development alongside the progress of Pen, Clive, and Philip as adolescents. This relationship is cemented by the persistence of characters from one text to the next, enabling the sense that a relationship may build over time between reader and character. The fictional world of Thackeray’s creation in these novels therefore becomes a part of his audience’s everyday lives on a regular but intermittent basis. This cyclical aspect of these three novels provides the author with a recurrent theme throughout his texts: What stories are new? […] With the very first page of the human story do not love and lies too begin? […] There may be nothing new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer, until the night comes and quiet. 34 By employing a flexible but uniquely tailored template of the Bildungsroman in each of these novels, Thackeray is self-consciously renewing an old story, in an acknowledgement that, while there may be ‘nothing new under and including the sun’, old stories may be looked at afresh. In Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Philip, Thackeray tries to capture and embellish on his own ‘pages[s] of the human story [… in which] love and lies too begin’. This repetition, rather than creating a rigid structure in which each text must be contained and defined from the ‘first page’, enables Thackeray to engage in narrative experiment and to expand or question the boundaries of the Bildungsroman form and of adolescence itself. Doing so over many months, as serial format dictates, complements such narrative evolutions. Repetitions foregrounding questions of form, literary convention, and publishing processes, provide readers with frequent opportunities to reflect on their own roles as readers or consumers. Such deliberations, however, also raise enquiries about the boundaries between real life (in which the material text and historical reader are situated) and the fictional world. Contemporary reviews of Thackeray’s work suggest that

44  The Bildungsroman and advertising the characters encountered in the pages of his novels played some kind of sustained role, even while the actual act of reading was discontinued. As late as 1900, one reader justified the pleasure he had found in ­Thackeray’s works, writing: I take it that if a “young man” can so much as read Thackeray with delight, he is more than half-way on the road to all that is best in modern English literature […] we revere him as introducing to us men and women who we feel will prove our lifelong friends.35 As testament to Thackeray’s skill and design, the ‘introduc[tion of] men and women who we feel will prove lifelong friends’ is achievable by means of the frequent use of the same characters and fictional spaces in his texts. The efficacy of using recognisable and well-received characters to people his novels proved to be a shrewd decision, creating a sense of familiarity between reader and text: Most of the characters as yet introduced to the reader are old acquaintances, and everybody will of course be pleased to find that Major Pendennis is as frivolous and worldly, Mr. Arthur as conceited and foppish, and good Mrs. P. as absurdly inconsequential, as ever.36 This critic, writing after the first instalment of Philip has been published in the Cornhill Magazine, is aware of (and assumes that his readers are also already familiar with) characters from the first Pendennis novel; the recognisable figures of Major Pendennis, Pen, and Laura offer readers a level of comfort with Thackeray’s new work. The ease with which readers were therefore able to engage with Thackeray’s novels, initiated by the reintroduction of characters from Pendennis in both The Newcomes and Philip, was also fostered by the serial format in which they were published. The month between each new number of the novels offered serial readers the opportunity to digest and reflect at some length on the contents of the previous instalment. In the first number of The Newcomes, which contains the chapters ‘The Overture – after which the Curtain rises upon a Drinking Chorus’, ‘Colonel Newcome’s Wild Oats’, and ‘Colonel Newcome’s Letter-Box’ (October 1853), the reader meets such ‘old acquaintances’ in the persons of Captain Costigan and Pen, and is reminded of Major Pendennis by means of a casual reference to Pen’s uncle. Their presence in this new work by Thackeray, and the establishment of relationships between known characters and new ones, alleviates potential lack of attention or interest in his readers by bringing forward ‘lifelong friends’ to provoke and maintain curiosity. The reader follows Pen, Major Newcome, and Clive into the Cave of Harmony, constructing a familiar environment

The Bildungsroman and advertising  45 for readers of Pendennis. Pen himself then shoulders the responsibility of narration with the explanation that: It was in the days of my own youth, then, that I met one or two of the characters who are to figure in this history, and whom I must ask leave to accompany for a short while, and until, familiarised with the public, they can make their own way. 37 Under Pen’s guidance, however, it is not only Clive and his father who must become ‘familiarised with the public’, but also the public who must become accustomed to them. Serial fiction, the original form of much of Thackeray’s work, may be loosely described as a narrative offered to the public over a period of several months, in different numbers and with enforced spaces during which the narrative is suspended. Jennifer Hayward, in Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera, suggests that broad attempts to define the serial may be supplemented with a shared set of characteristics, to include ‘the refusal of closure; intertwined subplots; large casts of characters […]; interaction with current political, social or cultural issues; dependence on profit; and acknowledgement of audience response’. 38 These additional elements of the form raise some significant issues for the study of ­T hackeray’s Bildungsromane in particular. Each of these three novels explicitly invites its readers to involve themselves in the narrative. Requests that the reader ‘Look back, good friend, at your own youth, and ask how was that?’ suppose that a definite relationship, by virtue of comparison within and beyond the novel, can and should evolve between text and audience.39 The intermittent publication of each text provides the reader with time and opportunity to take the narrative’s advice. The “real reader” may become the “implied reader” here, to borrow Wolfgang Iser’s useful terms, as the combination of serial format and a call for reflection encourage the audience to look back at their own experiences in youth, in order to corroborate the claims of the text.40 Further opportunity for the ‘acknowledgement of audience response’ that Hayward suggests is an intrinsic part of serial fiction may be found in the ways that early reviewers formed opinions on Thackeray’s works before the narratives had been fully published.41 One reviewer of Thackeray’s work, referring to The Newcomes during its serial run, was explicit in his recognition that the novel had still to be completed: We flatter ourselves that, in twenty years experience of novel-reading, we have attained to as clear a prescience of a denouement as most people; but Mr. Thackeray, with his tantalising interviews, and all his hints of the future, puzzles and outwits our ordinary penetration. While the conclusion is not as yet, and everything is possible, we do

46  The Bildungsroman and advertising not even find ourselves in a position to advise Mr. Thackeray; we can but assure him honestly, that we see no outlet for him, though we expect he is to make himself a brilliant one.42 This critic draws our attention to the potential for readers to actively impact the author’s choices during his writing. Charles Dickens’s continued inclusion of Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers due to his apparent popularity is perhaps the most famous example of the ways that serial readers in this period may be seen to participate in the creation of a text. This kind of interaction was made possible as a result of serial publication. The epigraph that concludes The Newcomes is another such instance, in which Pendennis as narrator must take responsibility for narrative anomalies, and in which Thackeray allows his readers (at their apparent request, as he received comments regarding Clive’s and Ethel’s fate) the illusion of a happy, unified ending by using the strategic escape-route of fairy-land. Readers of Victorian serial novels developed a consciousness of their own abilities to participate in the creation of a text, adding a new dimension to their investment in the lives and experiences of fictional characters. On this note, Bill Bell has suggested that such occurrences subvert the linear process of writing, claiming that: In the case of ‘writing by numbers’ […] the linearity of the productive mode is repeatedly disrupted by a kind of simultaneous production and consumption.43 This highlights the sense of immediacy serial texts could hold. During the unfolding of the narrative, ‘While the conclusion is not as yet, [… and] everything is possible’, a close relationship between reader, text, protagonist and writer may be cultivated.44 Linda Hughes and Michael Lund recognise in their book on the subject, The Victorian Serial, that: Much of what made literature meaningful to the nineteenth century occurred during the reading of a work, before its ending had been reached, just as we all assess the importance of events in our personal lives and in the world without knowing how it will all turn out.45 This emphasises the temporality of the reading experience, as well as the fact that interpretative exercises continue and develop as the publication of the text progresses. The serial novel has been intrinsically connected to the increased awareness of time that it upholds, for both reader and writer. Thackeray’s serial fiction refers to both individual past experience and shared history; it shows a conscious consideration of reading-time and writing-time.

The Bildungsroman and advertising  47 His novels also gesture toward the future as the full story is withheld and anticipated for so long, and to the present in which the reader is living. Each of these facets of Thackeray’s serialisation demonstrate a multiple awareness of temporality. His serial numbers also demonstrate an awareness of progress as each instalment accrues, reflected in the weighty movements of society, and through the individual development of Pen, Clive, and Philip. Thackeray’s choice of the ­Bildungsroman form is particularly and deliberately pertinent to the quirks of serial publication. The time that elapses during each protagonist’s bildung affords increased opportunity for readers’ identification with and sympathy for each young man to expand and solidify. The retrospective narration of each novel, however, in part counters the sense of anticipation that the serial novel inevitably inspires. Rather, each number fosters expectation, as well as providing stability instigated by the knowledge of future numbers to come, and a sense of continuity afforded by previous numbers consumed.46 Specific references to previous memorable events that occurred earlier in the novels’ release strengthen that continuity. In Pendennis, the second number concludes with an explanation of circumstances which have led to the revelation that Pen is hoping to marry an actress ten years his senior: ‘Send for the Major? with all my heart,’ said Arthur […]. And the colloquy terminated by the writing of those two letters which were laid on Major Pendennis’s breakfast-table, in London, at the commencement of Prince Arthur’s most veracious history.47 This acts as a reminder to readers of the very first pages of the text, in which the Major reads the two letters while breakfasting at his club, and so also invites the recollection of their responses and reactions to that first number. Hughes and Lund have emphasised the linearity of serial fiction, suggesting that serialisation follows a slowly evolving pattern of development that ‘matched significant patterns in Victorian life’ as society ‘subscribed to a notion of personal development running from infancy through maturity and ending in old age’.48 They suggest that: A serial literary work […] grew from simpler to more complex order, from a single initial fragment to an accreting and diversifying collocation of characters and plot lines. […] serials also grew in a strict chronological sequence […] determined by publishing schedule and reinforced by the linear narrative technique associated with literary realism.49 Hughes and Lund suggest that patterns of serial publication, which followed ‘a strict chronological sequence’, enabled a move towards a

48  The Bildungsroman and advertising mimetic evaluation of individual growth. Thackeray’s repetitious structure, however, effectively complicates the ways in which the serialised Bildungsroman form reflects the forward-moving trajectory of the novels’ young protagonists as they mature. The inconclusive endings of Philip, The Newcomes and Pendennis, as has already been indicated, and the succession of narrative similarities in these Bildungsromane thwart both character and reader in their attempts to find linear resolution in the text. The serial form, rather than imposing a linear structure to these three fictions as might be anticipated, subtly reinforces the cyclical movement in the novels, both through their own retrospective narration and by means of external influences. Readers of each novel would have certainly been aware that these novels represented part of a popular publishing genre, and so were far from unique. Advertisements for other serial novels, in various stages, surrounded the letterpress of both Pendennis and The Newcomes. In their serial form, the material format of each monthly number was a discrete pamphlet of several chapters, prefaced by an Advertiser with a range of advertisements for commodities and also other books, bound together by a recognisable yellow cover. In Number VII (May 1849) of Pendennis readers are informed of the availability of a ‘New Work by Mr. Charles Dickens’: This day is published, price One Shilling, the First Number of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences, and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He never meant to be Published on any Account) […] To be completed in Twenty Monthly Numbers. 50 This reference to Dickens’s ‘New Work’ reinforces readers’ awareness that Thackeray’s writing holds a place among various other serial novels and publications, in both the literary tradition of serialisation and in the publishing market of the day. The Newcomes similarly contains notices of new publications and current novels in the middle of their serial duration, such as Handley’s Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks’s Hunt ‘by the author of “Mr. Sponge’s Tour”’, available ‘in Monthly Parts (of which Nine are ready), price 1s. each’ in Number II (November 1853) (see Figure 2.1), and Harry Coverdale’s Courtship and All that Came of it by F. E. ­Smedley in the Advertiser for Number XIV (November 1854). Similarly, The Newcomes itself is advertised in other serial works – in Number XVII (July 1853) of Bleak House, readers are informed that: Messers BRADBURY & EVANS have the pleasure to announce that a NEW SERIAL by Mr. W.M. THACKERAY is in preparation, the publication of Which will be commenced in the course of the ensuing Autumn.51

Figure 2.1  Image of ‘The Newcomes Advertiser’, No. II, November 1853 (p.  2). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

50  The Bildungsroman and advertising Many popular serial novels included similar advertisements for ongoing or forthcoming serial works, both by other writers and by the author of the work in question. The ‘Pendennis Advertiser’ for Number VI of the serial novel contains an advertisement for the final part of Old London Bridge by G. Herbert Podwell, for example, as well as Thackeray’s own The History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty Diamond. This multiplicity of references to serial publications, along with spatial inclusion and exchange between part-issue books and their publishers in the pages of Advertisers for different novels, demonstrates the cyclical presence of serial fiction in the market. It was almost impossible to have experienced a serialised text in complete isolation from other printed matter; therefore such proliferation undermines the apparently linear structure of serials. The same holds true for The Adventures of Philip, the magazine serialisation of which occurred alongside other serial texts in the Cornhill, such as Anthony Trollope’s The Struggles of Brown, Jones and ­Robinson. By One of the Firm, George Eliot’s Romola, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Agnes of Sorrento, and, once its serial run was complete, it was followed by Trollope’s The Small House at Allington. As well as serial fiction, however, Philip was also part of magazine issues containing other work by Thackeray (his Roundabout Papers), as well as articles on subjects pertinent to the Bildungsroman and individual youthful development, such as ‘Gentlemen’ in Volume V, Number 27 of the magazine in March 1862, or ‘On Growing Old’ in Volume V, Number 28 (April 1862). These subjects resonate with the themes and issues of Philip, particularly with the depiction of adolescence not as a linear form of coherent progress, but as a more inclusive, fragmented, and repetitive process of masculine development. ‘The refusal of closure’ identified by Hayward as characteristic of the ­ ildungsroman – serial is also one of the more problematic aspects of the B a genre that implies resolution but, as we have seen in these three ­Pendennis novels, simultaneously resists such conclusions in favour of a disillusioned insistence of a reality beyond the text. 52 The inclusion of advertisements is one way in which Pendennis and The Newcomes, as part-issue serialised Bildungsromane, reminds the reader of the texts’ self-conscious fictionality because they intrude into the fictional world of the novels.53 The commodities advertised around the letterpress of the serial numbers disrupt the continuity of bildung by insisting that readers attend to the real world at the very moment that the text itself implies a removal from that world. In this way, advertisements help to prevent ‘closure’ or resolution for the readers of these serials, by framing and interrupting the narrative. Advertisements intersect with these novels in revealing ways. Bound inside the yellow wrappers of the part-issue numbers of Pendennis and The Newcomes, the customised, named Advertisers must be considered as part

The Bildungsroman and advertising  51 of the original text, despite the tendency to subsequently strip away wrappers and advertisements to bind the novel into volume form. Similarly, the predominantly literary advertisements that accompany Philip in the Cornhill Magazine are stripped out so that the periodical can be bound into volumes. The apparent ephemerality of serialised novels in their original form serves as a reminder to readers of the vagaries and demands of a developing consumer-based culture and publishing industry. The visual, material, explanatory, and narrative nature of these promotional advertisements can themselves be considered a text, and therefore analogous to the fictional narrative of development that lies alongside them.54 Jennifer Wicke has commented that ‘the intertwining of literature and advertising [in the nineteenth century] enmeshes two interdependent discourses, neither of which can be fully read without reference to the other’.55 This ‘intertwining’ is also evident in the Bildungsroman form and the idea of adolescence that evolves with it. In Thackeray’s serial Bildungsromane advertisements do also play a significant role in the way that the texts were experienced and interpreted. Certain events in different instalments will resonate particularly strongly for readers when those events bring forward commodities that happen to be listed in the Advertiser for that month. In all numbers of Pendennis, for example, the back wrapper holds an advertisement for Nicoll’s, a maker of ‘The Nicoll ­Paletot or Outer Coat’ and the ‘Registered Paletot’, which forms a persistent reminder of the dandified costumes of Pen and of Warrington’s manly jacket. In many numbers of Pendennis and The Newcomes the recurrence of an advertisement for ‘Eagland’s Invisible Spine Support’ and the ‘Gorget Patent Self Adjusting Shirt’, brings to mind Major Pendennis’s corsetry and self-consciously elegant dress ­(Figure 2.2). Issues addressed by the contents of the literary Advertiser find an echo in the serialised Bildunsgroman, from problems of appearance and authenticity (raised, for example, by the corset or ‘Self Adjusting Shirt’), to value and reputation (as evidenced by the advertisement for W. & J. ­Sangster’s umbrellas, whose products are ‘invaluable’, and who are ‘so largely patronised’ that they offer a guarantee of quality based on past sales and ‘confidence in its merits’ (Figure 2.2)). In The Newcomes, advertisements for ‘Phillips and Company Tea Merchants’ might in turn serve as an oblique reminder of Colonel Newcome’s career and life in India (­ Figure  2.3), a significant exporter of tea. In another instance, the placement of an advertisement for ‘Morison’s Medicines’ promoted by the ‘British College of Health’ becomes ironic for readers when immediately preceded by the specific news of a fatality in the narrative (the announcement of the death of the Countess Dowager of Kew). Such examples demonstrate some of the connections and associations implicitly created between these serial novels and their Advertisers. A concern with commodities, from medicines and coffee, to wigs, corsets, and umbrellas, to printing presses, new books, and silverware, reverberates throughout the novels,

Figure 2.2  Image from ‘The Newcomes Advertiser’, No. II, November 1853 (p. 8). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Figure 2.3  I mage of the ‘Pendennis Advertiser’, No. VII, May 1849 (p. 4). Reproduced with permission from the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

54  The Bildungsroman and advertising heightening awareness of their role not only in the society of the text, but also in commercial reality. These commodities speak to anxieties about respectability and social status, and are frequently advertised as objects endowed with the capacity to improve the consumer’s quality of life and place in the world. This aspirational aspect of the advertisements strikes a chord with the concerns of Thackeray’s Bildungsromane. Items that promise an easier life, more luxuriant hair, a better figure, the most flavoursome tea and chocolate, the highest dividends, or the most authentic accounts of travel accord with the focus on adolescent improvement and development in bildung. Such commodities also remind the individual of one’s place in society, a key concern of bildung. Advertisements here can also raise further relevant questions about honesty and transparency, the distinctions between pleasure and practicality, the idea of modernity, and also the value of advice (as many advertisements include testimonials). These are all anxieties that are similarly explored in Thackeray’s representations of adolescence. Thackeray’s early career as a hack journalist (for Fraser’s Magazine and Punch among others) informed the approach and tone of his later serial Bildungsromane. His production of short literary sketches and travel writings frequently maintained engaging subject matter, humorous narration, and accessibility, so that readers were effortlessly involved in the scenario created by each short piece, much as readers were invited to participate in these three Pendennis novels. This easy, journalistic style evident in Thackeray’s periodical articles and stories – such as the Paris (1840) or Irish Sketch Books (1842), The Snobs of England ­(1846–7), or The Fitz-Boodle Papers (which initially appeared between 1842 and 1843) – resurfaces in the three Pendennis novels due to the demands of serial publication, in both part-issue and magazine formats. The serial numbers of Thackeray’s long novels indicate, through their progressive accrual over time and ongoing development of their adolescent protagonists, the expectation of coherence and consistency (symbolised by their eventual unity in the form of the first volume editions). Their original appearance, however, highlights the inevitable fragmentation dictated by the vagaries of serial publication. This is emphasised further by the individual material integrity of each number. Thackeray’s long, digressive method of narration in The Newcomes, for example, demonstrates the influence of his literary sketches, so that the accrual of Clive and Pen’s self-knowledge and youthful experience is broken down into smaller segments or sequences, ‘which for three-and-twenty months the ­ onster reader has been pleased to follow’. 56 While such a ‘loose baggy m […] with queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary’ nonetheless functions as a unified multiplot novel – with Clive’s adolescent bildung at the forefront – its very ‘loose’-ness attests to its fragmented, sketchlike tendencies, in which ‘you tell your tales as you can’, and ‘the novelist puts this and that together’. 57 In a narratorial aside to the reader both

The Bildungsroman and advertising  55 the retrospective unity of the narrative, as well as its accretion of incident and character form, eventually, an amalgamated whole, which is put forward for the critics’ consideration: [Clive’s] narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written maturely and at ease, long after the voyage is over, whereof it recounts the adventures and perils; the winds adverse and favourable; the storms, shoals, shipwrecks, islands, and so forth, which Clive Newcome met on his early journey in life. In such a history events follow each other without necessarily having a connexion with one another.58 Thackeray acknowledges here, and forces the ‘judicious reader’ to accept, that although Clive’s ‘voyage’ of life creates the narrative, it is still made up of small moments that ‘follow each other without necessarily having a connexion with one another.’ Thackeray’s view of adolescence is therefore similarly fragmented, an experience made up of the discontinuous ‘adventures and perils’ that make up the young man’s ‘early journey in life’. This technique is mirrored by the material and temporal conditions of serialisation. According to Amanpal Garcha: While variety, capaciousness, and fragmentation define both [the sketch and the novel], multi-plot novels differentiate themselves from sketchbooks in their more pronounced attempt to create a sense of connectedness among their parts. These novels use multiple plots that, however distinct, produce some semblance of unity so that the reader sees the work as a complete novel not as a series of scraps. 59 Garcha conceives of the novel as ‘distinct’ and, in its own way, ‘complete’.60 The influence of the literary sketch remains, however, in the ‘variety, capaciousness, and fragmentation’ of Thackeray’s Bildungsromane, which is compounded by serial publication. Garcha goes on to suggest that ­Pendennis in particular also replicates the idea of ‘stasis as a more alluring aesthetic quality than structured, progressive plottedness’.61 This realisation further disrupts the forward momentum assumed to be characteristic of the serial novel (for example by Hughes and Lund), and of the ‘progressive plottedness’ inherent in the Bildungsroman with its focus on adolescent character and development. Pendennis’s debt to the variety and incoherence of the sketch therefore enables a further distortion of the progressive momentum of these three Bildungsromane. The digressive quality of each novel, the temporal elongation of reading and writing in instalments to create a ‘constant communion with the reader’, and the resilient connection between all three texts through the presence of Pendennis and other familiar characters all lead to a cyclical, repetitive narrative of bildung.62

56  The Bildungsroman and advertising As well as their sketch-like tendencies, these novels are also clearly informed by Thackeray’s own awareness of the almost symbiotic relationship between publication and advertisement evident in mid-­Victorian literary culture. Judith Fisher and Ann Horn have both commented on the integral role that Thackeray played in the formation, and success, of the Cornhill, for example, achieved in part through his established (commodified) reputation as a popular author.63 Smith and Elder, as the magazine’s publisher, allegedly spent £5000 on advertising.64 They created advance awareness of the magazine by inserting notices in other periodicals, such as ‘The CORNHILL MAGAZINE. Edited by W. M. THACKERAY. With whom will be associated some of the most distinguished Writers in every department of literature’, a notice which appeared in the Athenaeum in November 1859.65 Thackeray’s name and association was key to the success of the venture, and the author was conscious of his own reputation as a valuable commodity. This may be seen in an insertion used to advertise Thackeray’s new Christmas work Rebecca and Rowena (1849) in the Advertiser for David Copperfield: Passing many hours on the sofa of late, recovering from a fever, and ordered by DR. ELLIOTSON (whose skill and friendship rescued me from it) ON NO ACCOUNT to put pen to paper, I, of course, wished to write immediately, for which I humbly ask the Doctor’s pardon. […] M. A. TITMARSH. It need scarcely be said that the humble artist who usually illustrates my works fell ill at the same time with myself […] But this circumstance no one but the author (who disapproves of comparisons) will regret, as it has called in the aid of my friend Mr. RICHARD DOYLE, to illustrate the tale. Receive it kindly, you gentle readers of novels […] M. A. TITMARSH.66 Thackeray (writing under the name of Michael Angelo Titmarsh, although this alias had already been publicly identified) candidly appeals to his ‘gentle readers’, inviting his audience to participate in the text. His personal explanation of the private circumstances surrounding the preparation of Rebecca and Rowena; his recovery from ‘a fever’, reminds the reader that the author is a regular person like themselves. His gratitude to ‘DR. [John] ELLIOTSON’, his physician, acts as a further advertisement for his medical friend, while also promoting his new book.67 Thackeray himself, then, may be seen as an astute participant in the material, commodified culture of the publishing industry in which he operated. His serial novels are heavily intertextual, drawing on one another by means of self-referentiality, and deliberately creating ‘odious [but necessary] comparisons’ with other texts. Pendennis narrates a young man’s literary career, seen as an important stage in Pen’s adolescent self-development and increasing independence,

The Bildungsroman and advertising  57 and which is famously a semi-autobiographical account of Thackeray’s youth and own early journalistic efforts. Pen’s affiliation with the Pall Mall Gazette, and publication of Walter Lorraine, both key moments of his bildung, reinforce the affiliation of the Bildungsroman with the culture of advertising that was an integral aspect of Victorian periodicals. Advertisements resonate in numerous ways in Thackeray’s serial novel, as previously indicated, but not simply because the aspirational commodities in the Advertiser echo narrative objects within the part-issue text. The association between the textual product as a material object in its own right, an item also possessed of the capacity to become a means of circulation and further awareness of commodities, is made clear by Charles Babbage as early as 1832. He explained the association between periodical texts and the culture of promotion as one based on mutual benefit: A host of ephemeral productions are written into transitory popularity; and by the aid of this process, the shelves of the booksellers, as well as the pockets of the public, are disencumbered. To such an extent are these means employed, that the periodical publications of the day ought to be regarded as merely advertising machines.68 Babbage cites ‘ephemeral’, ‘periodical publications’ as ‘merely advertising machines’, which are written into ‘transitory popularity’ by other periodical publications such as reviews, articles, and various types of written and visual endorsement. The practice of “puffing”, or sanctioning a product through what would seem to be an impartial article or review, was a type of writing in which Thackeray himself had been engaged. More generally, as Babbage suggests and Garcha has identified, Thackeray and his contemporary journalists were ‘immers[ed] in a field in which the production of desire was a central activity’, a preoccupation that extends beyond the writing of actual ‘puffs’ to his sketches, short stories, and serial fiction.69 Puffing, for some, became synonymous with advertising itself, with little to distinguish between the two, as both are engaged in the same process of cultivating customers and generating an audience. One article on ‘Puffs and Puffing’ observed the contortions and subtleties of such advertising: It is not merely the personal vanity and physical sufferings of human nature, that puffery turns to account; every disposition of the mind is appealed to; friendship, curiosity, economy, love of acquisition – each finds its separate decoy in the wily category of its allurements.70 In advertising Rebecca and Rowena in the David Copperfield Advertiser, for example (above), Thackeray’s own name (or pseudonym) and reputation serve to encourage interest in his new Christmas book. This

58  The Bildungsroman and advertising advertisement plays on ‘friendship’ (between Titmarsh and his readers) and ‘curiosity’ prompted by the account of the writer’s illness and personal circumstances. Thackeray’s own name, together with his various aliases such as Michael Angelo Titmarsh, George Savage FitzBoodle, Dr. Solomon Pacifico, Theophile Wagstaff, or the Fat Contributor, all testified to the way that the author signified in contemporary literary and commodity culture. The author’s reputation, as evidenced by the advertising strategies of the Cornhill Magazine (above), was pressed into employment as a catalogue of value for the reading public. As Emily Steinlight comments: The figure of the author enters into circulation ostensibly as a repository of the accumulated literary capital – an index of the abstracted capacity to produce still greater value.71 Thackeray’s value, then, was both stored in his ‘accumulated literary capital’ and prior success as a writer, but also in his potential ‘capacity to produce still greater value’. Like the commodities of the Pendennis and Newcomes Advertisers, Thackeray’s reputation was commodified, and his works by extension could accrue literary worth, social relevance, and the potential for further future gains in the assumption that yet more unwritten texts would in time also be published. It was not until the success of Vanity Fair that Thackeray could refer to his work as ‘doing very well commercially […] at last’, although Thackeray found his fame both flattering and embarrassing:72 In spite of himself a man gets worldly and ambitious in this great place: with every body courting & flattering. I am frightened at it and my own infernal pride and arrogance […] What I mean is that all of a sudden I am a great man. I am ashamed of it: but yet I can’t help seeing it – being elated by it [while] trying to keep it down – &c.73 The pitfalls of ambition for social and professional recognition had also been exposed at some length by the author in The Snobs of England (1846–7). Thackeray’s statement views the ‘courting & flattering’ with anxiety, but still acknowledges, and is ‘elated’ by, his new reputation. Thackeray was nonetheless aware, however, that the desire to forge a good reputation, particularly when one’s social standing or career trajectory remained unfixed (as with the male adolescent), was generally understood to be a naturalised aspect of contemporary masculinities. This is evident in Pendennis, as Pen’s narrative involves not just a struggle to develop moral character, a realistic sense of self-worth, and manly modesty, but it also traces the adolescent’s growing drive to prove himself, to earn recognition from his peers, and to make a name for himself as an author. In a conversation between Helen Pendennis and Laura, the expectation

The Bildungsroman and advertising  59 that a young man must remove himself from the domestic circle at home to effect his socialisation and professional development is transparent: You should not be sad because Pen is unhappy here. All men are so. They must work. They must make themselves names and a place in the world. Look, the two captains have fought and seen battles; that Mr. Pynsent, who came here, and who will be very rich, is in a public office; he works very hard, he aspires to a name and a reputation.74 Laura does not dismiss Mr. Pynsent for his aspiration to ‘a name and a reputation’; rather, she holds that men ‘must make themselves names and a place in the world’. The reader is invited to view Pen, in failing to adopt a similar attitude and ‘work hard’, as deficient in manly vigour, enterprise, and determination to succeed. These are qualities that the young man rapidly cultivates, however, in developing his ambitions as a writer. In learning to appreciate the value of economic independence, the need for which Pen abruptly realises when his fashionable lifestyle exceeds his income, he is encouraged by Warrington to try his hand at writing for periodicals. Pen’s writing career, like Thackeray’s, is bound up in the mutual, reciprocal cultures of journalism and advertising. The extent to which the practice of self-interested promotion was accepted in this industry becomes evident when Pen is upbraided for his honest impartiality in reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette: “In the name of common-sense, Mr. Pendennis,” Shandon asked, “what have you been doing – praising one of Mr. Bacon’s books? Bungay has been with me in a fury this morning at seeing a laudatory article upon one of the works of the odious firm over the way.” Pen’s eyes opened with wide astonishment. “Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that we are to praise no books that Bacon publishes: or that, if the books are good, we are to say they are bad?” “My good young friend – for what do you suppose a benevolent publisher undertakes a critical journal, to benefit his rival?” ­Shandon inquired.75 This serves as Pen’s introduction to the partisan politics of journalism, in which he learns that altruism does not rate highly, and puffing forms a part of the everyday business of periodical writing. This self-seeking attitude, although displayed here in a humorous manner, is a part of what makes for literary and commercial success. As Thackeray later wrote in The Newcomes, in a chapter concerned with accomplishment and celebrity: ‘To push on in the crowd, every male or female struggler must use his shoulders. If a better place than yours presents itself just beyond your neighbour, elbow him and take it. […] What a man has to do in society is assert himself’.76 For Thackeray’s male adolescent characters, there is a

60  The Bildungsroman and advertising grain of truth in the demand for this apparently brutal struggle to ‘assert himself’. The art of self-promotion forms an uncomfortable part of forging both a ‘name and a reputation’, as Laura Bell had observed to Helen.77 In his short story The Ravenswing (1843), Thackeray had explained: perhaps, some country readers are not acquainted with the class of persons by whose printed opinions they are guided, and are simple enough to imagine that mere merit will make a reputation on the stage or elsewhere. The making of a theatrical success is a much more complicated and curious thing than such persons fancy it to be. Immense are the pains taken to get a good word from Mr. This of the Star, or Mr. That of the Courier, to propitiate the favour of the critic of the day, and get the editors of the metropolis into a good humour, – above all, to have the name of the person to be puffed perpetually before the public. Artists cannot be advertised like Macassar oil or blacking, and they want it to the full as much; hence endless ingenuity must be practised in order to keep the popular attention awake.78 While artists and authors ‘cannot be advertised like Macassar oil or blacking’, they remain commodities to be ‘puffed perpetually before the public’ in order to secure ‘a reputation on the stage or elsewhere’. Thus the movements of the fashionable celebrity writer Mr. Wagg in ­Pendennis are recounted in the County Chronicle, and ‘rumour’ about Pen’s political aspirations are published in ‘the Chatteris Champion, Clavering Agriculturist, and Baymouth Fisherman’ which was ‘so eligible a medium for advertisements.’79 Both literary men become a type of fashionable commodity to be promoted by the press, and kept in public view. In Warrington’s defence of Pendennis, during which he persuades ­Bungay to publish Pen’s first novel Walter Lorraine, Warrington ‘pointed out the merits of its distinguished author’ and Percy Popjoy puffed Pen’s work by representing it as ‘of the most exciting nature; a work that the whole town would run after.’80 Pen, as a writer, is advertised effectively by Warrington and Popjoy to the Bungays. Despite its affected sentiment, inauthentic emotion, and imitative style, Walter Lorraine duly ‘obtained a quick and considerable popularity before two months were over’, and Pen expresses ‘satisfaction and surprise’ at ‘seeing the second edition of ‘Walter Lorraine’ advertised in the newspapers’, in a process of continued publicity centred on the young writer.81 Both reputation and a concern for authenticity form a part of desirable bildung. Pen’s literary success and celebrity therefore cement his overall progress of socialisation. A modicum of self-promotion is, in Pendennis, a necessary aspect of the young man’s progress and achievement. Pen’s literary career begins, like Thackeray’s, with the mundane work of the hack journalist, but a work of fiction similarly elevates Pen to the rank of celebrated novelist. Both Pen and Walter Lorraine gain the

The Bildungsroman and advertising  61 pleasure of public success, a process in which advertising and ambition play a key role. As this Bildungsroman charts Pen’s achievement, however, the reader is reminded of the transient prominence of the advertised commodity. This point is made clear not only in the serial instalments of the novel, whose Advertisers maintain a rolling cast of objects and books for sale that differ each month, but also in Thackeray’s ‘Punch at the Pyramids’ (1845), in which the Fat Contributor erects an advertisement for Punch on an Egyptian pyramid: I PASTED THE GREAT PLACARD OF PUNCH ON THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS. I did it. The Fat Contributor did it. If I die, it could not be undone. […] One placard I pasted on the first ­landing-place (who knows how long Arab rapacity will respect the sacred hieroglyphic?).82 Although the reader is told that such an act ‘could not be undone’, Thackeray also muses ‘who knows how long Arab rapacity will respect the sacred hieroglyphic?’ The placing of an advertisement, then, on the one hand, can promote immediate popularity, but such success remains temporary. The ‘sacred hieroglyphic’ – whether a placard advertising Punch, a number of the Pendennis Advertiser, or Pen’s own name and reputation in society – can never be entirely stable and is constantly replaced. While the culture of advertising and self-promotion are important to Pen’s maturation, the tripartite narrative of the three Pendennis novels once more undermines assumptions that each Bildungsroman contains the completed development of each protagonist. The continuation of Pen’s story via The Newcomes and Philip remind the reader not that growing up ‘could not be undone’, but that such narratives of adolescent experience can reflect a more cyclical form of development. After all, as Thackeray had observed in Vanity Fair, ‘Which of us can point out and say that was the culmination ― that was the summit of human joy?’83 As these three novels indicate, it is very difficult to pinpoint a single event that represents the moment of completed bildung, particularly for Penndennis, whose growth continues during each text, and whose ‘summit’ or ‘culmination’ of maturation is not effected by the last number of the first novel.

Conclusion In their original serial forms, The History of Pendennis, The Newcomes and The Adventures of Philip not only highlight but also complicate their status as Bildungsromane. On the one hand, each novel literally exemplifies a young man’s growth or development in the narrative, which is mirrored and extended by its protracted publication. On the other hand, the maturing of Pen, Clive, and Philip also becomes an opportunity for readers to themselves develop, and the texts frequently invite

62  The Bildungsroman and advertising readers to reflect on their own experiences to intensify the significance of bildung, in the text and in the reader’s own life. The extended time-­ period over which these novels were serialised meant that a sustained, intimate relationship could form between reader, text, and narrator. Each novel refutes the supposed linearity of bildung and, to some ­extent, the consistent forward momentum of reading. Development (of the young protagonists in particular) becomes cyclical and rolling, repetitive and ongoing. While monthly serial instalments might seem to reassert a ­linear, chronological sense of time and movement, serial publication in fact emphasises the difference in Thackeray’s Bildungsromane due to the recurrence of familiar characters such as Pen himself. As these three novels are serialised, they form a part of mid-Victorian periodical culture. Thackeray recreates the adolescent experience of each young man through this medium, and in doing so he ‘creates personages who have become so much parts of our every-day life that we almost forget that they have no real existence’, allowing a bond of mutual bildung to develop over time between young protagonist and the reader.84 In his treatment of male youth specifically in these Bildungsromane, Thackeray engages with issues relevant to contemporary society in his appropriation of the opportunities provided by the genre. Pen, Clive, and Philip are seen to interrogate the limits of bildung in the way that their respective marital experiences unfold. Their artistic and literary careers, with Pen and Philip as journalists and Clive as a painter, explicitly involve work as an important part of the fabric of masculine development. In doing so, each protagonist learns to appreciate the extent to which public reputation could be seen to equate to character and manliness. While society itself could be seen as shallow and manipulative in persisting with this attitude, each young man must also recognise these as values held by their contemporaries. They should therefore be able to measure their success in these terms, as well reflecting on their other, more reliable qualities as representative of young men of the period. In conclusion, the three connected Pendennis novels encourage reflection, reformation, and community through their retrospective narratives and the repetition of characters and plot developments. Moreover, the persistent interruption of the real world into the fictional world of the novels forces serial readers to recognise their own status as readers. This is produced not only by advertisements, which insist on drawing readers’ attention to the material situation of the text in a wider commodity culture, but also by an inevitable awareness of the textual multiplicity around them. Letters, newspaper extracts, and metafictional narratives such as ­Philip’s work for the Pall Mall Gazette or Pen’s novel Walter Lorraine form part of this textual diversity in the novels. The reader of each instalment, however, is also conscious of notices for recent books, concurrent serial novels, and a plethora of articles and news in magazines and newspapers. The position of advertisements alongside the letterpress of the Pendennis novels

The Bildungsroman and advertising  63 affects the serial reader’s response to the narratives by situating the novels in a network of textual and visual material. This places the novels firmly in the aspirational world of commodities and writing as a business, and creates a sustained fictional world throughout the texts. The extent to which certain forms of identity can invest power and authority is also indicated with reference to Thackeray’s own name and literary reputation, so that opportunities for self-advertisement may be considered alongside self-development and maturation. This is a process echoed by Pen’s experience in particular, as he learns the value of self-promotion and of reputation in the wider world. Young men must, in these novels, learn to ‘make themselves names and a place in the world’.85 While this process of bildung is constant and continuous, the moments for forging that ‘name’ and ‘place in the world’, of forming one’s character and identity, are constructed in these novels as a series of episodes that may ‘follow each other without necessarily having a connexion with one another’, apart from the fact of their gradual accretion.86 While the continuation of Pen’s narrative is extended across three novels, creating a sense of coherence and continuity between the texts, the serial instalments of each novel reinforce their sketch-like qualities in their fragmentation from the whole and their discrete existence as an individual number. This does not detract, however, from the goal of bildung to which Thackeray responds, which dictates that each protagonist meets and learns to recognise his own potential and place in society. At the end of Pendennis, the reader is told of the young hero that: Time had brought to him, as to the rest of us, its ordinary consequences, consolations, developments. We alter very little. […] our mental changes are like our grey hairs or our wrinkles – but the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay […]87 This, then, demonstrates the accrual of ‘ordinary consequences, consolations’ and ‘developments’ over time. Rather than radical shifts in consciousness, each of these young men adhere to ‘the plan of mortal growth and decay’ in which they alter only gradually, with small moments of maturation and accomplishment. Thackeray’s concept of bildung promotes slow growth and consequent reflection in his protagonists and in his readership. In these three Bildunsgromane, this form is taken to be indicative of youth specifically, so that one reviewer could comment on male youth: their pride is not to be piqued into rebellion, by thrusting them into a half-way position between the man and the boy. But Mr. T ­ hackeray has a natural vocation in respect to his youthful countrymen. If he should happen, in fact, to be a grandfather, in disposition he is a young man continually – it is the life and pursuits of young men in which he is most skilled.88

64  The Bildungsroman and advertising In Thackeray’s descriptions of male adolescence, he deliberately places Pen, Clive and Philip ‘into a half-way position between the man and the boy’. This allows him, however, to identify with ‘his youthful countrymen’, to create a sense of community between his fictional young men, and those of his readership who can relate to the experience. Reading in serial parts reinforces such development by simultaneously extending the temporal aspects of each text, and by interrupting and constantly reviewing the momentum and coherence of narrative development in these novels. Male youth is therefore situated at a safe remove in Thackeray’s fictional world, and ripe for critical analysis by reviewers; but these texts also catalogue contemporary anxieties about the roles available to inexperienced masculinity in mid-­Victorian culture.

Notes 1 David Payne, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Serialization (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5. 2 ‘David Copperfield and Pendennis’, The Prospective Review, 26 (April 1851), 157–91 (pp. 158–9). 3 ‘David Copperfield and Pendennis’, p. 158. 4 Henry James, ‘Preface’, The Tragic Muse (New York: Scribner, 1908), p. x. 5 ‘David Copperfield and Pendennis’, 158. 6 Some critics have noted this effect of temporal extension in serial fiction, for example Jennifer Hayward, Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997); Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (­Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991); Sara Thornton, Advertising, Subjectivity and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Dickens, Balzac and the Language of the Walls (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 7 For example, see Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974); Ina Ferris, ‘Narrative Strategy in Thackeray’s The Adventures of Philip, English Studies in Canada, 5.4 (1979), 448–56; Richard Salmon, ‘The Genealogy of the Literary Bildungsroman: Edward Bulwer-Lytton and W. M. Thackeray’, Studies in the Novel, 36.1 (2004), 41–55. 8 Karl von Morgenstern, ‘Zur Geschichte des Bildungsromans’ (1824), p. 74, cited in Wulf Koepke, ‘Quest, Illusion, Creativity, Maturity, and Resignation: The Questionable Journey of the Protagonist of the Bildungsroman’ Helios, 17.1 (1990), 129–43 (p. 16); Wilhelm Dilthey, cited in G. B. ­Tennyson, ‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century English Literature’, in Medieval Epic to the “Epic Theater of Brecht”: Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. by Rosario P. Armato and John M. Spalek (Los Angeles: University of South California Press, 1968), 135–46 (p. 136). 9 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 40; (qtd. in Kopeke, ‘Quest, Illusion, Creativity, Maturity, and Resignation’, p.  74; qtd. in Tennyson, ‘The Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-­ Century’, p. 136). 10 Koepke, ‘Quest, Illusion, Creativity, Maturity, and Resignation’, p. 141.

The Bildungsroman and advertising  65 11 William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy, ed. and intr. by John Sutherland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 199–200. 12 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, ed. and intr. By John Sutherland (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983 [1998]), p. 319. 13 Pendennis, p. 977. 14 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, ed. and intr. by Andrew Saunders (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 203; p. 768. 15 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Adventures of Philip on His Way through the World; Showing Who Robbed Him, Who Helped Him, and Who Passed Him by (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan [Michigan Historical Reprint], n.d.), p. 210. 16 Thackeray, Letters, Vol. II, to Mrs. Thackeray, (May 1843), p. 110. 17 ‘The Psychiatric Case History of Isabella Shawe Thackeray’, Stanley Cobb, Appendix VII, from Letters Vol. I, pp. 518–20. 18 Thackeray, Letters, Vol. I, to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, (20–21 August 1840), p. 463; to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, (17 September 1840), p. 474; Vol.  II, ­‘Diary 27 July–11 August’, p. 32; to Edward Fitzgerald (13 September–­ October 1841), p. 37. 19 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 1009; p. 1007. 20 The instructive capacity of literature – particularly for youth – is also discussed in Chapter 3. 21 Anon., Review of The Adventures of Philip, The British Quarterly Review, 72 (October 1862), p. 467. 22 James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 10. 23 Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 11. 24 The question of display and the private self is also considered in the last chapter of this book. 25 Thackeray, Philip, p. 267. 26 Thackeray, Philip, p. 267. 27 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 48; p. 47. 28 Thackeray, The Newcomes, pp. 2002–3. 29 Koepke, ‘Quest, Illusion, Creativity, Maturity, and Resignation’, p. 134. 30 Such exemplars of others’ successes form a mainstay of advice literature, as well as of didactic fiction. This literary trope, and the potential it displays for readers, is highlighted in Chapter 3, with reference to Meredith’s novels and conduct writing at mid-century. 31 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 29. 32 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 347. 33 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 349. 34 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 5. 35 Cecil F. Silver, ‘The “Young Men” and Thackeray’, in ‘Correspondence’, Academy (27 October 1900), 388 (p. 388). 36 ‘The Magazines and Periodicals’, p. 813. 37 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 7. 38 Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, p. 3. 39 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 29. 40 See Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

66  The Bildungsroman and advertising 41 Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, p. 3. 42 ‘Mr. Thackeray and his Novels’, p. 93. 43 Bill Bell, ‘Fiction in the Marketplace: Towards a Study of the Victorian Serial’, Serials and Their Readers 1620–1914, ed. by Robin Myers and ­M ichael Harris (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993), p. 129. 4 4 ‘Mr. Thackeray and his Novels’, p. 93. 45 Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, p. 12. 46 In the case of Pendennis, this stability was undermined by a protracted hiatus between September 1849 and January 1850 due to Thackeray’s illness (see the advertisement for Rebecca and Rowena below). In the case of The Adventures of Philip, an arguably less-significant change occurred in the pattern of its publication, as from July 1862 George Eliot’s Romola replaced Philip as the leading piece of fiction for the Cornhill. 47 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 83. 48 Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, p. 5. 49 Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, p. 7. 50 ‘Pendennis [Rear] Advertiser’, No. VII, May 1849. From the copies held at the English Faculty Library, University of Oxford, and the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 51 ‘Bleak House Advertiser’, No. XVII, July 1853 (p. 1). From the copy held at the Rare Books Collection, Bodleian Library. Number I of The Newcomes was published by Bradbury & Evans in October 1853. 52 Hayward, Consuming Pleasures, p. 3. 53 The effect of the accompanying illustrations in Thackeray’s serial work also neutralises claims for linearity as a result of ‘strict chronological sequence’ (Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial, p. 7). As Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge have recently noted, both illustrations and chapter initials complicate the linear development of plot in serial novels. See ‘The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s’, Victorian Studies, 51.1 (2008), 65–101. 54 See Richard Simon, ‘Advertising as Literature: The Utopian Fiction of the American Marketplace’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22.2 (1980), 154–74; Emily Steinlight, ‘“Anti-Bleak House”: Advertising and the Victorian Novel, Narrative, 14.2 (May 2006), 132–62; Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, & Social Reading (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 55 Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions, pp. 1–2. 56 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 1007. 57 James, ‘Preface’, p. x; The Newcomes, p. 297; p. 616. 58 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 296. Thackeray had made a similar claim in Vanity Fair, in which the narrator explained: ‘my readers must […] be content with a chapter about Vauxhall, which is so short that it scarce deserves to be called a chapter at all. And yet it is a chapter, and a very important one too. Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?’ (Vanity Fair, p. 61). 59 Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 85. 60 Gowan Dawson also discusses this overall harmony despite fragmentation in the serial novel. See Gowan Dawson, ‘Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel’, Victorian Studies 53.2 (Winter 2011), 203–30. 61 Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, p. 86. 62 Thackeray, ‘Preface’, Pendennis, p. lv.

The Bildungsroman and advertising  67 63 Judith L. Fisher, ‘Thackeray as Editor and Author: The Adventures of Philip and the Inauguration of the Cornhill Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 33.1 (2000), 2–21; Ann Horn, ‘Theater, Journalism, and Thackeray’s “Man of the World Magazine”’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 32.3 (1999), 223–8. 64 Andrew Maunder, ‘“Discourses of Distinction”: The Reception of the Cornhill Magazine, 1859–60’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 32.3 (1999): ­239–58 (p. 244). 65 [Advertisement], Athenaeum 1673 (19 November 1859), 679. 66 ‘David Copperfield Advertiser’, No. VIII, Dec. 1849, p. 4. From the copy held at the Rare Books Collection, Bodleian Library. 67 As Edgar F. Harden has noted, this long advertisement was published erroneously by Chapman and Hall, who mistakenly included Thackeray’s ‘Preface’ to the work with the advertisement (the ‘Preface is the section extracted here). The mistake was later rectified, and the ‘Preface’ excised from the advertisements for Rebecca and Rowena. The initial advertisement, as it appears here, emphasises the importance of authorial identity and reputation in advertising a text – even though this example was inadvertent. See ­E dgar F. Harden, ‘Thackeray’s “Rebecca and Rowena”: A Further Document’, Notes & Queries, CCXXII (January 1977), 20–2. 68 Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (­London: Charles Knight, 1832), p. 330, original emphasis. 69 Garcha, From Sketch to Novel, p. 61. 70 Mrs. White, ‘Puffs and Puffing’, Sharpe’s London Magazine, 7 (July 1848), 140–2 (pp. 140–1). 71 Steinlight, “Anti-Bleak House”, p. 151. 72 Thackeray, Letters, Vol. II, 20 August 1848, to Lady Blessingston, p. 420. 73 Thackeray, Letters, Vol. II, 18 July 1848, to Mrs. Carmichael-Smyth, p. 401. 74 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 317. 75 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 445. 76 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 95. 77 After the success of Vanity Fair, Thackeray wrote in a tone both rueful and proud of his own thoughts on this subject to his mother: What an egotistical life the artists is. I wonder whether other people are always thinking of themselves as we are. One comfort here is that not a soul knows about Titmarsh the Great and that personage is taken no more notice of than a tall ungainly man deserves to be. (Letters, Vol. II, 26–29 July 1848, To Mrs. Carmichael Smith, p. 409) 78 W. M. Thackeray, The Ravenswing, from The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray in 13 vols, Vol. IX (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1891), p. 451. 79 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 952. 80 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 524. 81 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 530. 82 W. M. Thackeray, ‘Punch at the Pyramids’, Punch in the East, in Punch’s Prize Novelists, The Fat Contributor, and Travels in London (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1853), p. 179. 83 Thackeray, Vanity Fair, p. 792. 84 ‘David Copperfield and Pendennis’, p. 169. 85 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 317. 86 Thackeray, The Newcomes, p. 296. 87 Thackeray, Pendennis, pp. 766–7. 88 ‘Mr. Thackeray and His Novels’, p. 95.

3 Manly conduct Meredith and the culture of improvement

In the 1860s, Meredith wrote a letter to his future sister-in-law, K ­ atherine Vulliamy, in which he reflected on the propriety of her apparent willingness to read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859). He wrote to her: ‘On consideration, I thought that [reading it] could not do you harm’.1 He admits, however, that ‘It deals with certain problems of life, and is therefore not of a milky quality. I am afraid that it requires stout reading. If you weather it, unshocked, you will find my other works less trying’.2 That Mudie’s circulating library withdrew its 300 copies following ‘urgent remonstrances of several respectable families, who objected to it as dangerous and wicked and damnable’, is clearly mourned by the author as an unfortunate occurrence and a misconception of the book’s subject. The affair has become part of the myth of Meredith’s unfavourable early reception by his mid-Victorian readers and reviewers. Its apparent initial lack of popular success in the face of its frank treatment of sexuality and prostitution may have been particularly resonant given its publication just two years after the Obscene Publications Act (1857).3 In fact, as indicated by early reviews, Meredith’s novel was not entirely dismissed as ‘immoral’. His subsequent recommendation of The Ordeal to Katherine Vulliamy indicates his faith that a reader will find in it no ‘harm’ in spite of Mudie’s rejection, although he is aware of its capacity to offend those who are unable to stomach the ‘stout reading’ that it demands.4 Meredith’s claim that The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is ‘not of a milky quality’ translates into an acknowledgement that, for his reading public, the novel becomes a test of strength and rigour, even a rejection of cerebral effeminacy and weakness. The ‘stout reading’ that he assumes will be necessary for its appreciation involves active endeavour on the part of the reader, which speaks to the reader’s supposed acculturation or bildung that Thackeray examines in his three Pendennis novels, as discussed in the previous chapter. This phrase ‘stout reading’ also indicates that the reader should cultivate an approach to the text informed by the typically masculine values of vigour, resilience, and muscularity of intellect. These are qualities that Meredith variously ascribes to, or withholds from, the young men in his own novels. The means by which such manly characteristics may be learned and performed is not only a

Manly conduct  69 subject of interest to Meredith and his readers, but is also a pervasive topic in other contemporary discursive mediums, attested by the enduring popularity of mid-Victorian conduct literature designed for male youth. In advice writing for young men, the means of the development of manliness is often outlined in distinct chapters with explanatory titles such as ‘character’, ‘manners’, ‘conversation’, and ‘travel’, as in the anonymous Advice to a Young Gentleman, on Entering Society (1839, 2nd ed.) or on the other hand ‘knowledge’, ‘principles & habits’, and ‘true friendship’ as in The Young Man’s Aid to Improvement, Success, and True Happiness by “Mentor” (1847). Such compartmentalisation of information, along with the language of guidance, moral instruction, or warning designed for young men in conduct literature, however, are not employed in this category of writing exclusively. For instance, ­Meredith’s novels draw extensively on such ideas as filial obligation, Christian obedience, the realisation of individual potential, and the role of the ­Victorian man as either female protector or as enabler. Indeed, his novels often employ linguistic expressions, such as maxims and aphorisms, that emulate the style of conduct writing. Bildungsromane such as Evan ­Harrington (1861) and The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871) make use of the figure of a young man in the processes of both realising manly identity and also understanding his place and significance in the world (with varying degrees of success). These texts draw on a system of advice narratives both at the level of plot and in the development of character. Each young male protagonist encounters events or people that force him to recalibrate and refine his understanding of both manliness and gentlemanliness. The significance of friendship, familial duty, chivalric protection, altruistic conduct, and social polish are as central to these novels as to the manuals of advice that they parallel and extend. 5 In comparison with the previous chapter, which emphasised novelistic form in discussing the serial Bildungsroman as a vehicle for the elaboration of Thackeray’s cyclical vision of adolescence, Meredith’s fiction may be seen to appropriate the literary conventions and rhetoric of advice writing for male youth in the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, the practice of publishing advice on a range of subjects, from social etiquette to learning to balance financial accounts, was firmly established. One of the most popular forms of advice literature was the conduct book. In her useful bibliography of such texts produced in America before 1900, Sarah E. Newton observes: A conduct book is a text that is intended for an inexperienced young adult or other youthful reader, that defines an ethical, ­Christian-based code of behavior, and that normally includes gender role definitions. Thus “conduct book” embraces those texts whose primary aim is to describe and define a basically Protestant scheme of life, morals,

70  Manly conduct and behavior, in order to encourage ideal conduct in white, generally middle-class children, young men, or young women.6 This statement provides an accurate, if fairly broad, definition. Whilst Newton’s focus is primarily on North American material, conduct literature in Britain is similarly characterised by its aim to exhort the specifically youthful reader to monitor his or her behaviour so as to live according to a moral (often Christian) imperative. In doing so such texts reinforce conventional gender roles. These codes of conduct may be presented in a multiplicity of ways: secular or religious in style, admonitory or familiar in tone, or intended for male or female readers explicitly. In its apparent rigidity of purpose, prosaic character, repetitive modes of address, and formal simplicity, the conduct book is regarded as a prolific and facile cultural form that became especially popular in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, a surprising and complex relationship emerges between this abundant and conventional form of prose writing, and the intellectually highbrow work of Meredith. In their codification of male adolescence – in construction of the male adolescent as subject and, at times, as reader – these two opposing textual forms reveal much about Victorian positions on the need for guidance in youth. Each narrates anxieties about the processes of establishing manly character. ­Meredith’s attitude towards conduct writing, which is a form intended for youth, is strangely ambivalent. In the novels examined here, ­Meredith flirts with the genre of advice literature, in an array of attitudes ranging from vehement disgust or distrust to affirmative moments of seductive fascination with the form and its traditions. From the ‘copper coinage of wisdom in the way of proverbs’ to ‘intoxicating’ sayings and ‘profound truths’, Meredith’s novels draw on typical strategies employed by conduct writers in their dissemination and examination of the merits and pitfalls of advice for youth.7

Conduct literature and advice in Meredith’s fiction Meredith’s writing draws upon recognisable aspects and authorial stratagems of the literature of advice explicitly as well as in more tangential fashions. In several facets of his life, Meredith perceives an intrinsic value in the dissemination of advice. This is evident in his novels, within which a range of advice is given to the protagonists, in the form of written or verbal communication, or as example or warning through action. Thus, young Crossjay in The Egoist (1879) must choose between the different masculine role-models available to him as represented by his father the Lieutenant, as well as Sir Willoughby and Vernon Whitford. In Beauchamp’s Career (1875) Nevil defines himself with or against a host of male characters to include his friends Roland de Croisnel and Lord

Manly conduct  71 Palmet, Renée’s husband the Marquis de Rouaillout, and his relations Cecil Baskelett and Everard Romfrey. As well as offering such opportunities for advice on manly behaviour and different styles of masculinity in his novels, Meredith also provided twofold advice in his position as publisher’s reader for Chapman and Hall. Here he offered help and guidance to younger or less experienced authors, whilst also advising his employers on whether he considered a manuscript worth publishing.8 Meredith’s advice both as a reader, and as a novelist, became a valuable commodity for his employer and publisher Chapman and Hall. Meredith knew this, acknowledging to his son Arthur, that ‘I am allowed the reputation of a tolerable guide in writing and style, and I can certainly help you to produce clear English’.9 It is obvious that he felt confident in his ability as mentor to offer professional advice to his publishers, his son, his friends and colleagues, and to other writers. It was evident that Meredith was a generous supporter of younger, less-experienced authors, leading a biographer to comment that, ‘As he grew older, Meredith became an elder brother, or even a father-figure, to younger writers’.10 As a reader and as a friend, Meredith became a reliable source of assistance in literary matters, echoing the role of guide or mentor so familiar in the literature of advice.11 As a respectable Victorian man, Meredith understood that he had a responsibility to offer guidance to those in whom he perceived a need – whether sought or not. For instance, in his personal life, Meredith was extremely fond of parcelling out unsolicited advice, on issues ranging from education, marriage, health, travel, and etiquette, to those acquaintances and family who formed the majority of his correspondents. On topics relating to masculine behaviour and development Meredith is particularly vocal to other men. In letters to his son Arthur, for example, Meredith informs the young man variously on the means of establishment of manly character. On early life and friendship at school, Meredith explains to his eldest son: I am sure you do not altogether underrate the fine qualities of German youth; but perhaps your immediate sympathies, and a somewhat exaggerated sensitiveness, stand in your way. […] If you do not cultivate the people you are living amongst in your youth, you will fail in having pleasant places to look back on ― landmarks of your young days. And besides, the Germans are your hosts, and you owe them at least a guest’s thankfulness.[…] I know they have the capacity for friendship, and that as a rule English friendships are not so lasting.12 This example of Meredith’s paternal advice to his son, who at the time of this letter was seventeen and at a Gymnasium in Stuttgart, is indicative of his tendency to offer a combination of advice and opinion in his correspondence. Meredith is eager to correct Arthur’s behavioural

72  Manly conduct faults, by drawing attention to his ‘somewhat exaggerated sensitiveness’ and lack of intimacy toward others while staying in Germany. This attempt at correction reveals both Meredith’s desire to form the character of his son along respectable, conventional lines, and also Meredith’s broader project of passing on his own knowledge and experience as a part of responsible paternalism (see Chapter 5 on ‘Fatherhood and Filial Dialogue’, which develops this premise). Similar admonitions may be found in examples of mid-Victorian advice literature, in which statements emphasising the choice of acquaintance in youth are recurrent: The kind of society into which the young man is early introduced, will depend very much upon the habits which he early forms; and in the kind of company with which he sets out, he is most likely to continue. It is very difficult and rare for a man to change his company.13 Meredith is similarly alive to the importance of choosing friends, who ought to be ‘lasting’, as well as having the capacity to become ‘landmarks of your young days’ in later life. A young man’s choice of friend is, in Meredith’s fiction, a crucial part of his development that may impede or facilitate his progress towards an adult masculine identity. The Egoist underscores the importance of friendship for young men, by demonstrating that the creation of true, manly friendship is an active engagement on both sides, and that the qualities of a real friend ought to help refine character and manliness. At the start of the novel, Sir Willoughby claims to the disappointed Laetitia Dale that he values her for her friendship: You have taught me that the ideal of friendship is possible – when we find two who are capable of a disinterested esteem. The rest of life is duty; duty to parents, duty to country. But friendship is the holiday of those who can be friends. Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know how rare!14 This provides an early example of Sir Willoughby’s inability to recognise the flaws of his own character, and that the demands he makes in the name of friendship are fraudulent, manipulative, and entirely self-­ seeking. Sir Willoughby is mistaken in his penetration of the meaning of friendship. Those whom he calls friends function merely as mirrors that reflect back to Sir Willoughby his own self-image. Thus, ­Laetitia’s initial idolisation confirms his sense of masculine superiority; as a dependent, Vernon Whitford affirms Willoughby’s social stature and munificence; Willoughby’s Best Man, Colonel de Craye, cements and inflates ­Willoughby’s pride in winning Clara’s hand. By the end of the novel, when Clara breaks her engagement and Laetitia is persuaded to

Manly conduct  73 engage herself to Willoughby instead, he is forced to reconsider the glib statement that ‘Wives are plentiful, friends are rare’. Meredith is alive to the importance of friendship, which is a recurrent theme in his novels. The letter to his son (above) is witness to this preoccupation in daily life. While he remains confident in the substance of his counsel, however, Meredith is cautious of the vehicle by which it is dispensed. He warns his son, ‘Don’t imagine me to be lecturing you. I have favourable reports of you, and I merely repeat simple words of advice that it will be well for you to keep in mind’.15 This provides an indication that friendly or paternal advice could easily be misinterpreted as ‘lecturing’ or criticism by its intended audience. He had suggested in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel that: The born preacher we feel instinctively to be our foe. He may do some good to the wretches that have been struck down, and lie gasping on the battle-field: he rouses deadly antagonism in the strong.16 There ought to be, Meredith indicates, a balance between overt instruction and encouragement that enables youth. Acknowledgements to this effect often preface and conclude early- and mid-Victorian advice texts, although many writers of such literature are optimistic about the impact that their work will have on young men: The Young are often accused of being thoughtless, rash, and unwilling to be advised. […] That youth are unwilling to be advised appears to be untrue. At least I have not found it so. When the feeling does exist, I believe it often arises from parental mismanagement, or from an unfortunate method of advising.17 As well as the sense of complacency from this conduct writer, the importance of receiving advice in youth is also underlined, and the responsibility of those more experienced (whether the writer or the reader’s parents) is made clear. Advice literature is a useful lens through which to consider ­Meredith’s writing, and a shared interest over subject matter (such as the role of friendship to youthful maturation) offers an opening into the dynamic relationship between Meredith’s work and examples of the conduct genre. The ways in which he draws on such literature, and his accounts of the more informal, everyday occasions when advice is meted out, however, are equivocal. While Meredith’s fiction appears to value the positive potential of advice designed to promote the development of manly character, the young male heroes of his novels also explore the limits of advice and its more challenging consequences. In his novels, the giving of advice frequently creates familial tension, damages sexual, emotional, and platonic relationships, and causes other problems for the

74  Manly conduct young male protagonists rather than simply alleviating their situations. Offers of wisdom, or advice on the conduct of life – whether by use of example, quotation, maxim or proverb – can confuse and fly wide of the mark, as Meredith outlines in the opening chapter of Diana of the Crossways (1885): smart remarks have their measured distances, many requiring to be a brule pourpoint, or within throw of the pistol, to make it hit; in other words, the majority of them are addressed directly to our muscular system, and they have no effect when we stand beyond the range.18 The universality of the absolute truths apparently revealed in such writing is tempered in his fiction with recognition of the limits of its applicability and even plausibility. The ‘smart remarks’, here excised from the diary of Henry Wilmers, offer a version of legitimate wisdom in the single vision of the diarist. But his blunt observations only remain relevant or truthful in ‘measured distances’ – for a limited time and to certain readers. The conclusion that Meredith’s texts appear to draw is that the advice which proves helpful to one man may be more of a hindrance to another, suggesting that generic works of advice or self-help will always be flawed. Despite these shortcomings of conduct writing, the occasions of behavioural advice in Meredith’s novels retain a sense that the messages imparted are not in themselves necessarily defective. This is demonstrated in, for example, certain aphorisms contained in Sir Austin Feverel’s Pilgrim’s Scrip, as the narrator of The Ordeal implies: There ran through the volume a fire of Hope; and they did him injustice who said he lacked Charity. Thus he wrote: “I am happy when I know my neighbour’s vice.” And it was set down as the word of a cynic; when rightly weighed, it was a plea for tolerance. He said again: “Life is a tedious process of learning we are fools.” And this is also open to mild interpretation, if we do not take special umbrage at the epithet. For, as he observes, by way of comment: “When we know ourselves Fools, we are already something better.”19 Such sayings, which reinforce to a youthful reader the need for social awareness, self-knowledge, and humility, also proliferate in popular conduct texts, so that Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) opens: ‘“Heaven helps those who help themselves” […] a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience.’20 The employment of these and comparable citations of accepted wisdom in both M ­ eredith’s work and advice literature draws attention to their ubiquity in popular

Manly conduct  75 and literary culture at mid-century, but does not lessen the values of right conduct that they underpin for the mid-Victorian youth in his efforts at self-improvement. Despite its patriarchal, even misogynistic tone, some of the advice contained in the Pilgrim’s Scrip should not necessarily be dismissed out of hand by readers, or by the characters of the novel. Like many conduct books, there may be grains of truth amalgamated within the philosophical epigrams and experiential wisdom, and at least one critic has agreed that some of the aphorisms that surface in the novel ‘appear to have a positive function.’21 The responsibility or duty of passing on knowledge and advice to the following generation of young men is recognised in these novels as socially imperative, in the same way that Meredith himself draws on his own experience to offer others help. Similar sentiments are frequently found in advice literature, as in William Cobbett’s popular Advice to Young Men (1829): ‘It is the duty, and ought to be the pleasure, of age and experience to warn and instruct youth, and to come to the aid of inexperience’. 22 The idea that the paternal generation will take pleasure in imparting wisdom and advice is echoed in Meredith’s fiction. This can be seen, for example, in Vernon Whitford’s advice to Sir ­Willoughby in The Egoist, the Cogglesby brothers’ kindnesses to Evan in Evan ­H arrington, or the influence that both Richmond Roy and Squire Beltham attempt to exert over the eponymous hero of Harry Richmond. The counsel and encouragement offered by such characters, however, is almost never entirely altruistic in its purpose. It is also self-serving. The same certainly holds true of published works that offered guidance and advice to male youth. In writing about medical advice literature, Anita and Michael Fellman contend that: Instructors about the body and the mind … [were writing] for purposes of enhanced self-definition, increased social legitimacy, and financial gain, as well as for overt, instructional purposes. The need to assert their right to leadership, rather than to assume it, is indicated by the many justifications offered by the authors in advice literature. 23 The writers’ assertions of authority were assumed not simply by virtue of their profession or social standing as physicians or clergymen, but were upheld notionally by the ideological validity of the message extolled in their conduct books. Such texts, often considered conventional in their perspective, must nonetheless defend their position and intention to their readership. One example of advice literature, published in 1845, introduces certain points for guidance with the following statement: The claims of society upon young men are of the most weighty and serious character. They grow out of those indissoluble relations which you sustain to society; and those valuable interests, social,

76  Manly conduct civil, and religious, which have come down to us, a most precious inheritance, from our fathers, and which, with all the duties and responsibilities connected with them, are soon to be transferred to your hands and your keeping.[…] This representation is not made to excite your vanity, but to impress you with a due sense of your obligations. 24 Such an admission not only expressly identifies the advice contained in the pages of the anonymously-published The Young Man (1845) as a duty for the writer, but it also maintains that the act of reading the text forms a corresponding obligation to young men as the future generation. In addition to the sense of reciprocal duty played upon in such texts, advice literature must also be considered in commercial terms, so that the giving of advice becomes a marketable commodity which provides remuneration for the writer. For authors such as Timothy Shay Arthur and Samuel Smiles, of course, the publication of advice became a steady, respectable form of employment. Although the passing on of knowledge and experience to the succeeding generation may have been characterised as a profitable duty, the writers of conduct books also propagated the assumption at the heart of the self-help ethos: assiduous self-reflection and improvement could result in material as well as moral accretion. As Linda Young suggests: Given the tremendous demand for advice books it might be expected that readers had a fair expectation, perhaps based on models of their acquaintance, that it was indeed possible to pick up the knowledge of values and behaviour that would enable admission to middle-class status. The influence and power of the self-help movement and its promise of social notice for virtuous hard work is evidence of a widespread conviction that individual agency could breach privilege and become middle class. 25 While financial gain would often be scorned in the pages of such works, their promises of eventual strength of character, moral authority and the respect of others would also imply other, more worldly advantages as a consequence – even if they made explicit claims that one should not actively seek to simply improve one’s social or economic position. 26 Conduct literature therefore not only codifies middle class respectability, but is also embedded in the aspirational character of the culture of improvement. Smiles stated that ‘Comfort in worldly circumstances is a condition which every man is justified in striving to attain by all worthy means.’27 Self-help offered not only increased moral and educational advantages, but also class mobility and consolidation, an increase in social status, and the implicit hope of garnering greater wealth. Meredith, in his depiction of characters such as Victor Radnor, who displays his

Manly conduct  77 prosperity by building Lakelands in One of Our Conquerors (1891), Sir Willoughby Patterne who inherits both money and his large estate, and Lord Fleetwood, the wealthy owner of Welsh coal mines in The Amazing Marriage (1895), explored the moral consequences of financial acquisitiveness and display, as well as the merits and disadvantages of self-improvement over external aid in economic enterprise. Conduct literature for young men is designed to not only be useful, but is also prescriptive in that it attempts to compartmentalise the process of masculine development into recognisable, distinct parts of a young man’s life. The merits and dangers of social interaction are subjects frequently broached in such writing. The anonymous Advice to a Young Gentleman, on Entering Society, for example, writes with optimistic enthusiasm: In cultivating company, the advantages are as attractive as the duty is compulsive. […] For the correction of numerous indefinite evils, and the bestowal of some positive profits, habitual intercourse with society avails to produce the happiest effect upon the mind. 28 Conscious integration into society, many such texts suggest, may be considered an educative and enlivening experience. The rhetoric of advice is employed to persuade the young male reader of the necessity of good company, harking back to what John Tosh has termed the ‘gentlemanly politeness’ popular in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 29 In the anonymously-published Advice to a Young Gentleman, the author tries to impress on the youthful reader the need for sociability: You should remember on all occasions that you do not go into company so much for pleasure as for improvement […] You should consider everyone you meet with in society, who surpasses you in any good quality, as a person who is unconsciously to be your instructor in that quality.30 This appreciation for the potential moral worth of social engagement is recurrent in advice literature for young men, although the ideal sex and class of the ‘company’ to be sought varies. In Meredith’s work not only experienced men may become prominent mentors (such as Shrapnel or Mr. Goren) but women also prove legitimately influential to the young men of these novels: Mrs. Mountstuart in The Egoist, Evan Harrington’s elder sister the Countess de Saldar, and Lady Charlotte in Lord Ormont and His Aminta (1894). The author of Advice to a Young Gentleman advocates the company of older women as a valuable influence over male youth, and distinguishes between the ‘higher classes of minds’ and ‘those who are in the middle or the lower ranks of life, people of business, and all who are of an unthinking temper’.31

78  Manly conduct The idea that good company can have an improving and lasting effect on a young man is used and tested in Meredith’s novels. In The Egoist, the character and behaviour of Sir Willoughby Patterne at once upholds and contradicts this suggestion. He has, evidently, grown up with the advantages of good society, and one might expect that this opportunity for ‘habitual intercourse with society’ whether at home or abroad, would conspire to make Willoughby a perfect, polished English gentleman.32 Within the domestic circle of Patterne Hall, conversation provides an important opportunity to maintain civility and respectability. Sir Willoughby, while he appears conversationally adept, is highly selective and self-interested in the use of ‘conversational power’ as a means of improvement. Rather than engaging with those around him in order to more fully understand their perspectives or responses, Willoughby is primarily concerned to use conversation as a tool of egoistic domination, maintaining his masculine superiority, and ensuring that others participate in his static view of patriarchal authority. Charles Hill has concluded that: Sir Willoughby holds the most exalted opinion of himself, because all his life he has been nourished upon adulation. […] It is characteristic of the Egoist that he is perpetually looking at himself, perpetually listening to himself, and that he must have his environment minister to his ideal conception of himself. Sir Willoughby expects his relatives and his friends to serve as satellites, who will give him back his own image and make him shine the brighter by their subservient admiration.33 Willoughby, ‘perpetually listening to himself’ and demanding that those around him ‘give him back his own image’, is, as Laetitia Dale forces him to face at the conclusion of the novel before she consents to be his wife, ‘a gentleman nurtured in idolatry’ who ‘worships himself’.34 In defiance of the ideal proposed in most advice literature, Willoughby does not, in conversation, hold the giving of pleasure to others as a significant motive; rather, it is his own interests and person which hold the greatest attraction. When attending Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson’s dinner party, for example, she requests that he allow Clara and Horace de Craye ‘to be encouraged in sparkling together’, because otherwise the more serious attendees will cause ‘undigested lumps of conversation, unless you [Willoughby] devote yourself’ as a ‘cipher’; Sir Willoughby is resentful, as ‘it happened that he particularly wished to shine. The admiration of his county made him believe he had a flavour in general society […] and he was to relinquish his opportunity in order to please Mrs. Mountstuart!’35 Willoughby has less interest in helping a friend to ensure that conversation at her party runs smoothly than ensuring that he can be the focus of attention and subject of admiring discussion and flattery.

Manly conduct  79 Towards the end of the novel, during his midnight meeting with ­ aetitia, Willoughby is brought up short when his persistent monologue L of self-interested masquerade and romantic attachment is interrupted: ‘Young men, I assure you, are orientally-inclined in their ideas of love. Love gets a bad name from them. We, my Laetitia, do not regard love as a selfishness. If it is, it is the essence of life. At least it is our selfishness rendered beautiful.[…] It seems to me that I have not opened my mouth for an age. […] Why press you to speak? I will be the speaker. As surely as you know me, I know you: and –’ Laetitia burst forth with: ‘No!’36 Willoughby’s voluble attempt to persuade Laetitia to promise herself to him in this episode allows him to give free rein to his possessive, coercive use of language (which is examined further in Chapter 5). The irony of Willoughby’s statement ‘I have not opened my mouth for an age’, having talked over Laetitia at some length, is made more absurd in his excuse that his ‘selfishness’ is ‘rendered beautiful’. This is an example of his single-minded monologues which, according to Richard Stevenson, deny the opportunity for mutual, interactive discussion. 37 Willoughby tries to control Laetitia’s own voice and to eradicate reciprocal conversation, by presuming to speak for both parties: ‘Why press you to speak? I will be the speaker’. It is only when Laetitia agrees to marry Willoughby, and he is brought to recognise himself as an egoist, that Willoughby’s future as a man and a husband can be contemplated with even faint hope. His masculine ideal of himself must be reconciled with a more generous vision of manliness which, while retaining patriarchal authority, is nonetheless able to allow Laetitia, as future mistress of Patterne Hall, to ‘Dictate’.38 Sir Willoughby’s final acceptance of criticism, his willingness to be less strict in his expectations of others, and Laetitia’s determination that he will no longer solely be surrounded by ‘idolatry’, tentatively suggest a more positive future for Willoughby. In doing so the narrator implies a subdued investment in the power of advice and guidance to affect the young man’s development. For a middle-class young man at mid-century, the moral trajectory that he follows could be considered as a parallel to his occupation or career, and both of these combine to reflect upon his character and masculinity. Energy, dedication, vigour and determination, critics such as John Tosh, James Eli Adams, Martin Danahay and Norman Vance have all recognised, are of primary significance for manly identity in this period. The sphere of work or labour is the most suitable and likely arena for displaying and asserting these abilities. 39 The importance of forging an identity by means of improvement – to include the improvement of mind, character, social status, and even wealth – is also identified as particularly crucial to male development in works of advice literature

80  Manly conduct aimed at the working- and lower-middle classes. For Samuel Smiles, perhaps the most famous of the writers in this category considered here, industry and self-improvement define both individual manliness and also national character: The spirit of self-help, as exhibited in the energetic action of individuals, has in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnished the true measure of our power as a nation. […] Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education.40 The idea of ‘energetic individualism’ here is central to Smiles’s ethos, which corresponds with the claim that ‘man perfects himself by work’ and ‘energetic action’. Meredith’s fiction, which deals less with ­working-class young men in comparison to Smiles, nonetheless draws to some extent upon a democratic value of ‘energetic individualism’, as aspects of this vigorous and autonomous assertion of manliness may be found in Meredith’s male protagonists such as Richard Feverel, Carlo Ammiani in Vittoria (1867), and, in his later fiction, Dartrey Fenellan in One of Our Conquerors, and Matthew Weyburn in Lord Ormont and His Aminta. For Meredith in Beauchamp’s Career, entering a profession must coincide with what Smiles terms ‘energetic action’. Beauchamp accomplishes this in his initial foray into both his military and political careers, but is unable to sustain any real success in his career and ultimately fails to maintain such attempts to assert his masculinity. Nicholas Dames writes that Nevil Beauchamp, ‘denied admission to Parliament, can adhere to no stabilized path, and whose career is a series of unpredictable missteps’, thereby associating Meredith’s depiction of a career in this text with its earlier meaning of ‘a course of reckless, chaotic progression’ rather than the steady, logical momentum of professional progress, with its ‘systematized, rhythmic, grooved paths’.41 Meredith’s fiction simultaneously resists the prescriptive insistence of a single conduit for masculine development or a ‘systematized, grooved path’, while maintaining a cautious acceptance of the potential merits of conduct literature and informal advice to guide young men. Much like the codes of masculine behaviour inscribed in conduct books, a career ought not to be a haphazard series of lurches, but a more clearly evolved, coherent form of progress. Both Beauchamp’s Career and Evan Harrington are novels explicitly concerned with the negotiation between the disintegrating rigidity of class division and the reformation of what constitutes manly occupation in terms of both labour and leisure, and neither Nevil nor Evan is able to adhere to a sequential career with forward-momentum. Frederick R. Karl has noted that ‘Beauchamp’s Career is structured on a series of disappointments’.42 These ‘series of disappointments’ accrue

Manly conduct  81 primarily through Nevil’s inability to either sustain a career, develop a healthy and energetic physical form, or discover a suitable wife, culminating in the tragic-heroic failed attempt to save an ‘insignificant bit of mudbank life remaining in this world in the place of him’.43 For both Nevil and Evan, a sense of displacement in terms of class and family expectation further fractures their anticipated course of action. Evan Harrington, or He Would be a Gentleman is also fundamentally concerned with occupation and status as part of the development of character and manly definition. Evan must determine his calling, but to do this he needs to make a choice between his own desires and aspirations of being a gentleman, and his obligations toward his lower-­middleclass mother and recently deceased father to become a tailor and pay off his father’s debts. As Evan’s sister Louisa, the Countess de Saldar, conspires to persuade Evan to reject his legacy of tailordom, the young man is torn between disavowing his mother and his father’s memory, and remaining honest and true to his lower-class familial obligations. While Evan is concerned with his status or position in society, the more prosaic, pragmatic characters such as the widowed Mrs. Mel understand the real implications attendant on Evan’s career prospects, enquiring forcefully of her son, ‘What’s to be your income, Van? […] how are you to live, and pay the creditors?’44 Evan is reminded of the material dimension of whichever career or course of action he chooses, and the necessity to work seriously at something is made clear in terms that i­nclude resolving his filial obligation and providing for his personal future. As the problematic relationship between social status and gendered perception of the trade of tailoring forms the majority of discussion in Evan Harrington, it is ironic yet eminently suitable that Evan’s eventual commitment to his trade is itself an expression of manliness through its ascetic self-discipline, identified by James Eli Adams as a central means of performing Victorian masculinities. Evan’s profession, by the end of the novel, is both the cause of his failure to become an English gentleman, and an impetus to his increase in social standing as the story concludes and he marries the aristocratic Rose. While much of Meredith’s fiction draws more on instances relating to the less formal transmission of advice than is usually found in conduct books, such communications tend to be significant for the young protagonists, or even for Meredith’s readership. In The Egoist, the voice of the narrator intrudes into Willoughby’s deliberative struggle over whether or not to release Clara from their engagement, broadening the focus from the fictional moment to include the reader, and essentially imparting suggestions upon the way in which advice ought to be employed by individuals: Decide at the outset, that temper is fatal to policy: hold them with both hands in division. One might add, be doubtful of your policy and repress your temper: it would be to suppose you wise. You can,

82  Manly conduct however, by incorporating two or three captains of the great army of truisms bequeathed to us by ancient wisdom, fix in your service those veteran old standfasts to check you. They will not be serviceless in their admonitions to your understanding, and they will so contrive to reconcile it with the natural caperings of the wayward young sprig Conduct, that the latter, who commonly learns to walk upright and straight from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon on his crown, shall foot soberly, appearing at least wary of dangerous corners.45 This extract draws on the wealth of opinion or ‘the great army of truisms’ informing thought on current forms of acceptable behaviour and the making of decisions. The ‘truisms’ of ‘ancient wisdom’, the reader is assured, will serve ‘to check you’. The extract goes on to indicate that this process of education, or set of rules laid down for guidance, is to be learned ‘from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon’. This offers a revealing, if convoluted, view of Meredith’s apparent ambivalence about the transmission of advice. This section of The Egoist implies that listening to advice on masculine conduct can be serviceable, but this perspective is challenged by the brutal references that include ‘admonitions to your understanding’, ‘raps of a bludgeon’, and ‘dangerous corners’ that must be navigated in order for improvement to be effected. Thus, the form of edification learned from advice is constructed as only partially beneficial to the development of character. The process is invariably a difficult one within Meredith’s novels.

Rhetoric and literary form: Meredith and advice The practice of reading, whether for moral improvement or imaginative distraction, is evident in Meredith’s work as enabling self-reflexivity in both text and reader. Contemporary attitudes to reading varied widely, although the idea that ‘a love of reading has ever distinguished the wise and intelligent of mankind’ is often repeated in the literature of male advice and is also championed in Meredith’s letters and novels.46 In Beauchamp’s Career, the metatextual processes of reading in the text are significant, for either the development of or detraction from Nevil’s manliness, and also for the reader’s insight into the characters of those involved. As Gillian Beer has indicated, references to real books punctuate the novel, with frequent allusions to works by Ruskin, Byron, Dante and Carlyle: Meredith’s use of tutelary books in this novel differs in one basic and suggestive way from the rest of his work. Elsewhere the books themselves are fiction. […] In Beauchamp’s Career the books are real, available to the reader as well as to Beauchamp.47

Manly conduct  83 The effect of employing ‘real’ texts, such as Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), aids in constructing interest and sympathy with the failed hero on the part of the actual reader. In works of nineteenth-century advice on youthful reading, texts that displayed moral conduct or manly courage and heroism are typical of the recommended bill of fare, such as Waverley (1814), The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Robinson Crusoe (1719), Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), along with works by Wordsworth, Tennyson, and George Eliot; although anxieties about the potentially immoral influence of fanciful or sensational fiction on young minds were widespread. As one writer contended: ‘There is probably no form of idleness so seductive or so enervating to the mind as indiscriminate novel reading’.48 Nevil’s persistent admiration for the heroic, however, endears him to his friends and family through its imaginative optimism in the face of the prosaic world of Victorian society, although the concept of heroism must be modified to fit the demands of modern life. ‘Real’ books, such as On Heroes, which is described in the novel as ‘producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints’, serve to underline the necessary shift in redefining the heroic in a way that may be useful to both Nevil himself and to Meredith’s readers, in order to provide a recognisable ‘type of splendid manhood’ for the modern world to venerate.49 Writers such as Carlyle are held up by Nevil for admiration and emulation in Beauchamp’s Career. ‘Example’, Samuel Smiles writes in SelfHelp, ‘is one of the most potent of instructors, though it teaches without a tongue. It is the practical school of mankind, working by action, which is always more forcible than words.’50 In Beauchamp’s Career, a multiplicity of ‘example[s]’ are held up for consideration, both to the reader and to Nevil. From each version of masculine identity offered in the text, some moral code, some mode of behaviour, or some style of conduct may be learned. The method of instruction via exemplary stories or tutelary books, is seen by Meredith as haphazard: Meredith’s interest in print is, pervasively, an interest in fragmentation. His readers are readers of parts; the typographical conventions they consume and use as metaphor are bits, small patches, parts of larger wholes, addenda. They read chapters, not books; they rely, or fail to rely, on the parts of books that permit snatchy, non-sequential reading[.]51 While Nicholas Dames is primarily concerned here with understanding the relationship between Meredith’s segmented fiction and the physiology of reading – the ways that he ‘combines the fact of book materiality with an up-to-date psychological understanding of the units of consciousness to produce a fictional practice composed of small parts – aphorisms, flashes of insight, minute scenes’ – his argument also paves

84  Manly conduct the way for an examination of the formal effects of structural decomposition noted in Meredith’s fiction. 52 Meredith’s novels exemplify right (and wrong) codes of youthful conduct at the level of plot. As such, although the relationship between youthful behaviour and manly conduct outlined in advice text and novel is not always explicit, the reader of Meredith’s fiction is still invited to pay attention to the moral choices of the young men written into his work. Their example does provide opportunities for the reader’s own improvement. On the one hand, the idea that serious application to Meredith novels will reward the determined reader could be considered as a magnified reaction to the way in which conduct literature promised its readership the reward of eventual masculine validation. The curious ‘small patches’ and ‘flashes of insight’ in Meredith’s novels are also instructive as refined extracts: the kinds of edifying phrases and expressions that may be separated from the text as lapidary generalisations. In both Meredith’s fiction and in the nineteenth-century conduct book, the experience of reading for improvement is often held up as a useful and instructive pursuit. In The Egoist, the prelude, or ‘A Chapter of which the Last Page only is of any Importance’, claims that: The world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world’s wisdom. So full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression. 53 For Meredith in The Egoist this ‘compression’ of the history of life and experience is effected through comedy, and literally exemplified here in the way that the author compresses the material. Meredith candidly advises the reader that only ‘the last page’ will have any ‘importance’. Some kind of compression is necessary, and signposting is required in order to ‘translate […] those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly’. 54 The added imperative that ‘we must read what we can of it, at least the page before us, if we would be men’, parallels advice literature, so the ‘Book of Egoism’ is established here as a pervasive conduct book. 55 This metaphorical tome contains ‘the world’s wisdom’, reinscribed as a palimpsest by successive generations who share their versions of truth and proper conduct. The suggestion in Meredith’s novel that ‘we must read […] at least the page before us, if we would be men’ iterates the significance of reading in the achievement of legitimate masculine identity. It also implies a recognition of the imperative of the future in attaining such accomplishment, as reading ‘at least the page before us’ involves appraising both the present and future of the individual.

Manly conduct  85 Meredith famously demanded close attention to his novels and intellect in his readers. Mainstream advice literature on the other hand was essentially accessible, easy to read, commercial, and typically undemanding in terms of intellectual ability, suggesting that completion of and adherence to the straightforward text and its simple teaching would alone enable masculine development and achievement. In spite of their cerebral complexity, the difficult discontinuity of form and style in Meredith’s novels invite their nineteenth century readership to nonetheless draw comparisons with the structures of advice literature, wisdom literature, and books of literary compilation, as each of these genres may also be characterised by their epigrammatic configuration and segmented composition. It is evident that Meredith’s novels were perceived in this way by his contemporaries. For some this could mean an uncomfortable experience, as W. E. Henley protested in an 1879 review of The Egoist, stating that ‘to read Mr. Meredith straight off is to have an indigestion of epigram’, and recommending that in order to appreciate the author one must read only two or three chapters a day. 56 What Henley viewed as a sacrifice of plot nonetheless allowed the author to be ‘brilliant to the point of being obscure’.57 Henley commented that Meredith’s ‘pages so teem with fine sayings, and magniloquent epigrams, and gorgeous images, and fantastic locutions, that the mind would welcome dulness as a glad relief’. 58 Henley’s evident struggle with Meredith’s prose style, and admiration for his ‘fine sayings, and magniloquent epigrams’, isolate for consideration the tendency in Meredith’s novels to nurture and emphasise the reflective, often abstracted, thoughts of his characters and narrators, and to allow the small, fragmented moment of experience exemplified in a saying or aphorism to become weighty and momentous. In the mouths of those who observe society in Meredith’s fiction, such as Sir Austin Feverel and Mrs. Mountstuart, and via the narrative voices of those such as Dame Gossip and the Natural Philosopher, Meredith allows flashes of wisdom to emerge, along with the dross of simple, familiar proverbs. The uncomplicated perceptiveness of Mrs. Berry, who warns Lucy after her marriage to Richard Feverel that ‘Kissing don’t last: cookery do!’ may be prosaic, but it nonetheless offers a useful statement based on personal experience of marriage as advice to the young bride. Such brief, condensed sentences of advice on behaviour and attitude are similarly essential to nineteenth-century self-help literature and conduct books. Smiles’s Self-Help, for example, relies heavily on succinct quotations excerpted from a range of sources: ‘“The youth”, says Mr. Disraeli, “who does not look up will look down; and the spirit that does not soar is destined perhaps to grovel”.‘59 Other works of advice on conduct contain similarly quotable sentences, such as ‘You cannot expect to attain perfection at once; you must trust to time’, or ‘Society is the ethnic court of the temple of diplomacy; the ante-chamber and tiring-room of the

86  Manly conduct hall of politics.’60 Meredith’s fiction contains many epigrams and aphorisms that, when removed from the organic structure of the novels, remain intrinsically complete in their sense of thoughtful discovery and didactic tone: ‘A youth who is engaged in the occupation of eating his heart, cannot shine to advantage, and is as much a burden to himself as he is an enigma to others’.61 Readers of Meredith may be faced with what Henley termed ‘an indigestion of epigram’, but the recurrence of maxims, truisms, sayings, and other small moments of discovery and compressed articulation are a key feature in his work, and contribute to the segmented discontinuity of style and form. Surprisingly, in this way, Meredith’s novels may be considered as an analogue to the lowbrow genre of conduct writing, whose volumes frequently repeat favourite truisms as well as quote useful nuggets of wisdom from both advice literature (such as Chesterfield and Cobbett) and literary figures (such as Bulwer, Richardson, Thackeray). Contemporary readers had become sensitive to the fact that instructive or thought-provoking moments in Meredith’s novels could be freed from the narrative in which the author had bound them. In 1888 an American reader, Mary Rebecca Gilman, published a collection of selected aphorisms, maxims and epigrams taken from Meredith’s works to date, entitled The Pilgrim’s Scrip, or Wit and Wisdom of George ­Meredith. The ‘epigrammatic’ style and halting characterisation of the novels, which Nicholas Dames has described as full of ‘sudden lurches and discoveries’, find a new unity in Gilman’s text.62 This text, in part, constitutes an effort to compensate for the fragmentation of Meredith’s novels. Meredith’s pithy words of wisdom and memorable phrases are thereby condensed and abridged into a separate text, removing them from their context. In a sense, it becomes a philosophical handbook of English truisms. In bringing together a host of Meredithian insights and sayings, however, the textual admixture of Wit and Wisdom also highlights the original fragmentation of Meredith’s novelistic style. In their original form, these perceptive annotations on character and society appear at times to intrude on the narrative, despite their revelatory integrity in the text which allows the reader insight into the opaque texture of passing thought and fluctuations of temperament of Meredith’s characters. The narrator of The Ordeal explains: At present, I am aware, an audience impatient for Blood and Glory scorns the stress I am putting on incidents so minute, a picture so little imposing. One will come to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work. […] To them nothing will be trivial, seeing that they will have in their eyes the invisible conflict going on around us, whose features a nod, a smile, a laugh, of ours perpetually changes. And they will perceive, moreover, that in real life all hangs together: the train is laid in the lifting of an eyebrow, that

Manly conduct  87 bursts upon the field of thousands. They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter came out of that small one.63 Rather than the grand gesture and obvious crisis in an individual’s development, Meredith draws attention instead to the ‘incidents so minute’ that they could have been mistakenly dismissed as irrelevant: ‘the train is laid in the lifting of an eyebrow’. In The Ordeal, for example, ­R ichard surmises ‘that the life lying behind him was the life of a fool. What had he done in it? He had burnt a rick and got married! He associated the two acts of his existence’.64 The account of his own life is clumsily interpreted – Meredith’s interest here is less on these two events that serve to structure the narrative, but more on the humble flashes of truth revealed by Richard’s attitudes and behaviour as he grows up, such as the moments of resentful submission to his father’s System, his careless attitude towards his friend Ripton, or his treatment of his cousin Clare whose diary also ‘made much of little trivial remembrances, all bearing upon him’.65 As Richard reads Clare’s diary after her death, he realises that ‘She sees me as I am’, that this record of small moments can reveal as much if not more about a person than grand actions: ‘this great matter came out of that small one’. Similarly in Rhoda Fleming (1865), Meredith explains that Young men easily fancy that when the black volume is shut, the tide is stopped. Saying “I was a fool,” they believe they have put an end to the foolishness. What father teaches them that a human act, once set in motion, flows on forever to the great account?66 The smallest incident has its effect on youth’s individual maturation, but its full consequences are myriad and permanent. The attention paid by Meredith to the fleeting thought and seemingly irrelevant occurrence reveal his pervasive interest in human conduct and development, particularly ‘among boys’ in adolescence when ‘the race is only half civilized’.67 These small moments of revelation and formulations of moral p ­ rinciple – often presented as aphorisms, maxims, or other short expressions on experienced life – are removed from the novels and redistributed via Gilman’s Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith, incurring an ‘Immense Debtorship for a thing done’, in the words of Sir Austin’s Pilgrim’s Scrip.68 This exercise of persistent excerptation had gained currency since Vicesimus Knox published his Elegant Extracts in 1783, as Leah Price has noted in her work on The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. The practice of isolating such snippets from great or instructive works of poetry and prose (known as “beauties” or “worthies”) had become commonplace in nineteenth-century collections, anthologies, textbooks, prizebooks, and other types of semi-literary moral instruction.69 Divorced from the

88  Manly conduct context of the novels in which these sayings were originally situated, ­Gilman’s book becomes a version of the ironic book The Pilgrim’s Scrip created by Sir Austin. The truncated abridgement of ‘wit and wisdom’ in Gilman’s Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith lends itself to comparison with the carefully contained chapters of advice in conduct writing and self-help literature. The reasoning behind her selections offers a comparable experience of accessible edification and reward for its readers. Gilman explains the rationale for her choices of ‘aphorisms, […] witty epigrams, idiomatic phrases, and philosophical reflections upon life’, deliberately choosing extracts that will ‘present the public with only what will be intelligible and attractive at the first reading’, acknowledging that ‘the compiler who gains new readers for a great writer, who opens up to any reader a new mine of intellectual treasure, is perhaps of some slight service to the literary world’.70 Gilman acknowledges that ‘the didactic instinct’ is evident in much of Meredith’s writing, so that this collection will both gain ‘a sympathetic hearing’ of Meredith’s work, but in its isolation of ‘a number of short, brilliant sayings which have been skilfully hammered out of truth and experience’, The Wit and Wisdom will also prove edifying for the reader.71 Although Meredith gave his permission for The Wit and Wisdom to be published, he did so with reservation. For instance, he expressed reluctance for his ‘collections of precious stones’ to be regrouped together in this way, excised from their original narrative situations.72 He wrote to Mrs. Gilman: Over here [in England] I have not encouraged the collecting of extracts from my books. A gathering of “all plums”, if such they be, is not digestible. I doubt that good comes of it either to the author or the reader. Many of the excerpts can hardly be intelligible without the context.73 Meredith’s concerns are threefold: he fears the quotations may be misconstrued when removed from the novels; he is anxious that when collected en masse his phrases will be impenetrable; he doubts the benefit to either himself or the collection’s readership. Curiously, these anxieties are simultaneously a part of Gilman’s justification for publication, demonstrating the ways that excerptation and abridgement effectively create a new text with a different audience. Meredith reflected of his own writing that ‘If a man’s work is to be of value, the best of him must be in it. […] These are simple truisms. But of such are the borderways of the path of wisdom’.74 Thus, Meredith’s attitude towards the reproduction of such sayings is not simply condemnatory. Self-reflexively, Gilman includes in the Wit and Wisdom the following quotation collected from Rhoda Fleming: ‘Truisms, whether they lie in

Manly conduct  89 the depths of thought or on the surface, are at any rate the pearls of experience’.75 Meredith’s ‘pearls of experience’ are therefore laid bare in a process of deliberate selection by Gilman, which corresponds with Price’s claim for anthologies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: In the hand of its editors, the novel rose piecemeal: islands of lyric or didactic or sententious collectibles bobbing up occasionally from a sea of dispensable narrative. …. [This practice personified] a synecdochal esthetic that corresponds to an equally atomistic model of individual upward mobility.76 The Wit and Wisdom offers a good sampling of ‘didactic or sententious collectibles’ of a kind that, interspersed with explanation and justification, also made up advice literature such as Smiles’s Self-Help and Character (1871). Kenneth Fielden in his work on self-help literature has claimed that the reliance on aphorisms and allegories in such writing, at times, reduced its clarity, so that the reader of advice literature may have had to sustain a fairly active engagement with the text. He writes of self-help literature: The way it was presented did not make for overall clarity, for it did not appear in the form of an abstract, logical argument, but through biographical tales, by parables, stories, aphorisms, proverbs.77 Despite the tacit acceptance of advice literature as a facile and accessible form, if as Fielden suggests conduct writers in fact (due to their piecemeal diversity) made the reader work hard in order to effect their moral and social education, this would further accord with Price’s observation that the anthology – like the conduct book – embodies in this way the practice of ‘individual upward mobility’. Both of these two genres, in their ‘synecdochal esthetic’, promise fulfilment in their fragmented collection. The selected samples of moral lessons and literary beauties that they contain allow the reader to gain the “right” knowledge swiftly, thereby appealing to the aspirational adolescent reader. Meredith’s texts are not only segmented by their epithetic dialogue and divisible chapters (thus enabling Gilman to isolate excerpts easily from the novels), but they also draw on other, textual models of moral instruction. The inclusions of fragmented conduct books such as the ‘Book of Egoism’ (from The Egoist), Maxims for Men (from The Amazing Marriage), The Pilgrim’s Scrip, The Philosophical Geography, Sir Austin’s ‘secret book in his own handwriting, composed for Richard’s Marriage Guide: containing Advice and Directions to a Young Husband’, and even Mrs. Berry’s gift of Dr. Kitchener’s Domestic Cookery to Lucy (all from The Ordeal) reinforce the analogous relationship between the two genres.78 Forms of didactic and exemplary discourse proliferate, not

90  Manly conduct only in these fictional examples of conduct writing, but also with references to other morally instructive works such as Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) and Émile (1762), Hannah More’s tale Coelebs in Search of a Wife (1809), and also via persistent allusions to the novelist Samuel Richardson in the character of Lady Caroline Grandison. Lady Caroline’s obsessive desire to produce a son, who will become the nineteenth-century embodiment of her ‘legitimate descendant’ and ‘admirable ancestor’ Sir Charles Grandison, a model of restraint and propriety in Richardson’s 1754 novel, echoes Sir Austin’s designs for Richard’s route to manhood.79 Both Lady Caroline and Sir Austin rely on the guidance of the written word; Lady Caroline on Richardson and Sir Austin on his own Pilgrim’s Scrip and notebook. Sir Charles ­Grandison and The Pilgrim’s Scrip, each explicitly providing moral guidance for youth via cautionary example, perform as versions of conduct literature in the educational context of The Ordeal. While the Pilgrim’s Scrip can be clearly identified as a prospectus for the System, ­quotations from Richardson’s novels frequently surfaced in literary anthologies and collections of moral lessons, which remained popular well into the nineteenth century, such as The Paths of Virtue Delineated: Or, the History in Miniature of the Celebrated Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison; Familiarised and Adapted to the Capacities of Youth (1756). As Richardson wrote with the explicit intent of providing instruction to the young and inexperienced, Meredith’s references to Sir Charles Grandison in his own novel reinforce his interest in the forms of conduct writing, and particularly that which has masculine formation as its subject.80 These examples of the parental reliance on instructive texts, however, do not tell the whole story. In The Ordeal of Richard Feverel in particular, such texts function as moral luminaries for youth, as well as a written script for mothers and fathers such as Sir Austin and Lady Caroline who seek to carve out methods of rigorous education for their charges. In Meredith’s metatextual discourse of conduct manuals he explores the gendered prejudices of advice that circulated in the male-dominated society of Victorian Britain. Of the ‘Book of Egoism’, Meredith advises that ‘The writing in it having been done chiefly by men, men naturally receive their fortification from its wisdom’.81 Melissa Shields Jenkins has similarly observed: ‘Meredith’s novels begin inside the pages of imagined books to ask pointed questions about the reception and recycling of patriarchal texts.’82 As Jenkins indicates, the authors of conduct books – whether the Pilgrim’s Scrip or Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men – seek to control the behaviour of male youth via writing that is coercive and prescriptive. Garrett Stewart makes this point clearly in his assessment of both the Scrip and Sir Austin’s notebook as correctional texts that are ‘squeezing experience dry to wrest into view its monitory quintessence.’83 In the Pilgrim’s Scrip, Sir Austin is seen to display and exert

Manly conduct  91 his authority; his book exemplifies the monologism typically associated with the single-authored conduct manual. The Scrip is majestic in tone and employs a scriptural style, and, like the ‘Book of Egoism’, it is represented as an almost sacred text; a univocal ‘master-text, a biblios’ for the conversion of male youth to patriarchal supremacy.84 Sir Austin’s prescription for a System of education for male youth, which emerges in the Scrip, employs sacred language, although it is based on authority of a secular, mundane nature: Modern Aphorists are accustomed to make their phrases a play of wit, flashing antithetical brilliancies, rather than condensing profound truths. This one [Sir Austin], if he did not always say things new, evidently spoke from reflection, feeling, and experience: the Triad which gives a healthy utterance to Wisdom: and omitting one of which […] admirable sentences may survive as curiosities […] but are […] to men at large incomprehensible juggleries usurping dominion of their understandings without seal of authority.85 The Pilgrim’s Scrip, the narrator announces, gains legitimacy from the combination of ‘reflection, feeling, and experience’, which combine to form the necessary components of a guide to others. In his combination of ‘wit’ and attempts at ‘condensing profound truths’, he offers a textbook that does, at least at the beginning of the novel, have its ‘circle of converts’.86 In fact Meredith’s own combinations of ‘flashing antithetical brilliancies’ and ‘profound truths’ are perceived as possessing their own intrinsic value by the author and readers of Gilman’s The Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith. Robert Preyer opines that ‘many Victorian readers’ would have copied out the ‘shrewd and penetrating’ aphorisms from The Ordeal ‘into their commonplace books’, so that the authority and import of these ‘truths’ are disseminated even further beyond the original novel.87 The aphorisms and epithets that Gilman maintains are so ­memorable – and which can so easily be divorced from their narrative wholes as examples of probing, insightful wisdom – nonetheless remain an important part of Meredith’s exploration of character and perceptions of experience when left in place to fulfil their original illustrative purpose. Critics such as Gary Handwerk and Sean O’Toole have focused on Meredith’s epithetic discourse and ‘telegraphic phrasing’ for its self-conscious proliferation of meaning.88 Like the conduct books which use biographical examples to teach the reader about correct moral attitudes and behaviour, the epithetic designations of Meredith characters encourage self-­ reflexivity in the reader themselves. O’Toole explains that ­‘Meredith’s stylistic eccentricity enacts a kind of rigid egoism of its own; it is self-­ reflexive, as if to say these foibles are mine, and they are probably yours, too’.89 The partial recognition of self and other that the epithet enacts

92  Manly conduct reinforces the self-conscious process of edification achieved by reading Meredith’s fiction; a reciprocal civilisation which is particularly true of the Bildungsroman as suggested in the previous chapter with reference to Thackeray’s three Pendennis novels.90 In a late novel, One of Our Conquerors, Meredith’s narrator is explicit in praise of external judgement on individual character: We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of us until such a work of binding and labelling is done. And should the definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one stroke, we are at least rendered portable; this we pass into the conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.91 From his earliest fiction in the mid-Victorian period, Meredith’s novels evince a clear fascination with epithetic discourse. The ability of someone other than ourselves to ‘define us briefly’ ‘at one stroke’ for ‘posterity’ is of course not only troubling but also curiously liberating in his fiction. In comparison with conduct writing, in which the youthful reader may be told that ‘A young man has need to be especially careful as to the ­character which he acquires in his early years’ as those characteristics that ‘have been found in the boy, […] will certainly be considered as belonging to the man’, Meredith’s depictions of adolescent development do not necessarily confine individuals to fixed qualities or a static type.92 Although ­Handwerk notes that ‘Epithets seem partial and distorting, a one-eyed vision of the aspect for the whole’, O’Toole maintains that in purporting to offer a univocal quintessence of character, the epithets employed by ­Meredith in this work of ‘binding and labelling’ actually offer a rich fluidity of meaning. With reference to Mrs. Mountstuart’s epithetic description of Willoughby Patterne in The Egoist, for example (“You see he has a leg”), O’Toole observes, ‘the power of the phrase comes from its rapid-fire brevity, its refusal to say more, and the productive confusion that this creates. The meanings proliferate’.93 The phrase ‘You see he has a leg’, although intended as ‘an outline of vagueness, […] flung out to be apprehended, not dissected’, nonetheless offers those who hear it a multifarious perspective on Willoughby, who is made to seem at once sexual, moral, refined, elegant, a courtier, a modern gentleman, proud, and h ­ umble.94 The phrase itself strikes both the reader and Mrs. ­Mountstuart’s listeners with ‘the impression of its weighty truthfulness’; its suggestiveness ‘amplified’ because ‘after she had spoken you saw much more.’95 The fragmentary tendencies of Meredith’s narrative voice and dialogue invite productive confusion in their textual obscurity. In his deployment of such narrative opacity, Meredith appears to situate his writing in the context of nineteenth-century wisdom literature, whose forms may be similar at times to the most abstract of self-help books

Manly conduct  93 and aphoristic anthologies: what Robert Preyer has termed high wisdom or ‘fragmentary insight’, and the more formulaic ‘prudential wisdom’ of the maxim and proverb (which, as we have seen, were so popular in the Victorian conduct book as succinct reminders of proper behaviour).96 In novels such as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Meredith employs both prudential and high wisdom, offering both the reader and young Richard ‘wisdom of a utilitarian, practical cast, generalizations from social experience, [and] rules of conduct for the natural man’ in his prudential sayings, as well as various rhetorical forms that ‘offer a potent device for calling into question what has already been formulated and for extending, refining, and enlarging our consciousness of what we know by exhibiting this material in enigmatic or paradoxical perspectives’, which are more like obscure and abstract high wisdom literature.97 In comparison with the straightforward, functional advice offered to Harry Richmond by his grandfather, for example, Harry is also heavily influenced by the sweeping rhetoric of his father Richmond Roy, whose pronouncements appear to the boy at once both revelatory and opaque: I thought his remarks the acutest worldly wisdom I had ever heard,— his veiled method of treating my case the shrewdest, delicatest, and most consoling, most inspiring. It had something of the mystical power of the Oracles,—the power which belongs to anonymous writing. Had he disposed of my apparent rival, and exalted me to the level of a princely family, in open speech, he would have conveyed no balm to me—I should have classed it as one confident man’s opinion. Disguised and vague, but emphatic, and interpreted by the fine beam of his eye, it was intoxicating[.]98 Richmond Roy appears to offer Harry the ‘acutest worldly wisdom’, in a manner ‘disguised and vague’ but absolutely ‘inspiring’ and ‘intoxicating’. Here, Meredith demonstrates the way that fragments of high wisdom provide their own productive confusion, which become magnified when considered alongside the polyphonic experience of life. The many voices that provide guidance to the young men in ­Meredith’s novels emphasise the richness of experience. Like the literature of advice, which presses into its employ a multivocal choir of various quotations, exemplary biographies, biblical proverbs and literary extracts to equip young men with the knowledge to effect their self-development, Meredith’s novels develop even further a regard for the merits of dialogic form (as illustrated in Chapter 5). Donald Stone states in his essay on ‘Meredith and Bakhtin’ that: Meredith builds upon the novel’s dialogic structure: his heroes […] must find their way in a world of competing voices, competing

94  Manly conduct philosophies. Any one finalized position, and “system,” is always to be regarded with suspicion […] Meredith’s villains are his monologists, egoists deaf to the polyphony of life, who (like Willoughby Patterne) try to impose their sentimental scenarios upon others.99 Stone asserts the dialogic structure of Meredith’s fiction, in which ­different voices compete for dominance.100 Such polyphony is evoked in novels such as The Ordeal, in which multiple voices or versions of the truth exist simultaneously. First, for example, Sir Austin’s System of instruction is set alongside other, more inclusive forms of self-­education and socialisation. Conflicting counsels are proffered by not only Sir  ­Austin as Richard’s father, but also Doctor Lobourne, Austin Wentworth, Lady Blandish, Farmer Blaize, Bella Mount, and Mrs. Berry. As Jenkins has pointed out, The Ordeal is also host to two ‘dueling texts’ in the Scrip and in ­Richard’s adolescent poetic scribblings.101 Meredith offers his readers differing illustrations of youthful masculine conduct. In doing so, however, he does not provide the reader with clear patterns to suggest that the male adolescent experience is either effortless or a simple process of linear progress, much like that which emerges in Thackeray’s Bildungsromane. In his integration of multiple genres such as the Bildungsroman and conduct book, Meredith presents instead an opaque narrative and rhetorical texture that, in its complexity and intricacy, nonetheless provides revelatory glimpses into the potential for individual development offered by the ‘polyphony of life’. Meredith is communicative on the fruitful possibilities of opaque writing in his discussion of the ‘Book of Egoism’: This is full-mouthed language; but on our studious way through any human career we are subject to fits of moral elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in every civilized bosom approves it.102 Meredith’s ‘full-mouthed language’ and ‘fits of moral elevation’ illumi­ nate the ‘studious’ depiction of ‘any human career’, a comment that is applicable to his discussion of not only Sir Willoughby but also ­R ichard Feverel, Wilfrid Pole, Harry Richmond, and the other young men whose formative period is delineated in his work. Critics such as Allon White, who view Meredith’s prose as an example of early modernism, have suggested that his textual obscurity is a deliberate linguistic defence, and that the competing voices speaking this ‘full-mouthed language’ inspired by the ‘theme’ of masculine growth reveal a deep-seated suspicion in his novels of the apparent linear monologism of conservative nineteenth-century attitudes towards education, development, and even gender distinctions. Rather, Meredith is interested to evaluate the potential benefits that may be reaped if the dialogic character of

Manly conduct  95 adolescence is more fully acknowledged, and that the polyphonic richness of life-experience and self-education contribute significantly to the proper maturation and self-knowledge of the individual. Young men, in Meredith’s novels, are therefore revealed as a ‘race […] only half civilized’; a ‘double-man’ in the process of ‘fining himself down’; a ‘curious hotch-potch of emotions known to the world as youthful man’.103 In Emilia in England (1864, republished as Sandra Belloni in 1887), ­Meredith reflects on the character of Wilfrid Pole as an example of male youth actively engaged in the uncomfortable process of maturation: The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used to see men of murdered halves. These men have what they fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may be charged against them, though they know that they do not embrace Life; and so it is that we have vague discontent too universal. Change, O Lawgiver! the length of our minority, and let it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought out in approving daylight. The period of our duality should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man an individual—who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is divided? […] how has he been fortified for this tremendous conflict of opening manhood, which is to our life here what is the landing of a soul to the life to come?104 As well as Wilfrid Pole, many of his other young men must also deal with this ‘deadly wrestle’ in the effort to ‘embrace life’. Some, like ­Wilfrid or Nevil Beauchamp, recognise to some extent the ‘double-man’ within themselves, fighting to resolve ‘the period of our duality’ by wrestling with their romantic impulses in a prosaic society, or stifling their childish impulses to conform to the demands of ­Victorian discourses of respectability. Such duality is the case with Edward Blancove in Rhoda Fleming, who ‘was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and reflection alternately usurp the mind: remorse succeeded dissipation, and indulgences offered the soporific to remorse’.105 On the other hand, some examples of the male adolescent in Meredith’s novels must try to reconcile ‘this tremendous conflict of opening manhood’ as represented by two or more opposing external forces (such as Harry ­R ichmond between his father and grandfather, or Evan Harrington between his aristocratic aspirations and familial or economic obligations). The latter group of young men offer a more literal example of the struggles that male youth must endure; it is characters such as

96  Manly conduct Richard and Harry whose maturation becomes a matter of conflicting discourses about conduct and education embodied by their friends and relatives.

Conclusion Meredith’s novels, then, appear to draw upon, or parallel, the themes and formal rhetoric of advice literature popular at mid-century. The figure of male youth acts as a locus of concern, but male adolescence in both his fiction and in conduct books also articulates a widespread investment in the culture of improvement that informs mid-Victorian ideals of masculine achievement. Meredith does, at times, expose the limits of this generic self-help ethos in his novels. Simultaneously, however, he reveals in his writing the extent to which his own identification – as a Victorian man of letters, as a father, and as an active participant in print culture more generally – rests upon the dissemination of advice, related specifically to the formation of manly character. From issues of social integration and the merits of conversation, to the need for a respectable occupation, Meredith’s fiction maintains an attitude of fluid exchange towards conduct literature, using recognisable topics familiar to the reader of advice texts, but complicating the assumption that self-help is either easy or practical. His sustained use of advice rhetoric aimed at young men, however, emphasises the significance that male adolescence holds in the Victorian cultural imagination, and the importance that this facet of masculine experience may have held for Meredith more personally. Like many conduct books specifically for young men, Meredith’s novels offer their protagonists to the reader as a warning. Rather than providing idealised examples of behaviour to emulate, as does Smiles in Self-Help, these novels act as an investigation into some of the fundamental concerns facing adolescents in the mid-Victorian period, and also some of the cultural apprehensions about adolescence from an adult perspective, which might include a lack of moral or spiritual education, finding an appropriate sphere of work, or balancing vigour with self-control and social etiquette. While Meredith appears, in both his work and his personal life, to consider the guidance of youth and inexperience as a masculine moral imperative, his attitude towards the young and naïve in their need for advice is more ambiguous. Being in need of advice, his novels suggest, is part of the condition of adolescence as a formative period; but the disadvantaged position in which this places his young male protagonists poses problems for the expression of manliness and achievement of independence or pursuit of rugged individualism. In part, healthy forms of self-expression in these texts can offer a solution in encouraging a respect for youth, viewing adolescence as a training ground for manliness.

Manly conduct  97 The prophetic value of advice is exemplified in the novels via the introduction of prudential wisdom: a plethora of simple truisms and proverbs that ‘are at any rate the pearls of experience’.106 The facility of these ‘pearls’ to offer guidance becomes more literal when, for example, they are excerpted from the novels and anthologised, as in Mary Rebecca ­Gilman’s The Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith. The epigrammatic style appears to permit his writing to be extracted in this way, although the examples of wisdom proffered in the novels are not always simple. His aphorisms and minute scenes of reflection also contribute to the textual obscurity of his work, which is more probing and exploratory – though nonetheless revelatory in the fragmentary mould of high wisdom literature. Both aphoristic forms – when combined with the bildung trajectory of the young male protagonists – contribute significantly to reading Meredith’s novels as self-reflexive analogues to the nineteenth-century conduct book for youth. By using the advice manual as a lens through which to examine male adolescence, Meredith does not simply condemn its typically linear structure and clear moral lessons, but also offers dynamic revisions and suggestive parallels to the genre via his own writing. Although wary of the simple monologism that conduct literature might seem to represent, Meredith provides instead a more convoluted view of such manuals, revealing the polyphonic potential of their moral codes through the inquisitive rhetorical calisthenics that his novels employ.

Notes 1 The Letters of George Meredith, Vol. I, ed. by C.L. Cline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), July 7, 1859, to Samuel Lucas, p. 48; Letters, Vol. I, October 28, 1863, to Katherine [?] Vulliamy, p. 250. 2 Meredith, Letters, Vol. I, October 28, 1863, to Katherine [?] Vulliamy, p. 250. 3 Meredith, Letters, Vol. I, October 3, 1859, to Samuel Lucas, p. 51. 4 Favourable contemporary reviews of The Ordeal appeared, for example, in the Illustrated London News (August 13, 1859), the Westminster Review (October 1859), and the Times (October 14, 1859). 5 In exploring the uses of and references to conduct books in Meredith’s work, some well-known advice writers will be referred to here, such as Samuel Smiles and William Cobbett, but also work by less-recognised writers, from Hugh Stowell Brown, John Angell James and Hugh Blair, or writers publishing anonymously or resorting to aliases such as “Mentor”. Popular American writers such as Harvey Newcomb and Timothy Shay Arthur are included, as their work was reprinted in England and so their work appears to have succeeded in transatlantic appeal, adding to the plethora of advice literature produced in Britain itself. 6 Sarah E. Newton, Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900 (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 4. 7 George Meredith, Sandra Belloni [originally Emilia in England], (­Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010), p. 375; George Meredith, The Ordeal of ­Richard Feverel, ed. and intr. with notes by Edward Mendelson (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 9.

98  Manly conduct 8 Both George Gissing and Thomas Hardy offered manuscripts to C ­ hapman and Hall, to which Meredith counselled rejection, although the authors maintained an amicable friendship. More famous, perhaps, are ­Meredith’s recommended rejections of work by Ouida, East Lynne by Mrs. Henry Wood (1863), and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) during his time at Chapman and Hall, which suggest Meredith’s capacity to offer erroneous advice. Conversely, Meredith recommended that C ­ hapman and Hall accept of Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Gissing appears to have received useful guidance from Meredith, writing that, after a response to his early work, ‘Meredith tells me I am making a great mistake in leaving the low-life scenes; says I might take a foremost place in fiction if I pursued that’, (George Gissing, cited in Lionel Stevenson, The Ordeal of George Meredith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), p. 263.), and Hardy recalled that ‘Meredith was very kind and most enthusiastic. He gave me no end of good advice, most of which, I am bound to say, he did not follow himself.’ Thomas Hardy cited in Mervyn Jones, The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith (London: Constable, 1999), p. 221. No reference to original source provided. 9 Meredith, Letters, Vol. 2, June 19, 1881, to Arthur G. Meredith, pp. 625–6. 10 Mervyn Jones, The Amazing Victorian: A Life of George Meredith ­(London: Constable, 1999), p. 222. 11 Melissa Shields Jenkins had drawn attention to Meredith’s increasing ­cautiousness on this matter, citing a letter of 1906 with a footnote reading ‘This note is private. I have noticed that some of the replies to young authors have appeared in print … I am on my guard [Reprinted in ­Mohammad Shaheen, Selected Letters of George Meredith, p. 189]. See Jenkins, ‘“Stamped on Hot Wax”: George Meredith’s Narratives of Inheritance’, Victorian ­Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 525–43, p. 537. 12 Meredith, Letters, p. 435. 13 “Mentor”, The Young Man’s Aid to Improvement, Success, and True Happiness, fourth thousand (Glasgow: George Gaillie, 1847), pp. 34–5. 14 George Meredith, The Egoist, ed. and intr. by George Woodcock (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 68. 15 Meredith, Letters, Vol. I, October 25, 1870, to Arthur G. Meredith, p. 429. 16 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 78. 17 William A. Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide, fourteenth edition (Boston, MA: Perkins and Marvin, 1839), p. 19. 18 George Meredith, Diana of the Crossways, intr. By Lorna Sage (London: Virago, 1880), p. 1. 19 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 9. 20 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance, ed. by Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 17. 21 Joss Lutz Marsh, ‘“Bibliolatry” and “Bible-Smashing”: G. W. Foote, George Meredith, and the Heretic Trope of the Book’, Victorian Studies 34.3 (Spring, 1991), 315–36, p. 327. 22 Cobbett, p. x. 23 Anita Clair Fellman and Michael Fellman, Making Sense of Self: Medical Advice Literature in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 19. 24 [Frank Ferguson], The Young Man; or, Guide to Knowledge, Virtue and Happiness (Lowell, MA: Nathaniel L. Dayton, 1845), p. 7; p. 9.

Manly conduct  99 25 Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 138. 26 See Chapter 4 on the pitfalls and merits of financial gain and self-­investment in youth. 27 Smiles, p. 242. 28 Advice to a Young Gentleman, on Entering Society, by the Author of “The Laws of Etiquette”, second edition (London: A.H. Baity & Co., 1839), pp. vi–vii. 29 John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 12 (2002), 455–72, p. 455. 30 Advice to a Young Gentleman, p. 47. 31 Advice to a Young Gentleman, p. 60. 32 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 62; Advice to a Young Gentleman, pp. vi–vii. 33 Charles J. Hill, ‘Theme and Image in The Egoist’, in The Egoist: An Annotated Text, Background, Criticism, ed. by Robert M. Adams (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 518–23, p. 519. 34 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 595. 35 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 352; p. 353. 36 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 589. 37 See Richard C. Stevenson, The Experimental Impulse in George Meredith’s Fiction (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), esp. Chapter 4. For more on the importance of reciprocal dialogue to Meredith’s young men, see Chapter 5 of this volume, ‘The Language of Filial Dialogue in Meredith’. 38 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 597. 39 Martin Danahay in Gender at Work cites ‘the rejection of idleness’ as ‘one of the primary attributes of masculinity’ (p. 18), and Norman Vance in The Sinews of the Spirit states that manliness ‘brings with it connotations of physical and moral courage and strength and vigorous maturity.’ (p. 8). 40 Smiles, pp. 20–1. 41 Nicholas Dames, ‘Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition’, Victorian Studies, 45 (2003), 247–78, p. 256. 42 Frederick R. Karl, ‘Beauchamp's Career: An English Ordeal’, ­NineteenthCentury Fiction, 16.2 (1961), 117–31, p. 120. 43 George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 547. 44 George Meredith, Evan Harrington, or He Would be a Gentleman, intr. by Barbara Hardy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1983), p. 68. 45 Meredith, The Egoist, pp. 275–6. 46 Rev. George Smith, Books and Reading: A Lecture Delivered to the Young Men’s Christian Association, Devonport, on Tuesday evening, March 9th, 1852 (London: John Snow, 1852), p. 10. 47 Gillian Beer, Meredith: A Change of Masks, A Study of the Novels (­London: Athlone Press, 1970), pp. 81–2. 48 Earl of Iddesleigh, The Pleasures, the Dangers, and the Uses of Desultory Reading (London: Kegan Paul, 1885), p. 46. This list of suggested reading has been selected from recommendations made by the Earl of Iddesleigh, Rev. M. Johnson, ‘A Lecture of Reading’ (1853), and Charlotte Yonge, ‘What Books to Lend and What to Give’, (n.d. [1887]). 49 Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career, p. 19; p. 11. 50 Smiles, p. 297.

100  Manly conduct 51 Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 170. 52 Dames, Physiology of the Novel, p. 175. 53 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 33. 54 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 34. 55 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 35. 56 W. E. Henley, ‘Literature’, Athenaeum 2174 (November 1, 1879), p. 555. Henley acknowledged, however, that to contemporary novel readers limiting one’s reading of fiction in this way went against the grain. 57 Henley, ‘Literature’, p. 555. 58 Henley, ‘Literature’, p. 555. 59 Smiles, Self-Help, p. 317. 60 Advice to a Young Gentleman, on Entering Society, by the Author of “The Laws of Etiquette” (London: A. H. Baily & Co., 1839), p. 3; p. ix. 61 Meredith, Evan Harrington, p. 28. 62 Dames, Physiology of the Novel, p. 204. While advice literature is not often difficult to follow, the combined chapters of some conduct books express a determination to address aspects of masculine behaviour and experience that are so disparate, that young men attempting to follow all of their strictures must be overwhelmed with the multiplicity of instructive material, resulting in a sense of artificiality that modern critics often associate with Meredith’s fiction. See, for example. Richard C. Stevenson, The Experimental Impulse. 63 Meredith, The Ordeal, pp. 237–8. 64 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 397. 65 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 443. 66 George Meredith, Rhoda Fleming (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010), p. 131. 67 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 51. A similar preoccupation with the slow growth of the adolescent, and the minutiae of individual development, is also explored in Trollope’s figure of the hobbledehoy in the following chapter. 68 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 226. 69 See Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). I am indebted to Price’s book in these following paragraphs, as her work on anthologisation, abridgement and quotation has been invaluable for my thinking about the conduct-book edicts on masculine propriety that populate Meredith’s novels, and the lapidary generalisations that sustain his epigrammatic style. In this Meredith bears similarities to George Eliot, whose work Price examines in detail. 70 Mary Rebecca Gilman, The Wit and Wisdom of George Meredith, with Selections from his Poetry, and an Introduction (Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers, 1888), p. xlix. 71 Gilman, p. xxiii; p. xlix; p. xvi. 72 Gilman, p. xv. 73 Meredith, Letters, Vol. II, March 16, 1888, to Mrs. J. B. Gilman, p. 910. 74 Meredith, Letters, Vol. II, March 16, 1888, to Mrs. J. B. Gilman, p. 910. 75 Gilman, p. 60. 76 Price, pp. 6–7. 77 Kenneth Fielden, ‘Samuel Smiles and Self-Help’, Victorian Studies, 12.2 (December, 1968), 155–76, p. 158. 78 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 227. 79 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 158.

Manly conduct  101 80 See Sylvia Kasey Marks, Sir Charles Grandison: The Compleat Conduct Book (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1986) and also Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, especially Chapter 1 on Richardson, pp. 13–66. 81 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 178. 82 Melissa Shields Jenkins, ‘“Stamped on Hot Wax”: George Meredith’s Narratives of Inheritance’, Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 525–43, pp. 525–6. While Jenkins contends that Meredith’s use of conduct texts constitutes an outdated throwback to a previous era, such texts (both new works and reprinted volumes) remained popular for most of the Victorian period. As indicated by the frequent re-publication of works by authors such as Chesterfield, Cobbett, Smiles, Arthur, and emergence of new books and tracts well into the 1900s. John Tosh has termed the didactic literature of the Victorian and Edwardian periods ‘voluminous’. See ‘Editorial Introduction’, John Tosh, Masculinity: Men Defining Men and Gentlemen, 1560–1918, Sources from the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Marlborough: Adam Matthews Publications, 2002). Part 2: 1800–1918, reel 23, p. 1. 83 Garrett Stewart, Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 285. 84 Marsh, p. 326. 85 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 9. 86 Marsh, p. 326. 87 Robert Preyer, ‘Victorian Wisdom Literature: Fragments and Maxims’, Victorian Studies 6.3 (March, 1963), 245–62, p. 259. 88 Sean O’Toole, ‘Meredithian Slips: Embodied Dispositions and Narrative Form in The Egoist’, Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 499–524, p. 502. 89 O’Toole, p. 503. 90 Judith Wilt has similarly commented on Meredith’s fiction: ‘The struggle to define, distinguish, understand, and finally to shape and understand the reader becomes in various subtle, often exciting – sometimes damaging ways – the very core and content of his novels.’ The Readable People of George Meredith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 4. The process of self-education here – of bildung instigated by the self-reflexive reading practice – is analogous to the intent behind conduct books. 91 George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors, (Milton Keynes: Dodo Press, 2010.), p. 96. 92 Advice to a Young Gentleman, p. 14. 93 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 43 (original emphasis); O’Toole, p. 506. 94 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 79. 95 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 43. 96 Preyer, p. 245. 97 Preyer, p. 246; p. 258. 98 George Meredith, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, (Teddington: Echo Library, 2009), p. 190. 99 Donald D. Stone, ‘Meredith and Bakhtin: Polyphony and Bildung’, Studies in English Literature, 1500 –1900, 28.4 (Autumn, 1988), 693–712, p. 704. 100 See also Chapter 6 on the father-son relationships in Meredith and the tensions between monologistic paternity and the dialogic character of youth.

102  Manly conduct 01 1 102 103 104

Jenkins, p. 527. Meredith, The Egoist, p. 275. Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 51; Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 260; p. 500; p. 261. Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 260. For a more expansive assessment of ­Wilfrid’s adolescence, see Chapter 5. 105 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 38. 06 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 259. 1

4 Investments in youth Speculation and liberal adolescence in Trollope

In his series of Travelling Sketches, which appeared initially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865, Anthony Trollope caricatures several familiar types of British tourist. One of these humorous essays focuses on the quirky category of ‘United Englishmen who Travel for Fun’. Described in the essay as youths engaged in a latter-day Grand Tour-esque excursion, these male characters, Trollope implies, are popular types, and therefore recognisable to his reading public: A United Englishman travelling for fun should not be over ­t wenty-five years of age, but up to that age what he does, though he be a nuisance, should be forgiven him. […] we are well pleased that our sons should be among their number, and are conscious that amidst all that energetic buffoonery and wild effrontery, education is going on, and that much is being learned, though the recipient of the learning would himself be ashamed to own any such fact to himself.1 The mild escapades of such groups of young men are to be forgiven, the reader is informed, because despite the energy and unruliness of these youths, their jaunt is instructive at heart (even while Trollope suggests that this would be denied by the subjects themselves). The reader is assured that some form of educative experience is to be achieved in their travels abroad, the japes and tomfoolery notwithstanding. The fundamental benefits found in such an experience – not following a path of structured, formal education but a more organic process of cultivation – are asserted by Trollope in a manner that would have been familiar to his mid-Victorian audience, whose taste for novels dealing with such extra-curricular potential for acculturation had been well cemented by this period. 2 The writer proceeds to elaborate on his theory of this type of young man, to suggest that the very fact of his fertile juvenility is itself a bonus: Englishmen of the class in question are boys for a more protracted period of their life, and remain longer in a state of hobbledehoyhood, than the youths probably of any other nation. They are nurtured on

104  Investments in youth the cold side of the wall, and come slowly to maturity; but the fruit, which is only half ripe at the end of summer, is the fruit that we keep for our winter use. I do not know that much has been lost in life by him who, having been a boy at twenty, is still a young man at forty. But even in England we are changing all this now-a-days, and by a liberal use of the hot-water pipes of competition are in a way to force our fruit into the market as early as any other people. Let us hope that what we gain in time may not be lost in flavour.3 This recognisable male type enjoys, it seems, a prolonged adolescence. Tolerantly permitted a lengthy process of maturation, such young men do not appear to raise concerns, at least for Trollope, about inappropriate childishness or of potentially enervating effects which could accompany delayed emergence into a proper manhood. Rather, through an analogy of ripening fruit, the very fact of the deferral of adult responsibility and character is likely to produce a greater ‘flavour’ – a richness that has been achieved by the process of delay. Being merely a boy at twenty, and a young man at forty, under this scheme of growth, is not inconceivable – or even undesirable – although Trollope does seem to suggest (regretfully) that it is becoming less common. Readers familiar with Trollope’s work will recognise in this a defence of ‘hobbledehoyhood’, which is elaborated more fully in novels such as The Three Clerks (1858) and The Small House at Allington (1864), together with his Autobiography (1883). Although not every youth inscribed in Trollope’s novels inhabits the particularly lengthy immaturity, and corresponding social awkwardness, of the hobbledehoy, the figure certainly looms large. This is a term used with some frequency by ­Trollope to encapsulate the awkward, gauche, shy, and undeveloped nature of the ineffective male adolescent. He cultivates a marked fascination with the development of male youth in his writing. The more positive examples of the genus – as with the example in the Travelling Sketches that reveals the warm partiality of the writer – are often remarkable for their extension of juvenile imprudence beyond the number of years usually allotted to youth, or for behaviour which speaks to a lack of mature, socialised, established subjectivity. The prolonged experience of adolescence, in Trollope’s writing, emerges as largely ameliorative; deferred conditions of self-realisation and character formation provide opportune circumstances in Trollope’s narratives that foster correspondingly slow, leisurely growth and achievement. His view of male adolescence – figured in characters who range from the awkward Charley Tudor, Gerald Palliser and Peregrine Orme, to the more assertive Alaric Tudor, Sir Felix Carbury and Lord Silverbridge – is particularly inclusive. While not, perhaps, ranging in age up to those who might still behave like young men a forty, as indicated in the Travelling Sketch on ‘United Englishmen’, Trollope’s margins for constituting youthful behaviour remain suggestively supple.

Investments in youth  105 The hesitant, chequered histories of Trollope’s hobbledehoys in particular offer fertile ground for his examination of the merits of male adolescence, and an indication of the potential rewards provided for masculine identity in such lethargic or imperfect acculturation. In his writing, the male adolescent emerges with a capacity to enact a brand of masculinity which relishes the labile fluidity of this identity. As this chapter argues, the reiterative process of formation, reflection, and experimentation provides rewards for those male youths who continually struggle to assert themselves in line with other more polished and forceful modes of masculine character. Although youth remains a broadly transient stage, in Trollope’s novels it offers a crucial opportunity for the individual to cultivate his own moral selfhood, even while his rehearsal of accepted measures of dominant masculine behaviour may be dogged by failure. In doing so, the hobbledehoy revises normative masculinity to offer a surprising alternative, in part based on the very assumption of male inadequacy; nonetheless, this is a figure whose ameliorative capacity and strength of character is made evident in Trollope’s fluid, imperfect male specimens of this ilk. Trollope’s fiction has often been appreciated (or, conversely, censured) by critics for a preoccupation with the commonplace. For example, Courtney C. Berger has observed that ‘the banal aspects of Trollope’s novels have generally been regarded as the foundation of his moral and ethical claims – what critics have alternately referred to as tolerance, relativism, pluralism, or liberalism’.4 The detailed ordinariness of his subject, then, heralds a supportive tolerance, rather than mounting a radical critique. As opposed to marking an inherently traditional, conservative view of his society, however, Trollope’s apparent mundanity invests in social structures and regulations which, he recognises, are core features of his cultural moment. In doing so, William A. Cohen has noted of the Palliser novels that Trollope mounts a critical assessment of his period: in these texts ‘Modernity itself is shown to be a form of flexible accommodation, a way of preserving the social order’, which is in part informed by a model of ‘consent, adjustment, and propriety’. 5 Despite a few scandalous events, such as Phineas Finn’s murder trial and acquittal in Phineas Redux (1874), the tribulations of the scheming Lizzie in The Eustace Diamonds (1873), or swindling deception and suicidal demise of characters like Ferdinand Lopez and Augustus Melmotte in The Prime Minister (1876) and The Way We Live Now (1875) respectively, Trollope’s novels are more typically focused around less sensational plotlines. However, his writing, as Cohen implies, is not simply engaged in a regressive, backward-looking nostalgia; it focuses on, to some extent, ‘preserving the social order’, but this is achieved through a progressive vision of a modern world made possible through ‘flexible accommodation’ and continual ‘adjustment’. In doing so, Trollope essentially articulates in his fiction a liberal view of society. This chapter suggests that

106  Investments in youth this liberal ethic is reflected in his understanding of adolescence which, as the extracts above have indicated, should involve a corresponding slow-ripening of potential and adaptability in the individual as well as for wider society. In the novels examined here, and in his Autobiography, male youth is possessed of a dualism, or tension between two contrasting impetuses. The adolescent is torn between a lingering insufficiency and ineptitude on the one hand, often keenly felt by the youth whose lack of synchronicity with the world, and his sense of discomfort and personal failure, shadow his abortive efforts for personal growth and advancement. On the other hand, this incapacity is tempered by the narrator’s appreciation for the young man’s latent constructive possibilities, articulating a ­forward-looking promise of future potential as the adolescent’s aspirations come closer to realisation and his place in society garners greater solidity and recognition. The faltering progress of Trollope’s hobbledehoys is characterised by the blending of unfocused incompetence, maladroitness and even dissipation, which often obscures and moderates their process of improvement. Nonetheless, his fiction assures the reader that such growth is not only possible, but even particularly promising for its sluggish and unsteady course – it is the slow ripening which enables this constructive, enabling, and liberal vision of masculine development. Critics such as J. Jeffrey Franklin have done valuable work in studying the significance of exchanges of capital in Trollope’s fiction. A wide range of criticism has been produced in recent decades to examine further Trollope’s treatment of commercial capital, finance capitalism, monetary systems, and forms of exchange, from studies of the transmission of wealth through inheritance, marriage contracts and bribery, to analyses of monetary loss or gain as crucial plot elements, as well as forms of economic increase and reversal, such as debt or bankruptcy.6 The significance of finance in Trollope’s fiction has therefore come to be recognised as a crucial element for critics reading his novels. However, what has received scant attention as yet is Trollope’s consistent alignment of male adolescence specifically with capitalist discourse, so that, as the second section of this chapter elaborates, he articulates a nuanced understanding of both the individual significance and wider cultural importance of investment in youth. The accrual of those qualities which youth ought to learn during this period of cultivation may be considered in the light of cultural capital, according to Pierre Bourdieu’s rationalisation of how each form of capital can be acquired and deployed.7 Male adolescence not only possesses cultural capital, but is also a product of – and participant in – social and financial economies, and may be considered metaphorically as a form of stock. Trollope’s apprehension, however, is to make a distinction between positive, solid forms of investment in or by youth, in contrast with immoral, risky forms of speculation. As Audrey Jaffe has pointed out, Trollope’s fiction makes a ‘distinction between what was

Investments in youth  107 regarded approvingly as investment and what was reviled as speculation’ (with the latter representing ‘wealth made rapidly and mysteriously through the buying and selling of shares’ – a form of gambling dependent on abstracted and largely uncontrollable value); a difference which Jaffe identifies as dependent on a ‘distinction of feeling’.8 While cautious, rational investment is depicted as acceptable, speculation emerges as morally corrupt, and this distinction has an impact on Trollope’s depiction of those male youths who choose to engage in such ‘illegitimate’ activity as a means of self-development and social advancement.9 On the one hand, then, as the first part of this chapter demonstrates, the hobbledehoy provides a positive vision of ameliorative masculinity through measured self-investment and acculturation, despite seemingly lacking at times in agency or effective activity. On the other hand, as explored in the second half of the chapter, Trollope also elaborates, in contrast, cautionary examples of youthful masculinity. Such young men in his novels are fundamentally flawed due to their selfish, aggressive, speculative practices, in which both financial over-extension in the market, and the erosion of appreciable cultural capital through corrupt tendencies, combine to result in their devaluation.

The hobbledehoy In the penultimate chapter of The Small House at Allington, Trollope takes leave of perhaps his most famous hobbledehoy, Johnny Eames, depicted eating a solitary meal in London, having signally failed to win the hand of Lily Dale (to the anguish of his readers, many of whom even wrote to the author and complained at the lack of marital union between these two popular characters). Trollope’s narrator reveals ambivalence about leaving Johnny Eames in such an unresolved narrative state: His life hitherto, as recorded in these pages, had afforded him no brilliant success, had hardly qualified him for the role of hero which he has been made to play. I feel that I have been in fault in giving such prominence to a hobbledehoy, and that I should have told my story better had I brought Mr. Crosbie more conspicuously forward on my canvas. He at any rate has gotten to himself a wife—as a hero always should do; whereas I must leave my poor friend Johnny without any matrimonial prospects.10 As well as regretting that Johnny Eames remains a rootless bachelor in the final pages of the text, Trollope also professes doubt about Johnny’s fitness to play the role of hero at all, now that the narrative has concluded. From the outset of the novel, though, the reader has been told openly that the role of ‘hero’ was to be shared, and that no single young male protagonist would be wholly worthy of the epithet.

108  Investments in youth [T]hat part in the drama will be cut up, as it were, into fragments. Whatever of the magnificent may be produced will be diluted and apportioned out in very moderate quantities among two or more, probably among three or four, young gentlemen—to none of whom will be vouchsafed the privilege of much heroic action.’11 Johnny’s inadequacies had therefore been pointed out from the start of the text, and held before the reader’s eyes throughout. His role in the novel is sufficiently prominent that Trollope’s suggestion – in the final few pages – of anxiety about his own ‘fault in giving such prominence to a hobbledehoy’ rings false. The statement, however, does draw attention to the persistent presence of this ‘poor friend’ and surprisingly unheroic protagonist in the narrative. It is not, perhaps, surprising that within Trollope’s muted brand of realism he should choose a central male protagonist with only very ‘moderate’, broken, or ‘diluted’ credentials of ‘magnificen[ce]’ and epic or ‘heroic action’. The fact remains, though, that Johnny Eames has been allocated a conspicuous position in the narrative, even with all his faults – those imperfections which Trollope designates as features typical of the hobbledehoy. Hobbledehoy characteristics often possessed by such youths in his fiction include social ineptitude, lack of professional success or progression, a tendency to forge easy (and often insalubrious or imprudent) ­friendships, lack of status or recognition, and insufficient self-awareness and a­ uthority. It is typically coupled with a propensity to debt or poor financial ­regulation, as well as an inclination for the various temptations of urban life, which only serves to highlight the youth’s faltering juvenility, despite separation from the paternal home and maternal influence. According to Laurie Langbauer, in one of the very few critical assessments of this figure in Trollope, these youths ‘cannot fit themselves onto any kind of straightforward path. They are sidetracked or arrested or just plain fail, even when it comes to the kind of basic development – such as growing up – that we think ought to unfold naturally’.12 Trollope’s hobbledehoys, then, mark a particularly unfinished, even abortive form of adolescence, marked by arrested progress or even failure. While other young men, such as ­Alaric Tudor in The Small House at Allington, the eponymous protagonist ­Phineas Finn, or Felix Carbury in The Way We Live Now, are recognisable as unfinished, unpolished adolescents still engaged in their own process of independent development, hobbledehoys such as Johnny Eames, and the boyish “navvy” Charley Tudor of The Three Clerks, represent an even less advanced type of youth, who is confined to a slower, more hesitant and equivocal narrative of maturation. Indeed, for much of the novels in which they first appear, it is questionable whether or not these latter specimens do in fact progress much past the boundaries of their hobbledehoydom. In The Small House at Allington, Trollope outlines his most famous description of the hobbledehoy, in the person of Johnny Eames.

Investments in youth  109 There is a class of young men who […] do not come forth to the world as Apollos, nor shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes. Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease […] They go much about alone, and blush when women speak to them. In truth, they are not as yet men, whatever the number may be of their years; and, as they are no longer boys, the world has found for them the ungraceful name of hobbledehoy.13 This highlights the awkwardness and discomfort of such youths – who have clearly emerged from childhood into a realm of adolescent physicality (clumsy and rather gawky) and pubescent sexuality (flushing self-consciously when conversing with the opposite sex), but who are emphatically ‘not as yet men’ in character. In possessing these traits poor Johnny Eames is set against the Apollonian Adolphus Crosbie – the initially successful rival for Lily Dale’s heart. However, Trollope is at the least equivocal, if not openly sceptical, about the apparent disadvantages of backward hobbledehoyhood. He admits: the hobbledehoy is by no means the least valuable species of the human race. When I compare the hobbledehoy of one or two and twenty to some finished Apollo of the same age, I regard the former as unripe fruit, and the latter as fruit that is ripe. Then comes the question as to the two fruits. Which is the better fruit, that which ripens early […] or that fruit of slower growth […?] according to my thinking, the fullest flavour of the sun is given to that other fruit – is given in the sun’s own good time, if so be that no ungenial shade has interposed itself. I like the smack of the natural growth, and like it, perhaps, the better because that which has been obtained has been obtained without favour.14 As with the essay in the Travelling Sketches, Trollope favours the metaphor of ripening fruit to evaluate the seemingly unprepossessing figure of the hobbledehoy. Irrespective of age, in the comparison of the graceless ‘fruit of slower growth’ with the ‘ripe’ ‘finished Apollo’, the former, he claims, eventually has more to offer. Not only is such an unhurried maturation of benefit to the ‘flavour’, but appreciation of its quality is also enhanced by the knowledge of its ‘natural growth’, which is ‘obtained without favour’. The hobbledehoy, therefore, is in fact celebrated by Trollope for the unique, natural journey that has formed the young man’s late, uneven passage into adulthood. That Trollope’s hobbledehoys follow a long and irregular path to eventually advance beyond this period of their immaturity does have implications for their achievement of manly status. For Johnny Eames, for

110  Investments in youth example, his gradual emergence from the untried ineffectuality of hobbledehoyhood is marked by signal moments of trial and incremental successes that inform his character. These include accomplishments at work (in his promotion under Sir Raffle Buffle), moments of self-­realisation, physical courage (such as the episode with the Bull), a sense of honour and chivalry (as in his fight with Crosbie after Lily Dale has been thrown over), the cementing of positive friendships (such as that with Lord De Guest), and the lessening of insalubrious ties (as with his companion Craddell, the vulgar residents of Mrs. Roper’s boarding house, and Amelia Roper especially). In such instances, the narrator will often speak frankly about Johnny’s painfully slow progress, while identifying the young man’s potential merit and promise of admirable manliness to come. Thus, although Johnny spends much of the narrative ‘still floundering in the ignorance of his hobbledehoyhood’, the reader is assured that his character is indeed developing.15 I must explain, in order that I may give Johnny Eames his due, he was gradually acquiring for himself a good footing among the ­Incometax officials. He knew his work, and did it with some manly confidence in his own powers, and also with some manly indifference to the occasional frowns of the mighty men of the department. He was, moreover, popular – being somewhat of a radical in his official demeanour, and holding by his own rights, even though mighty men should frown. In truth, he was emerging from his hobbledehoyhood and entering upon his young manhood, having probably to go through much folly and some false sentiment in that period of his existence, but still with fair promise of true manliness beyond, to those who were able to read the signs of his character.16 Johnny develops a measure of independence, confidence, and a worthy reputation among both his peers and his seniors at work. In doing so, he not only takes a step away from his awkward youth with ‘a fair promise of manliness’, but he is already in possession of some measure of ‘manly’ self-assurance. This highlights the problematic position of the hobbledehoy in debates about acceptable forms of masculinity – a type of backward adolescent who, as Trollope specifically indicates in The Small House, is not yet a man. In this lack of manliness (despite its ‘fair promise’ in the future), as well as in his juvenile or inert status, the male hobbledehoy is effectively excluded from centric, hegemonic masculinity twice over. The hobbledehoy’s social legitimacy and utility is only slowly established in the narrative, through examples of increasing assertions of morality, or demonstrations of appropriate manliness through fitness for marriage and a resultant successful courtship, or steady attainment in an appropriate career. However, even the eventual achievements and rewards for the hobbledehoy are not meteorically triumphant. The enlargement

Investments in youth  111 of their characters and sense of self is admirable, but ­Trollope is careful that such trajectories remain psychologically plausible with fairly mundane outcomes. As with the example of Johnny Eames above, who is left at the close of the novel ‘without any matrimonial prospects’ to consume a solitary meal at an impersonal hotel, these young men rarely become brilliant stars in the social firmament, nor leading political figures or celebrities.17 But here we will leave John Eames, and in doing so I must be allowed to declare that only now, at this moment, has he entered on his manhood. Hitherto he has been a hobbledehoy,—a calf, as it were, who had carried his calfishness later into life than is common with calves; but who did not, perhaps, on that account, give promise of making a worse ox than the rest of them.18 It is in the slow, rather chaotic development of the hobbledehoy’s – not extraordinary, and still imperfect – character, that the author reveals his fascination and his belief in what emerges as a form of unexceptional, yet restorative masculinity in Trollope’s work. Langbauer has commented that ‘the temporal paradox of the hobbledehoy – neither boy nor man – extends adolescence beyond a fixed period in human development to figure instead fluid ways of structuring fantasy that persist lifelong, are reiterative rather than end-determined’.19 According to this view, hobbledehoyhood becomes a particularly inclusive, open-ended form of experience that, to an extent, is continual and ongoing, rather than limited to a particular age or simply a delimited stage of growth. While this is an abstract idealisation, extrapolated from Trollope’s writing about youth (as characters such as Johnny Eames do transform or finally ‘enter […] manhood’, albeit equivocally), its open-ended vision of adolescence does exert a strong influence over his hobbledehoy characters. The hobbledehoy, then, as Langbauer suggests, marks ‘a critical threshold, refusing developmentalism, resisting closure, redefining dénouement’.20 The concept of such an open, unbounded type of adolescent experience, however, also has implications for Trollope’s depiction of male experience specifically, and for the formation of an alternative masculinity. In his version of this quintessentially male type of experience, Trollope also develops a reiterative, inclusive, masculine type. Resistant to the polished, socially-adept, confident Apollonian young man, whose progress to maturity is swift, smooth, and self-aware (as with Adolphus Crosbie and Alaric Tudor), the hobbledehoy’s experience may be apparently marred by inexperience, bashfulness, awkwardness, disappointment, and a tendency to dissipation. However, such characters, in their protracted, cautious accrual of the “right” values and traits, in fact represent for Trollope an optimistic, encouraging brand of masculinity that is less aggressive and in many ways more progressive than most other, more assertive, dominant forms of

112  Investments in youth masculine identity in the period – such as the charmingly assertive Apollo, as initially represented by Crosbie. Having been introduced in the novel as a good-­looking, fashionable young bachelor, with an appreciation of his own merits, Crosbie’s disastrous disloyalty in jilting Lily for the rich Lady Alexandrina De Courcy terminates in a reduction of both his status and his manliness. Although he does eventually ‘recover his power at his office’ and ‘knew his business’, it is revealed that ‘elsewhere his star did not recover its ascendancy’. In fact, by the end of the narrative ‘he was not the Crosbie of former days’, and although he drifts into forming a small acquaintance at his club – that bastion of elite male privilege – ­Crosbie has no real friends, no especially prominent career, and lives separated from a wife whom he does not love. Essentially, then, Crosbie fails to achieve any real hallmarks of success in the realms of heterosexual union, homosocial conviviality, or through his labour in the Civil Service, in an abrupt and marked downward turn in fortunes. Although ‘He had taken his little vessel bravely out into the deep waters, and had sailed her well while fortune stuck close to him […] the first rock he met shivered his bark to pieces’.21 In comparison, the trajectory of Johnny Eames – whose progress has been an unpromising, faltering course from the beginning, continually dogged by failure – stands in opposition. Although his eventual lack of dramatic triumph in any sphere at the end of The Small House might seem to align him with Crosbie, in fact the repeated frustrations of Johnny’s growth and lack of anticipation for his success constructed by the narrative, set alongside the severely thwarted expectations of greatness for Crosbie – even with all the patent advantages of birth, situation, and appearance in his favour – mean that at the novel’s end Johnny’s equivocal emergence into a worthy manhood is secure, while Crosbie’s manliness has been effectively reduced, so their status in the text is inverted. Trollope’s investment in the figure of the hobbledehoy is therefore specifically imbued with positive, inclusive implications for masculinity. This often clumsy, directionless figure instead takes on a kind of expectant, supportive, and energised potential for the performance of male identity. The hobbledehoy represents a reiterative, open-ended form of masculinity, enabled by the slow but yeasty conditions of imperfect youth. This figure, exemplified by characters such as Charley Tudor and Johnny Eames, is typically set apart from mainstream society. Nonetheless, the hobbledehoy clearly has an essential place in Trollope’s writing, and to the exploration of masculinity in his fiction. The awkward youth’s apparent marginalisation (evident in his separation from the heart of respectable society or of fashionable circles, together with his failure to perform the set of behaviours typical of either the refined or more vigorous ideals of Victorian manhood) does not, in fact, lead to a corresponding relegation in masculine status. Ellen Moody has drawn attention to the potential subversiveness of Trollope’s unconventional conception of masculinity more generally. She states that ‘very unusually Trollope gazes boldly on heroes who are not sexually and socially triumphant’. 22 In this

Investments in youth  113 way, then, his depiction of masculinity is not only unusual or eccentric (and therefore of critical interest) but it may also be perceived as progressive. The figure of the hobbledehoy in particular conforms to this surprising version of masculinity: ‘Trollope is making a case against conventional norms. The character who is ugly, awkward, dressed wrongly, relatively poor, and even not quite a gentleman is frequently presented as nonetheless admirably manly’.23 Characters such as Larry Twentyman (in The American Senator), Mark Robarts (the blundering protagonist of ­Framley Parsonage), and Johnny Eames, typify the young man who adheres to this brand of subdued masculinity – defined by failure, awkwardness, and a deficient embodiment of assertive, dominant manliness. Despite a lack of resilient independence and social accomplishment or even sexual prowess, these characters are still allowed to be ‘admirably manly’. For example, Johnny Eames is dismissed as a serious contender for Lily Dale’s hand in the early chapters of The Small House at Allington, so that the Dales are initially led to compare Johnny unfavourably with Crosbie: ‘The young man was loved by them all, but not loved with that sort of admiring affection which had been accorded to Mr. ­Crosbie.’24 Nonetheless, Johnny – steadfast and loyal, but largely benign and ­passive – is the preference of Lily’s mother, who ‘had never really liked Crosbie as a suitor, and would herself have preferred John Eames, with all the faults of his hobbledehoyhood on his head’, as Johnny’s qualities as a lover and potential husband garner strength and momentum during his partial bildung.25 The ‘fine London Lover’ Crosbie – a ‘swell’, ‘snob’, and ‘Apollo’ – is after all discovered to be shallow and unworthy, condemned eventually by his own error to an empty marriage and then separation. 26 In contrast, Johnny Eames’s persistent love for Lily, despite Johnny’s feeling that it makes him appear foolish and weak, is conceived as manly. Helena Gurfinkel has similarly recognised the promise and potential offered by Trollope’s revision of normative masculine codes, in her assertion that the Greshams in Doctor Thorne (1858) – and young Frank Gresham in particular – provide an alternative to the aggressive, competitive, ‘phallic’ masculinity epitomised by the Scatcherds, by performing their masculinity from a feminine position. Such men, Gurfinkel claims, represent ‘an ideal of manhood that possesses traditionally feminine characteristics’, in which ‘identification with femininity is fundamental, and not subject to repression and disavowal’. 27 This gentle-­manliness is produced due to the reticence and tenderness of these aristocratic men, but is matched by the socio-economic situation inhabited by Frank Gresham especially due to his commodification within the marriage market, as he is ascribed to ‘the stereotypically female, passive role’. 28 Unlike Frank Gresham, the heir of Greshamsbury, young men such as Johnny Eames and Charley Tudor do not possess sufficient economic or social capital to effect their commodification as desirable objects of heterosexual exchange circulating within capitalist and erotic economies.

114  Investments in youth They do not, therefore, operate from a feminised position in the same way as does Frank, who is largely passive in acceding to his family’s attempt to broker his marriage for explicitly financial gain. Nonetheless, these hobbledehoys do occupy what could conventionally be assumed a feminine position within the novel, exhibiting a tendency to retreat inwards, maintaining a marginal position, demonstrating empathy, and lacking in public authority. In this way the otherness of the hobbledehoy aligns young men such as Johnny with the alterity of women. Nonetheless, in contrast, the marginalisation of the hobbledehoy does not result in abjection as in the case of women, but a positive avowal of a less aggressive, less assertive, and less polished, fluid masculine identity. Trollope’s novels constitute a cautious celebration of the hobbledehoy’s alterity, whose lack of fixity, self-assertion, seemingly inhibited masculinity and social unease mark his otherness, but who is nonetheless a figure of sympathetic interest. However, characters such as Johnny Eames perform a double duty for the author, as not only do they function as extreme examples of adolescent marginalisation and of non-normative male identity, but they also perform as personal cathartic figures in their recollection of Trollope’s own unsatisfactory youth. In her discussion of heterosexual masculinity, Gurfinkel illustrates this connection between Trollope’s depiction of male experience and failure: Drawing on his personal experience, Trollope justifies unheroic heroes and redefines worldly loss, defeat and individual withdrawals from social life and competition as misunderstood and understandable choices whose courage is underrated; through his presentation of heterosexual heroes Trollope defends his male readers against the norms he suffered from as a boy, young man, and as an older successful man too.29 Writing about male adolescence in particular offers possibilities for Trollope to revisit his own painful boyhood and youth. In its resistance to polished, well-socialised, sophisticated ideals of masculine achievement, hobbledehoyhood, according to Trollope’s conception, is not condemned but possesses a nostalgic, compensatory interest. It has often been noted that Trollope evinces a sentimental sympathy for those scapegrace characters who persist in an almost childish state of ineptitude and lack of forward momentum within his narratives – an articulation of awkward, disregarded youth that corresponds with Trollope’s memories of himself in his Autobiography: I was an idle, desolate hanger-on, that most hopeless of human beings, a hobbledehoy of nineteen, without any idea of a career, or a profession, or a trade. As well as I can remember I was fairly happy, for there were pretty girls at Bruges with whom I could fancy that I was in love; and I had been removed from the real misery of school. But as to my future life I had not even an aspiration.30

Investments in youth  115 Trollope’s own adolescence emerges in the Autobiography as a period of helpless shame, of ostracisation from his peers at school, of parental neglect which resulted from the reversal of familial fortune, and of a painful consciousness at the lack of his own abilities or of confidence in his future prospects. The hobbledehoy figure in his fiction functions partly as a self-reflexive revision of these experiences, indicating the therapeutic rehearsal of a painful past, and enabling the discovery of fresh significance in the recovery of such shame or trauma – a period of ‘hopeless[ness]’, ‘idle[ness]’ and lack of direction or self-assurance. Trollope adapted his fictional hobbledehoys as a means to forge a fresh understanding of this unsettling period of male experience – not only on a personal level, but also to explore the agonies of self-consciousness induced more widely by disaffected male youth.31 His hobbledehoy past included not only anxiety and humiliation as a boy, but also extended into his early career as a young man in the civil service. During that time Trollope lived a reckless life let loose in London, usually in debt, and consorting with low acquaintance: ‘No allurement to decent respectability came in my way. It seems to me that in such circumstances the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail with a young man. […] The temptation at any rate prevailed with me.’32 The swift descent into dissipation is fictionalised in the life of Charley Tudor in The Three Clerks, who also went ‘headlong among the infernal navvies too quickly’. 33 Although Charley’s seemingly ruinous tendencies keep him in trouble – in debt to a persistent money-lender, cultivating a poor reputation at his office, and flirting with a barmaid who pressures the young man for an engagement – Trollope nonetheless admits, perhaps self-reflexively, ‘how should it have been otherwise? How can any youth of nineteen or twenty do other than consort himself with the daily companions of his usual avocations?’34 These are the ‘proper attributes of youth’, the reader is told, and it was natural that even such kind, honest, and friendly young man as Charley ‘took at once the full impression of the stamp to which he was subjected’, as had Trollope himself under similar circumstances. 35 In rewriting his memory of ineffectual listlessness, abortive momentum, and ne’er-do-well profligacy, this ‘hobbledehoy’ period accorded to Charley Tudor and Johnny Eames as with himself possesses a redemptive allure that also gestures towards the greater acceptance of awkward adolescence and youthful male ineptitude. One of the crucial tendencies for Trollope, in his depiction of the hobbledehoy, is the youth’s practice of indulging in imaginative daydreams which, again, is rooted in his own autobiographical rehearsal of particular fantasies: As a boy, even as a child, I was thrown much upon myself. I have explained, when speaking of my school-days, how it came to pass that other boys would not play with me. I was therefore alone, and had to form my plays within myself. […] Thus it came to pass that

116  Investments in youth I was always going about with some castle in the air firmly built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. […] I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. […] I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart, and open of hand, and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since. 36 This passage has often been cited by critics whose focus is on Trollope’s professional career as a novelist. 37 However, it also elucidates Trollope’s association of hobbledehoy daydreams with the positive, creative, and reflective tendencies with which he invests the socially-marginalised, introverted male adolescent. Hobbledehoys, Trollope asserts in The Small House, do not ‘shine at all, keeping what light they may have for inward purposes’; the hobbledehoy’s ‘eloquence is heard only by his own inner ears’, and his ‘triumphs are the triumphs of his imagination’ alone. 38 The daydreams experienced do, of course, tend to be self-aggrandising: the individual is envisaged as his own ‘hero’, ‘kind’ and ‘a very clever person’. They are also potentially erotic (reminiscent of Richard Feverel’s sensual daydreaming in Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, for example), suggestive of a heterosexual impulse; but they are also implicitly feminising, dependent as they are on a removal from women’s company due to the hobbledehoy’s inability to engage with the opposite sex in a competent, manly, and assured manner. The daydream is therefore simultaneously autoerotic and also reflective of sexual interest projected onto a female other – in Trollope’s fantasies ‘beautiful young women used to be fond of me’, and in Johnny Eames’s daydreams he possesses all the force and charm of a ‘Don Juan’ and is ‘especially eloquent among beautiful women’.39 However, these self-indulgent fantasies are not simply sexual, and they speak to a much wider significance for the character and identity of the male adolescent. For Trollope’s fictional hobbledehoys as well as for his own juvenile self inscribed in the Autobiography, indulging in secluded ‘castle-building’, and naturally starring as the primary subject in these imaginative musings, formed a crucial characteristic of this figure. The innocent daydreams gesture at once towards the awkward youth’s diffident immaturity, but also his potential sensitivity and morality. This promise of creative energy and self-assurance is mimicked in the fantasies that youth creates, and is retained for ‘inward purposes’ in shaping his masculinity: The true hobbledehoy is much alone, not being greatly given to social intercourse even with other hobbledehoys—a trait in his character which I think has hardly been sufficiently observed by the world at large. […] he wanders about in solitude, taking long walks, in which

Investments in youth  117 he dreams of those successes which are so far removed from his powers of achievement. Out in the fields, with his stick in his hand, he is very eloquent, cutting off the heads of the springing summer weeds, as he practises his oratory with energy. And thus he feeds an imagination for which those who know him give him but scanty credit, and unconsciously prepares himself for that latter ripening, if only the ungenial shade will some day cease to interpose itself. Trollope highlights the importance of this creative outlet, as by daydreaming in this way the hobbledehoy is essentially rehearsing visions of his future self, and so ‘preparing himself for that latter ripening’, augured by the references to ‘success’, ‘achievement’, and ‘energy’. His very introspection and imaginative capacity illustrate the weight of his potential. While these reveries illustrate the young man’s emotional sensitivity and thoughtfulness, as they often occur at key moments in the narrative (for Johnny, his daydreams are most prominent after futile meetings with Lily), they also clearly gesture towards the future development of his character. This is evident in the ‘castle in the air’ in which Johnny indulges: the special deed in [Lily’s] favour to which his mind was turned,— that one thing which he most longed to do on her behalf,—was an act of corporal chastisement upon Crosbie. If Crosbie would but ill-treat her,—ill-treat her with some antenuptial barbarity,—and if only he could be called in to avenge her wrongs!40 This episode occurs just before Johnny saves the Earl De Guest from an angry bull – an act of instinctual bodily courage which tacitly supports Johnny’s assertion of his desire for a physical altercation with his charismatic rival Crosbie. In turn, this also foreshadows Johnny’s eventual ‘corporal chastisement’ when he strikes Crosbie in public at the train station, which suggests that the hobbledehoy’s daydreams can at least gesture towards an obtainable future. Such daydreams can also be redemptive; for example, Charley Tudor’s fantasies of a more positive, worthwhile future for himself are redemptive in that they provide the impetus for his own emancipation from his insalubrious lifestyle. In The Three Clerks Alaric Tudor suggests that Charley marry wealthy ­Clementina Golightly to secure her fortune of £20,000. However, ­Charley’s subsequent daydream reveals his own sense of honesty and decency, as he rejects Alaric’s proposal to use this morally questionable method of relieving himself of his money troubles: ‘He dreamt of other things and a better life. He made visions to himself of a sweet home, and a sweeter, sweetest, lovely wife’, at which point the reader is told of Charley’s love for Katie Woodward.41 In dreaming of his own redemption and the possibilities of future marital happiness, Charley takes a crucial

118  Investments in youth step in the right direction to restore his respectability. Such opportunities for harmless fantasy actually function for the hobbledehoy as occasions for self-exploration, reflection, and to display their developing self-­knowledge, as well as alerting the reader to the youth’s increasing emotional proficiency and moral character. Laurie Langbauer has suggested that daydreams provide solace for the hobbledehoy, and that their mutual association affords such adolescents a positive continuity and open-endedness aligned with the imagination: ‘they console themselves (as [Trollope] did) for their lack of direction precisely with pointless fantasy. They gesture less to the plottedness of career than to the idle fog of daydreams’.42 There is evidently a correlation between hobbledehoyhood and daydreaming, although the self-­ reflexivity of such contemplations, as the examples above illustrate, are not solely a means of consolation for lack of success; they also have a more energising, ameliorative function by heightening self-awareness and crystallising future goals or exploring motivation. Rather than ‘idle fog’, then, these moments of abstract vision can offer greater clarity or foreshadow later growth, as well as provide occasion for retrospective introspection, as with Johnny Eames: “What an ass I have been,—always and ever!” he said to himself. It was not only of his late disappointment that he was thinking, but of his whole past life. He was conscious of his hobbledehoyhood,—of that backwardness on his part in assuming manhood which had rendered him incapable of making himself acceptable to Lily before she had fallen into the clutches of Crosbie. […] When he had thus stood upon the bridge for some quarter of an hour, he took out his knife, and, with deep, rough gashes in the wood, cut out Lily’s name from the rail.43 Trollope’s use of the term hobbledehoy in The Small House is often accompanied by such emphasis on imagination or dreaming. Johnny’s musings here about his own inadequacies – those very characteristics which mark him out as a hobbledehoy, and his ‘backwardness […] in assuming manhood’, are forcibly borne in on his mind during his bitter self-reflection – followed by the symbolic act of erasing Lily’s name from where he had carved it in the wooden bridge. This action embodies a conscious attempt to move beyond his own unhappiness and sense of inadequacy. Hobbledehoydom, then, offers a unique model of productive, flexible, and inclusive masculinity, which is in part attained, paradoxically, through the figure’s very liminality and inadequacy – a condition of immaturity. Typically situated on the margins of society and of respectability, failing for a large part of these narratives to achieve much measure

Investments in youth  119 of success, Trollope nonetheless ascribes to the hobbledehoy dynamic moral significance which, he implies, demands greater cultural investment and recognition. The unformed and unsteady adolescent, engaged in the slow, steady ripening to which Trollope refers in the Travelling Sketches and The Small House, is a valuable figure who represents on the one hand a nostalgic fantasy of youth – but also, and most importantly, who offers an alternative and ultimately profitable vision of masculinity and restorative self-awareness.

Speculation and liberal adolescence The energising and fruitful daydreams of Trollope’s awkward hobbledehoys often cement youths’ self-identity and provide a key to their aspirations. In doing so, they contrast with the more calculated, even aggressive ambitions of other male adolescents in Trollope’s novels. These other young men, such as Alaric Tudor, Sir Felix Carbury, Lord ­Silverbridge and George Vavasor, are far more self-possessed, socially adept (or even manipulative), and exhibit recognisable indicators of more conspicuous styles of masculinity, in comparison with hobbledehoy characters like Johnny Eames and Charley Tudor. These confident young men are often deliberately and actively engaged in the pursuit of concrete achievements, and strive towards measurable success in their narrative trajectories. Rather than dreams which tend to affirm their moral standing, decency, and honest potential, characters such as George Vavasor and Alaric Tudor construct coldly calculated visions of their futures that demonstrate their selfish, avaricious, corrupt personalities. Far from embodying a vision of positive, protracted youth as emblematic of a restorative, generous masculinity (like the hobbledehoy), these young men reveal Trollope’s corresponding anxiety that male adolescence was liable to perversion. The labile nature of youth, he suggests, could be easily contaminated by a corrupt capitalist society to emerge instead as not only showy and bright, perhaps, but also deeply egocentric, immoral, and therefore unmanly and insincere. As with the naïve fantasies of the hobbledehoy, these young men’s dreams and aspirations are not just idle; they also reveal and reflect the psychology of male youth, and in particular how each imagines securing his place in the world. The desires of George Vavasor, Alaric Tudor, and Felix Carbury indicate a callow ruthlessness at the root of their personal ambitions. In The Three Clerks, for example, even from the beginning of the narrative Alaric swiftly seeks to elevate his own position: ‘He had already begun to indulge ambitious schemes, already had ideas stretching even beyond the limits of the Weights and Measures, and fully intended to make the very most of himself’.44 He is less scrupulous and more selfishly calculating than his friend Harry Norman, and under the tutelage

120  Investments in youth of the unprincipled Undy Scott, Alaric’s chief ambitions of fortune and social status are increasingly achieved at the expense of friendship, conscience, moral fibre, respectable reputation, and even the law. At the root of Alaric’s drive upwards towards greater and better position lies a flawed ethos of practical egotism, or a self-serving attitude that prioritises his own ease and success over not only the feelings of others, but also to the cost of honest principles of labour in which achievement and legitimate financial return are the reward for hard work, time and effort. Alaric is described as a restless young man on the make, incessantly motivated by the promise of the good things he could try to attract his way, but without any corresponding appreciation for those successes, promotions, or dividends already achieved. For example, Alaric is described as rather coldblooded in his reaction to his first big promotion at the office of the Weights and Measures, even when he triumphs over his friend Harry who had been working in the same office for longer. He displays profound indifference to the resentment of his hitherto superior colleagues over whom he has leapt: It was the nature of Tudor’s disposition, that he never for a moment rested satisfied with the round of the ladder on which he had contrived to place himself. He had no sooner gained a step than he looked upwards to see how the next step was to be achieved. […] When he found that the august Secretary received him on his promotion without much empressement, he comforted himself by calculating how long it would be before he should fill that Secretary’s chair—if indeed it should ever be worth his while to fill it. […] ­A laric was already beginning to think that this Weights and Measures should only be a stepping-stone to him; and that when Sir Gregory, with his stern dogma of devotion to the service, had been of sufficient use to him, he also might with advantage be thrown over.45 Alaric’s constant impulse to ascent of the social, professional and pecuniary ladder, without sufficient pause or humility to appreciate his progress, is opportunistic and destructive. Alaric’s methods of getting ahead represent the perversion of ideals of adolescence. Not only is Alaric’s advancement in the narrative charted by his desire for social mobility as well as professional attainment, but also, and significantly, by radical financial escalation and then collapse. Swiftly over a short period, Alaric elevates himself from a clerkship with £100 annual salary, to £1,200 a year on top of Clementina Golightly’s fortune of £20,000, which he has under his control (and which he fraudulently abuses). Such rapid rise in economic prosperity and authority, in ­Trollope’s novel, is emblematic of the dangerous association of male adolescence with risky speculation – a form of investment with notoriously precarious return, often condemned in his writing due to its association

Investments in youth  121 with other forms of gambling. Alaric Tudoe’s excessive acquisitive drive also contains elements of a desire for possession and the continual generation of money which resonates with a kind of deviant sexual impulse. The emphasis on producing greater and greater profit rapidly through private transaction makes this form of illicit generation particularly illegitimate. Alaric, of course, pays for his greed and his hitherto dramatic and speedy ascent of the ladder, in a spectacular public trial followed by his incarceration for embezzlement. Trollope repeatedly frames male youth through concomitant ­capitalist and commercial discourses. His fictional young men are invariably placed in economic contexts in which both money and the youths themselves are in constant but volatile circulation, so that his depictions of male youth are consistently bound up with the language of finance, commerce and speculation. The latter in particular comes to the fore in Trollope’s representation of male adolescence – characters such as Dolly Longstaffe, Sir Felix Carbury, Ferdinand Lopez, Alaric Tudor, Lord Silverbridge, and George Vavasor take part in various hazardous types of monetary exchange; these include involvement in the stock exchange and buying or selling shares, gambling, betting, calculating on an presumed future inheritance, borrowing from money-lenders, establishing credit under false pretences or other fraudulent activity, engaging in new risky business ventures, and other types of investment in what Trollope conceives as overtly risky and therefore dangerous and immoral speculative practices. It is by no means exclusively Trollope’s youthful male characters who become associated with such dubious, high-stakes engagement in notoriously insecure financial undertakings; the swindling, fraudulent, gaming propensities of older men such as Augustus Melmotte, Undy Scott, and Earl Grex permeate the novels, and such men form influential models of adult masculinity for, or parallels of, the younger generation who follow in their footsteps. Nonetheless, those younger male characters are shown to be exposed to such influences at a crucial formative moment during their adolescence, as they embark on their careers, are on the cusp of receiving their patrimonial inheritance, or begin to consider marriage. These youthful figures might therefore be drawn naively into the ­quasi-respectable playing at cards, as a form of leisure, but in an escalation of the same principle of betting may then be seduced by the allure of immediate financial return to speculate in turn on the stock market or in new and perilous commercial enterprises. Entering into the world of fashionable London society is itself represented as a kind of high-stakes game in Trollope, where the risks are manifold, but the temptations of actual economic speculation are firmly embedded as an inevitable aspect of modern, urban, adolescent socialisation for the middle-class or aristocractic young man. Monetary speculation, in whatever form, corresponds with their already precarious position, and the expanding jungle world

122  Investments in youth of high finance exerts a fascination for many of Trollope’s youthful male characters. However, it also raises questions about the moral character, independence, honour, and common sense of those adolescents who are drawn into the murky waters of financial speculation. This is true, for example, in the depiction of Sir Felix Carbury in The Way We Live Now, whose propensity for gambling is established early in the novel, and is a sign of the young man’s vicious habits and lack of self-control: ‘the devil of gambling was hot within his bosom; and though he feared that in losing he might lose real money, […] yet he could not keep himself from the card-table’.46 In order to gamble Sir Felix forces his mother to hand over the little money she has (having squandered his own inheritance), placing her and his sister Hetta in a precarious situation due to the strain on the widow’s income, so his self-indulgence is indicative of the weakness and selfishness of his character. Felix is also engaged in the speculative ‘game’ of wooing the rich heiress Marie Melmotte in order to obtain her fortune.47 Still, his sense of responsibility and awareness of his financial condition tend to be limited to his immediate wants: He could not even feel his own misfortunes unless they touched the outward comforts of the moment. It seemed that he lacked sufficient imagination to realise future misery though the futurity to be considered was divided from the present but by a single month, a single week,—but by a single night. He liked to be kindly treated, to be praised and petted, to be well fed and caressed; and they who so treated him were his chosen friends. He had in this the instincts of a horse, not approaching the higher sympathies of a dog. But it cannot be said of him that he had ever loved any one to the extent of denying himself a moment’s gratification on that loved one’s behalf. His heart was a stone.48 Sir Felix is bound up in instant pleasure, relishes the life of comfort and ease that money can obtain, but has such poor self-awareness that he is unable to recognise fully the equation by which future security can be ensured – through careful respect for money, and by kinder treatment of those around him who are bound to be invested in his long-term future. As Roger Carbury complains of the youth’s behaviour, ‘he is not so young that he should not begin to comprehend’ how he ought to properly conduct himself, and in refusing to acknowledge this advice Sir Felix demonstrates his immaturity and dearth of adult accountability.49 Sir Felix betrays his own (future as well as present) obligations as a young man, both to himself and to his family, and this is made particularly evident in his predilection for gambling and fallacious financial investments (from his card-playing to his Board membership of the specious South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway), all with a view to reaping swift and easy benefits.

Investments in youth  123 However, as many of the characters in The Way We Live Now discover, engaging with such speculative practice involves reliance on and trade in abstracted forms of monetary transaction, which has the potential to disrupt assumptions about value due to the absence of hard currency. Thus Nathan K. Hensley has identified speculation generally in this novel as a form of deracination, bound up in the text’s emphasis on credit, paper money, IOUs, and worthless or inflated shares: speculation involved ‘wealth without substance, [as] this capital form derives profit, in other words, not from land rents, manufacturing outputs, or “hard work” – Trollope’s favorite – but from a managed combination of speed, public opinion, and risk’. 50 Speculation depends on this abstraction and lack of tangibility, which Hensley claims has a feminising effect on those who engage in it. Rather than the patriarchal tradition of land-based wealth, or solid, palpable monies, the circulation of abstract or virtual money in Trollope’s novel functions as an indicator of not only ungentlemanly inauthenticity, but also of the unmasculine through its implied association of loose, unanchored speculation with the feminine. Hensley suggests that ‘for the Trollope of the mid 1870s, finance, writing, and marriage have all degenerated into the realm of suspicious fiction, a defectively masculine or “improper” state of deracination’. 51 In particular, however, this is true of those louche young men who congregate at the Beargarden club, such as Lord Grasslough, Sir Felix, Lord Nidderdale, and Dolly Longstaffe. Each exhibits a distinct lack of masculinity that aligns their idleness, feebleness, and irresponsibility – constituted as a lack of manliness, vigour, honesty, and assertiveness – with the alienated, unanchored form of money in which they choose to deal, through nebulous, ­credit-based, and potentially feminised speculation. While Hensley views this as endemic in the text, it is of particular import for those male adolescents who seek to establish themselves within this social and economic arena. These youths are further dispossessed of masculine credentials in the wider economic world due to their very juvenility – the majority have yet to inherit fully, or do not take appropriate steps to assert their independence or make sensible judgements about financial investment (for example, being seduced by Melmotte’s unfounded promises of wealth). The retardation of their sense of responsibility is an extension of the false, conjectural, and risky elements of speculation in which they are all engaged, as the fictitious money that they continue to exchange in playing cards extends outward to the cheating of the Beargarden club by its purveyor Herr Vossner, and attempts to secure riches by calculating on the odds of winning Marie Melmotte’s hand (and so also her fortune), as well as in the City through naïve involvement with the Mexican Railway Board. As Robert Tracy comments, their elective congregative space of the Beargarden club indicates this association of their youthful masculinity with loose morals,

124  Investments in youth fiscal irresponsibility, and inauthenticity, as the club provides a metaphor for the wider market: in commercial slang bear means stock that exists purely for speculations (the phrase “sell a bear” means to sell something one does not possess), and a garden is a place where one is betrayed or defrauded. 52 Their experiences of improper adolescence are therefore clearly aligned with unsafe financial speculation. The space that they occupy, which as Tracy suggests is an extension of the wider marketplace and emphasises the immoral atmosphere of speculation, comes to symbolise the hazardous, corrupt environment in which these youthful bachelors choose to situate themselves. The potential rapidity of the anticipated financial return in speculation situates such activity in a moral cul-de-sac: Within Victorian novels the more rapid the exchange [of money or capital] – as in the case of a theft, a win at gambling, or a “killing” in the stock market – the more likely it is to prove harmful to the individual and to the social order. 53 In making such an observation, J. Jeffrey Franklin suggests that the relative rapidity of the time-signature in the exchange of capital possesses a corresponding moral valence in Victorian fiction. This has an impact on the way in which the sudden (but implicitly unearned) winning of a ­fortune – through gambling or the stock market – casts the lucky recipient in an unworthy light. Gambling especially held the potential for ‘dangerous social and financial upheaval’ due to the abrupt shifts in monetary possession as well as social mobility in either direction. 54 For the male adolescent, the moral as well as financial risk involved in speculation and gambling is particularly significant. From a moral standpoint, purely speculative financial practices were often perceived as ­degenerate, enervating, or viewed with suspicion, as such hazardous investment could be a cause of fiscal vulnerability and even bankruptcy, while ­simultaneously functioning as a barometer of character. In addition, however, even successful ventures of this nature could lead to a kind of false positive, in that huge sums of money were gained with very little real effort or hard work, which placed it at odds with both codes of gentlemanliness or nobility of character and with the Smilesean equation of honest manliness with hard work and application. As ­Trollope’s appreciation of the hobbledehoy has highlighted, explored earlier in this chapter, positive adolescent experience rests on the individual being afforded the time and space for maturation, as the slow-seasoned harvest reaps the greatest and most honest rewards. While Trollope has no expectation

Investments in youth  125 that youth will follow a smooth path to maturity, as ­evidenced in the ­ udor, and his own hobbledehoy narratives of Johnny Eames, Charley T awkward, ineffectual self as depicted in the ­Autobiography, there should nonetheless be a protracted struggle for identity negotiation during adolescence. Male youth, in his novels, is therefore envisaged as a form of cultural stock. Like the ripening fruit metaphor to which ­Trollope returns, the male adolescent should engage in a long-term investment to offer a solid return. In Phineas Redux, Trollope clarifies this view, proposing that those aspects of one’s character which are of greatest value are those inculcated in the individual over time: Before the man can be manly, the gifts which make him so must be there, collected by him slowly, unconsciously, as are his bones, his flesh, and his blood. They cannot be put on like a garment for the nonce,—as may a little learning. A man cannot become faithful to his friends, unsuspicious before the world, gentle with women, loving with children, considerate to his inferiors, kindly with servants, tender-hearted with all,—and at the same time be frank, of open speech, with springing eager energies,—simply because he desires it. These things, which are the attributes of manliness, must come of training on a nature not ignoble. But they are the very opposites, the antipodes, the direct antagonism, of that staring, posed, bewhiskered and bewigged deportment, that nil admirari, self-­remembering assumption of manliness, that endeavour of twopence halfpenny to look as high as threepence, which, when you prod it through, has in it nothing deeper than deportment.55 Possessed of cultural capital which accrues over time, ‘collected […] slowly’ and ‘not put on like a garment for the nonce’, the young man must learn to participate in and ideally take responsibility for the ongoing accretion of his relative cultural worth and masculinity. Manliness, Trollope suggests, ‘must come of training’, is indicative of real as opposed to projected worth (suggesting trustworthiness as opposed to inauthenticity), and cannot be assumed instantaneously. This view accords with Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of the way in which cultural capital operates: The accumulation of cultural capital in the embodied state, i.e. in the form of what is called culture, cultivation, Bildung, presupposes a process of embodiment, incorporation, which, insofar as it implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor. 56 Adolescence fosters key moments in social interaction and the negotiation of identity through particular skills and attributes, and clearly

126  Investments in youth time ‘must be invested personally’ in the process. The uneven progress of youths such as Johnny Eames illustrates Trollope’s indication of how cultural capital accrues via embodiment. Over the course of the narrative Johnny gradually learns to adapt and assimilate in his own cultivation, becoming engaged in his own process of reflective acculturation, as well as beginning to distinguish himself against his initial disadvantages and doubtful beginnings: He was aware that his career in London had not hitherto been one on which he could look back with self-respect. He had lived with friends whom he did not esteem; he had been idle, and sometimes worse than idle; and he had allowed himself to be hampered by the pretended love of a woman for whom he had never felt any true affection […] it was necessary that he should altogether alter his mode of life. In truth his hobbledehoyhood was dropping off from him, as its old skin drops from a snake. Much of the feeling and something of the knowledge of manhood was coming on him, and he was beginning to recognize to himself that the future manner of his life must be to him a matter of very serious concern. No such thought had come near him when he first established himself in London. 57 As he matures he embraces a sense of responsibility and therefore obtains an amplified ‘manhood’. In his lengthy transition, during this acquisition of increased cultural capital, Johnny is given credit by the author for his thoughtfulness about his own future as it is indeed ‘a matter of very serious concern’. Unlike the increase of economic capital, the embodiment of cultural capital cannot be transmitted instantaneously, so the emerging masculine habitus is not formed directly but continuously in adolescence. Trollope therefore elaborates male adolescence as circulating in the cultural arena as a form of stock, whose accreted choices and actions will effect the shifting cultural value of youth as the individual matures, and the extended passage of time, rather than rapid movement, is an essential part of the process. While deploying this vision of male youth as possessed of fluctuating cultural capital – or, in ideal scenarios as the example above indicates, accretive value – Trollope also draws on exchanges of financial capital as measures of worth in the assessment of male adolescence. Although not synonymous, the two are often closely aligned in his work, as the rapid acquisition of monetary wealth is often used to highlight a young man’s deficiency of cultural capital. This is evident, for example, in Trollope’s strictures in Phineas Redux above on the artificial inflation of ‘twopence halfpenny’ disguised ‘to look as high as threepence’, which is exposed as mere pretension to manliness and therefore condemned. Cultural capital and economic capital therefore often align in Trollope’s work.

Investments in youth  127 In contrast with Johnny Eames, more finished, polished young men such as Alaric Tudor or George Vavasor – all more sensitive to their degree of both social and economic forms of capital – are shown to possess less social credit and to offer diminished cultural worth by the end of the novels in which they feature. George Vavasor is violent to his sister, attempts ­murder, cozens Alice out of a large share of her money, and must emigrate to America under a false identity to evade arrest. Alaric similarly sees all his aspirations dashed, being imprisoned following a humiliating public trial for embezzlement and finally emigrating with his family to ­Australia. The reversal of these young men’s social status and financial strength accords with the extreme depression in their cultural value as adolescents, and in part this can be equated with their attempts at the rapid transmission of capital in all its three forms. Rather than a lengthy process of maturation and thus solid self-investment, such characters do not recognise the value of social or cultural apprenticeship during their emergence in society. They aim too high too fast, which leads ultimately to their depreciation. Various forms of capital possessed by male youth, and speculation based on that capital, symbolically aligns the market with male adolescence for Trollope. Financial and cultural valuation parallel one another in his emphasis on character as a measure of worth, for the male adolescent as (ideally) an individuated, liberal subject. Each gestures towards anticipated security following some kind of initial outlay, and yet both are also liable to fluctuations in value or return – of loss as well as gain. Speculative practice is not only often a literal act conducted by male youth, but is also symptomatic of the wider cultural investment placed in the adolescent as the representative of a future generation. The language of speculative investment is employed as a metaphor for male adolescent experience. In The Way We Live Now Sir Felix, for example, demonstrates his lack of self-sufficiency, and want of cultural capital as a result of his wasted youth: Up to this period of his life Sir Felix Carbury had probably felt but little of the punishment due to his very numerous shortcomings. He had spent all his fortune; he had lost his commission in the army; he had incurred the contempt of everybody that had known him; he had forfeited the friendship of those who were his natural friends, and had attached to him none others in their place; he had pretty nearly ruined his mother and sister; but, to use his own language, he had always contrived “to carry on the game.” He had eaten and drunk, had gambled, hunted, and diverted himself generally after the fashion considered to be appropriate to young men about town. He had kept up till now. But now there seemed to him to have come an end to all things.58 The passage demonstrates that Sir Felix is literally “spent” – he has run through his options together with his money, and his inability to continue ‘the game’ clearly parallels the novel’s themes of gambling and

128  Investments in youth speculation. Sir Felix has no appreciation for what he had obtained, indicating his immorality through his lack of conservation with no regard or respect for the value of money, friendship, family, or occupation. That Sir Felix’s assessment of his condition is immediately followed by a passage detailing the depreciation of the Mexican Railway stock, in which ‘game’ he had unwisely invested, drives the point home. In refusing to cultivate himself – in giving up his time to idle pleasures and immediate gratifications, and in betting heavily on ill-founded plans for increasing the security of his position (in both financial terms and in character) – Sir Felix has lost any sense of self-sufficiency or proper manliness. However, in these novels, the young men who engage in speculative practices are often speculated upon by those around them. Living within an economy of social and cultural as well as economic exchange, male youth is raised by Trollope as a valuable prospect for investment not only for the young men themselves, but also for others around them who are seen to naturally set store by the adolescent’s ongoing progress. Male adolescence is situated within a wider capitalist discourse of commercial value and exchange, of improvement and cultivation, as the young male protagonists are able to accrue potential or promissory value in the cultural marketplace. Nineteenth-century advice literature, as examined in Chapter 3, often draws on such scenarios to promote the idea that the rewards of youth, requiring the proper investment from parents as well as the individuals themselves, will be reaped in later life. The desire for a guaranteed, tangible return on that investment, however, does not always make for an easy understanding between parents and their children: the fathers and mothers of the present generation understand but little of the inward nature of the young men for whom they are so anxious. They give them credit for so much that it is impossible they should have, and then deny them credit for so much that they possess! They expect from them when boys the discretion of men,— that discretion which comes from thinking; but will not give them credit for any of that power of thought which alone can ultimately produce good conduct. Young men are generally thoughtful,—more thoughtful than their seniors; but the fruit of their thought is not as yet there.59 Parental expenditure or emotional outlay on a young man, as with this example from The Small House at Allington, drives home the necessity for extended investment, as the youth’s cultural value is in the process of development from boyhood to manhood. Trollope’s novels display several different forms of cross-generational speculative exchange. In The Duke’s Children, for example, the Duke of Omnium, left alone in the world after the death of Lady Glencora Palliser, must try to act as

Investments in youth  129 guide and mentor in his paternal obligations to his sons. Much of the text depicts the Duke’s attempts to impose on his children a proper sense of their duty and responsibilities as the future generation, and both Silverbridge and his younger brother Gerald struggle to balance their own interests with the desire to gain the approval, love and respect of their father. Following Silverbridge’s disastrous betting on the turf, and the swindle perpetrated by Major Tifto and his cronies which would cost the Pallisers the huge sum of £70,000, the Duke is brought to reflect that ‘it was for his son’s character and standing in the world, for his future respectability and dignity, that his fears were so keen, and not for his own money’, and that this anxiety had been foremost ‘from the earliest days of his son’s semi-manhood’.60 Following payment of the debt, The Duke resolves that ‘The boy must be made to settle himself in life’, which highlights Trollope’s tendency to continually align youth with financial investment, as the comment is suggestive of not only maturing into adult life, but the phrase also alludes to the act of clearing one’s debts.61 However, parents can only attempt to instil in youth a sense of the responsibility they must bear for their own future. The young man must bear the ultimate duty of advancing – with some measure of reflective ­calculation – the foundation of their future prosperity. As with the examples of Sir Felix Carbury and Alaric Tudor, many of Trollope’s young men fail in their own proper self-investment. George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? (1864–5) exhibits a similar dearth of appropriate self-­reliance and acculturation. Vavasor does not recognise the cultural imperative to develop a moral sense of purpose and direction, as he borrows money on the illusory assumption that he will inherit the Vavasor family estate from his grandfather the squire. As presumptive heir, George Vavasor feels sufficiently sure of his future that he gambles on the promise of his anticipated wealth (thereby engaging in dubious speculative practice by investing without a sound footing). However, such an expectation fosters at once an enervating weakness through lack of independence, and simultaneously a violent streak that emerges when his desires are thwarted. The promise of future riches has therefore perverted the young man, whose thin disguise of moral character and respectability is swiftly torn down when his financial security is threatened and when his progress becomes frustrated: Vavasor had educated himself to badness with his eyes open. He had known what was wrong, and had done it, having taught himself to think that bad things were best. […] Vavasor, in those dreamy moments of which I have spoken, would sometimes feel tempted to cut his throat and put an end to himself, because he knew that he had taught himself amiss. Again he would sadly ask himself whether it was yet too late; always, however, answering himself that it was too late. […] he was able to resolve that he would go on with the business that he had in hand, and play out his game to the end.62

130  Investments in youth Part of the effect of George Vavasor’s mis-edification as a young man, having ‘educated himself to badness’, is in large part a result of his tendency to reduce all relationships to a monetary level, so that the processes of exchange and investment in which he engages are a form of dispassionate, but purely self-interested speculation. This is evident, for example, in his decision to gamble on whether or not to propose to Alice, idly betting to himself on the outcome, and only posting the letter asking her to venture her fortune for him by demanding a servant identify if a coin by his bedside showed heads or tails. His behaviour is pre-eminently self-serving, to the extent that it also serves to make him strangely disconnected from the rest of society.63 Tamara S. Wagner views George Vavasor as an example of the gentlemanly stock-market villain: a cunning speculator who occupies an indeterminate position in the text due to the tension between his upper-class credentials and coldly calculated roguery. She identifies his hypocritical propensity for reducing courtship, politics, and other forms of endeavours to signify in solely pecuniary terms, so that he exhibits ‘a mixture of sincere insincerity and deliberate misrepresentations in his financial engagements’ and views ‘all contracts as financial’.64 This demonstrates, of course, his lack of appreciation for any value that extends beyond the economic, exposing the shortcomings of his own character and his lack of those qualities that Trollope deems so essential to cultivate during adolescence such as loyalty, openness, generosity of spirit, gentleness, authenticity, reflexivity and dynamism. All of these indicate the progress of manly character to which young men should aspire (like Johnny Eames), in opposition to the financial reductionism exhibited by characters such as George Vavasor. Confining the vision of oneself, as he does, to a financial stock on which to speculate, perverts the analogue of youth with investment, by overextending the parallel and ignoring the role of cultural capital. Rather, balance is required, so that even when viewing adolescence as part of a broader capitalist construct of ageing as a process of cumulative value, Trollope demands that it not be divorced from the liberal project of cultivated agency and self-reflecting individuality. Alaric Tudor provides a similar example to demonstrate the danger of over-investment in speculative financial practice, at the cost of ­under-investment in those other future-oriented attributes which enrich the transformative possibilities of adolescent character formation. Not least is this due to his dependence on quick returns in his dubious financial affairs, as opposed to a reliance on the progressive, unhurried cultivation which Trollope advocates for the hobbledehoy. As Audrey Jaffe has stated, ‘the truth about a character, Trollope implies, can be learned from the way that character feels about money’.65 The growing scepticism the reader possesses about Alaric’s aggressive self-promotion is a fundamental demonstration of his duplicitous monetary dealings, which accords with Jaffe’s explanation of fundamental differences in

Investments in youth  131 attitude towards the solid, prudent investor versus the risk-taking speculator during the Victorian period: Thus while the investor is typically imagined as detached from his money, able to ignore its day-to-day movements, the speculator is viewed as a creature of unregulated impulse and unruly emotion, in thrall, day and night, to his greed. […] The investor, able to wait for his “emotional payoff”, is promised in the end an even greater reward, while the speculator serves as a useful embodiment of bad habits: mental depravity, idleness, deceitfulness, and greed.66 The illicit, suspicious activity of the opportunist financial adventurer marks these speculators, in Trollope’s fiction, as unmanly and ungentlemanly. In their persistent embodiment of greedy, irrational speculation, male adolescents such as Alaric Tudor and George Vavasor represent the opposite of the careful investor. The ‘greater reward’ eventually realised by the careful investor finds its clear analogy in the slow ripening of the adolescent. The liberal character of Trollope’s ideal adolescent is a result of an improving mind, rational autonomy, and self-reflecting ­individuality – all of which create a subject worthy of cultural investment. Those who attempt the realisation of swift, unregulated, rapid methods of achievement exemplify the unpredictable vagaries of risky speculation, in which material loss (and moral bankruptcy) is just as likely a prospect as gain. In The Duke’s Children, speculation is considered dubiously by Plantagenet Palliser as akin to gambling, as he tries to instil in his youngest son appropriate suspicion about relying on such risky enterprise. Doing so, he suggests, taints the money so won, and by extension defiles the character of the man who engages in such practice even when he wins: There is nothing so comfortable as money,—but nothing so defiling if it be come by unworthily; […] to think that it may be got by gambling, to hope to live after that fashion, to sit down with your fingers almost in your neighbour’s pockets, with your eye on his purse, trusting that you may know better than he some studied calculations as to the pips concealed in your hands, praying to the only god you worship that some special card may be vouchsafed to you,—that I say is to have left far, far behind you, all nobility, all gentleness, all manhood!67 In advising his son Gerald of his irresponsibility in having lost a large sum of money to Sir Percival in a single game of cards, the Duke of Omnium equates the immorality of speculation with a lack of manliness, as he articulates fears lest this squalid behaviour impact the future character of his boy. The Duke cannot distinguish between the man who gambles, and a robber or cheat. In his exchange with Gerald, Palliser is

132  Investments in youth evidently disappointed in his son’s lack of awareness about the operation and circulation of finance capital. He invites Gerald to consider the nature of money, and following the youth’s naïve reply, ‘cheques, and sovereigns, and bank-notes’, instructs: Money is the reward of labour […] or rather, in the shape it reaches you, it is your representation of that reward. You may earn it yourself, or, as is, I am afraid, more likely to be the case with you, you may possess it honestly as prepared for you by the labour of others who have stored it up for you. But it is a commodity of which you are bound to see that the source is not only clean but noble.68 The Duke’s illustration of the way in which capital operates, touching on the young man’s role in its preservation and thus the responsibility of the capitalist, reflects in part the political liberalism of the Duke of Omnium who desired that both his sons ‘devote themselves to the service of this country’ as he had, having been Prime Minister.69 The articulation of cumulative wealth as part of a wider moral as well as economic contract resonates with Marx’s views on capital. Although part of the aristocracy, Palliser’s attempts to instil a respect for the value of money in his son, to be obtained ‘worthily’ rather than through gambling or cheating, intensifies the degenerate cast of speculative practice in Trollope’s text. All this suggests, of course, the importance of work or some other form of endeavour as a worthy, respectable, and manly means of generating wealth – at odds with risky speculation, which involves the reliance on chance and fluctuations in value which are beyond the individual’s control. Trollope is at pains to show that financial reward for continued honest employment is distinct from the greediness of the unfettered speculator, as demonstrated in his Autobiography which seeks to equate his infamous productivity as a writer with the vigour and energy of professional masculinity. However, Trollope’s valorisation of rigorous endeavour and hard work places the emphasis for male adolescence once more on gradualist investment, as opposed to precipitate, untenably swift success. In this reminder of the detrimental effects of unnecessary forcing and premature achievement, as in Alaric Tudor’s rapid promotions which correspond with the downward bent of his moral corruption, Trollope echoes the anxieties about precocity by Sir Austin Feverel in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and recalls the redundant educational forcing apparatus at Dr Blimber’s Academy in Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848). In parallel with Trollope’s denigration of risky speculation as rapid but corrupt and invalid financial profit, self-improvement, and the accrual of cultural capital, is not achievable instantaneously (or ought not to be). It is possible to read Trollope’s narratives, in which individual professional success impacts on the tenor of youthful character and values, as providing opportunities to read adolescence – itself

Investments in youth  133 a paradigm of individual potential for perfectionism – as a vehicle for liberal thought, or at least informed by a liberal discourse. The rhetoric of cultivation and language of improvement Trollope employs in his discussion of adolescence not only prioritises individuality and discrete responsibility, but also highlights the importance of social valence in his view of character development. Not only ought effort and a sense of accountability be cultivated for a successful career and formation of character during youth, but also a corresponding appreciation of the social dimension of one’s progress. Despite the emphasis which must be placed on the independence and assumed autonomy of the subject, nonetheless the individual does not operate within a vacuum. In The Three Clerks, Alaric neglects to acknowledge the obligations he may have to those who have helped him on his way, preferring instead to recast his success as achieved entirely alone: “I have got so high,” said Alaric, “by my own labour, by my own skill and tact; and why should I stop here? I have left my earliest colleagues far behind me; have distanced those who were my competitors in the walk of life; why should I not still go on and distance others also? Why stop when I am only second or third?” […] There was no word in all this of gratitude; there was no thought in Alaric’s mind that it behoved him to be grateful to Sir Gregory. […] Grateful, indeed! In public life when is there time for gratitude? Who ever thinks of other interest than his own? Such was Alaric’s theory of life.70 Mistakenly attributing his ascent purely to his own calculated effort, Alaric displays his selfish egotism and ‘theory of life’, and also licenses (in his own eyes) his continued ambition, as he misreads his own selfish competition as a universal picture. Drawing on his watchword or motto of ‘Excelsior!’ as an inspiration for his own entrepreneurial energy and ambition, Alaric’s increasing roguery collapses into reckless self-­promotion and what Lauren Goodlad has termed ‘anarchic individualism’: the cry of ‘Excelsior!’ becomes ‘Trollope’s ironic term for the destructive powers of energy and ambition in a modern bourgeois society’, thus emerging as a novel in which traditional, genteel hierarchy (represented by Harry Norman) is balanced against the entrepreneurial spirit to develop instead a middle-ground (embodied by Charley) in which incremental change (neither radical not static) becomes the ideal.71 In this egotistical pattern of upward professional as well as social mobility, Alaric adopts the ethos of his persuasive friend Undy Scott, who himself ‘could not afford to associate with his fellow men on any other terms than those of making capital of them’, and whose own marriage had been a matter of ‘matrimonial speculation’ having successfully ‘gone forth into the marketplace’ and ‘sold [himself]’.72 In viewing his

134  Investments in youth career and social alliances in such an antagonistic, utilitarian light, and not allowing his conscience to check his fraudulent enterprises, Alaric increasingly exhibits a blinkered, career-oriented vision of himself which speaks to a poorly-calculated level of aggressive ambition and of speculation on his own future prospects at the expense of others. He increasingly isolates himself from potentially ameliorative influences (for example Harry Norman and Mrs. Woodward), and in doing so gambles (morally as well as financially) to the eventual cost of his young family’s prosperity and stability. Trollope recognises that while male youth operates within a cultural framework of investment, excessive prioritisation of literal forms of financial speculation conducted by youth can defraud and damage their future potential.

Conclusion The weight of cultural expectation placed on adolescence affords time to youth for their maturation. Trollope’s narratives suggest that a long period of investment should be allowed for successful development, as an individual’s potential is accretive and this will offer a safer return. In suggesting this as eminently desirable, because it forges a self-­reflexive masculinity through gradual progress, Trollope articulates a liberal narrative of male adolescence. His version of youthful masculinity is open-ended and reiterative, with an emphasis on improvement and advancement in evaluating the cultural capital of the male adolescent. ­Trollope’s hobbledehoy Johnny Eames is therefore an example of the flawed yet honest ideal of adolescent experience and identity: John Eames was thoughtful. They who knew him best accounted him to be a gay, good-hearted, somewhat reckless young man, open to temptation, but also open to good impressions; as to whom no great success could be predicated, but of whom his friends might fairly hope that he might so live as to bring upon them no disgrace and not much trouble. But, above all things, they would have called him thoughtless. In so calling him, they judged him wrong. He was ever thinking,—thinking much of the world as it appeared to him, and of himself as he appeared to the world; and thinking, also, of things beyond the world. What was to be his fate here and hereafter?73 Johnny’s thoughtfulness and willingness to engage in earnest reflection about his conduct are commended by Trollope, despite the assumptions that Johnny will never achieve ‘great success’ for himself, which is borne out by the youth’s unremarkable progress. As this example highlights, male adolescence according to Trollope’s conception of the hobbledehoy is never perfect – but nor is unblemished, smooth, Apollonian progress desirable for the robust, reflective masculinity that Trollope proposes.

Investments in youth  135 As such, Trollope’s vision of male adolescence is essentially modern. He envisages a society in which male youth – rather than being hustled into swift maturity with the aid of self-help mantras, educational cramming, and the weight of parental anxiety and expectation – should be allowed a greater flexibility and accommodation. Nonetheless, the capitalist society of mid-Victorian Britain offers particular pitfalls for those young men emerging into their independence and engaging in the continued negotiation of their own self-formation. The explorations of male adolescence in Trollope’s fiction frequently press into use metaphors of finance and capital venture in assessments of youthful maturation. In doing so, Trollope embraces a wider cultural investment in adolescence, which seeks to understand youth as a stock in which value, credibility, and masculine worth will accrue over time (under the right conditions, and following provision of the proper security). Not only are his young male characters imagined as metaphorically aligned with future-oriented cultural investment, which he views as a positive measure of acculturation, but many of his young men are also notable for their own engagement in unsound financial speculative practices, which he constructs as selfish and risky. This serves to highlight the hazard involved in the project of adolescence, and young men such as Alaric Tudor, George Vavasor, and Sir Felix Carbury demonstrate the extent to which unsound pecuniary endeavours are morally dangerous, as well as financially precarious, as their cultural capital decreases in accordance with their harmful financial transactions. Ultimately, Trollope articulates a politicised, liberal view of male adolescence, in which elasticity and adaptability underpin individual growth. Even the uneven, halting progress embodied by the hobbledehoy itself marks a particular achievement as it indicates the future realisation of full potential which is worth the corresponding effort of self-­ improvement and cultural investment. As the Duke of Omnium laments to his son Gerald, in attempting to make him recognise that his loss of money may also correspond to a drop in his character, manliness, and moral standing: ‘Go on without reflecting! Yes; and where to? where to? whither will such progress without reflection take you? […] how can I wash your young mind clean from the foul stain which has already defiled it?’74 Despite such dire warnings borne of paternal anxiety for the youth’s gambling tendencies, occasional mistakes are shown as part and parcel of the adolescent experience in Trollope’s novels. Nonetheless, continual debauched behaviour – and especially persistent over-reliance on risky speculative endeavours and financial swindles with a view to obtaining swift or easy returns – will certainly end in a loss of character and of appropriate masculinity for Trollope’s young men. These are novels which, in their depiction of male adolescence specifically, are cautiously positive about reflective agency and autonomy as part of a liberal aesthetic, while they warn, too, about the dangers of

136  Investments in youth overtly aggressive individualism. Trollope’s texts are therefore a part of the flourishing philosophy of improvement, cultivation and reform dominant in mid-Victorian Britain. In prioritising the ameliorative potential of male youth, adolescence is imagined by Trollope as integral to identity negotiation, rather than simply a transitional stage to be endured and surmounted.

Notes 1 Anthony Trollope, Travelling Sketches (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), pp. 43–4. 2 See for example Chapter 2 on the Bildungsroman. 3 Trollope, Travelling Sketches, pp. 46–7. 4 Courtney C. Berger, ‘Partying with the Opposition: Social Politics in The Prime Minister’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 45.3 (2003), pp. 315–36 (p. 317). 5 William A. Cohen, ‘The Palliser Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 44–57 (p. 53). 6 For example see J. Jeffrey Franklin, Tamara S. Wagner, Audrey Jaffe, N ­ athan K. Hensley, Annette Van, Kathy Psomiades and Francis O’Gorman. 7 See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, trans. by Richard Nice, in Handbook for the Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. by. John G. Richardson (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241–58. 8 Audrey Jaffe, ‘Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance in The Prime Minister’, Victorian Studies, 45.1 (2002), pp. 43–64 (p. 52). 9 Jaffe, ‘Trollope in the Stock Market’, p. 52. 10 Trollope, The Small House, pp. 653–4. 11 Trollope, The Small House, p. 12. 12 Laurie Langbauer, ‘The Hobbledehoy in Trollope’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles ­(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 113–27 (p. 113). 13 Trollope, The Small House, p. 35. 14 Trollope, The Small House, pp. 35–6. 15 Trollope, The Small House, p. 502. 16 Trollope, The Small House, pp. 389–90. 17 Trollope, The Small House, p. 654. 18 Trollope, The Small House, p. 653. Trollope’s use of the term ‘calf’ here is curious, as its previous appearance in the novel refers to Crosbie, who resents feeling like a sacrificial calf when he feels bound to Lily Dale by what he comes to see as an unsuitable engagement. The contrast suggests that Crosbie – ­certainly no hobbledehoy – in fact has an inflated sense of his own self-worth, in that he views himself as a prize to be caught. Johnny, in contrast, develops a true yet modest sense of his own character, in the transformation from his extended ‘calfishness’ to full ‘promise’ as he ‘entered on his manhood’. 19 Langbauer, ‘The Hobbledehoy in Trollope’, pp. 114–15. 20 Langbauer, ‘The Hobbledehoy in Trollope’, p. 115. 21 Trollope, The Small House, p. 665. 22 Ellen Moody, ‘Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work’, Victorian Web, www.victorianweb.org/authors/­ trollope/moody2/comfort.html [accessed 9/3/15]

Investments in youth  137 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37

Moody, ‘Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men’ [accessed 9/3/15]. Trollope, The Small House, p. 64. Trollope, The Small House, p. 337. Trollope, The Small House, p. 237; p. 238. Helena Gurfinkel, ‘“The Intercourse between the squire and His Son”: The Father-Son Marriage Plot and the Creation of the English Gentleman in Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 35.2 (2007), pp. 451–69 (p. 451; p. 15; p. 17; p. 455). Gurfinkel, “The Intercourse between the squire and His Son”, p. 455 Moody, ‘Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men’ [accessed 9/3/15]. Trollope, An Autobiography, p. 28. This is reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s authorial recreation of his own episode of boyhood trauma, the humiliation he endured while employed at Warren’s blacking factory, which was famously fictionalised in David Copperfield (1850). Trollope, An Autobiography, p. 51. Anthony Trollope, The Three Clerks, ed. by Graham Handley (Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 21. Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 17. Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 17. Trollope, An Autobiography, pp. 42–3. Peter Allen, for example, states that

Trollope portrays himself as having been a social outcast as a boy and an ineffectual daydreamer as a young man. He sees his habit of daydreaming as a substitute for play with others and says of it that there could “hardly be a more dangerous mental practice.” Yet he believes that it was essential to his later success as a writer.   From ‘Masculinity and Novel-Writing in Trollope’s An Autobiography’, Prose Studies, 16.2 (2001), pp. 62–83 (p. 63). 38 39 40 41 42 43 4 4 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

Trollope, The Small House, p. 35; p. 36. Trollope, The Small House, p. 36. Trollope, The Small House, p. 225. Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 191. Langbauer, ‘The Hobbledehoy in Trollope’, p. 114. Trollope, The Small House, p. 599. Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 19. Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 131. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, ed. by John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 44. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, p. 67. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, pp. 17–18. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, p. 61. Nathan K. Hensley, ‘Mister Trollope, Lady Credit, and The Way We Live Now’, in The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse and Regenia Gagnier (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. ­147–60 (p. 152). Hensley, The Way We Live Now, pp. 149–50. Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 165. J. Jeffrey Franklin, ‘Anthony Trollope Meets Pierre Bourdieu: The Conversion of Capital as Plot in the Mid-Victorian British Novel’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31.2 (2003), pp. 501–21 (p. 503).

138  Investments in youth 54 J. Jeffrey Franklin, ‘The Victorian Discourse of Gambling: Speculations on Middlemarch and The Duke’s Children’, ELH, 61.4 (1994), pp. 899–921 (p. 903). 55 Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux, ed. by John Bowen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 485. 56 Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, p. 244. 57 Trollope, The Small House, pp. 555–6. This passage closely parallels a similar reflection in An Autobiography. 58 Trollope, The Way We Live Now, p. 154. 59 Trollope, The Small House, p. 556. 60 Trollope, The Duke’s Children, p. 360. 61 Trollope, The Duke’s Children, p. 361. 62 Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, ed. by Stephen Wall (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 480–81. 63 Vavsor’s difference and deviancy as an adolescent are treated more fully in Chapter 6. 64 Tamara S. Wagner, ‘Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel: Making Stock-Market Villains and New Paper Fictions’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 36 (2008), pp. 21–40 (p. 32). 65 Audrey Jaffe, ‘Trollope in the Stock Market: Irrational Exuberance and The Prime Minister’, Victorian Studies, 45.1 (2002), pp. 43–64 (p. 49). 66 Jaffe, ‘Trollope in the Stock Market’, p. 53. 67 Trollope, The Duke’s Children, pp. 517–8. 68 Trollope The Duke’s Children, p. 517. 69 Trollope, The Duke’s Children, p. 518. 70 Trollope, The Three Clerks, pp. 394–5. 71 Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 131; Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 148; p. 137. 72 Trollope, The Three Clerks, p. 88; p. 82. 73 Trollope, The Small House, pp. 146–7. 74 Trollope, The Duke’s Children, p. 516.

5 The language of filial dialogue in Meredith

George Meredith’s novel The Adventures of Harry Richmond, ­initially serialised in the Cornhill Magazine in 1870–1, traces ‘the gradual changes of the growing Harry, in his manner of regarding his father and the world.’1 This summary of the book, in Meredith’s words, highlights the young man Harry Richmond’s central role in the narrative, and it explicitly privileges ‘his manner of regarding his father’, thereby emphasising the filial relationship between Harry and his father Richmond Roy above the youth’s ‘manner of regarding […] the world’ at large. Roy figures prominently in the first-person narrative of Harry’s adolescence, but Harry’s attitudes towards his father are complex: At times he appeared to me a commanding phantasm […] but within range of his eye and voice the reality of him grew overpowering. It seduced me, and, despite reason, I began to feel warm under his compliments. He was like wine. Gaiety sprang under his feet. Sitting at my window I thirsted to see him when he was out of sight, and had touches of the passion of my boyhood. […] Oh for the choice of having only a little of him, instead of having him on my heart! The unfilial wish attacked me frequently: he could be, and was, so ravishing to strangers and light acquaintances. Did by chance a likeness exist between us? My sick fancy rushed to the Belthams for a denial. There did, of some sort, I knew[.]2 Harry reflects at length, here and at other points in the novel, on his father’s significance to him. At times Roy’s presence in the text looms larger than Harry’s own, almost eclipsing the young man, as the father ‘grew overpowering’. Roy inspires in his son fascination and ‘passion’; he makes him ‘feel warm’. At the same time, Harry rejects ‘having him on my heart’, repulsed by the idea that ‘a likeness [might] exist between us’. The language used here indicates Harry’s conflicting emotions about his father – Roy is both bewitching and distasteful. In the almost desperate bond that emerges between the two men, there is something transgressive. The hold that Roy wields over his son is unhealthy in its devouring force, so that although there appears to be affection felt between the

140  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith two, their relationship is also corrosive. Harry has an ‘unfilial wish’ to distance himself from his father and all but disown him as kin (by appealing to his maternal ‘Beltham’ forebears). There is also anxiety here about the corrupting influence of his father, in whose presence the young man is willing to objectify himself: He ‘seduced me […] despite reason’, Harry realises. His reaction to his father is physical as well as emotional, revealed via an alluring, almost libidinous account of physiological response, in which the young man ‘feels warm’ at his father’s compliments, ‘thirsts to see him when he was out of sight’, is excited to ‘passion’, and recognises that he is ‘overpower[ed]’ and ‘seduced’ by his father’s ‘ravishing’ authority. While Harry’s relationship with his father can clearly be damaging and consuming, their obsessive bond informs Harry’s development throughout the novel. As much as he resents his father’s excitable influence, he also learns to feel pity for the ‘commanding phantasm’, and to feel caution at the ‘hot-bed of fruitless adventure, tricksy precepts, and wisdom turned imp, in which my father had again planted me’.3 Growing up, for Harry, becomes a tortuous process of learning to manage his father. Meredith’s fiction illustrates numerous instances in which a young man must learn to both respect and deflect paternal authority. As young men such as Richard Feverel in The Ordeal, Wilfrid Pole in Sandra Belloni, and Edward Blancove of Rhoda Fleming mature, they attempt to assert their independence from the paterfamilias in order to establish their own masculine identity – with variable success. The father figure is therefore central to the development of such characters. Their youthful experience is often a reaction to the performances of paternity that they witness, and which they either perpetuate or reject. The identities of father and son are mutually constituted, revealed by an ongoing dialogue in Meredith’s writing about their respective roles. Victorian fatherhood, a concept dominated by middle-class ideologies and discourses, was seen to offer opportunities for the demonstration of moral manliness and the responsibility to impart similar values to the next generation, in whom the father would instil the same qualities: generosity, respectfulness, modesty, natural authority, energy, discipline, knowledge, valour, industry, self-reliance, and honesty. Despite the well-documented cult of motherhood developing in the nineteenth century, which privileged the role of the mother, the transmission of idealised masculine virtues was also viewed by many as an invaluable process.4 There was therefore a weight of cultural pressure and expectation on both the father figure and, of course, the male youth whom he had in his charge. Victorian perceptions of paternalism were founded on a sense of responsibility to safeguard the success of the future generation, and on such continuation as its own partial reward. These attributes would devolve to familial, as well as national, security and prosperity in a patriarchal society.

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  141 As well as the social obligations of fatherhood, however, the affective ties between father and son were also assumed to offer emotional recompense, as the bond provided exclusive opportunities for expressions of warmth, tenderness, and supportive affection. The demanding expectations that a father fulfil all of these responsibilities simultaneously, however, led to Victorian fatherhood emerging as a contested cultural site of masculinity and authority, as affectionate care for youth must be juggled with paternal discipline. The significance of the fatherly role is evident in the numerous pamphlets and books of advice literature from father-figure to son, in which the guidance of the elder, and the affective relationship between the two, are often explicitly highlighted. 5 The cultural focus on the father-son relationship – its difficulties and ­pleasures  – is similarly evident in fiction. Novelists such as Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, through memorable father-figures such as Mr. Dombey, Joe Gargery, Colonel Newcome and Mr. Tulliver, provided the mid-Victorian reader with illustrations of this relationship that could inform and mould contemporary understandings of paternal responsibility. The complexities of this relationship are often also at the forefront of George Meredith’s novels.6 In fact, two of his works are explicit in offering the reader portraits of filial experience and paternal practice: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, subtitled ‘A History of Father and Son’, and The Adventures of Harry Richmond, which in its second edition contained the statement ‘The Story Is Laid in the Foundation of a Young Man’s Love for his Father’ after the title page.7 His fictional fathers are myriad, veering from the tyrannical and autocratic to the feeble and ineffectual, and they exhibit a range of paternal styles and masculine types held aloft for inspection and interrogation. The young men in these novels must contend with both ineptitude and exacting demands from their fathers, in the attempts to forge their own separate identity. These youths nonetheless remain informed by the impact of their fathers, whether by their absence or overbearing interference. The incidence of paternal management is often integral to the young man’s development and to his masculine identification and performance.

The problems of paternity in Meredith’s fiction Monica Mannheimer, in her study of the inter-generational relations in Meredith’s novels, observes that ‘a right relationship between father and son [is] a basic moral obligation.’8 The forging of this bond, however, presented difficulties for Meredith’s fictional characters. Indeed ­Meredith, in his own life as a father to two sons and a daughter, was conscious of the responsibilities of a father to his child, although also keenly aware that fostering and maintaining a healthy or ‘right relationship’ sometimes escaped even the best intentions. For example, the

142  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith author’s relationship with his eldest son, Arthur, became increasingly difficult. In writing to Arthur after the recent death of Meredith’s friend Tom Taylor, he expresses regret at his own lack of communication with his eldest son (they had not seen one another for nine years), and apportions blame to himself as the father: We have been long estranged, my dear boy, and I awake from it with a shock that wrings me. The elder should be the first to break through such divisions for he knows best the tenure and the nature of life. But our last parting gave me the idea that you did not care for me; and further, I am so driven by work that I do not contend with misapprehension of me, or with disregard, but have the habit of taking it from all alike, as a cab-horse takes the whip. […] I shall hope to hear from you soon.9 It is apparent that Meredith, as father, recognises his responsibility to cultivate a ‘right relationship’ with Arthur, and to make the first move towards reconciliation given that they are ‘long estranged’ and he is ‘the elder’. It is also clear here that Meredith’s ‘shock’ at their division raises parallel thoughts about absence, loss, and his own mortality, perhaps also brought about by remembering his deceased friend Taylor and so thinking of Arthur by extension, for as the ‘elder’, ‘he knows best the tenure and nature of life’. This epistle reveals some assumptions about fatherhood and its obligations. Meredith acknowledges here his own fault, and in addressing Arthur as ‘my dear boy’ he is adopting the language of loving fatherhood. The letter is not only a kind of apology, however, but also an instruction and supplication to his son: ‘I shall hope to hear from you soon’. He displays some discomfort at the awkwardness that has grown between them, distressed at ‘the idea that you did not care for me’, yet also anxious to remain in a position of authority by denying any vulnerability in his statement that ‘I do not contend with misapprehension of me, or with disregard’. This concern touches on intersecting discourses about fatherhood and masculinity. His sense of failure appears to refer to himself as both father and writer. As ­A rthur’s father he has been guilty of paternal neglect, and as a writer he creates fiction ‘for a public that does not care for my work’.10 This letter draws on his earlier fondness and concern for Arthur, as well as employing the affectionate and sentimental emotion that could be considered, on the one hand, as natural, instinctive fatherly feeling, and on the other hand a more conscious effort to perform emotive paternity. His defence, that ‘our last parting gave me the idea that you did not care for me’ suggests the latter. Still, such expressions, coupled with Meredith’s guilt at being ‘so driven by work’ that he has allowed the rift to develop, suggest that he was aware of the social and cultural expectations of fatherhood, and recognised the importance of forging a ‘right relationship’ with his son.

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  143 What becomes clear through reading Meredith’s fiction, as well as his own admission of neglect in the letter above to Arthur, is that in forging a ‘right relationship’ between father and son, affection and love by themselves are entirely insufficient. In the picaresque Bildungsroman The Adventures of Harry Richmond, Harry’s youthful development occurs as he grows up the heir of his wealthy grandfather Squire Beltham. In constant battle with his grandfather over Harry’s upbringing and future is his father Richmond Roy. Harry struggles to accommodate both father-figures. From a young age, he evidently finds his father fascinating and beguiling, a charming rogue, full of aspirations, a carnivalesque figure of romantic history, excitement, and intrigue. From the beginning of the narrative, however, Richmond Roy’s inability to provide stability and to instil in Harry a realistic view of the world outweighs his paternal love. In fact, Roy’s desperate, ‘dangerous devotion’ to his son actually damages Harry and thwarts his development as a young man.11 Excessive ‘devotion’ to a child compromises, in Harry Richmond, Roy’s ability to guide and provide for his son, and this imbalance detracts from Roy’s paternal identity. Such excess of fatherly emotion, instead, unmans the idealistic Richmond Roy. Throughout the text, Roy’s difference as a father is insistently repeated, and his failure to provide appropriately for Harry is made increasingly clear in spite of his obvious affection. Although initially described as ‘my best friend and only true companion, besides […] being my hero’, Roy is depicted by Harry as, variously, a ‘figure of bronze’, ‘totally of a different construction from other men’, ‘a new creature’, ‘utterly deluded’, and ‘a profound schemer’.12 Harry reflects, towards the conclusion of the novel, ‘He figured in my apprehensive imagination as an engine more than an individual’, and such descriptions combine to withhold a practical, valuable, energetic masculine identity from Roy as his father, creating an identity that is, instead, disengaged and mechanical. Eventually, Roy can no longer be viewed by either Harry or the reader as fulfilling a proper paternal role. He refers to himself as a ‘wreck of a father’, and ‘broken’, finally relinquishing his real paternal responsibilities to Squire Beltham.13 Meredith delineates the struggles that Harry, as a son and a young man, must face not only in coming to some understanding of his father but also in trying to carve out a social identity that is distinct from his parent. In Meredith’s fiction, acting as a father to male youth offers the potential for reciprocal emotional satisfaction and pride, but more frequently it actually involves insecurity and jeopardises masculine self-assurance and solidarity. Despite often strenuous efforts, fathers in these novels do not find fatherhood an experience of affirmation, a confirmation of their masculine authority and social status; rather, in performing the role of father, men such as Richmond Roy, or Sir Austin Feverel and Samuel Bolton Pole in other novels, and are repeatedly diminished in the eyes of their children over the course of the respective narratives. If, as Valerie

144  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith Sanders suggests ‘Paternity makes men vulnerable as well as affirming their virility’, then the exposed position of the father in ­Meredith’s work may figure as a reaction to the maturation and development of the son.14 Expectations of fathering involve a high degree of support and encouragement as well as discipline for youthful charges, although such a demand is contradictory. On the one hand, a father figure should be a significant presence in a young man’s life, and act as a role model or guide. On the other, some degree of absence and paternal deficiency seems necessary to enable masculine advancement in the adolescent. John Tosh has suggested that, in the Victorian period, an affiliation with the home is central to realising masculine identity, and is one of the ways in which middle-class masculinity is understood and affirmed: The place of the home in bourgeois culture could be summed up by the proposition that only at home could a man be truly and authentically himself. While the workplace and the city crippled his moral sense and distorted his human relationships, home gave play to feelings of nurture, love and companionship, as well as “natural” forms of authority and deference; it nourished the whole man.15 If, as Tosh claims, ‘only at home could a man be truly and authentically himself’, because the domestic environment ‘natural[ised]’ paternal authority and ‘nourished the whole man’, then domestic spaces should play a crucial role in the idealisation of fatherhood. The pervasive gendering of home as the province of women in the nineteenth century, however, leaves little room for a corresponding role for men. This implicitly undermines the husband’s or father’s traditional role as head of the household. Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers underline the responsibilities of fatherhood in terms of involvement with or absence from domestic duties: The father must be absent enough to provide, to represent his family in public settings, to support his country’s mission abroad, and to afford the mother her ascribed role as primary influence and educator, but present enough to participate in, and benefit from, the domestic rituals, duties and pleasures that were understood as formative of personal, civic – and civilian – virtue.16 The conflicting demands and expectations of fatherhood – to be both absent and present, to be guide and protector and to allow the mother to be the ‘primary influence’, to be both affectionate playmate and to demand respect and authority – are difficult to reconcile, and indicate confusion in the Victorian period about the proper role of a good father both within and beyond the home. In Meredith’s fiction, however, fathers do tend to be disassociated with the home in some way. We rarely witness, for example, Edward or

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  145 Algernon Blancove at their father’s residences in Rhoda Fleming, and Samuel Pole in Sandra Belloni is frequently in London. Even for those fathers and other paternal figures who remain in a stable domestic setting such as Sir Austin Feverel or Squire Beltham, the absence of a mother and siblings conspire to suggest an unconventional approximation of familial security. In Meredith’s novels the kinship model of the idealised family unit, consisting of a mother, father, and siblings in addition to other close relatives, is revealed as both impractical and unrealistic. With the exception of Evan Harrington, all of the young male protagonists are without a mother for most if not all of the narratives, and several of these fathers hold the ambiguous position of being predominantly absent (being either at a remove from the immediate vicinity, or even dead) while exerting an inescapable influence over their sons (such as Richmond Roy, or even Samuel Pole). These incomplete, ‘transnormative’ family structures created in each novel are inevitably revealed to be fundamentally flawed through lack of emotional cohesion or sympathy, and irredeemably asymmetrical.17 Rather than the position of the young man being explicitly relative to the home as a place of ‘nurture’ or a site for the exertion of parental authority, Meredith’s fiction often focuses on the relative situation of the father beyond the domicile. Home is not a stable, nourishing environment even when it does figure largely. Houses such as Riversley in Harry Richmond, Brookfield in Sandra Belloni, and ­Raynham Abbey in The Ordeal are all spaces in which the authority of the father-figure is either corrosively omnipresent or problematically absent. Meredith’s evident interest in the problems of the father-son relationship, and in the processes of fathering, may also be seen to correspond with his own uncomfortable family arrangements. Meredith’s understanding of fatherhood in his novels is inextricably bound up with his perception of marriage and being a husband, and these concerns echo between his writing and his own life. His first marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, which saw the birth of Arthur as the only living child, disintegrated when she left him for Henry Wallis. His second marriage to Marie Vulliamy in 1863, while apparently happy, strained the relationship between young Arthur and his father. In his fiction, Meredith similarly associates husbanding with fathering in unified roles. In Evan Harrington the Great Mel’s debts post-mortem, for example, reflect his incapacity for responsible husbandhood as they simultaneously expose his deficiencies as a father and provider to his son. Fathering as an anticipated extension of husbandhood becomes a means of publicly demonstrating one’s masculinity, not simply in terms of sexual virility, but as a manifestation of patriarchal values. As the responsibilities of being a father, in the novels, tend to reflect corresponding duties in marriage, both are, as two primary and respectable masculine roles established for men in Victorian society, invariably tied up with questions about manliness.

146  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith Fathers in Meredith’s novels are frequently widowers, which isolates the father-son relationship for attention. Broughton and Rogers summarise the significance of the widowed father at the time that Meredith was writing: Lone fatherhood, usually precipitated by the death of a spouse, was a common predicament in the nineteenth century, one that highlighted the structural fragility of divisions of labour within the household, and forced individuals to reconsider the role of father as caregiver.18 The representations of a man as a father, and a man as a husband, are often associated in these novels with loss and death. Perhaps in part a reflection of Meredith’s early experiences as an estranged husband and ‘lone father’, such positions, which consider fatherhood as indicative of alienation, are recurrent in his fiction. In wider society, too, in cases of divorce or marital separation, fathers still retained many privileges in child custody even after the 1839 Custody of Infants Act, and it was not until 1873 that parliament extended the presumption of maternal custody for children less than seven years old.19 The situation of ‘lone fatherhood’, then, was a further ‘common predicament in the nineteenth century.’ Critics of The Ordeal have viewed the creation of the System as Sir Austin’s way of vindicating himself in the eyes of the world after the failure of his marriage. 20 This creates a firm association between fatherhood and husbandhood, and suggests that, for Sir Austin, caring for his son is both a painful continuation of his legal and moral duties as a (forsaken) husband, and also a means of supplanting the love he had felt for his wife: After five years of Marriage, and twelve of Friendship, Sir Austin was left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a little baby-boy in a cradle. […] The woman he could not forgive. 21 Sir Austin rejects the wife who has wounded him, and instead transfers his love to the ‘little baby-boy’ who finds himself the recipient of the prescriptive, protective education of the System devised by his father. The System, apparently based on theoretical principles of moral physiology promoted by mid-Victorian medical practitioners such as William ­Acton, is in fact a warped response to the elopement of Richard’s mother with his erstwhile friend (in a oft-mentioned parallel to Meredith’s own actual marital situation). Sally Shuttleworth has noted that, as a result of Meredith’s own domestic abandonment by his wife, his ‘suspicions of womankind were so strong that he decided to take the very unusual step of having a male nurse for his child’. 22 The insistence on male provision of care in Meredith’s fiction, however, does not necessarily indicate a

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  147 preferential respect for male influence. The eventual collapse of these isolated father figures – particularly those whose marital relations have been unsuccessful, such as Sir Austin and Richmond Roy – might also indicate inadequacy or deficiency in manliness. Paternal responsibility is therefore not viewed in these texts as the ameliorative solution to maternal absence, or as a defiant triumph of male solidarity and dynamism over female desertion. In having to perform as a single parent these father figures effectively fail in their duty of care, as they have also publicly failed to maintain domestic harmony in their estrangement from each boy’s mother. In his insistent reproduction of ‘lone fatherhood’, however, Meredith’s fiction is predisposed to avoid the consideration of parental responsibility as a dual-gendered exercise. The development of the child – and the son in particular – is therefore brought into focus in terms of explicitly patrilineal descent. In The Egoist, this uncomfortably ­gender-biased view of procreation is developed even further, to grotesque proportions that eventually dispense with sex and gender altogether. Sir ­Willoughby, whose family is described as a ‘House’ or ‘tree’, announces his ­desire for Constantia Durham as his wife in terms of asexual, animal procreation:23 He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex’s eyes first of all men.24 Willoughby’s selfish fantasy of Constantia’s desexualisation and birth ‘out of cloistral purity’ places him in a godlike position ‘first of all men’, as husband, and also as both father and mother. 25 In his desire to ­imprint himself onto Constantia, whom he wished to be ‘completely enclosed before he tapped the shell’, Willoughby Patterne’s desire is as much to create another version of himself in the egoistic Patterne pattern, to become the sire of Constantia’s consciousness, as it is to be ‘first of all men’ and to find his mate untouched and unsoiled by other male interest. Sir Willoughby evinces a perverted desire to possess godlike ability in his proposed generation of a wife out of his own image. ‘He wanted her simply to be material in his hands for him to mould her; he had no other thought’. 26 Willoughby’s impulse is absolutely possessive, wishing to be both lover and father ‘to mould’ his future mate. His expectations of Constantia or Clara (and later Laetitia), to relinquish themselves up to his progenital authority, is repeated with young Crossjay, the son of his cousin Captain Patterne, whom he fosters. Not only does Willoughby impose himself between the biological father and his son when he claims ‘I think I am to be approved for desiring to make a better gentleman of the son than I behold in the father’, he literally absorbs himself into the

148  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith paternal role, attempting to usurp the position at the expense of any other influence: But if I take him, I claim undisputed sway over him. I cannot make a gentleman of the fellow if I am to compete with this person and that. In fine, he must look up to me, he must have one model. 27 What Willoughby proposes here is another version of Sir Austin’s System, by means of which young Richard Feverel is expected to emerge as ‘a boy who has no voice but mine’.28 In their performances of coercive paternity, Willoughby and Sir Austin dispense with the need for a feminine perspective. Fatherhood here becomes a struggle for absolute influence; feminine input, rather than possessing complementary value to the father’s voice, is considered by each of these men as little more than ‘having to compete with this person and that’, so that dual-­gendered parenting becomes combative and competitive, and female input a presumptive irritation. Such distortion of received ideals of what might be considered as the fatherly role is in part due to the relative alienation of these characters from ordinary social inclusion. In conversation with his friend and secretary Vernon Whitford, Willoughby draws on his male authority as head of the family to state: Crossjay doesn’t bear your name. He bears mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice in the settlement of his career. And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval of a young man is the best certificate for his chances in life. 29 Vernon’s caustic reply, that Crossjay, son of the naval marine, is in his view ‘fit neither for the University nor the drawing-room’, attacks ­Willoughby’s aristocratic stance. Willoughby’s power here is vested in him by virtue of his class, his name, and his stratified values that only acknowledge ‘drawing-room approval’ as the yardstick of success. In comparison, Vernon reminds Willoughby of Crossjay’s much more humble origins, suggesting that although it may lack refinement and gentility, fighting for his country offers an important alternative for the boy. This much more practical image of masculine labour and endeavour is indeed a more likely prospect for Crossjay, as noted by Stephanie Green, who views Crossjay as ‘a new generation of the British adventurer’. 30 Rather than becoming, in Vernon’s words, ‘one idle lout the more’, Crossjay could find useful employment following in his heroic, albeit lower-class, father’s footsteps. 31 He would no longer be beholden to and under the doubtful auspices of the capricious, feudal Sir Willoughby. In comparison with the eccentric, aristocratic father figures in M ­ eredith’s writing, men such as the yeoman farmer Jonathan Eccles in Rhoda Fleming

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  149 offer a much more natural, less cultivated approach to fatherhood. Paternity instead becomes a matter of natural response rather than a considered, analytical exercise or experiment. Although Jonathan Eccles has fallen out with his son Robert, their relationship remains less artificially constructed. In their first meeting after Robert’s recursion from the army, the farmer remains affronted at his son’s apparent rejection of the agricultural livelihood in which he has taken such pride. Nonetheless, the youth is allowed to cross the threshold back into the family home, ‘assuming his privilege to enter’.32 Their forthright exchanges indicate affection and loyalty on both sides, even if Jonathan claims disappointment in his son’s choice of career: “Give me your hand first,” – Robert put his own out humbly. “I’ll be hanged if I do,” said Jonathan firmly. “Bed and board you shall have while I’m alive, and a glass to look at yourself in; but my hand’s for decent beasts.” […] “Look here, sir; I want to make use of you, so I’ll go in.” “Of course you do,” returned Jonathan, not a whit displeased by his son’s bluntness; “what else is a father good for?” […] Robert passed into the house in advance of his father, whom he quite understood and appreciated. There was plenty of paternal love for him, and a hearty smack of the hand, and the inheritance of the farm, when he turned into the right way. Meantime Jonathan was ready to fulfil his parental responsibility, by sheltering, feeding, and not publicly abusing his offspring, […] as it was, Jonathan submitted to the infliction gravely.33 Jonathan Eccles demonstrates a firm and honest attachment to his son, for whom he has ‘plenty of paternal love’ tempered by frustration. Robert’s relationship with his father therefore seems more secure and straightforward than Richard’s with Sir Austin or Sir Willoughby’s with young Crossjay. His father is both patient and more accepting than those other Meredithian fathers who become either actively disinterested or obsessively controlling over the actions and behaviour of their charges.

Styles of paternity in Meredith In Meredith’s work, as in the wider cultural context of Victorian ­Britain, no single unified vision of fatherhood emerges. It is constructed in different ways, and fathering is therefore an activity and relationship ­performed variously across the novels. Over the course of each narrative these young men encounter their fathers as masculine role models, as teachers, as disciplinarians, as friends, and even as dependents or rivals. In doing so, each text suggests, they respond to their fathers in the formation of their own style of masculinity, as they ‘need to create their own identity in rejection of their fathers’. 34 In particular, however,

150  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith Meredith is fascinated by the ways in which fathers and sons relate to one another when the elder man refuses to relinquish authority as the child matures into adulthood. In order to move toward an adult, masculine identity, Meredith’s young men must in some capacity rise above their fathers, to take over their role as head of the household, and to form an assertive, forceful personality that is no longer submissively dependent on these paternal figures. J. H. Buckley has suggested of Harry Richmond that, ‘Throughout his growth he is slowly defined by his attitude toward each [his father and grandfather] in turn, and he does not reach his maturity till he can finally assert his independence of both’. 35 Harry must attempt to ‘assert his independence’ from Beltham and Roy in order to stake his legitimate place among the rising generation. At the conclusion of The Adventures of Harry Richmond, it is Harry’s father’s mismanagement and lack of control that are consumed in the same flames that burn both the house and Roy himself, extinguishing the old order so that Harry and Janet may move forward into a new life together. Jacqueline Banerjee similarly suggests that ‘As in Richard Feverel, the struggle at [the novel’s] heart is simply to escape paternal influence’, but she further contends that ‘this time the goal is much more successfully achieved’. 36 Harry’s implicit claim for masculine self-government, however, is only achieved through the death of his grandfather, and then the death of his father in a fire at Riversley Grange, rather than through his own active efforts towards achieving autonomy. Neil Roberts iterates the point that ‘Harry, the character, at the end, no longer the point of tension between two powerful voices, seems drained of substance’, and concludes that ‘Meredith felt it necessary to recapitulate the conflict between Roy and Beltham, this time destroying Roy literally and Beltham symbolically’. 37 The conflagration, then, obliterates the literal presence of both father figures. However, rather than providing a point of retributive, newfound authority for Harry (whose own narrative, of course, the novel is supposed to be, and whose bildung the reader has been invited to trace through his ‘adventures’), the young man emerges ‘drained of substance’ rather than liberated. This suggests that Harry, having been ‘the point of tension’ between two dominant voices of paternal influence, has in fact been damaged by the excess of paternal interest. Rather than overcoming symbolically his diminutive position towards Beltham and Roy by their sudden absence, Harry in fact has nothing left to narrate after these two vibrant personalities have been extinguished from the text. The last words of the novel, that Roy ‘was never seen again’, could be seen to promise the reader that Harry was finally free to flourish and thrive on his own terms. However, as Margaret Tarratt has observed, Harry seems woefully ‘innocent of personal aspiration’, and the novel ‘ends on an almost surreal note of uncertainty, leaving us with a sense that little has been established’. 38 The conclusion, rather than proclaiming Harry

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  151 as the rallying point for the new male generation, remains curiously silent on how he will fare when removed from the pressures exerted, and methods of management imposed on him, by Roy and Beltham. Harry, absent when his grandfather dies and when Riversley Grange burns down, is clearly not the instigator of his release from their control over his life and choices. The statement that ‘He was never seen again’ is not symbolic of Harry’s newfound freedom and potential for self-assertion; it is the opposite, as the death of his “fathers” signifies a termination of Harry’s story and development. The struggle between youth and age may be seen as emblematic of the way that the young men of Meredith’s novels must in some way triumph over the paternal figures in authority over them, in order to successfully inhabit autonomous male identities. Once the young man leaves home, achieves majority, or finds a wife, the paternal role should necessarily be redefined, to accommodate a new social equality between them as men. The young adolescent hero also, at the close of the novel, frequently becomes a father himself with all its attendant anxieties about status, role, and masculine identification. In their enactment of the paternal role, however, they often seem to replicate in their behaviour the practices that their own fathers have maintained, rather than viewing the introduction of their progeny as an opportunity to break away from the attitudes, values and actions of the previous generation. Richard Feverel is left a single father who ‘will never be what he promised’ at the conclusion of The Ordeal; Nevil in Beauchamp’s Career also becomes a father, only to sacrifice himself in a heroic rescue attempt, thereby leaving his son fatherless in the same way that his own narrative began. 39 While Meredith seems to indicate that a healthy adolescence should entail the ‘mount[ing of] a challenge’, the extent to which his characters do ‘transfer […] power to the succeeding generation’ is limited, and does not offer a healthy prognosis for the straightforward reproduction of masculinity.40 This process or transaction therefore becomes an important moment of contest in the formation and expression of masculine power. The subjects of inheritance, variation and adaptation were, of course, contextually relevant to Meredith’s original readership. Interest in evolutionary theory and the consequences of such scientific thought had become public with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, and through his 1871 treatise The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, these theories were applied specifically to the human race and made directly relevant to society. In The Egoist, the relationship between father and son is illustrated in similarly reproductive or biological terms, so that Meredith’s vision of paternity responds in part to such evolutionary debates. His depiction of the transmission of inherited characteristics, and of youthful adaptation or

152  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith familial ‘preservation’ in ‘the struggle for life’, are therefore situated in a wider scientific framework. As Claudia Nelson has observed: The burning question of the age was that of heredity; and if children simply recapitulated the characteristics of their forbears near or remote, parental influence became more or less trivial once the children had left the womb. […] For Darwin’s heirs family had to give way to lineage or race.41 Meredith’s novel The Egoist engages in the debate about the impact of Darwinian theory, and ideas about ‘heredity’, ‘lineage and race’ on Victorian perceptions of family and paternity. It is deliberately ironic, however, that the specimen held up for evolutionary scrutiny is Sir ­Willoughby, by whom Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selection are appropriated and then abused. Willoughby mistakenly reinterprets the ‘burning question of the age’ as a burning question of his own significance, and a justification for his own selfishness in the guise of a grand evolutionary ‘struggle’ and triumph: Willoughby Patterne’s egoism extends from himself to his family line: just as he regards his own person as the origin and focus of all thought to those around him, so that his view of his genealogy is that of a line originating with himself and continuing in a line of small copies or patterns of himself.42 Placing himself as the core of the evolutionary process, and as ‘the origin and focus of all thought’, Sir Willoughby assesses his own significance as the current head of the House of Patterne as a fixed point, from which his forebears and descendants radiate backwards and forwards from himself at the centre. Willoughby anchors himself between history and posterity. He frequently positions himself, and narrates his understanding of his family and lineage, in false evolutionary terms. ­Meredith depicts Willoughby as understanding his duty of marriage to Clara and, subsequently, fatherhood and posterity, as reduced to a genetic and genealogical necessity: ‘His grand hereditary desire to transmit his estates, wealth and name to a solid posterity […] attached him desperately to her splendid healthiness’.43 Although Willoughby acknowledges the literal need for a “mate” in order to fulfil his procreative duties, he also develops a more disturbing, mythical view of the process of egoistic self-creating fatherhood. Carolyn Williams has commented of Willoughby: His idea of reproduction is aesthetic, unnatural, sterile. It is by definition unfruitful, for it represents not a natural sexual union but a mystical, hermaphroditic unity, sterile for lack of differentiation.44

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  153 Willoughby’s vision of himself is both self-perpetuating and abortive, as he displays ‘hermaphroditic unity’ by claiming of himself the roles of both father and son. The effect of this egoism is that Willoughby’s vision of himself as both father and son, as self-created and self-creating, offers a correspondingly fraught and unbalanced view of male adolescence and Victorian paternity. In a way, Willoughby’s potential growth is inevitably stunted, as full independence can never be achieved if the father’s authority cannot be replaced or challenged by the son’s development of his own distinct identity: The Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the son; they reciprocate affection, through the closest of ties […] Absorbed in their great example of devotion do they not think of you. They are beautiful. Yet it is most true that the younger has the passions of youth: whereof will come division between them; and this is a tragic state. […] That the son should bewail his fate were a dishonour to the sire. He reverenced, and submitted.45 In Willoughby, as an egoist, the two roles of father and son are experienced simultaneously and self-reflexively, so that they are mutually dependent as ‘the elemental reconstituted’.46 Each must ‘reverence’ and ‘submit’ to the other. As Willoughby had earlier claimed to Laetitia, ‘There can be no medium: not with me. I give all, I claim all. As I am absorbed, so must I absorb’.47 Consequentially, Willoughby is the dual product of his own perverted creation, as both ‘father’ and ‘son’ together. He must cultivate himself in both roles of this cyclical relationship in which ‘there can be no medium’ in his love for himself. Fathering in Meredith is often a form of performance, and, as such, it forms a conscious part of masculine self-display.48 Placing the figure of the father at the forefront of various masculine types, however, is not without its complications in the novels. The father-figure in Meredith can be reluctant to cede power to the next generation. This is evident, for example, in Meredith’s depiction of Mr. Samuel Pole in Sandra Belloni, father to Wilfrid and his three sisters, who dreams of great marriages for his offspring to wealth and status in order to cement his own social and financial position. He publicly cites his faith in primogeniture and patrilineal entail which, in his own words, ‘knits the family bond [… and] makes the trunk of the tree firm’.49 Samuel Pole, however, a prosperous City merchant, fraudulently extends himself beyond his financial means, involving the whole family in a scandal which is revealed fully in the final chapters. Rather than ensuring that ‘the trunk of the tree’ remains ‘firm’, Pole himself is guilty of its collapse. Before the denouement of the novel Mr. Pole demonstrates little desire to relinquish his (usually financial) influence over his children. When his true economic difficulties

154  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith threaten exposure, however, Mr. Pole’s authority disintegrates. He is found ‘gasping in his chair […] in a dangerous state’, and ‘for the first time in his life Wilfrid perceived that he had become an old man’ as ‘a nervous frenzy seemed to take possession of him’.50 As Mr. Pole’s financial stability and mental equilibrium unravel, so does his authority over his children, despite his efforts to retain it. The difficulties presented to male youth – in particular by fathers who are unwilling to relinquish full control over their offspring – are also apparent in the history of Purcell Barrett in the same novel. Mr. ­Barrett thinks of himself as ‘under a peculiarly malign shadow’ due to his father’s insane mania ‘verging to insanity from caprice’ through which, like Sir Austin Feverel, he ‘sought to obliterate [his wife] utterly’ from both his own and his son’s lives.51 Purcell ‘had grown up with ideas of filial duty perplexed, and with a fitful love for either [his mother or father], that was not attachment’.52 This ‘la[id] the foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love’, as he ‘had been dead-beaten from his boyhood’. 53 Purcell’s ‘sentimental mind’, however, remains under the influence of his father to such an extent that, when it seems that Cornelia Pole will not marry him, he finds comfort only in the fact that ‘he had [his life] at his own disposal’, and ends by committing suicide. 54 In ascribing his father’s madness ‘to the Fates by whom he was persecuted’, Purcell extends this providential lack of personal responsibility to his own death. Rather than committing himself to decisive action, Purcell withdraws only one pistol from a case of two in which one is primed and the other unloaded. His reluctance to commit to either death or life represents not only his sentimental selfishness, but also perhaps his filial oppression: ruled over in his childhood by an unstable father whose condition was a result of ‘the Fates’, his final act was one in which he too elected to relinquish control to providence. In Meredith’s fiction, the extent to which a father’s influence may prove detrimental for the adolescent is made especially transparent in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Sir Austin, who fixes himself ‘in a radiating centre of intuition’, is explicit in his desire to remain of primary importance not only throughout but also beyond ­R ichard’s youthful development. 55 As Susan Payne has summarised, he ‘remains firmly in power throughout the book and moreover never demonstrates any desire to concede independent adult status to his son’. 56 This unwillingness to ‘concede’ Richard’s increasing maturity and independence is demonstrated in Sir Austin’s speech to the lawyer Mr. Thompson: “I find […] there are fathers who are content to be simply obeyed. Now I require not only that my son should obey, I would have him guiltless of the impulse to gainsay my wishes: feeling me in him stronger than his undeveloped nature”[.]57

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  155 Here the father extends his expectations of the paternal role so that Sir Austin anticipates moving beyond a position of supportive guidance ­ ichard’s towards his child, seeking an unusual level of filial dependence. R ‘undeveloped nature’ should have no ‘impulse’ of its own; every thought and desire should be governed by the father without conscious effort in an almost symbiotic yet also parasitic dialectic. Richard, under Sir Austin’s System of paternity, should not even be aware that the option to ‘gainsay [Sir Austin’s] wishes’ exists. While this imagined exclusivity in their relationship might be seen to demonstrate Sir Austin’s protectiveness over Richard’s welfare, it is detrimental to Richard’s ability for self-government as he matures. Under the guise of an excessive instinct to nurture, Sir Austin actually articulates a style of paternal dominance less concerned in its application with cherishing and defending the son from harm, and which is instead a process of intrusion into Richard’s adolescence that amounts to usurpation. Sally Shuttleworth observes of Sir Austin: His aim is not merely to replicate himself in another being, but actively to inhabit that person, as a form of animating spirit, or secular Holy Ghost. He wishes not merely to guide his Son, or even to instill in him his principles, but to take over his very sense of self, so that Richard becomes another expression of the Father. 58 Sir Austin’s attitude and behaviour, in his apparent desire that ‘­Richard becomes another expression of the Father’, create a father figure so powerful that his influence all but obliterates the son. In comparison to Victorian cultural expectations of paternity (as reproduced via advice literature), in which a father ought to act as guide to the son yet also actively encourage his subsequent independence, Sir Austin fails to fulfil his proper function. As a part of the adolescent project, male youth must exert itself to overcome the father’s ‘natural’ authority. The desire for this process, however, should be reciprocated by the father, who ought to recognise that part of his paternal role is to enable the young man to establish for himself a discrete identity. Sir Austin, contrary to such an ideal of fatherhood as facilitation, seeks to impose his own will onto Richard, such that the son’s own youth becomes the property of the father who has forcibly commandeered Richard’s emotional and psychological experiences. This can also be seen at a wider level, as Sir Austin anticipates (and therefore describes and reduces) Richard’s natural adolescent ‘impulse[s]’ into pre-ordained sections of permissible development such as the Blossoming Season and Magnetic Age, in which deviation from the father’s rules becomes unrecognisable. The prescriptiveness of this systematisation of adolescence is further made unassailable by young Richard as Sir Austin’s plotting of his progress emerges verbatim from the Pilgrim’s Scrip and Sir Austin’s notebook.

156  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith These are both patriarchal texts which seem to legitimise the information contained within them:59 In Sir Austin’s Note-Book was written: ‘Between Simple Boyhood, and Adolescence – the Blossoming Season – on the threshold of puberty, there is one unselfish hour: say, Spiritual Seedtime.’60 The Ordeal therefore becomes not just a young man’s struggle for adult autonomy; the narrative also dwells on Sir Austin’s masculine development as a father. In fact, Gisela Argyle, in reflecting on the novel as a Bildungsroman, observes that ‘the father inhibits the son’s organic individual Bildung and moreover, despite all professions of love, treats him as a means to his own end’.61 Sir Austin orchestrates his own form of education for his son, the System, on the assumption that, first, he himself has completed his bildung by surviving his own ordeal, and that, second, he will thus be able to coach his son Richard in a perfect life-experience: ‘to make this one Son of his, after a receipt of his own’.62 Sir Austin learns of his hubristic error in the last part of The Ordeal as, reconciling himself to Richard’s choice of bride, he finds his son such a product of the System that Richard’s false pride and misplaced sense of duty prompt him to a duel with Mountfalcon, preventing him from returning to his wife Lucy, and thereby causing her eventual death. The father’s bildung, then, lies parallel to Richard’s own, and the two are revealed as mutually dependent. The novel is not only a narrative of male adolescence, but it also engages explicitly in the exercise of paternity as a corresponding issue. Richard, it is hoped, will no longer continue to repeat his father’s mistakes. Until the close of the narrative, Sir Austin Feverel becomes in Meredith’s fiction an epitome of ‘pathological paternity’.63 His paternal dominance becomes so excessive that it emerges as disruptive intrusion in his son’s development; such perversion of natural fatherly instructiveness can also be recognised in Richmond Roy’s style of fatherhood. An egalitarian ideal of fraternal masculine bonding rarely appears to offer any real solution for fathers and sons in these texts (in comparison with the establishment of amicable homosocial friendships in Thackeray’s novels). The father-son relationship is intrinsically vertical, and there are few instances when this hierarchical structure adopts a more horizontal arrangement. This can only be achieved, in Meredith’s texts, when the young man is successful in his bid to break free from the father’s influence, yet it can only be accomplished if the youth’s revolution into independence is effected with sympathy, honesty and respect. Such is the case in Edward Blancove’s final footing with his father in Rhoda Fleming. In their meeting in Sir William’s library, we are told, ‘Edward had opened his heart, and his father had breathed some of the dry stock of wisdom on it’.64 Although his son’s news, that he had ‘deceived and wronged an under-bred girl of the humbler classes’ whom

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  157 he now intended to marry after a period of abandonment, is difficult for the father to reconcile, his reaction to his son’s explanation does not result in a termination of their association.65 Sir William has to adjust to a new understanding of Edward, who at least wishes to take adult responsibility for his behaviour. The elder man reflects: ‘There sat the son of his trust and his pride, whose sound and equal temperament, whose precocious worldly wit, whose precise and broad intelligence, had been the visionary comfort of his paternal days to come’.66 In Edward’s conviction about the very different life and career to which he will have to adjust, however, the prospect of a father-son relationship based on a more equal footing becomes possible. Rather than remaining beholden to his parent, or Sir William relying on his son for the ‘comfort of his paternal days to come’, both men must concede some power and authority to the other. Despite addressing his father respectfully as ‘sir’ throughout their conversation, this point is underscored by Edward’s explicit view of their equality, addressing his father as ‘him who must ever be my dearest friend. And few young men can say as much of one standing in the relation of father’.67 The two are able to establish, or at least to recognise the possibility of, a more democratic basis for their relationship. The son demonstrates with some sensitivity his claim to adult status independent from his father, while reaffirming their bond in his petition for Sir William’s blessing and statement of their capacity for friendship. In Meredith’s fiction, the relationship between father and son, then, is never easy and is rarely productive of a comfortable experience in which both parties flourish. Many of Meredith’s fictional narratives of male adolescence illustrate the experience as sexually fraught. After all, as many medical and moral commentators of the period acknowledged, the changes during puberty result in both important physiological changes and a developing consciousness of sexuality.68 As a part of Richard ­Feverel’s progressionary phases of adolescence, he must face the Magnetic Age: ‘the Age of violent attractions; when to hear mention of love is dangerous, and to see it, a communication of the disease’.69 This onset of new, erotic sensations, ‘the Age of violent attractions’ in which the romantic youth is inflamed and ‘intoxicated by anticipation’, ushers ­R ichard into a new form of self-awareness and gives him access to a sphere of sexual feeling that heralds his dawning manhood.70 The father’s invasive presence, in The Ordeal, is presented as an additional stress, and yet he is inextricably bound up in the process of stimulating the male youth’s sexual self-discovery. Richard first experiences this newfound awareness during a swimming match. Lady Blandish, one of his father’s female admirers, attends, wearing a bonnet that catches ­Richard’s eye as he is about to dive naked into the water so that he hesitates and loses the match. ‘The Bonnet’, the reader is informed, ‘caused his heart […] violent palpitations’; it ‘was etherealized, and reigned glorious mistress’.71 Richard’s romantic visions provide a sweet and imaginative

158  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith entrance into the murky, complex world of sexual fantasy. Despite the apparent innocence of Richard’s sexual recognition of ‘The Bonnet’, it is a key moment for the boy: the ripening blood has put spark to the imagination, and the earth is seen through rosy mists of a thousand fresh-awakened nameless and aimless desires, panting for bliss, and taking it as it comes […] The passions are then gambolling cubs; not the ravening gluttons they grow to. They have their teeth and their talons, but they neither tear nor bite.72 Richard’s heightened state of ‘fresh-awakened nameless and aimless desire’ is acknowledged by his father as a welcome ‘perfecting toward the flower of manhood’, and, accordingly, Sir Austin maintains an ‘incessant watchfulness’ over his boy in this new and impressionable state.73 ­R ichard’s ‘mooning propensities’, however, in fact mark a new era of division between the younger and older Feverels; Richard finds an outlet for his passion by turning to writing poetry, but this is stopped by Sir Austin as a possible ‘sign of degeneracy’ and precocity:74 Killing one’s child is a painful imposition. For a youth in his Blossoming Season, who fancies himself a poet, to be requested to destroy his first-born […] is a piece of abhorrent despotism, and Richard’s blossoms withered under it. […] Farewell all true confidence between Father and Son.75 Despite Sir Austin’s repressive interference, and the consequent breach in ‘all true confidence between Father and Son’, the ignition of Richard’s more active sexual consciousness is in fact sparked by his father’s own actions. Richard observes his father kissing Lady Blandish’s hand, which gives rise to an excess of restless adolescent longing: All night Richard tossed on his bed with his heart in a rapid canter, and his brain bestriding it, traversing the rich untasted world, and the great Realm of Mystery, from which he was now restrained no longer. Months he had wandered about the gates of the Bonnet, wondering, sighing, knocking at them, and getting neither admittance nor answer. He had the key now. His own father had given it him. […] The abashed Baronet dared not whisper to his soul what had thus distracted the youth. […] it was impossible for him to face his son for some time to come.76 For both Richard and his father this is an awkward moment, which neither is willing to acknowledge openly to the other. The result may be a breach in confidence, but the moment of Richard’s observation

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  159 and subsequent turmoil of sexual desire in fact also implies an uncomfortable parity between the two men. The sexual interest of both father and son is revealed to have been piqued by the same woman. This knowledge both repels the youth away from paternal influence and simultaneously reinforces the attraction to the father as a model to emulate. Richard’s sexual awakening is in part a response to Sir ­Austin’s kiss, as his father occupies the position which Richard wishes to inhabit. He desires what he perceives his father to possess, and wishes to occupy the same standing with the immediate object of his desire (Lady Blandish). His sexual interest is still plastic, however, and ­R ichard swiftly transfers his attraction to his cousin Clare after Ralph Morton’s misplaced confidence of his own feelings the next morning. Richard’s initial sexual awakening, then, is almost incestuously fertile; he is inspired first by his sexual jealousy at his father’s performance of courtship and then by his friend Ralph’s admission of admiration for Clare. In fixing his sights on their objects of interest, Richard effectively places himself in sexual competition with each. In this respectful mimicry he also adopts a potentially homoerotic stance through mutual desire, and raises in his father at least a tacit awareness of his youthful sexual virility.77 This transgressive affinity is further elucidated in Mrs. Berry’s later analysis of Sir Austin’s relationship with Richard, stating that ‘matrimony have come [sic] between him and his son’.78 Meredith’s fiction outlines the possibilities for erotic competition between father and son.

Speech and dialogue: communication and male adolescence Meredith’s discussions reproduced between father and son in particular, but also other conversations and modes of expression, reveal the ways that the rising generation of male youth sought to situate itself in wider narratives about masculinity. The ways that these young men identify with, rail against, dictate to, or submit to the instructions of their fathers and other characters in these novels, offer glimpses into the developing awareness of the male adolescent in his wider homosocial sphere. In The Egoist, each of the three main protagonists focus on Crossjay – his future prospects and education – as a subject for debate and a means of learning to articulate their own principles. The disagreement between Willoughby and Mr. Whitford about Crossjay’s upbringing is highlighted by Willoughby, who is ‘almost frolicsome’ towards the boy, and therefore provides contradistinction to Mr. Whitford’s ‘tutorly sharpness’.79 The division between their different styles of paternity is exacerbated by Willoughby in his desire to prove his superiority to Vernon in his paternalistic ability and his masculinity. Willoughby goes to some length to ridicule Vernon. In doing so, however, he also exposes himself.

160  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith The egoism of the young man is revealed in his monologistic lack of consideration for others when poking fun at his friend to Clara: “[Vernon’s] notion of wooing, I suspect, will be to treat the lady like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves for the word, and fly through the leaves for another word, and so get a sentence. Don’t frown at the poor old fellow, my Clara; some have the language on their tongues, and some have not. […] Vernon does not know how to speak – as we speak.”80 Willoughby dismisses Vernon on grounds of his linguistic hesitancy and thoughtfulness. His claim that ‘Vernon does not know how to speak’ reveals the importance of speech to the formation of identity and specifically to the demonstration of masculinity. Later in the novel, ­Willoughby complains that ‘Vernon did not talk sense to men’.81 As usual, however, Willoughby misses the point. He himself certainly possesses ‘the language on [his] tongue’, being well-versed in bringing the witty phrases of courtship and sparkling flirtation to bear on the ladies in his circle. He inadvertently reveals his own lack of manliness, however, by allocating to himself a glib loquacity in ‘hav[ing] the language on [his] tongue’. In comparison with Vernon, who ‘did not talk sense to men’, he unveils his ready capacity for empty rhetoric. Vernon’s manliness, and Clara’s appreciation of straightforward speech rather than Willoughby’s verbal acrobatics, are shown to the reader in their conversation together at the train station. Vernon speaks first: “I have no power whatever to persuade. I have not the ‘lady’s tongue’. My appeal is always to reason.” “It is a compliment. I loathe the ‘lady’s tongue’” [Clara responds].82 Willoughby’s attempt to dismiss Vernon as a threat to his own masculinity neglects to acknowledge the revelatory potential of both language and speech; his own speech exposes his monstrously large self-opinion as well as his artificial ‘lady’s tongue’. Communication through speech becomes, for Sir Willoughby, a ­litmus test of masculinity. Willoughby’s personal version of ideal gentlemanliness, however, is significantly different from the types of manliness valued by Clara, Vernon, Horace De Craye and even Crossjay. Willoughby’s display of hegemonic masculinity is revealed in his principles and practices that are designed to maintain male privilege, and his static, old-fashioned view is inimical to the mid-Victorian ideals of manliness propounded by contemporary writers such as Samuel Smiles, Charles Kingsley, or William Acton. This is unlike the socially conscious, more progressive Vernon, who is ready for ‘real talk’, could ‘read his master a lecture’, and is ‘quite equal to a philippic on women’s rights’.83

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  161 In comparison, Willoughby’s fixed sense of his own masculine self-­ importance is, by the end of the novel at least, accepted only by the two spinster aunts, who offer a litany on the subject and are so well-versed as dependents that they ‘took to chanting in alteration’: “– We are accustomed to peruse our Willoughby, and we know him by a shadow.” “– From his infancy to his glorious youth and his established manhood.” “– He was ever the soul of chivalry.” “– Duty: duty first. The happiness of his family. The well-being of his dependents.” “– If proud of his name it was not an overweening pride; it was founded on the conscious possession of exalted qualities.” […] “His only fault is –” “– His sensitiveness. And that is –” “– His secret. And that –” “– You are not to discover! It is the same with him in manhood. No one will accuse Willoughby Patterne of a deficiency of manliness”.84 The two aunts ascribe a generosity of feeling to Willoughby in performing his ‘duty’ and rationalise his arrogance as an indication of ‘manliness’. However, as Mrs. Mountstuart later explains, ‘the policy of the county is to keep him in love with himself, or Patterne [Hall] will be likely to be dull as it was without a lady enthroned. When his pride is at ease he is a prince’.85 Willoughby’s princely attitude and self-satisfaction do not, however, equate with manliness, vigour, modesty, or industry; his liveliness is invested is ‘keep[ing] him in love with himself’, displaying a ‘sensitiveness’ which he doesn’t realise is an open ‘secret’ discussed widely across the county. His appreciation of his own ‘duty’, ‘chivalry’, and other ‘exalted qualities’ eclipses any consideration of himself as ‘dull’ or indeed as ‘deficient in manliness’. This disparity in perspective is important to Meredith’s work. The dialogism of his fiction signifies that the young men in his novels must assimilate into a world of rich linguistic polyphony, and therefore ideally develop and flourish in their responsiveness to this myriad of voices, genres of speech and thought, and masculinities. Willoughby, perversely, enshrines himself in his own antithetical model of manliness, thereby cutting himself off from healthy masculine development: Meredith builds upon the novel’s dialogic structure: his heroes […] must find their way in a world of competing voices, competing philosophies. […] Meredith’s villains are his monologists, egoists deaf to the polyphony of life, who (like Willoughby Patterne) try to impose their sentimental scenarios upon others.86

162  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith This ‘world of competing voices’ offers these male youths in particular various masculine types for their consideration and response. This is made explicit in Harry Richmond, in which the adolescent is hemmed between two dominant men whose patterns of speech and modes of behaviour oppose one another. Beltham and Roy provide two clear alternatives for Harry to react against throughout his period of maturation, ‘an antagonistic dialogue of social heteroglossia’.87 The situation is made more diverse and complex as other characters such as Walter Heriot, Dr. Julius von Karsteg, and Jorian DeWitt (not to mention Janet Ilchester, Princess Ottilia, and Kiomi the gypsy girl) also operate in different speech genres and so provide additional voices which Harry may interpret and respond to. If adolescence is often characterised in this period by restlessness and dissatisfaction, however, such heteroglossia offers young men like Harry a weft of constructively frictional threads of identity to pull at and unravel or rework, thereby informing his own personality. As a part of the socialisation of adolescence, and the young man’s assimilation into the wider community, he must invariably learn to read efficiently the language and speech patterns of those around him. At the same time, he must actively learn to respond and continually shape his own unique forms of communication that will themselves contribute to his development towards a stable identity. This is particularly true of Wilfrid Pole in Sandra Belloni, who operates in different modes almost simultaneously: civilised and rational on the one hand in his pursuit of Lady Charlotte Illingworth, and romantic and sentimental on the other in his appreciation of Emilia. Wilfrid, together with several other adolescents in Meredith’s work, progresses through the narrative particularly plastic and flexible in his modes of thought and speech. In turn, his character retains the elasticity of youth in this unfixed period of trial and growth. He shifts and dances between various styles of communication as he adapts to his environment, represented in his patterns of speech. Wilfrid veers between schoolboyish mischief, referring to his father as ‘the Pater’ and ‘the dear old boy’, engaging in flirtatious familiarity with Mrs. Chump, indulging in ‘precocious cynicism which is the young man’s extra-Luxury’ at his club with a ‘brother officer’, and is ‘all on fire with a word’ adopting the passionate, halting tones of romantic intemperance to Emilia: ‘I would do any madness, waste all my blood for you, die for you!’88 These shifts in personality and styles of utterance are remarked on by those around him, who find his volte face difficult to digest. This can be seen, for example, in his display of male superiority to his sisters after his return to Brookfield from Lady Charlotte’s residence: He was incomprehensible. His visit to Stornley had wrought in him a total change. He used to like being petted, and would regard

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  163 everything as right that his sisters did, before he went there; and was a languid, long-legged, indifferent cavalier, representing men to them: things made to be managed, snubbed, admired, but always virtually subservient and in the background. Now, without perceptible gradation, his superiority was suddenly manifest; […] His style was too good. […] He commenced [speaking with Arabella], without a shadow of circumlocution, and in a matter-of-fact way, as if all respect for the peculiar genius of the house of Pole had vanished[.]89 Having been in the company of the cool Lady Charlotte, Wilfrid has discovered how to repel the penetration of his elder sisters and become ‘incomprehensible’; no longer a ‘languid … cavalier’, Wilfrid is direct in his speech to his oldest sister without his usual deference for her ‘Fine Shades’ and ‘Nice Feelings’, later converting to the ‘old familiar style of converse – part fun, part flattery’ with Adela.90 He learns to adapt his speech to his company and situation and to absorb tone and language from those around him. The text makes clear that such sensitivity and responsiveness to others is a tempering process in which his identity may be forged while ‘he [is] verily fining himself down’.91 The narrator draws attention to Wilfrid’s prospects for improvement in this way, stating: Wilfrid was a gallant fellow, with good stuff in him, But, he was young. Ponder on that pregnant word, for you are about to see him grow. He was less a coxcomb than shamefaced and sentimental; and one may have these qualities, and be a coxcomb to boot, and yet be a gallant fellow. One may also be a gallant fellow, and harsh, exacting, double-dealing, and I know what besides, in youth. The question asked by nature is, “Has he the heart to take and keep an impression?” For, if he has, circumstances will force him on and carve the figure of a brave man out of that mass of contradictions.92 This lack of essential self and ‘mass of contradictions’ that the narrator identifies as peculiar to youth holds promise only if Wilfrid has ‘the heart to take and keep an impression’. Wilfrid’s experience in the novel is coloured and influenced by the discourse of those around him. He is identified as the chief proponent of sentimentalism, defined by the “Philosopher” (the secondary narrator in the text) as the very practice of appropriated and reflected opinion: “The sentimentalist,” he says, “goes on accumulating images and hiving sensations, till such time as (if the stuff be in him) they assume a form of vitality, and hurry him headlong.”93

164  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith Wilfrid himself ‘goes on accumulating images and hiving sensations’, which the reader is informed is ‘the order of civilization’ and which receptivity ‘play[s] a principal part in our human development and social history.’94 This responsive, sensitive elasticity, however, is also regarded in the novel as tending towards instability and artificiality. While youth must attune itself to the polyphony of life, it should also actively seek to establish some kind of secure identity, some sense of masculine self-awareness, lest one’s manliness becomes eroded by drifting indecision (as with Purcell Barrett in his noncommittal attempt at suicide). Male adolescents in Meredith’s fiction are involved, as a part of their move towards adult masculinity, in a struggle to develop stability and self-knowledge as well as carving a place for themselves among their social milieu. Novels such as Sandra Belloni demonstrate how precarious this process may be: The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and we are used to see men of murdered halves. […] The period of our duality should be one as irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young man an ­individual—who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he educated, when he dreams not that he is divided?95 Part of Wilfrid’s problematic growth is due to the ‘deadly wrestle within him’. As a part of the polyphonic experience of youth in Meredith’s writing, Wilfrid should develop a sensitivity to his own ‘duality’ through the absorption of future possibilities and modes of behaviour, internalised from his ‘accumulating images and hiving sensations’. His failure to do so means that the ‘two men composing most of us at the outset of life’ do not ‘fuse […] into one’, but operate on the young man like ‘a pair of alternately kicking scales’ so that he is ‘a man of murdered halves.’ While hybridised discourse in Meredith’s fiction offers the young men in its pages opportunities for self-development, the tensions that emerge as a consequence can also tend to fragmentation of the self rather than cohesive growth. Wilfrid remains nebulously ‘divided’, formlessly plastic, and therefore lacking organised forward-momentum. He fails to appreciate that he must internalise and unify the voices of those who influence him, and so remains at the end of the novel still rooted in indecision and abortive in his attempts at proper communication or decisive action. In Meredith’s work, dialogue and lexical convolutions become a crucial part of demonstrating the social and familial position of the male

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  165 adolescent. Conversations and monologues, and reflective passages of free indirect discourse, frequently allow for insight into the way that these young men relate themselves to the rest of the world. In Harry Richmond, the anxious rapport between Harry and Richmond Roy is particularly evident in the confusion of names that both father and son employ. The evolution of Harry’s own name signifies his varying allegiance to either his father or his grandfather. Roy’s name fluctuates from Roy or Richmond, to ‘plain Augustus Fitz-George Roy Richmond’ and ‘Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy’ to indicate the instability of his character.96 Their references to one another, however, suggest a mutual dependence and affection in the process of naming, as well as reciprocal frustration. Valerie Sanders has drawn attention to the significance that a shared nonsense language can hold as a means of defining and strengthening ties between father and child, and Roy in particular uses language in this way in an attempt to maintain authority over Harry, and also to reinforce their familial ties.97 For example, when speaking to Harry, Roy refers to himself as ‘papa’ and ‘your dada’, and to his son as ‘Richie’, suggesting a relaxed, loving relationship.98 As Harry grows up and moves beyond childhood, growing more wary of his father’s loquacious ‘florid flimsy’, greater strain is placed on their relationship as their linguistic connection deteriorates.99 Harry’s increasing inability to identify with his father begins during their reunion at Sarkeld when, on hearing his son’s name ‘Richie’ called out by Temple, Roy breaks from his inanimate pose as a statue to cry ‘Richmond! my son! Richie! Harry Richmond! Richmond Roy!’100 After long neglect as an active presence in his son’s life, Roy’s inability to articulate his son’s name demonstrates confusion as to his son’s identity and character, but also guilt about the indifference he has shown towards Harry since placing him at Rippenger’s school. Harry’s response to his father magnifies the linguistic gulf that has come between father and son: ‘Each time he spoke I thought it an unnatural thing: I myself had not spoken once’.101 The balance of power in their relationship, as Harry grows older and starts to take over the role of parent to his father, is often evaluated by Harry himself in relation to speech and the use of language as a manipulative, persuasive apparatus. Roy’s ‘torrent-like’, hyperbolic rhetoric is, throughout the text, his most disarming weapon against the world.102 Harry reflects that: I have said that I weighed my power of will against my father’s. Contemplation of the state of the scales did not send me striving to meet him. […] I heard his nimble and overwhelming volubility like a flood advancing.103 Roy’s rhetoric and ‘power of will’ initially keep Harry in his thrall, ‘like a flood advancing’.

166  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith Towards the novel’s conclusion, however, as Harry becomes more independent and resentful of his father’s schemes, the shift in power is demonstrated through Roy’s linguistic deterioration: “I am broken,” he repeated […] “I shall presently forget the names of men. […] I cannot speak! One word to you, Mr. Beltham: put me aside, I am nothing: […] let him abjure my name; let me be nameless in his house.”104 Following this final confrontation between Harry’s father and grandfather, Harry observes of Roy: ‘He collapsed in speech, and became what he used to call “one of the ordinary nodding men,” forsaken of his swamping initiative’.105 In doing so he firmly establishes himself, the son, as the greater force between them, as his father’s loss of speech divests him of his power. In comparison with the decline in Roy’s linguistic virility the reader is reminded that Harry’s eventual dominance over his father is exemplified by his first-person narration of the text, so that the young man (literally) has the last word. In Meredith’s fiction, speech and dialogue, as much as plot development, disclose key moments of revelatory communication between men. The language choices and speech patterns of male adolescents in Meredith’s novels reveal not only their developing characters, but also at times the inherent flexibility of the cultural space that they occupy in Victorian society. These young men veer in their speech patterns while testing the linguistic registers of those around them to mould and establish their own style of language. Conversational ability and expressiveness can also become ways of interrogating the relationship between father and son specifically. The prolix speeches of Sir Willoughby, Sir Austin Feverel, and Richmond Roy fail in effective communication between father and son due to their linguistic dominance and lack of sensitivity to their young wards’ needs. Natalie McKnight has drawn attention to the charisma of linguistic playfulness and excess in Charles Dickens’s fiction, suggesting that, as viewed in characters such as Mr. Micawber and Captain Cuttle, ‘creativity, playfulness, and expressiveness in language frequently distinguish Dickens’s most appealing fathers’.106 In comparison, the most acrobatic of articulations are reserved for the more challenging and injurious of Meredith’s fictional father-figures. In particular, Roy’s performed, stylised manner of speech claims control over others in its deliberate oratorical complexity: We may suspect Roy of having learned words from the dictionary: […] This is combined with an elaborate, periodic sentence-structure to produce a rhetoric that is both periphrastic and dominating.107 Roy’s ‘elaborate’ speech effectively dazzles his son, who is troubled to find that ‘it seduced me […] like wine’.108 Richmond Roy, together with Sir Austin

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  167 and Sir Willoughby, inhabit monologistic paternity. Rather than the plastic impressionability of adolescence, in each version of their masculine roles (as fathers, lovers, gentlemen) these men are static in their self-­presentation to society and the reader. Neil Roberts explains that Sir Willoughby in The Egoist, like Richmond Roy, is the creation of his own discourse: He is a monologist, in the sense that his word is designed to repel or divert the word of the other. In the most literal sense, he does not enter into dialogue: again and again we see him evading the word of his interlocutor, or even appearing not to hear it.109 Willoughby often engages in monologues under the guise of conversations ‘designed to repel or divert the word of the other’. His self-­congratulatory logorrhoea is evasive even while it simultaneously perpetuates his most constant subject: himself. As Randall Craig has also indicated, ­Willoughby’s constative speech is rigidly closed against ‘the dynamic processes of discourse’ so that ‘he does not enter into dialogue’.110 In revealing to herself that Willoughby is an ‘Egoist’, Clara notes that even ‘his generosity roared of I louder than the rest. […] his garrulous return to his principle theme, his emphasis on I and me, lent him the seeming of an old man spotted with decaying youth’.111 This ‘petrifaction of egoism’, in which she envisages marriage to him as ‘to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound on them’, further suggests the blind selfishness of the man (and his lack of constructive responsiveness to the words of others in consequence). This compares unfavourably with the varied and engaging words of young Crossjay, whose adventurous and relaxed attitude to language emerges ‘in a lingo of dashes and asterisks’ employing ‘every crack and bang in a boy’s vocabulary’.112 Willoughby’s ‘monotonousness’ in which he ‘dragged [Clara] through the labyrinths of his penetralia’ until ‘he talked to her plain hearing like a monster’, also accentuates in his mode of speech what Robert Polhemus has termed ‘the empty pornographic dream of “I”’: This “I” of the Egoist […] is an alphabetical priapus, popping up again and again in Willoughby’s conversation to identify egoism with the preening male vanity. […] since he loves only self, and real intercourse with another is impossible, and what we really have is an exhibition of linguistic masturbation.113 Willoughby exemplifies this phallic symbol of “I” in his language and physical communication as well, at one point ‘straightening his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I’ and later returning to his eminent subject in stating to Laetitia ‘I have the specific, I, my love, I!’114 ­Willoughby’s self-absorption signifies his extreme lack of dialogic potential: he does not possess the flexibility of male adolescence in either his speech or thought,

168  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith and is therefore rigid in his ‘decaying youth’ and ‘petrifaction of egoism’, a ‘priap[ic]’ stone ‘obelisk’ standing monument to his own lack of social responsiveness. As Willoughby’s conversation becomes a combative exercise in domination over his interlocutors, he is resistant to the rich potential of social heteroglossia in which other young men such as Harry, Wilfrid or Richard are immersed. Set between the gushing, self-interested monologists such as Willoughby, and the silent, disengaged onlookers who also distance themselves from the polyphony of life (such as Adrian Harley in The Ordeal), there are cautious opportunities in Meredith’s fiction for his youths to learn a healthy, virile, measured ability of speech and action. Those young men who willingly engage in such dialogue sustain the best chances of forming their own concrete and balanced identity in response to the variety of discourses available to them. In the father-son relationships of these novels, the difficulties of accurate self-expression are often revealed via miscommunication and the subsequent problems of interpretation. This is especially true in The ­Ordeal, in which Sir Austin, ‘despite his rigid watch and ward, knew less of his son than the servant of his household’.115 In his discovery of his son’s role in the “Bakewell incident”, for example, when Richard takes revenge on Farmer Blaize by arranging for local boy Tom Bakewell to burn the man’s hayricks in return for the beating he had received while trespassing, there emerges a disparity between Sir Austin’s adult understanding and the youthful speech of Richard and Ripton Thompson. Sir Austin’s inability to comprehend his son is symbolised in this scene, drawing attention to the emotional distance as well as linguistic barrier between the two generations as the father spies on his son: The heads of his son Richard and the boy Thompson were seen crouched against the glass, holding excited converse together. Sir ­Austin listened, but he listened to a language of which he possessed not the key. Their talk was of fire, and of delay: of expected agrarian astonishment: of a farmer’s huge wrath: of violence exercised upon gentlemen, and of vengeance: talk that the boys jerked out by fits, and that came as broken links of a chain impossible to connect. But they awake curiosity. The baronet condescended to play the spy upon his son. […]He was beginning to gather a clue to the dialogue.116 It is not simply the content of the teenage boys’ talk that raises the linguistic gulf between Sir Austin and Richard to symbolic proportion; R ­ ichard’s duologue with Ripton also retains the exclusivity of shared youthful excitement. Their ‘excited converse together’ replaces, in Sir Austin’s ‘jealous heart’, his anticipated confidence between father and son.117 Sir Austin is shaken by the breach that has developed between them: [T]he altered manner of his son impressed him strangely. He was not the boy of yesterday. To Sir Austin it seemed as if a gulf had

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  169 suddenly opened between them. The boy had embarked, and was on the waters of life in his own vessel.118 The key to this ‘gulf’ and to Richard’s ‘altered manner’ may be found in his manner of speech and exclamatory utterances: ‘talk that the boys jerked out by fits, and that came as broken links of a chain impossible to connect’. The hurried brevity of their communication excludes Sir Austin in its addressivity: the chain is ‘broken’ and ‘impossible to connect’ by Sir Austin as he is intruding on the conversation and does not have a point of reference through which to contextualise their speech. Sir Austin listens to ‘a language of which he possessed not the key’, although the import of Richard’s words is of course clear enough to Ripton Thompson. The differences between father and son are often indicated, in Meredith’s fiction, by such crucial moments of miscommunication and linguistic variance. Young men in these novels are therefore taught to be wary of language that can ‘seduce’ or control, while also learning to appreciate and employ eloquence without artifice in their self-expression.119

Conclusion In Meredith’s novels, father-figures represent inadequate moral guidance for youth, although their inefficiency can be a constructive frustration for the male adolescent heroes to negotiate. Nonetheless, the father-son relationships represented in Meredith are predominantly riddled with anxiety for both generations. The outcomes of these relationships as the young men grow up are similarly tense and unresolved. As these fathers perform their paternal roles, they often fail to provide properly for their charges, exerting their own dominant voices so that fatherhood (for men such as Sir Austin Feverel or Richmond Roy) becomes a coercive practice rather than a natural exercise in nurturing affection. Mutual respect and fraternal feeling rarely emerge as the anticipated product of a healthy bond between father and son. In these examples of mid-Victorian fiction, fatherhood features as an important aspect of masculine identity, both for the young male protagonists who seek to define themselves in relation to paternal authority, and for those young men whose progress brings them around full circle to emerge as fathers themselves. The father-son dynamic offers modern readers a window into Victorian anxieties about the productivity of male familial and homosocial relationships, and into concerns about the gaps in contemporary nineteenth-century perspectives between the generations. The tensions that materialise on the subjects of paternal duty and filial responsibility in Meredith’s novels indicate that such issues are an integral aspect of male identity in mid-Victorian culture. Flexibility and adaptive strategies in speech, and good command of language, can be in Meredith’s fiction a way of charting linguistically the progress and growing independence of his young men. Fictional dialogue

170  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith reveals to the reader not only the youth’s ability to situate himself in a social context, but also his emotional affinity with (or distance from) his father in particular as a guide and role model in his masculine development. Dominant, destructive fatherhood is therefore often discoverable in excessive rhetorical practice, in which the voice of youth is allowed little freedom. Coherent, cogent, yet straightforward speech is associated with idealised masculine virtues, such as honesty, morality, respect, rigour, industry, and virility. In comparison, the gushing male (such as Richmond Roy or Willoughby Patterne) may be considered effeminate in speech, washed away on a tide of his own loquacity; whereas inarticulate men are unable to engage properly in the social heteroglossia around them and therefore fail in their proper masculine functions (as does Samuel Pole). Male adolescence, in Meredith’s work, is a project of both outward and inward discrimination: a process of assimilating and differentiating between these diverse means of engaging with the world and articulating oneself.

Notes 1 George Meredith, Letters ed. by C.L. Cline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), November 2 (1871), to William Hardman, p. 543. 2 Meredith, Harry Richmond, pp. 346–7. 3 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 346. 4 See, for example, Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Barbara Z. Thaden, The Maternal Voice in Victorian Fiction: Rewriting the Patriarchal Family (New York and London: Garland, 1997). 5 The proliferation of such works has been noted in Chapter 3. Mid-­Victorian works of advice purporting to be from father to son include “B.A.”, A Father’s Advice to a Son, in a Letter (Manchester: John Haywood, 1872); J.  A. M., Letters from a Father to his Son (London: S. Straker & sons, n.d.); and Thomas Hardy, Fatherly and Affectionate Advice to a Youth, A Letter (London: E. Palmer and Son, 1853). 6 As with the exemplar of Joe Gargery for most of Dickens’s novel, M ­ eredith’s view of fatherliness is inclusive – it is perceived to be behavioural rather than biological (much like adolescence itself). 7 This latter observation has been made by Neil Roberts, Meredith and the Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 100. 8 Monica Mannheimer, The Generations in Meredith’s Novels (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiskell, 1972), p. 67. 9 Meredith, Letters, Vol. II, June 23 1881, to Arthur G. Meredith, p. 628. 10 Meredith, Letters, Vol. II, p. 627. 11 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 367. 12 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 30; p. 129; p. 149; p. 160; p. 321; p. 367. 13 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 396; p. 397. 14 Valerie Sanders, The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 5. 15 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 33.

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  171 16 Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, ‘Introduction: The Empire of the Father’, in Gender and Fatherhood, ed. by Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–28 (p. 4). 17 Elizabeth Thiel, The Fantasy of Family: Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature and the Myth of the Domestic Ideal (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 8. Thiel’s explanation of the term ‘transnormative family’ is useful in the context of this study, as it describes a family unit that is fractured or unbalanced, and which in some way transgresses established norms. 18 Broughton and Rogers, p. 22. 19 This compounded the impact of the controversial “Bastardy clause” established by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which meant that illegitimate children were effectively the sole responsibility of the mother until 16 years of age. This stood until 1844 when mothers were legally able to petition for maintenance from the father in court. 20 Mannheimer, pp. 75–6. 21 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 23. 22 Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1830–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 158. 23 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 38. 24 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 51. 25 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 51. 26 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 76; p. 80. 27 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 121. 28 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 39. 29 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 145. 30 Stephanie Green, ‘“Nature was strong in him”: Spoiling the Empire Boy in George Meredith’s The Egoist’, Australasian Victorian Studies Journal, 5 (1999), 88–95, (p. 89). Green suggests that Crossjay embodies the virtues associated with patriotism and national identity. 31 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 144. 32 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 136. 33 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, pp. 142–4. 34 Gisela Argyle, Germany as Model and Monster: Allusions in English Fiction, 1830s – 1930s (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), p. 57. 35 J.H, Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 84–5. 36 Jacqueline Banerjee, George Meredith (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2012), p. 53. 37 Roberts, Meredith and the Novel, p. 109; p. 110. 38 Margaret Tarratt, ‘The Adventures of Harry Richmond: Bildunsgroman and Historical Novel’, in Meredith Now: Some Critical Essays, ed. by Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 165–87, (p. 173; p. 169). 39 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 492. 40 Michael Roper and John Tosh, (eds.) Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 17. 41 Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1910 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 75. 42 Sophie Gilmartin, Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth Century ­British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 164.

172  The language of filial dialogue in Meredith 43 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 286. 44 Carolyn Williams, ‘Narrative Selection and Narrative Form in “The E ­ goist”, Victorian Studies, 27:1 (1983), 53–79 (p. 69). 45 Meredith, The Egoist, pp. 465–6. 46 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 466. 47 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 380. 48 The significance of performance and self-display to the formation of masculinity is explored in relation to Thackeray’s representation of dandyism in the subsequent chapter. 49 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 110. 50 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 167. 51 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 476; p. 477. 52 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 477. 53 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 477. 54 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 478 55 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 139. 56 Susan Payne, Difficult Discourse: George Meredith’s Experimental Fiction (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1995), p. 51. 57 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 139. 58 Shuttleworth, pp. 158–9. 59 A point made by Melissa Shields Jenkins in ‘“Stamped on Hot Wax”: George Meredith’s Narratives of Inheritance’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 39 (2011), 525–43. 60 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 106. 61 Argyle, p. 57. 62 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 17. 63 Shuttleworth, p. 151. 64 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 331. 65 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 331. 66 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, p. 331. 67 Meredith, Rhoda Fleming, pp. 335–6. 68 In particular see chapter six on adolescent sexuality. 69 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 114. 70 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 123. 71 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 111. 72 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 111. 73 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 111. 74 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 113. 75 Meredith, The Ordeal, pp. 113–4. 76 Meredith, The Ordeal, pp. 123–4. 77 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 78 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 396. 79 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 83. 80 Meredith, The Egoist, pp. 130–1. 81 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 356. 82 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 332. 83 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 111, p. 355. 84 Meredith, The Egoist, pp. 532–3. 85 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 601. 86 Stone, ‘Meredith and Bakhtin’, 693–712 (p. 704). 87 Neil Roberts, p. 91. 88 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 130; p. 124; p. 257; p. 457. 89 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, pp. 119–20.

The language of filial dialogue in Meredith  173 90 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 4; p. 122. 91 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 500. 92 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 96. 93 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, pp. 412–3. 94 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 4. 95 Meredith, Sandra Belloni, p. 260. 96 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 11; p. 150. The act of naming is particularly crucial for Richmond Roy as a man and as a father in this novel. Himself illegitimate, the desire to confer on Harry a patronymic inheritance, by dubbing him as the second Richmond Roy, is bound up with his own attempts to establish his own, apparently aristocratic, lineage by proving his birth through ‘testificatory documents (p. 284). The fact of his bastardy is constantly reinforced through his name of ‘Fitz’ (which means ‘the son of’, and is usually conferred on illegitimate sons). ‘Fitz…Roy’ suggests ‘son of the king’. 97 See Sanders, The Tragi-Comdey of Victorian Fatherhood, especially ­Chapter 1. 98 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 14; p. 283. 99 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 371. 100 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 129. 101 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 129. 102 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 371. 103 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 371; p. 367. 104 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 397. 105 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 400. 106 Natalie McKnight, ‘Dickens’s Philosophy of Fathering’, in Fathers in Victorian Fiction, ed, by Natalie McKnight (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 51–62 (p. 54). 107 Roberts, p. 91. 108 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 346. 109 Roberts, p. 160. 110 Randall Craig, ‘Promising Marriage: The Egoist, Don Juan, and the Problem of Language’, ELH 56:4 (Winter, 1989), 897–921 (p. 918). 111 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 137. 112 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 342; p. 343. 113 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 467; p. 468; Robert M. Polhemus, Comic Faith: The Great Tradition from Austen, to Joyce (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 219; p. 213. 114 Meredith, The Egoist, p. 475; p. 50. Original emphasis. 115 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 113. 116 Meredith, The Ordeal, pp. 61–2. 117 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 61. 118 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 62. 119 Meredith, Harry Richmond, p. 346.

6 Aberrant youth The dandy, the wild man, and the deviant

In W. M. Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850), Can You Forgive Her? (1865) by Anthony Trollope, and George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), male adolescence is considered a period of experience simultaneously characterised by queer sexuality, transnormative social and fraternal dynamics, and the eroticisation of both privacy and violence. Youth emerges as a porous, labile identity, which struggles to adhere to dominant social and cultural strictures on acceptable behaviour, and to dominant codes of manliness which emphasise the merits of social integration and of individual sovereignty or self-control. These young protagonists – Arthur Pendennis (Pen), George Vavasor, and Richard Feverel – develop discrete methods of coping with the weight of cultural expectation as it impacts on their masculinity. In adopting modes of manliness typically perceived to be outside of the cultural mainstream during the mid-Victorian period (the dandy, the wild man and the deviant), these youths provide examples of dissidence and aberrance in their search for masculine identity, and in their exploration of the permeable boundaries of youthful male experience. All three authors emphasise the fundamental difference of youth from other categories of age-determined experience, highlighting the complexity of maturation, and creating exploratory figures of male youth each of whom subverts Victorian expectations of, and assumptions about, youth as a linear form of development. In particular these young men resist those whose outlook on the instability of this formative period manifested in anxiety, and so they often undermine ideologies which sought to proscribe the individual’s progress towards a successful occupation of both adult manliness. Such a process, these young male protagonists make evident, involves a clear struggle in negotiating the various demands placed on idealised, heteronormative masculinity. All three authors interrogate aspects of this negotiation for identity in different ways. Both Thackeray and Trollope for example, although through discrete emphases, explore the merits of privacy, which for Thackeray operates as a space of safety and interiority. In forming a barrier between the self and society, clothing in particular becomes a positive means of protecting the individual and

Aberrant youth  175 their subjectivity, while deflecting scrutiny through the contradictory mode of self-display. In comparison, in Can You Forgive Her?, privacy becomes perverted into secrecy, so that it emerges as excessive, mystifying, and therefore unmanly. Both of these authors also explore the benefits of homosocial conviviality, and of male bonding and identification as a means of learning to perform socially-­integrated and well-adjusted masculinity, with varying degrees of success. On the other hand, ­Meredith, unlike Trollope, does not implicitly believe that secrecy itself will necessarily corrupt the moral tendency of youth. He parodies medical discourses which speak strenuously of the need for rigorous transparency and openness in youth, so that a parent can keep a watchful eye on a boy’s character as it develops. However, in this novel Meredith also underscores the merits of sexual ambiguity and exploration, which are nonetheless relegated to the margins of social consciousness due to a lack of wider cultural acceptance of the fluidity of the adolescent’s capacity for less rigid forms of identification – which The Ordeal suggests ought to be recognised more openly. In the work of all three authors, the youthful male body is brought forward in attitudes of display, and these novels illustrate the heterogeneity and the instability of the male adolescent. In Trollope’s novel, George Vavasor’s body repeatedly fails to enact the proper processes of self-discipline and self-control (themselves equally essential to the project of dandyism explored in Pendennis). Instead, Vavasor’s emotional immaturity bleeds into a selfish anger towards others, which frequently erupts into violence, crippling and distorting his performance of civilised masculine behaviour. The erotic body – and the homoerotic body in ­particular – is not only apparent in the dandyism of Thackeray’s ­Pendennis, but also, and more transparently, in Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The latter novel in particular explores sexuality as an integral part of male adolescent experience, albeit one that causes cultural anxiety due to its potential deviancy. Nonetheless, youthful sexuality is dissident, emerging as a pre-regulated form of desire that struggles to remain within socially-constrained, heteronormative bounds, but this sexuality is also productive in its fluidity.

The dandy in Thackeray Through an exploration of the dual influences of privacy and performance, W. M. Thackeray’s Pendennis identifies the ways that male youth is able to create and sustain authenticity and to cultivate selfhood by means of negotiation between public display, and the moral values of the day which emphasised the primacy of a carefully mediated interiority. Pendennis may be seen to variously draw on, or set itself against, spectacular performances of masculine types to inform male development as a part of the socialisation of young men in the mid-Victorian

176  Aberrant youth era. Thackeray’s novel also provides an analysis of the male body at its most obviously sexually-fraught period through attention to the external dress and deportment of the young male body during this period of emotional and psychological exploration in response to the physiological changes of puberty. Pen’s youthful body is manipulated to indicate the precarious balance between public and private in youthful male experience, through his exploration of the difficulties in forging an adult male identity in the wider world. Pen’s body is variously represented as a cover or screen, a highly visible source of pleasure, a means of self-display and ornamentation, or even as a disguise, as well as a desirable object. Costume in particular, as a visual indicator of the body beneath, becomes a crucial part of ­Thackeray’s interrogation of male development and exploration, drawing attention to the performances of masculinity in the social arena. Forms of performance and theatrical spectacle remain a source of apparent fascination for both the young hero and for the author, despite the theatre itself being exposed as sham and artifice.1 Costume and dress, however, feature as persistent reminders that the theatricalising gaze exists in polite society beyond the stage, and that flamboyant costume serves a cultural purpose in the formation of identity in everyday life, as well as for the dramatic purposes of play or production. As Emily Allen has outlined, ‘theater provided the novel with an unstable opposite that served both to repel and attract’.2 Costume or clothing is isolated in Pendennis, especially in relation to masculine performance and development, as not merely functional, but as enabling a complex negotiation of the boundaries between social spectacle inviting the public gaze, and interiority or privacy. In each stage of his career – whether first love, his time at Boniface College, or his forays into the bohemian London of the literary man – Arthur Pendennis is provided with a new opportunity for self-creation, both in the visual terms of his self-fashioning and in terms of his experience and subsequent character development in the novel, as he learns from each new scene of his life and the characters he meets: Mr. Pen said that anthropology was his favourite pursuit; and had his eyes always eagerly open to its infinite varieties and beauties: contemplating with an unfailing delight all specimens of it in all places to which he resorted […] And, indeed, a man whose heart is pretty clean can indulge in this pursuit with an enjoyment that never ceases, and is only perhaps the more keen because it is secret and has a touch of sadness in it; because he is of his mood and humour lonely, and apart though not alone. 3 Pen, as an occasional student of ‘anthropology’, observes those around him with the same interest and amusement as that of the reader when

Aberrant youth  177 studying him. The process of observation or spectatorship, however, necessarily creates a distance between subject and object, and Pen finds that this ‘pursuit’, while enjoyable, is nonetheless isolating. By divorcing himself from those around him, the young man’s detachment affords him a privileged position for viewing others’ behaviour and to form judgements, ‘contemplating […] all specimens’ and the ‘unfailing delight’ around him in the disinterested, impartial manner of the flâneur. Thackeray allows Pen to create an identity not just through his own experiences, but also by distinguishing himself (and his body) in relation to other characters. However, his observations, from a detached perspective, enhance his identity by providing the opportunity to imitate the physical presentation of those around him: ‘Pendennis was a clever fellow, who took his colour very readily from his neighbour, and found the adaptation only too easy’.4 Pen’s mimetic capacity for ‘adaptation’ figures his self-conscious presentation. The constant possibility of comparison or contrast is what Peter Brooks identifies as an erotic dynamic: The relation to another body is repeatedly presented in visual terms, and the visual as applied to the body is often highly eroticised, a gaze subtended by desire. The desire can be a desire to possess, and also a desire to know; most often the two are intermingled.5 Through a process of coveting, emulating, or distinguishing himself against the bodies of the men that surround him in his society, Pen creates a complex web of display and appropriation, in which he feels ‘apart, though not alone’, and alienation becomes a positive, formative force.6 The power of such distance is evident in the novel as, after meeting with Mr. Samuel Huxter at Vauxhall Gardens, Pen is made doubly conscious of his own appearance due to the contrast with Huxter, who is described as: A young man in a large white coat with a red neckcloth, over which a dingy short collar was turned up so as to exhibit a dubious neck – with a large pin of bullion or other metal, and an imaginative waistcoat with exceedingly fanciful glass buttons, and trousers that cried with a loud voice, “come and look at me and see how cheap and tawdry I am: my master, what a dirty buck!”7 Pendennis is insulted that ‘such a creature as this could have the audacity to give him a card’, and attempts to detach himself from association with his old acquaintance, choosing to distinguish himself against Huxter rather than recognise their similarities.8 Other dubious characters prone to this showy self-display include the Clavering chef Mirobolant with his

178  Aberrant youth ribbons and ringlets. Mirobolant, we are told, cuts an outlandish figure in the rural market town of Clavering: He walked among them quite unsuspiciously […] in his usual favourite costume, namely, his light green frock or paletot, his crimson velvet waistcoat, with blue glass buttons, his pantalon Écossais, of a very large and decided check pattern, his orange satin neckcloth, and his jean-boots, with tips of shiny leather – these, with a gold-­ embroidered cap, and a richly-gilt cane, or other varieties of ornament of a similar tendency, formed his usual holiday costume […].9 Mirobolant’s continental, ostentatious dandyism is exceptional in Pendennis; he is the most effeminate, and therefore the most deviant, of all of the dandies in the novel aside from Pen.10 The interchange between desire and knowledge that Brooks identifies develops as Pen matures in his adolescence, and the resulting self-consciousness allows Pen to see his physical self as both a private and a public body. By regulating his image, and adapting the presentation of his body through dress, occupation, location, and company, Pen learns confidence in both how he sees himself as a young man and how he is perceived by those around him. As with Huxter’s vulgar attire and Mirobolant’s foreign foppery, it is a characteristic of Thackeray’s fiction that costume frequently indicates character, or reveals an individual’s characteristics: Apart from face and hands […] what we actually see and react to are, not the bodies, but the clothes of those about us. It is from their clothes that we form a first impression of our fellow-creatures when we meet them.11 Thus, in Pendennis, Blanche’s pale costume, Foker’s outlandish clothing, Warrington’s jacket, and Major Pendennis’s cane become emblematic of themselves as individuals, or symbolic of elements in their character. Blanche, who wears ‘a dove colour, like a vestal virgin’, is blankly white, her clothing providing a carefully chosen screen of impenetrability, and Major Pendennis’s cane and corset declare both his age and his reliance on la mode of an outmoded and bygone era.12 Both declare the body’s presence, and obscure it. Anne Hollander, in her influential work Seeing Through Clothes, acknowledges and expands on this: Nothing is more common than the metaphorical mention of clothing, first of all to indicate a simple screen that hides the truth or, more subtly, a distracting display that demands attention but confounds true perception. […] Besides sexual secrets, clothing also hides the commonness of nakedness; and so, by its variable creative means, it produces the quality of individuality.13

Aberrant youth  179 Clothes hold various functions, however, and as well as obscuring the body, clothing also ornaments the body, transmits information about the person wearing it (such as class, wealth, occupation, gender, age), allows for the symbolic use of items of dress, and also provides crucial opportunities for self-creation. In Pendennis Thackeray’s depiction of men concerned with their external apparel draws on the figure of the Regency dandy, who came to prominence in the first decades of the nineteenth century: ‘The dandy in Regency England had been a man careful of externals, and dedicated to perfecting his refinement of taste and wit. This was nowhere more apparent than his dress’.14 The dandy represented a pinnacle of self-­ cultivation, with an emphasis on both physical and mental poise, and while the Regency dandy prioritised neatness, austerity, and cleanliness, the later Victorian dandy developed a taste for exhibitionism and conspicuous excess at odds with the earlier sobriety typified by, for example, George “Beau” Brummel.15 Thackeray’s novel, filled as it is with morally dubious men staking claims to fashion, is often cited as an example of the writer’s disapproval of dandyism.16 During Pen’s adolescence, his increasing tendency towards modish attire reflects his attempt to forge a recognisable role for himself in his society as a member of the rarefied dandy set. Pen’s friend and mentor Warrington gently teases Pen about his excessive concern over his appearance: Mr. Pen was blushing while he [replied] to his unromantical friend, and indeed cared a great deal more about himself still than such a philosopher perhaps should have done. Indeed, considering that he was careless about the world, Mr. Pen ornamented his person with no small pains in order to make himself agreeable to it, and for a weary pilgrim as he was, wore very tight boots and bright varnish.17 Warrington’s cynicism and apparent bachelor status provide Pen with a steady and responsible role-model. The functional and unfashionable jacket, simple shirt, and humble pipe of tobacco which become associated with Warrington are emblematic of a new brand of honest and manly Englishness, which led one reviewer for the Spectator to claim that: A ‘healthy animalism’ is still a prominent characteristic of our better classes of young men; and in spite of much dissipation, much dandyism, and much pseudo-philosophy, it is no very rare thing among that class to find the best scholars and the truest gentlemen neither too fine to drink beer and smoke short pipes.18 A similar sentiment may be found in Thackeray’s earlier essay ‘Men and Coats’, published by Fraser’s Magazine (1841), in which the writer

180  Aberrant youth states that ‘A man IN A JACKET is a man’.19 Thackeray apparently set great store by the jacket as worn by Warrington, so much so that that Ellen Moers has suggested that, ‘the rough, manly, unadorned jacket was becoming a moral symbol to Thackeray; it was the costume of a gentleman’. 20 The value of the unobtrusive jacket, for Thackeray, was its simplicity and functionality as an everyday garment. Warrington, as Pen’s mentor, is often seen as more practical, steady, and honest than his young companion, all of which may be glimpsed in his lack of fine tailoring, indicative of his lack of vanity. This is in contrast with the moral ambiguity of Major Pendennis, who is often cited as suggestive of Thackeray’s dislike of dandyism. In comparison with the honest, ­jacket-sporting Warrington, the Major and his superannuated friend Viscount Colchicum represent an older and outmoded form of dress and comportment, and provide Pen with examples of a style of masculine dress that Thackeray disliked, complete with corsetry, padded shoulders, and multi-layered great-coats as well as other, more ornamental aides de toilettes. 21 Clair Hughes has suggested of Pen’s uncle that: The Major serves as both role-model and warning to Arthur Pendennis, the novel’s unheroic hero, whose career across the novel is charted in a series of exquisite outfits which throw no very favourable light on his character. 22 Major Pendennis’s ostentatious dandyism provides a representation of manliness steeped in artifice and lack of honesty, which contrasts with that of Warrington, and offers one mode of performance for Pen to follow or reject in the text as ‘both role-model and warning’. Being close to Pen in familial terms, he is naturally a significant influence in Arthur’s life-choices and general code of conduct, although his false aids to modish appearance, corresponding with his ambitions of social mobility for the family, indicate that the Major’s outmoded style of masculine performance does not constitute an appropriate form of manliness that Pen ought to imitate. Thackeray’s ambivalence about the vulgarity of foppishness and sartorial ornamentation which, partly as a result of the influence of Pen’s university friend Harry Foker and his own uncle, is frequently adopted by young Pen. While it remains a largely innocuous vice in itself, Thackeray nonetheless tends to attach moral stigma and suspicion to such excessive concern with adorning the body, a theme which occupies several entries in his Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town (1849) and is recurrent in his essay ‘Men and Coats’ (1841), among other contributions to contemporary magazines. Ellen Moers states of Thackeray’s view of the dandy that: In the course of describing his own youth as the history of ­Pendennis, Thackeray came to the conclusion that dandyism was nothing more nor less than selfishness raised to the nth degree. 23

Aberrant youth  181 Such selfish concern can bode ill for other areas of life, and Pen is frequently accused of selfish and narcissistic tendencies in the text. Thackeray’s final reduction of dandyism to ‘nothing more nor less than selfishness’, as Moers suggests, however, seems unconvincing, as the articulation of dandyism in the novel appears to be more subtle than the simple equation of modishness with self-obsession and anti-social behaviour. Rather, Thackeray’s dandy is, instead, invested with an admirable sense of self-awareness, although the difficult balance between confidence and egotism in such performance is what draws Thackeray’s attention. Thackeray’s focus on clothing and façade therefore suggests a more ambivalent attitude towards the dandy, or aspects of dandyism, than has largely been ascribed to the author, and in particular this novel begins to explore what dandyism as a style of masculinity, and as a cultivated form of self-awareness, can offer male youth as he negotiates the transition into adulthood. While Thackeray is severe on the theatrics of “butterfly” dandyism, the vigorous manliness of Brummellian dandyism was a form of attire and attitude towards the body that he does not entirely disparage. The spirit and elegance of early Regency dandyism were most accurately embodied in the style of Brummell, whose emphasis on nature rather than artificiality may be perceived by Thackeray as a masculine, rigorous enterprise that seeks to discipline excess, and is therefore more respectable and worthy of emulation than the louche foppery and vulgarity of the Victorian dandy. Brummell emphasised the lines of the body, and demanded that tailoring should fit the body in its natural form (without the aids of devices such as buckram-wadding or lacing), and advocated sobriety in both colour and cut, favouring navy blue or other dark colours in his coats. His idea of sartorial sophistication valued the body and, above all, its cleanliness. Thackeray muses in his essay ‘Men and Coats’, that: A man who is not strictly neat in his person is not an honest man. […] A man who wears a dressing-gown is not neat in his person; his moral character takes invariably some of his slatternliness and looseness of his costume. 24 It is this element of neatness, honesty, and strictness that is of such value to Thackeray in Warrington’s jacket, in comparison with the loud styling of Mirobolant or Huxter, or even the polished yet corseted Major Pendennis. Care in dressing, if not taken to excessive lengths and applied to vulgar costume like these latter men, may be a positive element reflecting good character. Pen’s own dandyism, then, is not necessarily indicative of moral laxity, as due attention to one’s self-presentation may be beneficial during adolescent development, both as a means of self-creation, and as an expression of character. Clothing or costume creates its own boundary between the secret, inner self and the exterior presentation of

182  Aberrant youth the individual consciously available to public scrutiny. Quiet, sartorial elegance, which in Pendennis resides somewhere between the ‘rough and ready’, yet honest Warrington, and Pen’s attempts at fashionable smartness, provide an opportunity for continual individual privacy even while on display. As Thackeray discusses in ‘Men and Coats’, the right kind of tailoring may provide a sense of comfort, self-containment, propriety, and thoughtfulness so that, in effect, the private self may be legitimately performed in public situations. The male body in Pendennis is inscribed as meaningful for its revelatory ability to project developing selfhood in social environments. It is also, however, valued for its facility in misleading and deflecting public scrutiny. The capacity for private agency and individual choice in ­carefully-constructed attire suggests the potential for authentic self-­ creation and interiority in Thackeray’s representation of the youthful dandy. Judith L. Fisher writes of Pendennis that ‘The dandy-phase of the protagonist is the public version of his private search for self through love; the costume and mannerisms are performances of status’.25 Pen’s dandification results in a projection of this ‘public version of his private […] self’ by means of self-consciously adopted ‘costume’ and ‘performance’. In the novel, Thackeray’s emphasis on neatness and cleanliness in dress implies a hesitant sympathy with austerity and simplicity, as distinct from the gaudy trappings of, for example, the dandyism of Byron, Bulwer, and Disraeli. The preoccupation over dress and character in ‘Men and Coats’ (1841), The Snobs of England (1846–7), Pendennis (1848–50), and Mr. Brown’s Letters to a Young Man About Town (1849), coupled with his friendship around this time with the Count D’Orsay, Lady Blessington, and the fashionable set at Gore House, Thackeray seems to have been intrigued by dandyism and its devotees, suggesting a fascination that went beyond absolute repugnance. Rather, Thackeray’s interpretation of raiment and the dandy-ethos – in Pendennis, evident in what Fisher has termed Pen’s ‘dandy-phase’ – informs the creation of an acceptable male identity during youth. Jessica Feldman has similarly commented on the dandy that: He is the figure who practices, and even impersonates, the fascinating acts of self-creation and presentation. He is the figure of paradox created by many societies in order to express whatever it is that the culture feels it must, but cannot, synthesize. This dandy is neither spirit nor flesh, nature nor artifice, ethical nor aesthetic, active nor passive, male nor female. He is the figure who casts into doubt, even while he underscores, the very binary oppositions by which his culture lives. 26 The ambiguity and paradox of the dandy is therefore productive of tensions that help to inform the formation of identity for youth. The ability to ‘synthesize’ both private choice and public spectacle establishes a significant role for dress in the creation of adolescent identity in Pendennis.

Aberrant youth  183 The idea that the body is a legible text is similar to the discussion of the dandy as a fundamentally ‘Clothes-wearing Man’ in Thomas Carlyle’s esoteric philosophy of clothes Sartor Resartus (1838) in which a language of ‘Symbols’ represents ‘Articles of Faith’, which combine to illustrate ‘the essential nature of the British Dandy, and the mystic significance that lies in him’.27 Clothing is conceived, for Pen, in a similar manner, as a means of both concealing and displaying selfhood. Herbert Sussman, in his informative work Victorian Masculinities, has noted that, ‘For Carlyle, the interior space of the male body, or, more accurately, of the male self […], is characterized by unstable fluidity’. 28 Sussman’s analysis of Carlyle’s use of such language raises the ‘unstable’ boundaries of the ‘hydraulic’ male body as a cause of concern.29 Pamela Gilbert has similarly observed a tendency of anxiety in Victorian narratives of embodiment: The pulpiness within the dangerous body was always threatening to burst the bounds of the skin, which defined and disciplined individual embodiment. Disease, lack of self-control, femininity, and madness were all aligned with liquidity, liquefaction, and perhaps putrefaction as well – those who lacked self-control and possessive individualism were liable to melt back into a primal flow of dangerous ooze.30 In Sartor Resartus, this ‘primal flow of dangerous ooze’ is described as ‘watery, pulpy, [and] slobbery’.31 Thackeray’s figure of the dandy in Pendennis, raising as it does fears about the effeminacy of the male body on display, does not, however, define Pen in terms of either ‘liquidity’ or ‘pulpiness’. Instead of expressing concern about the ‘pulpiness […] threatening to burst the bounds of the skin’, the integrity and fixity of Pen’s body is tested from without by images of water and ‘liquidity’ as an external rather than an internal threat. His early emotional attachment to Blanche Amory, for example, is reciprocated by means of Blanche’s ability to ‘compassionate other susceptible beings like Pen, who had suffered too’.32 Pen’s ‘susceptib[ility] is assaulted by Blanche’s ‘plaintive outpourings’ in the literary endeavours of Mes Larmes, her reflective diary and volume of sentimental poetry:33 It was a wonder how a young creature […] should have suffered so much – should have found the means of getting at such an ocean of despair and passion (as a runaway boy who will get to sea) […]. What a talent she must have had for weeping to be able to pour out so many of Mes Larmes!34 Pen is eventually able to withstand the effect of ‘Miss Blanche’s tears’, although other images of water in the novel threaten to thwart Pen’s advancement as a young man.35 On being ‘plucked’ from Oxbridge, to the ‘terror of Pen’s tutor and tradesmen’, Pen’s hat is found ‘near a mill-stream;

184  Aberrant youth and, for four-and-twenty hours, it was supposed that poor Pen had flung himself into the stream’.36 Major Pendennis, when hearing the news that Pen has been rusticated, states angrily ‘You are of age, and my hands are washed of your affairs’.37 The language of washing, drowning, or being swept away suggests that Pen must learn to fight against the ‘liquidity’ or ‘pulpiness’ of the social world around him, by which he could be consumed, as well as to differentiate himself from the fluidity and instability of others on ‘the voyage of life’.38 Pen must struggle to retain his authentic interiority as distinct from the corrupting and encroaching theatrics of the social stage, and the physical appearance that he presents to the world forms a part of his resistance to its incursions on his sense of selfhood. In maintaining a balance between the physical self as an impermeable barrier that protects the young man from external threats to his autonomy, and as a mode of self-presentation cultivated deliberately to mediate between the private self and the world at large, Arthur Pendennis is at once resistant to but also fascinated by the bodies of other men – ­attracted in large part by the potential that they offer for emulation of the masculine style that they embody. The body which is constructed as the most desirable to Pen, however, is that of his friend and mentor George Warrington. Pen not only wishes to emulate the older man, but also relishes the opportunity to be close to him, and to receive his approbation. The dynamic of their relationship is distinctly homoerotic, and Pen’s reactions to his older friend are frequently phrased with a feminine inflection. So Warrington is described as ‘Arthur’s hero ― the brave and the kind ― he has come hundreds of miles to succour him, when he heard of his friend’s misfortune’, and Pen responds to such ‘succour’ ‘with tears at once of weakness and of pleasure’.39 Pen is easily led by Warrington, and as their relationship develops he expresses an increasing admiration for and reverence towards his companion. Warrington is most frequently cited as an example of vigorous heterosexual masculinity in Thackeray’s novels, as a gentleman without pretensions who chooses to wear a manly jacket rather anything more ornamental, who claims ‘I like to talk to the strongest man in England, or the man who can drink the most beer in England […] I like gin-and-water better than claret’, and who likes the company of coarse but authentic and lively working men in public houses ‘better than [men] of his own class, whose manners annoyed him’.40 In comparison, Pendennis’s own dandyism marks him out as exhibiting contrary indicators about the extent of his own manliness (such as the rigours of self-fashioning in the persona of the dandy, but also the effete connotations of such attention to both dress and to self). While Warrington appears to exemplify a code of manly self-­sufficiency, honesty, and straightforward amiability tempered with a dash of healthy cynicism, however, his intimacy with Pen may be considered in less clearcut terms. Warrington, described by the narrator as ‘a woman-hater’, maintains a clear authority over young Pen, whom he instructs after

Aberrant youth  185 their first meeting to abandon his plans to attend the opera, ‘You had much better come home and smoke a pipe with me, […] ― a very short one’.41 The imagery of pipe and cigar smoking is employed in the text as symbolic of a shared homosocial pleasure, and as a means of cementing fraternal bonds. As well as smoking, Warrington introduces Pen to both his apartments in Number Six, Lamb’s Court, and to the club of literary friends suggestively named the Back Kitchen, who met at the unfashionable ‘Fielding’s Head’ in Covent Garden. When Major Pendennis comes to visit his nephew in the ‘queer’, ‘dingy’ and disordered rooms shared with Warrington, he is unsure what to make of Pen’s new friend:42 “I don’t care for female society. In fact, it bores me. I spent my evening philosophically at the Back Kitchen.” “The Back Kitchen? indeed?!” said the major. “I see you don’t know what it means,” Warrington said. “Ask Pen. He was there after Lady Whiston’s [party]. Tell Major Pendennis about the Back Kitchen, Pen ― don’t be ashamed of yourself.” So Pen said it was a little eccentric society of men of letters, and men about town, to which he had been presented; and the major began to think that the young fellow had seen a good deal of the world since his arrival in London.43 The Major’s response to Pen’s introduction to the society of the Back Kitchen is ambiguous, and Warrington’s admonition that Pen ought not to ‘be ashamed’ to frequent such a place is similarly equivocal. Younger than Warrington by more than a decade, it is perhaps fitting that Pen should look up to his elder, more experienced friend. His habit of fine dress, and his effeminate tendencies (such as preferring to drink tea rather than beer, and to arrange his own room in a ‘coquettish’ manner in comparison with Warrington’s sparsely furnished chamber) contrast with his friend’s ‘rough and ready’ attitude and appearance.44 Although unhappily married, Warrington lives the life of a bachelor, concealing the existence of his wife for some time behind his own impenetrable barrier or front, but soon considers his roommate ‘a great comfort to a lonely and unfortunate man’.45 This highlights their friendship as both mutually-dependent and bordering on the homoerotic. The shared private space that they occupy figures prominently in the narrative, intensifying their relationship so that it possesses not only a social aspect, but also emphasises its essentially private function. Warrington is one of the very few characters in the text who is able to penetrate past Pen’s carefully constructed, dandified, protective clothing, to the private body and personality beneath this exterior shell. This is signified through the private life that they share by living together at Lamb’s Court, and by means of their shared history as Boniface men and occupation as professional men of letters. The dynamic of their

186  Aberrant youth

Figure 6.1  I llustration from Pendennis, by W. M. Thackeray, ‘Pen pursuing his law studies’. Personal copy owned by the author.

friendship, and their physical occupation of these rooms, are clarified in Thackeray’s accompanying illustrations to the novel. In the two illustrative plates that show Pen and Warrington in their rooms, Pen is clearly feminised not only through his softer features, but also through his posture (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2). In both pictures Pen is on a lower level than his friend, and is more self-conscious of his body as he crosses it or partially obscures it from Warrington, who is more upright and who takes an aggressively masculine stance, with his legs apart, and who observes Pen from his higher vantage point. Warrington’s assumption of authority in their friendship is conceived as natural, and it allows Pen to view Warrington’s body, reciprocally perhaps, in terms of desire. In the suggestive terms outlined by Brooks, Warrington becomes the symbolic ‘key to satisfaction, power, and meaning,’ so that Pen is both drawn to Warrington and wishes to emulate him, adopting his mannerisms and occupation, and, towards the end of the novel, even by plagiarising his interest in Laura Bell (of whom he displays little awareness prior to Warrington’s expressions of esteem).46 Pen’s admiring response to his friend draws on both Pen’s immaturity (and so as a natural reaction to Warrington’s ‘rough and ready’ performance of masculinity), and on his own pursuit of manliness through his attempts to negotiate the blurring

Aberrant youth  187

Figure 6.2  I llustration from Pendennis, by W. M. Thackeray, ‘Pen hears himself in print’. Personal copy owned by the author.

of gender boundaries involved in dandiacal project. Pen’s physical answer to Warrington’s touch, for example, parallels the hetero-normative love affairs of youth: “I think [the manuscript of Walter Lorraine] is uncommonly clever,” Warrington said in a kind voice. “So do you, sir.” And with the same manuscript which he held in his hand, he playfully struck Pen on the cheek. That part of Pen’s countenance turned as red as it had ever done in the earliest days of his blushes: he grasped the other’s hand, and said, “Thank you, Warrington,” with all his might.47 The homoerotic subtext of their friendship, including Warrington’s theatrically staged mock-chastisement of Pen, who ‘blushes’ and thanks his friend, informs Pen’s adolescent development and his struggle to find a suitable, masculine identity to display to the world. This friendship with Warrington – the wearer of the honest jacket – in conjunction with the value for privacy established in the text and with the potential for dress as a means of both self-creation and defence, is a crucial part of Pen’s experience of maturation.

188  Aberrant youth The costumed and dandified body is central to Thackeray’s discussion of masculine identity in Pendennis, as an isolated individual and as part of a wider community. Joseph Litvak has suggested that, despite being renowned for their emphasis of privacy, nineteenth-century novels are founded ‘in a widespread social network of vigilance and visibility – of looking and of being looked at – [that] renders them inherently, if covertly, theatrical’.48 This ‘network of vigilance and visibility’ is translated in this text to emerge as a society conscious of the constant impact of spectacle and surveillance, which is therefore, as Litvak suggests, ‘inherently […] theatrical’. To engage in the theatrical presentation of one’s own body to society, Thackeray implies in Pendennis, enables the necessary balance between privacy and display required for healthy individual development, and in a manner which may be liberating during adolescence but still socially legitimate. Thackeray’s novel, responding to a cultural environment in which masculinity could be defined in terms of physical presence, energy, ability and healthfulness, emphasises the social value placed on performances of manliness. Dandyism, while remaining an ambivalent subject for Thackeray, nonetheless holds a fascinating appeal for the author in its simultaneous combination of anti-theatrical austerity and deliberate display. The use made of dress and costume in the novel, as part of the apparatus of spectacle and self-presentation, is used not only to signify personality or traits of character but also to enable self-projection as well as the deflection of the hurtful public gaze away from the vulnerable private self, which allows Thackeray to create a complex representation of masculine identity in mid-Victorian society. Self-conscious performance, by means of adaptation, emulation, or rejection of the different styles of masculinity on offer in the novel, serves to enable and sustain an essentially private identity for the adolescent Arthur Pendennis from the intrusive onslaught of public life.

The wild man in Trollope In Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?, one of the central young male protagonists, George Vavasor, forms a study in the disintegration of manliness. In part, Vavasor’s failure to perform a socially productive, well-adjusted masculinity is rooted in his inability to transition beyond the inward-looking egotism and emotional turbulence of youth to cement his place in the world through those associative relations with others which should form a part of a young man’s identity and sense of self. This is coupled with an increasing lack of civilised, well-regulated behaviour. Trollope’s study of violent masculinity, in Vavasor, therefore signals the extent to which discipline, integrity, and normative sociability are imperative qualities that male youth must adopt in order to effect successful, respectable manhood. In Can You Forgive Her?, George

Aberrant youth  189 Vavasor – cousin and erstwhile fiancé of the central female protagonist Alice – re-emerges to persuade Alice to jilt her current lover, the ‘worthy man’ John Grey, in order to attach herself once more to George himself and his aspirations for a career in parliament.49 Feeling unfit for the moral security and quiet seclusion represented by Mr. Grey, and believing that she can secure her cousin’s future prosperity by helping to anchor him in political and social life, Alice re-engages herself to Vavasor, only to realise the severity of her error as he disgracefully extorts money from her as his betrothed. His physical behaviour also becomes increasingly violent and threatening. Eventually, Vavasor’s irregular conduct is such that he must flee the country, leaving Grey to forgive Alice and reclaim her as his intended wife. Although a little over thirty, George Vavasor exhibits the turbulence and rebelliousness typically associated with youth, and is reminiscent of the aberrant desires and impulses attached to adolescence (particularly during puberty). No less than Thackeray and Meredith, Trollope emphasises the period of transition from boyhood to manhood to illustrate this stage of growth as particularly fertile in the formation of manly character – which entails struggle and hard work in order to be achieved. The restlessness and rebellious tendencies linked with youth became, as Jenny Holt has argued, a motivating factor for reform in public schools during the Victorian period, as a means of combating a ‘general sense of panic surrounding the conduct of the young’. 50 The psychological instability of adolescence could be anxiously associated with sexual volatility, delinquency, violence, and criminality. Vavasor’s frequent displays of anger and resentment are reminiscent of those experienced during youth, in which the boy or young man, feeling disenfranchised, is faced with the frustrating challenge of negotiating his place in society and struggling to forge his identity. Vavasor’s egotism and increasing lack of self-control expose the extent to which he has been unable to transition effectively into maturity. This process of civilisation was crucial to successfully inhabit ideals of respectable Victorian masculinity such as discipline, application, honesty, rationality, self-mastery, and a regard for others. These qualities, as has been well documented in recent decades, dominated the characteristics of various types of manliness in mid-Victorian Britain.51 Self-control became a key tenet of middle-class masculinity, in order to protect the self and others from the passionate impulses and urges that men must keep carefully on a tight rein. This was important, because as Peter Gay suggests, manliness could also involve a ‘potentially volatile compound of desperate restraints and ferocious desires barely held in check’.52 Physical violence and aggression were becoming less and less acceptable. George Vavasor, whose physical composure becomes frayed, is unable to negotiate between the competing impulses of civility and aggression, and to assert a rational will over his disruptive tendencies. As he becomes increasingly brutal towards

190  Aberrant youth those around him, he is no longer able to govern his temper, and his anger erupts in unregulated acts of ferocity beyond his control: ‘The Fury was driving him on, and he himself was not aware whither he was driven’, the narrator reveals of George’s lack of self-possession, and his sister Kate admits ‘[h]e is not in his senses when he is angered’.53 ­Vavasor’s integral fault of untrammelled aggression corroborates that which could have been mistaken as a signifier of physical virility and masculine power, but is in fact the weakness of unmanly character. His association with violence and unrestrained urges demonstrates his lack of rational, civilised maturity and manhood. In opposition to John Grey as the ‘worthy man’ of the novel, Vavasor is designated as the ‘wild man’. 54 In a chapter which uses this epithet, the narrator jokes that Vavasor does not, of course, initially appear to be a ‘wild man’, as he ‘did not roam about in the woods unshorn, or wear leathern trappings and sandals, like Robinson Crusoe’; instead, ‘[h]is wildness was of another kind’. 55 The designation is then all but retracted, as ‘Indeed, I don’t know that he was in truth at all wild’, but still the associations of the barbaric adhere to Vavasor, providing an indication of those savage aspects of his character which will come to dominate as the novel progresses. This description also, however, illuminates the root of George’s later problems. In raising Robinson Crusoe as a figure of archetypal ‘wild man’, Trollope alludes to two crucial aspects of Daniel Defoe’s protagonist; first, in order to survive, the mariner continues to maintain as closely as possible the civilities of ‘normal’ life even during the long years of his deserted situation, and second, Crusoe claims in the narrative that his greatest hardship was his isolation on the island. Unlike Crusoe, Vavasor is unable to recognise the recuperative significance of conformity to the social niceties, or the benefits of socialisation and interaction with others. Instead, he prefers to hold himself apart from others – which compounds his distinction as the disruptive ‘wild man’. Unlike Lord Chiltern in Trollope’s 1869 novel Phineas Finn (the next of the Palliser series), another ‘wild man’, Vavasor is not able to redeem himself through human connection (as Chiltern does in his happy marriage to Violet Effingham) nor to regulate his aggression through productive work or sporting culture (achieved by Chiltern in his activities as MFH in Trollope’s subsequent 1874 Palliser novel Phineas Redux). As well as his own preference to distance himself from social encounters, ‘not a man that made himself really popular in any social meetings of men’ and who ‘never gave breakfasts, dinners or suppers under his own roof’ but ‘would [rather] have wished that no one should have known his whereabouts’ or the location of his private abode, Vavasor is also physically set apart from his peers. 56 The bodily nature of Vavasor’s uncivilised propensities is established partly through his swarthy virility, described with dark hair, having a ‘low stature’ but still ‘broad in the chest and strong in the loins’; he is a ‘fine horseman and hard rider’ who

Aberrant youth  191 possessed unusual skill with pistol, rifle, and fencing sword. His tendency to physical violence, however, is marked clearly on his body due to the gaping scar on his face: He would not generally have been called ugly by women, had not one side of his face been dreadfully scarred by a cicatrice, which in healing, had left a dark indented line down from his left eye to his lower jaw. That black ravine running through his cheek was certainly ugly. On some occasions, when he was angry or disappointed, it was very hideous; for he would so contort his face that the scar would, as it were, stretch itself out, revealing all its horrors, and his countenance would become all scar.57 The repellent gash in Vavasor’s face comes to signify his instability, as the wound flares open and engorges with blood ‘revealing all its horrors’ in accordance with the wrath, resentment or irritation he feels. ‘“He looked at me like the devil himself – making the hole in his face gape at me,”’ states George’s grandfather, fixing the threatening scar with demonic potential. 58 However, this unsubtle barometer of his unregulated emotional state possesses, at the start of the novel, an arguably more positive connotation, as the disfigurement is a lasting commemoration of an episode from George’s early youth. Alone in the family home with his sister and the maidservants one night, an attempted robbery was made on Kate Vavasor’s jewels, kept in her bedroom. George, ‘yet hardly more than a boy’, manages to accost the burglar, who had been let through a window by an accomplice, and kills him:59 at the proper witching hour of night a stout individual crept ­up-stairs in his stocking-feet, and was already at Kate Vavasor’s door, – when, in the dark, dressed only in his nightshirt, wholly unarmed, George Vavasor flew at the fellow’s throat. Two hours elapsed before the horror-stricken women of the house could bring men to the place. George’s face had then been ripped open from the eye downwards, with some chisel, or house-breaking instrument. But the man was dead. George had wrenched from him his own tool, and having first jabbed him all over with insufficient wounds, had at last driven the steel through his windpipe.60 This is a story of which Alice, as George’s fiancée, felt she had every right to be proud. Vavasor had protected the valuable jewels – and symbolically by extension the honour – of his sister, and as such the scar bears testimony to the protective and courageous nature of the man. However, the narrative provides no commentary on George’s actions, so the episode is neither condoned nor condemned by Trollope. The lack of approbation of George’s conduct is noticeable by its absence, and could

192  Aberrant youth also therefore implicitly question the necessity for such a brutal response to the threat of home invasion. Unclothed, unarmed, and alone, George overpowers a full-grown criminal and, rather than subdue the intruder and wait for police aid or adult assistance, repeatedly stabs the man before finally plunging the metal instrument so far into his neck that it doesn’t just crush but actually breaks ‘through his windpipe’. The horror of the episode not only demonstrates that George is powerful and aggressively protective over what he perceives to belong to him, but it also serves to warn the reader of the latent brutality of the young man, with the scar a potent and highly visible reminder. George’s scar is communicative of his inner demons or ‘Furies’, which seem to drive him almost mad with a desperate, unappeasable rage. As Vavasor’s approximation of respectability crumbles and he plunges into physical violence towards both Alice and Kate, as well as the attempted murder of John Grey, Vavasor’s scarred face telegraphs the threat that he poses to others, as in his anger ‘the cicature on his face’ would become ‘ominous’.61 In arguing with Alice Vavasor, the inflammation of the wound corresponds with his own perceived sense of insult and resentment: he looked at her with all his eyes, with his mouth just open, so as to show the edges of his white teeth, with the wound down his face all wide and purple. The last word came with a stigmatizing hiss from his lips.62 Later in the text, at the reading of the will in which the old Squire’s money is not left to Vavasor who had been the presumptive heir and was counting on the inheritance, his actions become bestial, and he performs the role of irredeemable ‘wild man’ when he ‘turned round at his uncle as though about to attack him, […and] showed his teeth’.63 Even Vavasor’s blindly adoring sister Kate is brought to recognise with shame her brother’s unacceptable behaviour, which fills her with horror, as she contemplates his ill treatment of Alice in which his scar performs its usual repulsive communication of Vavasor’s violent anger. She envisages the scene: the loud curses, the whispered threats, which had been more terrible than curses, the demand for money, made with something worse than a cut-throat’s violence, the strong man’s hand placed upon the woman’s arm in anger and in rage, those eyes glaring, and the gaping horror of that still raw cicatrice, as he pressed his face close to that of his victim!64 The revolted horror that other characters experience when Vavasor’s scar widens and inflames, signifying his fury, suggests the instability of his character as well as the changefulness of his countenance.

Aberrant youth  193 The young man is isolated by this disfigurement, which marks out his difference. Part of his lack of manly character, however, also comes from his morbidly static social presence. His inability to embrace sociability, and his voluntary isolation, compound his dangerously marginalised position, which leaves him ‘stand[ing] ever on the brink of some half-seen precipice’ through his damaging self-obsession and lack of affinity with others.65 In an essay by David Skilton on masculinities in Trollope, the importance of viewing Trollope’s construction of masculinity as social, rather than simply individual, is underscored, and George Vavasor provides an extreme example of unsocialised, maladjusted masculinity. Homosocial environments, as well as family ties, ought to provide crucial points of interaction and integration for young men in order to facilitate the formation of manly character, and sociability forms a crucial aspect of these opportunities for exchange, shared experience, cross-­identification, and bonding. Skilton observes that manliness for Trollope: is education and socialization, building on a good foundation of character. […] The consequence is that Trollope does not present male characters and their development as something separate from their integration into society, and “manhood” is achieved by reaching a state in which a character fits without effort into his family and the society of men and women, and, importantly, into the masculine institutions of his fellows.66 Vavasor signally fails to effect his proper development and achievement of sanctioned manliness by refusing to engage on a social level, or behave convivially, with other men in particular. Instead, his isolationist tendencies mean that the basis for his interaction with others becomes skewed, and manifests itself in unhealthy rivalry or a desire to dominate. While sporting activities provided a healthy outlet for the working through of aberrant urges and physical aggression, and competition offers a basis for male interaction in particular, for Vavasor neither emerges as a viable check of his belligerence. Trollope was a famous rider and participant in the hunt, and scenes of foxhunting populate his novels to which Can You Forgive Her? is no exception with Vavasor featuring prominently in the meet at Edgehill and in his appearance at Roebury where he stables his horses. Hunting often provides opportunity for the demonstration of a range of qualities associated with manliness, which Trollope raises in his defence of the country sport in his Hunting Sketches (1865) as well as in his fiction and Autobiography. For Trollope, hunting emerges as a site of manliness, involving skill, strength, composure, courage, discipline, and commitment. The robust activity could enhance both mind and body, and as Pablo Murkerjee observes, it ‘inculcated both physical and moral authority’.67 Callum McKenzie

194  Aberrant youth also relates hunting to ritualised forms of regulation and initiation as a type of training for successful manhood: ‘Field sports prepared the boy for his life’s journey which would require stoicism, perseverance and robustness’.68 As well as forming part of the activities of the male elite, in which, as both Murkerjee and McKenzie suggest, masculine values could be learned, Trollope conceived the hunt as an important site of socialisation and interaction, unifying the various types who congregated and participated in the event. George Vavasor, however, is shown to reject the social opportunities the meet could provide, and rather than forming part of the company, prefers to keep himself aloof and ride alone: ‘He never rode in a crowd, always keeping himself somewhat away from men as well as hounds’ and at Edgehill ‘had spoken no word to anyone since the hunt commenced, nor had he wished to speak to anyone’.69 As the debate over the cruelty of blood and field sports gained momentum during the nineteenth century, hunting was implicitly aligned with discourses of animal cruelty and human barbarity. While Trollope strenuously resisted such attacks on his beloved sport, nonetheless hunting could be seen to make acceptable public displays of violent conduct, as with Chiltern in the Phineas novels, who sublimates and so legitimises his violent urges into the rituals of the hunt. Vavasor, however, does not seem able to regulate his impulses in the same way, and the hunting scenes in this novel reveal more about George’s lack of social integration than they function as a release for his disruptive anger and energy, highlighting his preference to avoid the company of others. In his desire to marry Alice, George exhibits further his combative nature, by reason of which he ‘did not love to abandon any contest in which he had been engaged’.70 To such an extent is this desire to conquer other men evident in George’s character that the young man admits his wish to marry Alice is in large part due to the vindictive pleasure that ‘robbing Mr. Grey of his wife’ would give him, recognising that ‘he could have no greater triumph than “walking atop of John Grey”, as he called it.’ 71 George’s desire is borne of spite, and dog-in-the-manger resentment; he cannot bear that another should have what (or whom) he wishes to possess. This feeling of entitlement generates hatred and frustration, which manifest in physical aggression: ‘George Vavasor, when he hated, was apt to follow up his hatred with injury. He could not violently dislike a man and yet not wish to do him any harm’.72 The rivalry between the two men is fed by Vavasor’s antipathy towards Grey, in a demonstration of his immaturity, lack of social adjustment, and moral laxity. Refusing to engage Vavasor in a confrontational contest for Alice’s hand in marriage, Grey, the ‘worthy man’, is by no means an ideal suitor, and Alice’s anxieties about marriage with him involving, to a degree, what she feels is an abdication of herself to his moral superiority, is at the heart of her decision to jilt him. John Grey, like Vavasor, employs coercive language in his addresses to Alice, but, while Grey emerges as a forgiving,

Aberrant youth  195 generous-spirited, respectable, and well-intentioned gentleman, despite his tendency to monologism, Vavasor’s speech and behaviour push him by all standards beyond the bounds of what could be excused in the period as acceptable attempts to exert his dominance over others. At no point in the narrative is this made more obvious than in the chapter ‘Bold Speculations on Murder’, which marks a turn in George’s descent into irredeemable violence both physically and psychologically. His ire raised by Alice’s transparent lack of love or care for him personally gives rise to the contemplation of murder as a means of ridding himself of those who oppose him. Vavasor reflects angrily on her treatment of him, brought to such a pitch that if his need for more money had not stayed his hand, he would have sought to ‘dispose’ of her ‘in some manner that would have been exquisitely painful to Alice’.73 While the narrator assures us several times that ‘he did not meditate murder’, George is clearly, as the chapter title suggests, fantasising about not only who he would kill (at this point, he ­considers the benefit of assassinating his grandfather, and then later he includes Mr. Grey, and Mr. Scruby the unscrupulous attorney, in his scheming, too, as well as Kate and Alice), but also the method that he would use: He suggested to himself that, if he desired to do so, he would have courage enough to make his way into the old man’s room, and strangle him; and he explained to himself how he would be able to get down into Westmoreland without the world knowing that he had been there,—how he would find an entrance into the house by a window with which he was acquainted,—how he could cause the man to die as though, those around him should think, it was apoplexy,—he, George Vavasor, having read something on that subject lately.74 Vavasor’s imagined murder of his grandfather is grotesque, despite the narrator’s assurances that he would not actually carry through his plan. The method that he chooses to kill the old man also strangely echoes the story of George’s scar, envisioning himself entering the house by means of a small window – as had the burglar’s accomplice in the attempt to steal Kate’s jewellery. This reinforces the criminality of Vavasor’s inclinations, and ensures that despite the ambiguity of the original episode, the emphasis now falls on his brutishness as he imagines himself as the perpetrator of the crime, rather than pointing to him as the defender of family property and honour. While his musings place him outside of a normalised culture of civilised masculine identity, setting him apart from refined society, Vavasor extends this by also imagining himself as part of a niche community of notorious killers, admiring the manliness, nerve, and daring of ‘Rush and Palmer – the openly bold murderer and the secret poisoner’ whose deadly exploits had been well documented, when both were hanged following their convictions in 1849 and 1856 respectively.75

196  Aberrant youth Both of them, in Vavasor’s estimation, were great men. He had often said so in company. He had declared that the courage of Rush had never been surpassed. “Think of him,” he would say with admiration, “walking into a man’s house, with pistols sufficient to shoot every one there, and doing it as though he were killing rats![”] […] And of Palmer he declared that he was a man of genius as well as courage. He had “looked the whole thing in the face,” Vavasor would say, “and told himself that all scruples and squeamishness are bosh,—child’s tales. And so they are. Who lives as though they fear either heaven or hell? And if we do live without such fear or respect, what is the use of telling lies to ourselves? To throw it all to the dogs, as Palmer did, is more manly.”76 Vavasor’s admiration for these celebrated criminals suggests that he prefers to align himself with other men outside of sanctioned social, legal, and familial circles, whose prohibited actions he views as ‘more manly’ than even the actions of national heroes such as Lord Nelson at Trafalgar and, by extension, other responsible, public-spirited citizens acting for the common good as opposed to being driven by callous individualism for personal gain. Legal and moral restrictions are dismissed as mere ‘scruples’ and ‘child’s tales’, adherence to which displays a lack of forthright manliness. While Vavasor’s ‘bold speculations on murder’ seem darkly comic in their incongruity with the domestic and political concerns of the novel, and as light relief given their hypothetical formulation, they underpin Vavasor’s increasingly violent behaviour, as the next chapter depicts the physical altercation between George Vavasor and John Grey, in which ‘Vavasor struck [Grey] repeatedly’ resulting in an undignified ‘scramble’ between the two.77 The ‘speculations on murder’, however, also foreshadow George’s later premeditated (but unsuccessful) attempt to shoot and kill John Grey when, as the latter refuses to accept George’s challenge to a duel, Vavasor fires his pistol and only narrowly misses the other man’s head. Vavasor’s desire to dominate and crush others so warps and distends the young man’s masculine identity – having become a ‘wild beast’ as the veneer of his decorum is worn away – that the end of the novel sees him forced into exile. George Vavasor creates a new identity for himself as ‘Gregory Vance’ prior to emigrating to avoid arrest, thereby cutting any ties to the associational or familial groups with whom he has been nominally connected by relinquishing his ancestral name, his emotional past with his ties to his sister and to Alice (both of whom had provided support even while the majority of society had condemned him), and reneging on his obligations.78 The reader is left to infer that each of these ties should form a crucial aspect of an individual’s identity, and as such Vavasor has failed in his adult responsibilities.

Aberrant youth  197 Throughout the novel George Vavasor is depicted as an outsider, although as Tamara S. Wagner has pointed out, he theoretically possesses a kind of insider status through his lineage, family, class, and background, which initially confuses the issue of his difference.79 However, his lack of social integration stems from his continued inability to form meaningful relationships, and to develop adult ties through the cultivation of amiability and openness in his dealings with others. He admits that he had never loved his dead fiancée, for whom he broke his first engagement to Alice, and has a physical altercation with his previous employer; he keeps himself aloof from congenial homosocial circles, argues with his grandfather, and eventually drives away his sister through his mistreatment of her in his unreasonable demand that she scheme dishonestly on his behalf to further his interests with both Alice and the old squire, finally – literally – pushing her away from him and in doing so breaking her arm. George’s sense of isolation perpetuates his divorce from the collective. Even his membership of the hunt, and his election to parliament for the latter part of a session (in itself only a partial and temporary success), do not redeem Vavasor through ameliorative social cohesion, as he prefers to ride alone, and in parliament is associated with Mr.  ­Bonteen who is himself unpopular and devious. Even when the young man does interact with others, it is often a forceful and hostile attempt to redress his annexation, as when he intrudes into a circle in which he does not belong (such as the Roebury Club, Vavasor Hall, Mr. Tombe’s legal offices, or John Grey’s bachelor rooms). Vavasor penetrates such spaces, even while it is clear that their occupants are resistant to the unwelcome intrusion of the threatening outsider. He grows increasingly marginalised in his resentment of others who do occupy positions of social and cultural acceptance, demonstrably belong to centric networks, or are active in assimilating within respectable institutions and communities. The resultant frustration at his own lack of ability to forge such ties manifests in increasing anger, which in turn fuels the violent behaviour that generates a greater sense of revulsion by as well as towards others: There had come upon him of late a hard ferocity which made him unendurable. And then he carried to such a pitch that hatred, as he called it, of conventional rules, that he allowed himself to be controlled by none of the ordinary bonds of society.80 As such, his actions perpetuate Vavasor’s marginalisation, and sense of alienation and disaffection, which feed his impotence and frustration in his inability to force his romantic, familial, financial, and political enterprises to fruition. This feeling of dispossession informs all of his endeavours, so that his sister recognises his perpetual desperation for money as part of the problem of his social detachment: she ‘had watched her brother longing for money all his life, —[…] the intensity

198  Aberrant youth of his wish for it, —the agony of his desire’.81 George’s thwarted sense of entitlement fuels his rage against those who, to his mind, oppose his success: He cursed his grandfather, his uncle, his sister, his cousin, and himself. […] Over and over again he cursed the will that had robbed him, and the attorney that had made it. He cursed the mother that had borne him and the father that had left him poor. He thought of Scruby, and cursed him, thinking how that money would be again required of him by that stern agent. He cursed the House of Commons, which had cost him so much, and the greedy electors who would not send him there without his paying for it. He cursed John Grey, as he thought of those two thousand pounds, with double curses. He cursed this world, and all worlds beyond[.]82 He is unable to recognise, rationally and maturely, that his ‘misfortune’ has largely stemmed from his own unmeasured selfishness – refusing, for example, to appease his grandfather before the old man’s death and reconcile, or to think of Kate’s interests and possible future, of Alice’s happiness, or to deal in good faith with his constituency of the Chelsea Districts, as he had no intention of making good his election promise to extend the embankment of the Thames river after taking his seat in the House of Commons. Vavasor’s detachment from others disables him; he cannot form the network of affective ties that was supposed to anchor the adolescent’s development, aid and enhance his transition to manhood, and to cement his position among his peers and society more generally. His identity lacks the social integration, interaction, and processes of exchange that can ensure a well-rounded, informed perspective, or to provide a positive environment for his growth. He was not a man that made himself really popular in any social meetings of men. He did not himself care for the loose little talkings, half flat and half sharp, of men when they meet together in idleness. He was not open enough in his nature for such popularity. Some men were afraid of him, and some suspected him. There were others who made up to him, seeking his intimacy, but these he usually snubbed, and always kept at a distance. Though he had indulged in all the ordinary pleasures of young men, he had never been a jovial man. In his conversations with men he always seemed to think that he should use his time towards serving some purpose of business.83 Secluding himself in comparative isolation, choosing to avoid the social institutions which could offer the requisite means of homosocial bonding in particular, Vavasor is unable to form any sense of altruism

Aberrant youth  199 or generosity of spirit, preferring instead to wholly prioritise his own desires, and coming to view such as no more than his right. Vavasor appears unable to appreciate that public activity could often be conceived as masculinising, and his reluctance to engage in social niceties and intimacy with other men, as well as those business-­orientated connections that are the only ones he is able to forge, indicate a lack of social adjustment and cohesion that nullify any potential for George Vavasor to rectify his position and to recuperate his aggressive, histrionic, unmanly tendencies. Not only does Vavasor elect to refrain from associating with other men, but he prefers the company of the other sex: ‘With women he could be happy. With women he could really associate’.84 This compounds Vavasor’s otherness in his rejection of the convivial processes of masculine exchange and friendship which for male adolescence is typically encouraged in the period (as has been discussed in Chapter 3), through various forms of masculinising, associational culture which help to establish male standing, reputation, and initiation. As Ben Griffin points out, removal from the male homosocial arena or public sphere ‘ran the risk of self-absorption or effeminacy’ because ‘public activity […] was other-regarding rather than selfish, often competitive, and above all strenuous.’85 Vavasor’s lack of social competence and of his ability to perform masculinity as part of an ‘other-regarding’ culture of civility are crucial factors in his descent into violent, bestial, and wild behaviour. This violence solidifies into a socially-unacceptable type of masculinity that is strenuous and competitive but also distorted in its lack of outward-­looking capacity; it is not only his physical aggression that constitutes this lack of appropriate manliness, or his inclination to female company, but his secrecy and lack of openness also suggest unmanly tendencies. Trollope valued honesty, transparency, and openness in his male characters. As the cultivation of masculinity involves sociality and communication, a rejection of social interaction or of candidness is, by extension, an indication of potential moral inhibition. Such reticence can mark guilt, shame, or deceit, so that while sociability is linked to civility, Vavasor’s excessive reluctance to engage meaningfully with others amounts to a suspicious withdrawal: His lodgings were his private retreat, and they were so private that but few of his friends knew where he lived. And had it been possible he would have wished that no one should have known his whereabouts. […] He had a mode of dressing himself when he went out at night that made it almost impossible that any one should recognise him. […] He was a man who would bear no inquiry into himself. If he had been out of view for a month, and his friends asked him where he had been, he always answered the question falsely, or left it unanswered.86

200  Aberrant youth Vavasor is inclined to privacy to such an extent that it tips over into mystery, which is itself at odds with the Trollopian ideal of a masculinity that applauds discretion but mistrusts secrecy. Vavasor conceals himself from the eyes of the world, deliberately misleading others through disguise and misdirection – actions which do not speak to honesty and moral probity. The young man becomes a combination of seclusion on the one hand, and, on the other possesses a violent anger that erupts threateningly; his inability to ‘bear inquiry into himself’ suggests a high level of self-regulation that is almost mean in its closeness, while his aggressive outbursts also demonstrate an unmanly lack of emotional and physical discipline. Trollope clarifies that George Vavasor’s lack of openness reveals a deficiency in his masculinity: There are many men of whom everybody knows all about all their belongings;—as to whom everybody knows where they live, whither they go, what is their means, and how they spend it. But there are others of whom no man knows anything, and George Vavasor was such a one. For myself I like the open babbler the best. Babbling may be a weakness, but to my thinking mystery is a vice.87 This accords with the value placed on openness of disposition and honesty in the cultivation of manliness during youth – popular strictures in nineteenth-century conduct books for young men, as Chapter 3 has already indicated. In Trollope’s Autobiography, he suggests that, in writing, ‘the language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader’, which corresponds with the preference for ‘babbling’ and transparency rather than the cultivation of ‘mystery’ and obscurity around a man’s identity. Not only does Vavasor seek to conceal his movements from his acquaintance and his family, which suggests a lack of candidness and scrupulousness even among those with whom he might be closest, but he actively keeps secrets, so that he furtively maintains not just two domiciles, but includes a clandestine, ‘nameless’ third accommodation: Vavasor also maintained another little establishment, down in ­Oxfordshire; but the two establishments did not even know of each other’s existence. There was a third, too, very closely hidden from the world’s eye, which shall be nameless[.] For a young man to court concealment in this way contradicts the gentlemanly frankness to which Trollope’s adolescent should strive – a manly candour that must be learned by, for example, Johnny Eames and C ­ harley Tudor in The Small House at Allington and The Three Clerks. George Vavasor not only refuses to attempt to cultivate openness in his dealings with others, but he consistently keeps much of his life secret – for example

Aberrant youth  201 at the end of the novel it is apparent that he has had calling cards printed with his secret alias of Gregory Vance well before they were actually needed. The narrator comments on his secretive tendencies: I am not aware that he had any special reason for this peculiarity, or that there was anything about his mode of life that required hiding; but he was a man who had always lived as though secrecy in certain matters might at any time become useful to him[.]88 From this admission, it is apparent as the text opens and Vavasor is introduced that there may not be any ‘special reason’ for such mystification of his private life, as living in this manner had become second nature to him, but that also ‘secrecy’ might at some future moment be particularly expedient. The reader is left to conjecture about Vavasor’s need for secrecy, and to consider whether there is either a reason for concealment of the truth, or to view this as a symptom of a mistrustful personality. The suggestion of a secret, however, adds a further dimension to Vavasor’s character, posing the question of what he may have to hide. As well as the facts of his ugly temper, and his inability to transition out of an aggressive adolescent self-interest, Vavasor may, of course, have another secret to conceal – which operates as a source of anxiety, guilt, or shame on the young man. His public reputation has clearly been tainted, and his lack of social conviviality and self-mastery might imply some illicit sexual element. If Vavasor’s unnamed secret consists of an occluded sexual history or inclination, such indeterminacy allows the secret to signify as part of a queer hermeneutic – as homosexuality – which, through Eve K. Sedgwick’s theorisation, ‘was distinctly constituted as secrecy’ during this period.89 The alignment of homosexual identity with secrecy, with the nameless, unknowable, and hidden in desire, has been well documented.90 Vavasor’s tendency to secrecy, and his unwillingness for others to have access to ‘certain matters’ of his life and his omission of specific detail – his ‘nameless’ third establishment ‘closely hidden from the world’s eye’, his sensitivity that ‘would bear no inquiry into himself’, and his preference for the company of women ‘with whom he could be happy’ – all suggest a queer sexual element to his identity. George Vavasor also keeps an ‘ancient groom’ Bat Smithers, and the two together conduct what seem to be unnecessarily clandestine meetings, as ‘Many were the long whisperings which George and Bat Smithers carried on at the stable door, in the very back depth of the yard attached to the hunting inn at Roebury’.91 This suggestively shifty behaviour, of conducting meetings in the insalubrious ‘back depth of the yard’, over the threshold of the door (with both gesturing towards oblique connotations of dissidence), alerts the reader to potentially immoral behaviour, and of a secret which Vavasor intends to keep hidden. This is reinforced by his desire for such secrecy in his doings that as ‘a

202  Aberrant youth valet about a man knows a great deal of a man’s ways’, so ‘therefore George had no valet’, and specifically too no witness to his most private moments or to his unclothed body – as ‘he did not deem it impracticable to put on his own trousers without having a man standing at his foot to hold up the leg of the garment’.92 The explanation here of Vavasor’s independence in dressing, however, does not outweigh the fact that he has no valet because he has no wish to metaphorically expose himself, or to divulge knowledge of his secret to another. It is not until nigh on the final episode of Vavasor’s murder attempt, that his secret life – or at least a part of it – is partially decrypted in the person of Jane – a woman seduced and then abandoned by Vavasor, but whom the young man now refuses to support. Thus the secret may be arguably resolved as heterosexual, and of a nature that reminds the reader of Vavasor’s loose morals (while providing some reassurance about the nature of his nameless secret, which in its heteronormative dimensions is still transgressive, but less disruptive than the threat of homosexual identity which had been encoded in the secrecy endemic to George Vavasor). Still, the text resounds with the problems of maintaining privacy under the threat of exposure, anxiety about which engenders aggression often related to defensiveness for Vavasor. He repeatedly conceals his hands – and finally of course his weapon – in his pocket (the withdrawal and discharge of which lead to his having to assume a new identity abroad). The other significant item secreted into George’s pocket is the gift-ring that he had intended to give to Alice. He throws the ring into the ashes of the fire after arguing with his fiancée, dislodging and losing one of the two diamonds set on either side of a ruby, ‘knocked out by the violence with which the ring had been flung’.93 As William A. Cohen has argued persuasively, in relation to another Trollope novel, sexual (and especially genital) attributes may be symbolised by precious jewels, for both men and women.94 Following such logic the loss of the diamond (that provides for symmetry and the completeness of the engagement ring which George had intended for Alice) perhaps symbolises his own imperfection or even impotence as a future mate. The lack of the second stone may represent the breakdown of Alice’s and George Vavasor’s betrothal, as well as the latter’s flawed character, but it also gestures towards some sexual inadequacy or irresolvable incompatibility. Despite anxiety about the exposure of his identity, maintained through his aversion to openness, George Vavasor’s young male body features prominently in Can You Forgive Her?, and although its virility and power indicate strength, Vavasor’s physical presence – from the scar that disfigures his face to his threatening aggression towards characters such as Grey, Alice, and Kate – ensure that Vavasor is set at odds with codes of acceptable, desirable masculinity. His inability to keep his own disruptive tendencies in check, and his lack of ameliorative sociability, disable him. Vavasor is therefore increasingly marginalised in the text,

Aberrant youth  203 unable to break out of the cycle of resentment towards others, and unable to control his anger at that frustration – itself associated with the turbulence and egotism of adolescence – which erupts and manifests in violent, antisocial, and eventually criminal behaviour.

The deviant in Meredith Discourses of adolescence in the mid-Victorian period reveal a growing unease about the sexual potential of male youth. Sexual consciousness, as Meredith indicates in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was viewed with anxiety in many circles, especially because sexual awakening was becoming the special province of the adolescent.95 A great deal has been written on the affirmative omnipresence of sexuality in the Victorian period in which, as Michel Foucault has noted, the ‘repressive hypothesis’ of sexuality was regulated by a culture ‘which speaks verbosely of its own silence, [and] takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say’.96 It is this ‘rhetoric of unspeakability’, and apparent cultural desire for its perpetuation, that is of particular interest for Meredith’s treatment of adolescent sexuality in The Ordeal, which prioritises the topics of sexual desire and seduction.97 As well as these politically-charged and seemingly indelicate subjects treated in the novel, however, Meredith’s exploration of male adolescent experience is particularly tolerant. In his progressive theories of the potentially unruly tendencies of erotic attraction and experimentation, Meredith’s view of adolescence – and especially of adolescent sexuality – acknowledges in male youth of this period a labile tendency to what would have been viewed as deviancy by ­Meredith’s contemporaries. In this novel, Meredith establishes adolescence as queer. In his orientation of male adolescence with supposed sexual deviancy, his young male protagonist engages in potentially homoerotic attachments, and experiences (or is attracted to others who experience) gender mis-identification, which reveals Meredith’s view of male youth as subversive. Meredith reconfigures conventional conceptions of youth to include conflicted erotic affinities, disrupting assumptions about normative heterosexual energies that are typically motivated by the reproductive imperative. In doing so, he unsettles models of adolescent identity that adhere to a static point of sexual alignment and expression. This stage of development – a highly charged and inherently unstable category of individual growth between the seemingly more static categories of childhood and adulthood – emerges during the nineteenth century as a concept invested with a great deal of cultural weight. Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson observe that during the nineteenth century adolescence was conceived as ‘an unusually turbulent time that might also represent a threat to social order’.98 One of the implications of this is the adolescent’s untrammelled sexuality, but instability is also apparent in the tensions at work between sexual maturity on the one hand and juvenile social status

204  Aberrant youth on the other. Age, and categories of ageing, have also been identified as resistant to discourses that speak about normative identity as fixed and stable. Claudia Nelson, in her work Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (2011), observes that: Arguably, since age constantly changes, while gender was presumed to be fixed and deviant sexuality a matter of criminality, illness, or innate difference, age might seem to be inherently queer from the outset.99 Lydia Kokkola concurs, suggesting that adolescent sexuality is always rendered deviant and that ‘all adolescent sexual desire can be regarded as a queer desire’, because it ‘undermines the locus of power that rests on the adult/adolescent divide’.100 Adolescence itself therefore emerges as an essentially queer form of experience. Meredith’s novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was attacked by contemporary Victorian critics for his unconventionally tolerant and sensitive attitude towards the awakening of sexual feelings in his characters, and for his unambiguous depiction of their negotiation over the temptations of sensual pleasures to be found both in the world at large and in the home. An anonymous reviewer of the Critic wrote that ‘Mr. Meredith is a man who has evidently thought much and deeply; but there are many passages in his book which lead us to believe that his mind is none of the purest’.101 Meredith himself could see little evidence of gratuitous indecency in The Ordeal, however, and voiced his frustration that Mudie’s Circulating Library – the most prestigious of its kind – had refused to stock the three hundred copies of the novel previously ordered. This novel’s use of sexuality as a theme is bound up with the ideas about physical growth and personal development found consistently throughout the text, and in particular those which Sir Austin’s rigid System of education draws on in the general medical and physiological debates about adolescence and male development. Jeffrey Weeks has commented on the importance that adolescence held in mid-Victorian theories about sex and the control of sexuality. He states that: As the image of home became more sentimentalised in the nineteenth century, one’s entry into the world of affairs appeared more threatening and the promptings of prudence suggested deferred gratification. […] The nineteenth-century anxiety about the centrality of sex in people’s lives was redirected towards the burgeoning physical potentialities of young people.102 Rather than the regulation of sexuality in general, it was the fear of the potential inherent in adolescence that was, in particular, of such interest

Aberrant youth  205 to Meredith in The Ordeal: As Weeks observed, ‘Pre-adult sexuality remained something to be organised and controlled’.103 But The Ordeal of Richard Feverel also includes a specific sexual threat, identifiable as the bugbear of many Victorian medical writers: masturbation. By the time Meredith was writing, the fear about “selfabuse” generated predominantly by popularised medical discourse had become increasingly directed towards adolescents. This meant that, in some ways, masturbation was inherently a problem of adolescence, and the one indicated the other, as Weeks has observed: ‘by the mid-­ nineteenth century the focus of interest in the treatises against masturbation was more clearly young people rather than adults, and there seems little doubt that this was connected with the redefinitions of adolescence’.104 The topic became one of quasi-obsessive concern, as the figure of the masturbator became ‘almost the archetypal image of the sex deviant’.105 It is evident in his correspondence that Meredith himself was troubled by the spectre of masturbation looming over the adolescent development of his eldest son Arthur. In his letters, George Meredith describes his careful arrangements for sending Arthur away to school. He was relieved, he claims, to see signs in the school dormitory that the boys were kept separate from one another at night, presumably to protect Arthur from what one medical writer of the period termed: ‘the secret indulgence of the vice, [and] the communication of this habit from one boy to another’, which will occur ‘wherever boys are gathered together’.106 Meredith writes to his friend Frederick Maxse: The boys are healthy, gentlemanly fellows, who work hard, and play all the games of their generation. So, are occupied. They have a fine river for rowing; a good cricket ground etc. […] Each fellow is partitioned by a wall of 7 feet from his neighbour.107 The sternest punishment, Meredith informs another friend, is for breaching this partition between the beds, and this letter appears to indicate his awareness of the debates of popular medical men such as William Acton or William Carpenter over the problem of masturbation as a kind of contagious disease, particularly in schools or other all-male environments.108 Calvin Thomas suggests that masturbation is intrinsically allied to queer tendencies, ‘associating the turbulence of solitary sex with the disturbances of identity formation’.109 Although known familiarly as the solitary vice, autoerotic practice also gestured towards the homoerotic or at least homosocial heterosexual conduct. The practice was perceived to be rife in public schools especially, conflating masturbation with sexual engagement through mutual interaction.110 In The Ordeal, medical suppositions on which the System is founded are frequently threatened by the implicit power of the adolescent

206  Aberrant youth imagination, through both reading and writing. Meredith indicates in the novel not only the importance of the imagination to individual development, but also how such instinctive indulgence is highly troubling to Sir Austin Feverel as a symptom of unwelcome maturity and of voluptuous tendencies in his boy. The first sign of this independence may be seen in Sir Austin’s discussion with Dr Clifford immediately before Richard’s fourteenth birthday party, when Richard refuses to let himself be subjected to a strip examination. The baronet also expresses dissatisfaction over Richard’s apparent fondness for reading Lemprière’s Dictionary, a detailed account of Classical mythology, which was considered by some to be overtly erotic and unnecessarily explicit. Apart from the suggestive content matter of the book, that it is found in Richard’s bedroom is a particular cause for concern. ‘A Lemprière in the bedroom’, Sir Austin worries, ‘looked like precocity […] Supposing the boy to be precocious, the whole System was disorganized’.111 Sir Austin’s anxieties about the suggestive private reading matter of his son are corroborated by the views of medical men such as William Acton, who thought that the Dictionary tended to incite sexual thoughts in pubescent boys. Acton writes in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) that the ‘mysterious halo which surrounded all the sexual feelings’ during adolescence was ill served by the imaginative stimulation felt on the ‘reading of the loves and of the gods and goddesses to be found in “Lemprière’s Dictionary,” and other text-books for the young student’.112 Acton goes on to explain that: In such works the youth may, and I have been assured over and over again by patients, does, gloat over the pleasures which the heathen deities are supposed to have indulged in; his imagination may run riot amidst the most lascivious passages; the doctrine laid down in these volumes seems to be that lust went on unchecked, that it was attended with no evil results, either physically or morally, to the individual, or to the society in which such scenes are supposed to have existed. Poor deluded boy! […] To enable him to live as these gods of old are supposed to have done, what companions must he not associate with?113 Acton’s fears over the Dictionary are echoed by Sir Austin, to whom the fact and place of the Dictionary’s discovery seems ‘a rather grave sign’ that ‘looked like precocity’.114 The second reference to Richard’s imaginative inclinations in the novel occurs at a later stage of the System, when Sir Austin is once more highly disconcerted to discover that his son has been writing poetry. The incident happens immediately after Sir Austin has congratulated himself over Richard’s development through the first stages of the System and

Aberrant youth  207 his arrival at the ‘Blossoming Season’. The father’s complacency in this prediction that Richard is ‘perfecting toward’ what he termed ‘the flower of manhood’, however, is momentarily shaken by Richard’s poetic attempts. Lady Blandish assures Sir Austin that Richard’s literary inclinations show no ‘sign of degeneracy’, but he nonetheless makes Richard burn his poems and promise to write no more.115 Meredith’s narrator seems heartfelt in his commiseration with Richard, as the reader is informed: Killing one’s darling child is a painful imposition. For a youth in his Blossoming Season, who fancies himself a poet, to be requested to destroy his first-born, without a reason […] is a piece of abhorrent despotism, and Richard’s blossoms withered under it. […] Not only his blossoms withered, his being seems to draw in its shoots and twigs. And when, coupled thereunto […], his father, in his tenderest manner, stated that it would give him pleasure to see those same precocious, utterly valueless, scribblings among the cinders, the last remaining mental blossoms spontaneously fell away.116 Significantly, it is one of these ‘scribblings’ that helps to seal the happiness of Richard’s first meeting with Lucy on the bank of the river a couple of chapters later, when he realises that she has been treasuring one of his poems: ‘O wonderment immense! His own handwriting!’117 The narrator indicates the connection now made between Richard’s poems and his adolescent love: ‘remnant of his burnt Offering! A page of the sacrificial Poems! One Blossom preserved from the deadly universal blight. He handed it to her in silence. She took it, and put it in her bosom’.118 Lucy is Richard’s first object of sustained sexual and emotional attraction, and her careful preservation of the poem offers silent reciprocation of that attachment. Writing and reading form part of other significant occasions in the novel, such as Richard’s feeling of sexual responsibility that awakens in him on reading in Clare’s diary after her suicide for unrequited love of him, or Bella’s fateful letter informing Richard of Lord Mountfalcon’s licentious intentions towards Lucy. In his notebooks Meredith responded to contemporary medical thought, which isolated the youthful imagination as problematic, writing that: ‘In youth we exaggerate our impressions – we force our imaginations ­voluptuously – hence much of our subsequent disenchantment’.119 This equation of heightened sensations with the imaginative impulse is a theme that Meredith repeats in The Ordeal, with emphasis on its significance during adolescence. William Cohen in Sex Scandal claims that, for the Victorians, unease about sexual awareness was visible only in coded linguistic signposts, through which the potential scandal of sexual transgression could be explored in relative safety by both writers and their readers. Cohen

208  Aberrant youth suggests that this is particularly true of discussions focused on the ‘unspeakab[le]’ subject of masturbation, stating that: The placement of hand on genitals remains a secret in the Victorian novel, but like all secrets it wants to be told […] In a genre that forbids direct observation of genitals in action, this manual code gives voice to what otherwise cannot be spoken.120 Richard’s sexual awakening, facilitated by his domination over a new young friend Ripton Thompson to whom Richard becomes hero and leader, also takes place alongside a variety of both physical and manual pastimes. On the one hand, activities such as swimming, hunting, and rowing were all viewed as healthy, outdoor pursuits; however, they were also promoted as positive measures to be taken in order to avoid indulgence in the “secret vice”. As outlets for youthful energy, sports in the novel may also become symbolic for sexual urges – whether as a means of repression or of substitution. This is made evident in the episode when Farmer Blaise catches the boys poaching, and whips them both. The masochistic pleasures of flogging were raised by Acton and others, who acknowledged that caning and corporal punishment should be avoided during puberty in case it incited licentious thoughts. As Sally Shuttleworth has outlined in her chapter on The Ordeal in The Mind of the Child, Richard’s conflicted feeling of degradation, and the language that Meredith uses to describe his feelings during the punishment, were all of a part with debates about masturbation in the period: so that ‘the associative resonances are there.’121 It is, in some measure, the father’s apprehension over Richard’s developing sexuality from puberty onwards that prompts the System in The Ordeal, in which it is explicitly women from whom Sir Austin wishes to separate his son, and so avoid contamination. ‘Dr Clifford could not help thinking’, we are told in his discussion with Sir Austin at ­R ichard’s fourteenth birthday, that ‘there were other temptations than that of Eve. [But] For youths and for men, Sir Austin told him, She was the main bait: the sole to be dreaded for a youth of good pure blood: the main to ­resist’.122 Sir Austin’s paramount concern is the threat posed to Richard’s smooth progression into perfect manhood by the temptation of woman in the various forms of ‘Eve’, ‘the Serpent’ and ‘the Apple-Disease’.123 On the one hand these seductive perils outlined as part of Richard’s youthful development assume a heterosexual attraction to women, through references to the Biblical Fall. Eve, according to Sir Austin’s system, has much to answer for. However, as Sven-Johan Spånberg has noted, the meaning of the term ‘apple’ was ambiguous, referencing not only the temptations of femininity, but also potential autoerotic impulses, as the term could also be used to mean testicle. As Spånberg wryly suggests, the onset of the ‘apple-disease’ in The Ordeal

Aberrant youth  209 may not necessarily involve the presence of a ‘corrupting Eve’; the sexual illness to which it alludes could be masturbatory – a reminder, therefore, of that deviant practice which was swiftly becoming synonymous with adolescent sexuality.124 As well as introducing the apparently aberrant behaviour arising from autoerotic practice, The Ordeal also engages with other possibilities of eroticism beyond the regulatory constraints of heteronormative behaviour. The queer instability of adolescence is articulated not just through Richard’s masturbatory practice, his precocious desire for his young bride Lucy, his covert sexual interest in his father’s womanfriend Lady Blandish, or even he and his friend Ripton’s exposure at Richmond to loose women of the demi-monde. Such opportunities for even indecorously open sexual pleasure and reflection still adhere to dominant assumptions about the experiences of youth all being motivated by normative, heterosexual objects of fascination embodied by the opposite sex. However, in this novel Richard is also drawn to two women in particular whose own gender misidentification is a source of intrigue for the young man. When Richard’s father takes him to London, to separate him from Lucy and to begin the process of marrying him off to a suitable young woman, the girl that is chosen is Carola Grandison, supposed descendant of the eponymous fictional character Sir Charles Grandison in ­Samuel Richardson’s novel. When they meet in the park, her first question to him is unusually frank, and challenges his own manliness: ‘Are you afraid of girls? [she asks…] My sisters all say you are. A man afraid of girls! I never heard the like!’, after which Richard replies ‘at all events I’m not afraid of you!’, and then jokingly asks her, ‘Are you a girl?’. Carola’s affirmative reply is regretful: she reveals, ‘I’m afraid I am! I used to keep hoping once that I wasn’t’. When Richard presses her, she explains her wish to be a boy, at which point Richard ‘took to the young woman’. ­Carola is open in her identification as male, and co-opts a willing ­R ichard to treat her like a boy and call her Carl, discussing her desire to ride astride, and claiming that: ‘I will smoke for my complaint when I grow up’.125 But Carola’s – or Carl’s – desire to align herself with masculine attributes does not just draw attention to her own queer status in the text. Richard is also complicit in her attempt to undermine the female body that she inhabits, complimenting her by corroborating her identification as male, saying ‘he thought she would grow up to be a very handsome chap’, and laughingly calling her ‘a funny fellow’.126 Carl invites Richard to participate in her gender subversion, and in the same way that she actively chooses to act like a boy, through their conversation Carl compares Richard himself more with her sisters rather than associating him with boyish or manly attributes. In discussing their proposed marriage, Carl persists in adopting a manly tone in her description of the love letters that she would send to Richard, to which he declares ‘That would just do

210  Aberrant youth […] All we want is to be married soon!’, which makes the ‘faithful’ Carl blush. Richard privately admits in the narrative that ‘a girl so like a boy was quite his idea of a girl’, and this is corroborated by Clare’s observation, written in her diary, that ‘he only loves boys and men’.127 Richard is therefore not only amused by, but also seems appreciative of, Carl’s rejection of the gender norms to which girls of her age and class would typically be subject. Despite the fact that he has been marked out by several other characters as the romantic-hero type (of the chivalric rather than Byronic order), his sympathy marks Richard as a young man with the potential to display a less rigid view of identity formation than, say, his father, whose own thinking about the boy’s growth are underpinned by medical discourses which sought to regulate and proscribe complementary forms of gender behaviour. Recently, Judith Halberstam has pointed out the potentially liberating effects of what her text calls The Queer Art of Failure, in which she remarks that ‘gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals’ because ‘not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures’.128 While Carl is still restricted, and must still adhere to the apparatus of the patriarchal society she inhabits, through marriage for example, the acts by which she does refuse to conform – smoking, renaming herself, and choosing to perform a masculine role – Carl embraces her gender ‘failure’. By extension, in their conversation, Richard is also receptive to the possibilities that such fluidity might entail, jokingly playing along to Carl’s adoption of a masculine tone to his own consequent feminisation. Richard’s evident interest in and charmed response to Carl’s elective gender re-alignment is later piqued again, albeit in a much more explicitly erotic manner, in his dangerous relationship with Bella Mount, the mistress of Lord Mountfalcon. As Melissa Jenkins contends, Richard is one of Meredith’s male characters who ‘channel seemingly homoerotic desires through attractions to masculine women’.129 Bella Mount generates significant sexual confusion for the young man, who is fatally drawn to her ‘man-like conversation’, such that he declares to his friend Ripton that ‘She’s very like a man, only much nicer. I like her’.130 His scandalous relationship with Bella is doubly unlicensed in Victorian society; first, for his status as a married man who oughtn’t to be spending time alone with what Mrs. Berry terms a “Beller Donner”, and, second, for his fascination in such a masculine woman.131 Bella plays with gender boundaries and engages Richard’s attention sexually partly in her cross-dressing in the character of Sir Julius. Donning the costume and mannerisms of a cavalier, Bella asks Richard, ‘wasn’t it a shame to make a woman of me when I was born to be a man?’ Her men’s attire is so bewitching to ­R ichard, however, that she reminds him playfully that ‘a man mustn’t admire a man’, drawing attention to the homoerotic tensions between the two characters during what Mark Osteen has termed the ‘highly charged scene of transvestic seduction’.132 When the couple parade the streets

Aberrant youth  211 of London at night, the illicit nature of Bella’s transvestic performance is highlighted when she alludes to a history of homosexual persecution and associated outlawed behaviour, in the observation that ‘They take men up, Dick, for going about in women’s clothes’.133 In an extension of the seductive gender reversal that Bella enacts, Richard’s sexual orientation and gender compass are both subverted. She likens him to a ‘pretty butterfly’, and the scene where she sets herself on fire climaxes with a tableau, provided by Bella standing, while Richard kneels at her feet and clasps her round her legs in an intimate position of subjugation.134 Both of these episodes, between Richard and Carl and then Richard and Bella, resonate with Holly Furneaux’s view of sexual orientation in this period. In a study of Charles Dickens’s novels, she claims that in the mid-Victorian era: ‘there was a great flexibility in the thinking of the erotic […] better able to articulate desires that expand and expose the limits of what now registers as the sexual’.135 This fluidity of erotic desire is conducive to less polarised assumptions about the spectrum of gender identification, as well as providing opportunities to investigate suggestive ambiguities in the sexual make-up of the adolescent – who, in any case, already occupies an unstable position in Victorian thought. Meredith in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel tries to undermine the moral values imposed on sexual relations by society, and to question the validity of gender roles outlined by various dominant mid-Victorian ideologies. The pursuit of sexual identity and sensual pleasure in the novel forms a representation of Meredith’s attempt to subvert ‘the Victorian conception of masculine and feminine roles’, and to explore unlicensed opportunities beyond the dominant norm.136 Meredith’s text demonstrates adolescence as the formative period in which the rules of heteronormative masculinity ought to be learned, so that patriarchal imperatives can be reproduced and maintained. His novel, however, explores some of the alternative possibilities that this transitional, heavily freighted figure can entail. In particular, his consideration of both gender formation and sexual orientation in youth is especially flexible. The associative relationship between adolescence and sexuality was such that, in Meredith’s novel, the two are inextricably linked. Meredith’s treatment of sexuality is therefore highly involved in his exploration of male adolescence and the formation of an assumed heteronormative masculinity in progressing towards adulthood. Although self-regulation should be learned during this period, Meredith acknowledges that adolescence is at odds with the masculine ideal of discipline and self-control. Rather, it is synonymous in this novel with experimentation, sexual maturation and exploration, and the pushing of boundaries. In The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, adolescent sexuality and unstable performances of gender subvert conventional views of adolescence as a stage of linear progression. His view of conflicted gender identification and erotic desire mean that, in Meredith’s novel, adolescence is queer.

212  Aberrant youth

Conclusion In each of the three novels examined here, male adolescence is constructed as a period of turbulent character formation, in which male youth engages in a process of both repulsion and attraction towards others in order to establish a unique identity. Motifs of erotic transgression mark the problematic position of the young man, who seeks to distinguish himself from (or align himself with) both familial and associational homosocial cultures, or to stake a claim to social acceptance through the heteronormative patterns of courtship and marriage. Such processes, however, are shown to be complex, and not always achievable. Thackeray’s protagonist in Pendennis learns to cultivate dandyism as a form of self-exhibition, which negotiates between public display and private life. In so doing it is able to explore beyond the confines of acceptable male homosocial bonds while simultaneously constructing a public-facing veneer with which to protect the vulnerable self. Young Pen is largely successful in his eventual efforts to deflect or school the penetrative gaze of a critical society. In Pendennis, the figure of the dandy appears inherently artificial in its reliance upon spectacle and display, yet it also enables self-creation and the maintenance of privacy during adolescence, in particular through dandyism as a form of self-regulation and fraternal bonding. In comparison, in the first of Trollope’s Palliser novels Can You Forgive Her?, the volatile, disruptive George Vavasor descends into a corrosive disintegration of the masculine persona which he had struggled unsuccessfully to maintain, in part through his inability to connect and integrate himself with others, or to form affective ties, and also due to his own violence and lack of self-control. Vavasor effectively positions himself at odds with acceptable codes of manliness, and is unable to recover. His violence-inflected gender identity is therefore in conflict with codes of gentlemanliness. His eventual decision of a clean break from every link to his past, in the formation of a new identity under the name of Gregory Vance, iterates the cultural imperative for male youth to find one’s place in the world through proper and effective socialisation (in which he has failed). It also suggests a lingering sense of the fragility of male identity as a result of the heavy weight of cultural expectation in negotiating such integration before a passport to manhood can be achieved. In Meredith’s The Ordeal, the marginalised experience of adolescence may be viewed as inherently queer. Precariously situated between the notionally stable categories of childhood and adulthood, although male adolescence is heavily invested as the site of masculine formation, it is also a labile, fluid period of development full of erotic possibilities including (but also crucially beyond) the heteronormative imperatives of dominant patriarchal discourse in the period. Through reference to pseudo-­ scientific discourses, the novel reproduces and interrogates mid-Victorian

Aberrant youth  213 hysteria about youth succumbing to sexual temptation before marriage. However, Meredith cautiously articulates a more positive understanding of sexual ‘precocity’ as a healthy aspect of masculine identity. The persistent allusions in The Ordeal to masturbation, homoeroticism, and gender inversion or transvestic performance, allow Meredith’s view of male adolescence to emerge as a period of particularly flexible erotic connotation, revealing in his novel a covert yet persistent tendency toward experimental sexuality as a characteristic of male youth. The queer instability of adolescence in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is articulated not just through Richard’s youthful passion for his young bride Lucy, for example, but also through unlicensed opportunities of gender fluidity, misidentification, cross-dressing, and auto-erotic impulses. The male protagonists in these three novels inhabit irregular styles of manliness in their struggle to achieve culturally-determined types of acceptable masculinity. In doing so, they suggest that youth itself resisted Victorian tendencies to rigid or restrictive classification via such revelations about the instability of adolescent identity. Each of the young men exposes youth’s divergent status within Victorian culture, and the prominence of issues raised by the volatility of adolescence, which gave it such a problematic character. In their novels these three authors interrogate the processes of identity formation and consolidation, as their protagonists struggle towards (but only equivocally embody at best) accepted types of manliness. Negotiating the construction of their masculine identity in very different ways, the dandy, wild man, and deviant are all shown to be flawed. These novels serve, however, to reiterate adolescence as a process of formation that ought to be allowed greater freedom in the possibilities of identification than those typically afforded to respectable, middle-class constructions of male identity. Thackeray and Meredith depict two characters whose degree of development is rather ambiguous, disordered, and certainly not straightforward, while ­Trollope’s protagonist, Vavasor, manifestly fails to transcend his unstably violent, rebellious, and anti-social tendencies.

Notes 1 Critics such as John Carey have noted Thackeray’s interest in theatrical forms of entertainment, from plays and pantomimes to ballet and opera. See John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), particularly chapter 5 on ‘Theatre’. 2 Emily Allen, Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), p. 7. 3 Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, p. 588. 4 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 476. 5 Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (­Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 11. 6 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 588. 7 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 597.

214  Aberrant youth 8 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 599. 9 Thackeray, Pendennis, pp. 286–9. 10 See Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes, and Ellen Moers, The Dandy for the effects such charges of effeminacy in dandyism held on debates and perceptions of masculinity. 11 J. C. Flugel, The Psychology of Clothes, (New York: AMS Press, 1976 [1950]), p. 15. 12 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 270. 13 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 445–7. 14 Miles Lambert, ‘The Dandy in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Pendennis: An Early Victorian View of the Regency Dandy’, Costume, 22.1 (1988), 60–9 (p. 60). 15 See Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 77–226. In addition, Anne Hollander and Clair Hughes have both distinguished Brummell’s style of dandyism as emphasising simplicity, cleanliness, and impeccable behaviour. Claire Nicolay has similarly commented that Brummell was ‘the primary architect of dandyism’ and that he ‘developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behaviour and style of wit that opposed ostentation.’ (‘Delightful Coxcombs’, p. 289). 16 This is an idea touched upon by, for example, Juliet McMaster in Thackeray: The Major Novels (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), who states that ‘the society satirized in Pendennis is that of the dandy’ (p. 65). More recently, however, Thackeray critics are becoming sensitive to the complexity of the author’s attitude towards dandyism, such as Robert P.  Fletcher, in ‘The Dandy and the Fogy: Thackeray and the Aesthetics/Ethics of the Literary Pragmatist’, English Literary History, 58:2 (1991), 383–404, who suggests that, ‘The young dandy stands as individual, independent of the social conventions of family and work, and, in the metaphors of T ­ hackeray’s universe, as the figure of self-creation’, (p. 401); and Claire Nicolay in ‘Delightful Coxcombs to Industrious Men: Fashionable Politics in Cecil and Pendennis’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 (2002), 289–304, who observes that ‘dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.’ (p. 289). 17 Thackeray, Pendennis, pp. 588–9. 18 R. S. Rintoul, from ‘Thackeray’s Pendennis’, Spectator xxiii (21 Dec., 1850), 1213–5 (pp. 101–2). 19 William Makepeace Thackeray, ‘Men and Coats’ [August 1841] in The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, in Thirteen Volumes, Vol. XIII (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1891), p. 335. Original emphasis. 20 Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking Press, 1960), p. 203. 21 Major Pendennis encapsulates the style of dandyism made popular by King George IV, both during his period as regent and in his reign. For more specific examples of the evolution of fashion between 1810 and 1850, see C. Willett Cunnington and Phyllis Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). Although rather dated, this text still provides a detailed account of dress in the period, as does Norah Waugh, The Cut of Men’s Clothes, 1600–1900 (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

Aberrant youth  215 22 Clair Hughes, Dressed in Fiction (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), p. 7. 23 Moers, The Dandy, p. 212. 24 Thackeray, ‘Men and Coats’, Vol. XIII, Works, p. 334. 25 Judith L. Fisher, Thackeray’s Skeptical Narrative and the ‘Perilous Trade’ of Authorship (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 115. 26 Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993) 27 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Times of Herr Teufelsdröckh, intr. By Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 2002), p. 279; p. 223; p. 281. 28 Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 19. 29 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 19. 30 Gilbert, The Citizen’s Body, p. 134. 31 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 68. 32 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 280. 33 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 280. 34 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 281. 35 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 281. 36 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 242; pp. 242–3. 37 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 246. 38 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 767. 39 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 669. 40 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 376. 41 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 378; p. 374. 42 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 363; p. 265. 43 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 365. 44 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 364; p. 360. 45 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 733. 46 Brooks, Body Work, p. 8. 47 Thackeray, Pendennis, p. 524. 48 Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. x. 49 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 55. 50 Holt, Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence, p. 25. 51 Martin J Wiener, for example, assesses the ‘diminishing acceptance of interpersonal violence’ in the nineteenth century, which Emelyne Godfrey also traces in the cultural shift of the civilizing process towards ‘a less belligerent response towards violent crime’ and a greater emphasis on self-­control, which is made apparent in her readings of Trollope’s Phineas novels. See Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian ­England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) (p. 13); and Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature: Duelling with Danger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) (p. 1). 52 Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred, ‘The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud’, 5 vols. (London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1993), vol. 3, p. 115. 53 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 595; p. 598. 54 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 55. 55 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 69. 56 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 150; p. 151; p. 189. 57 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 75. 58 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 75. 59 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 75–6.

216  Aberrant youth 60 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 76. 61 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 379. 62 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 496. 63 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 581–2. 64 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 572. 65 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 572. 66 David Skilton, ‘The Construction of Masculinities’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. by Carolyn Dever and Lisa Niles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 120–41 (p. 130). 67 Pablo Murkherjee, ‘Nimrods: Hunting, Authority, Identity’, Modern Language Review, 100.4 (2005), 923–39 (p. 927). 68 Callum McKenzie, ‘“Sadly Neglected” – Hunting and Gendered Identities: A Study in Gender Construction’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 22.4 (2005), 545–62 (p. 558). 69 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 204–5; p. 207. 70 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 445. 71 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 153; p. 173. 72 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 153–4. 73 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 541. 74 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 541. 75 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 541. 76 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 451–2. 77 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 552. 78 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 596; p. 746. 79 See Wagner, ‘Speculators at Home in the Victorian Novel’, 21–40. 80 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 580. 81 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 601. 82 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, pp. 604–5. 83 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 189. 84 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 189. 85 Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 171. 86 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 151. 87 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 151. 88 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 151. 89 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 73. 90 See, for example, D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) and H.G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003). 91 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 152. 92 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 155. 93 Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?, p. 497. 94 William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 159–90. 95 See Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 96 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knoweldege: The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. by Robert Hurley (London and New York: London, 1998 [1976]), p. 10; p. 8. 97 Cohen, Sex Scandal, p. 32.

Aberrant youth  217 98 Charles Ferrall and Anna Jackson, Juvenile Literature and British Society, 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), p. 2. 99 Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 11. 100 Lydia Kokkola, Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2013), p. 98; p. 99. 101 Unsigned review, Critic xix (2 July 1859), in Meredith: The Critical Heritage, ed. by Ioan Williams (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971) p. 66. 102 Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 50. 103 Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 51. 104 Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 49. 105 Weeks, p. 49. 106 Acton, The Functions and Disorders, Appendix A, p. 107. This appendix is a letter from a friend of Acton’s about the problems found in schools of the period. 107 Meredith, Letters, No. 181 to Frederick A. Maxse, (October 7 [6], 1862) p. 166. 108 Sir Austin in The Ordeal is careful not to place his son into school, as he concurs with Acton that they will corrupt innocent youth. Richard does not even have male friends, until Ripton Thompson (chosen by Sir Austin as a suitable companion) is invited to Raynham Abbey upon the occasion of his fourteenth birthday. 109 Calvin Thomas, ‘Foreword: Crossing the Streets, Queering the Sheets; or, “Do You Want to Save the Changes to Queer Heterosexuality?”’, in Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature, ed. by Richard Fantina (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), pp. 1–8 (p. 3). 110 For more on masturbation and homosociality in schools, see Alice Crossley, ‘Violent Play and Regular Discipline: The Abuses of the Schoolboy Body in Victorian Fiction’, in The Victorian Male Body, ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 25–45. 111 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 36. 112 Acton, The Functions and Disorders, p. 9. 113 Acton, The Functions and Disorders, pp. 9–10. 114 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 36. 115 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 113. 116 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 113. 117 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 131. 118 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 131. 119 Notebooks, Maroon “Patent” Notebook, IV. 24, iv, p. 46. This is an idea that Meredith appeared interested in returning to later in his career, as it is one of the very few notes repeated in a different notebook. In the Blue “Patent” Notebook, dating from circa 1863 to the late ‘60s, Meredith writes ‘Much of our disenchantment when Youth has gone arises from our having forced our imaginations voluptuously when young.’ VI. 14, iv, p. 62. 120 Cohen, Sex Scandal, p. 33. 121 Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 164. 122 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 40. 123 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 40; p. 17.

218  Aberrant youth 124 Sven-Johan Spånberg, ‘The “Scientific Eye”: Science, Sexology, and Romance in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’ in Realism and Its Discontents, ed. by Danuta Fjellestad and Elizabeth Kella (Karlskrona: Blekinge Institute of Technology, 2003), pp. 112–35 (p. 113). 125 Meredith, The Ordeal, pp. 197–8. 126 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 199. 127 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 200; p. 444. 128 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 4. 129 Melissa Shield Jenkins, ‘“Was ever hero in this fashion won?” Alternative Sexualities in the Novels of George Meredith’, in Straight Writ Queer, ed. by Fantina (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland), pp. 124–133 (p. 124). 130 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 397 p. 382. 131 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 388. 132 Mark Osteen, ‘Meredith/Joyce: Bella Mount and Bella’s Mount’, James Joyce Quarterly, 35.4–36.1 (1998), 873–8 (p. 876). 133 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 398. 134 Meredith, The Ordeal, p. 415. 135 Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 11–12. 136 Sven-Johan Spånberg, ‘The Theme of Sexuality in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel’, in Studia Neophilologica: A Journal of Germanic and Romance Philology, ed. by Bengt Hasselrot, xlvi (1974), pp. 202–24 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiskell Periodical Company, 1974), p. 216.

Conclusion

The period covered in this study, from the mid-1840s to the late-1870s, saw fundamental changes in gender relations, social and political reforms, and reformations of class distinction and educational policy. Claudia Nelson has commented that, ‘As social class, religious faith, and other props and stays of the national order came increasingly under attack, there seemed ever less solid ground on which to stand’.1 As these established structures came under scrutiny, adolescence gained in significance to become a part of the cultural consciousness in mid-Victorian Britain, partly in response to such disrupted models of social life and behaviour. It is within this context that Meredith, Thackeray, and Trollope trace the cultural significance of male adolescence in their work, as a discrete identity and masculine type. In response to the atmosphere in which their novels are written, all three writers draw on a diverse body of texts, ranging from periodical articles to conduct literature. Their work therefore becomes extra-referential, creating an intertextual dialogue about the nature of the concept of adolescence in relation to other cultural strands of thought and discourses such as medical writing and religious doctrine, many of which help to inform their writing or provide a social position against which ideas about youth may be developed. These authors insist in their novels that adolescence provides a forum within which society designates the instruction of, and absorption of, masculinising values. This book has illuminated how, in their work, the ‘rising generation’ is invested with a sense of importance for its contribution to the future of society, and how their fiction responds to this cultural speculation through representations of individual male youth in myriad forms. 2 Each incarnation allows the author and reader to focus on particular features of male adolescent experience, so that, for example, in Thackeray’s Pendennis, both the egotistical and imitative tendencies of the young protagonist come under inspection, in The Three Clerks, aggressive individualism and the drive for financial wealth are set at odds with the restorative qualities of slow maturation and character development in the figure of the graceless hobbledehoy, or in Beauchamp’s Career, the heroic impulses of immaturity are examined

220  Conclusion alongside prosaic necessity and the hierarchical logic of professional and social development. Adolescence is revealed as a distinct experience, and as a separate masculine identity that may be considered alongside – but also part of – other viable masculine roles such as the gentleman, the father, or the professional man. Trollope, Meredith, and Thackeray pay careful attention to the rigours of individual development, each forming a detached understanding of the limitations placed on youth by society and the conventions of respectability in their novels. By employing the medium of fiction, these writers are able to respond to the social forces governing everyday reality, yet also to reflect on more imaginative possibilities of maturation in their narratives as well as personal remembrances of youth. The young male protagonists in the novels that have been studied here reveal the complexities of maturation, and in so doing illustrate potential opportunities for self-creation and exploration that do not necessarily align with either dominant views on how the journey from childhood to adulthood ought to be effected, or with popular, largely heterosexual types of masculinity that were viewed as central pillars to maintain the Victorian patriarchy. Thackeray represents adolescence as a means of shared self-evaluation, and provides an analysis of where and how youth can fit into society. In doing so, fictional adolescence interrogates individual development. By responding to, and exposing the lack of stability in, the relationship between adolescence and certain aspects of cultural thought such as fears over dandyism as an egotistical, effeminate mode of behaviour, or literary conventions of closure in forms such as the Bildungsroman, Thackeray’s novels raise adolescence as a crucial part of the cultural milieu. Adolescence is constructed in Pendennis, The Newcomes, and Philip not only as other and unfamiliar, but also as a part of shared experience and so part of a continuum. Thackeray’s interpretation of the Bildungsroman form in these connected serial novels reassesses such literary conventions as marriage as a means of narrative conclusion, so that closure is withheld not only from the protagonist but also the reader. This is magnified by the temporal elongation of the texts over several months of serial publication in instalments, in which the adolescent maturation of each protagonist is mirrored by the development of his audience, so that the fictional world of the Pendennis novels is sustained during the serial run of the text, and exists side by side with the everyday material world suggested in the advertisements that surround the letterpress. Thackeray’s view of adolescence can be humorous, although his representations of the foibles of male youth remain sympathetic, in particular, his observations of the conflicted attitudes about the presentation, appearance, and obfuscation of the young male body. By engaging with a view of adolescence as a psychological and emotional response to physical changes at puberty, Thackeray invites his readers to consider the social and private

Conclusion  221 dimensions of masculine identity, citing adolescence as a crucial moment in which social participation must be negotiated in relation to private self-awareness. Meredith, with a slightly different emphasis, employs adolescence as indicative of pressing cultural as well as individual concerns. While acknowledging the potentially disruptive and fluid characteristics of adolescence, Meredith establishes male youth as a valuable asset to modern society, and domesticates it by situating adolescence more generally alongside parallel issues about manliness, sexual development, socialisation and education. The System devised by Sir Austin Feverel in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, for example, exemplifies a failed ideal of male edification, exposing the flaws of such methods of youthful development that remain disengaged and detached from the feelings and desires of young men and from social reality. By acknowledging the significant role that youth, as symbolic of futurity, can hold, Meredith raises adolescence as worthy of notice, although novels such as Evan Harrington and The Egoist also complicate this stage of male experience by corrupting and deflating the popular cultural ideals of masculine development and behaviour found in self-help writing and conduct literature. Meredith’s youthful protagonists, while accentuating the significance of male adolescence, categorise it as a disruptive necessity, as it poses a threat to the established patriarchal authority of the older generation. For Trollope, male adolescence emerges as a site of personal interest as well as a key facet in the cultivation of cultural capital. This period of maturation, achieved through effective socialisation, growth in self-­ confidence, and the stabilisation of masculine status, is also a crucial ­period for self-investment. However, as Trollope’s novels demonstrate, the worth of the cultural capital accrued by male youth rests in part on the temporal extent of their progress and measure of self-­reflexivity, as those whose rise to apparent success is too swift and steep have not been given sufficient opportunity to entrench within themselves the moral fibre, honesty, or value for hard work, which combine to produce manly character. Such flaws are often possessed by protagonists such as ­Adolphus Crosbie, Alaric Tudor, and Sir Felix Carbury, whose ill-founded reliance on gambling or speculation, unsound financial practices, corrupt behaviour, and destructive selfishness lead almost inevitably to their ruin. As such, while self-reflection is a key aspect of positive experiences of male adolescence, the positive, ameliorative effect of relationships, and the development of an outward-facing personality, also emerges as crucial to combat potential tendencies to be redundantly inward-looking, secretive, socially-­maladjusted, or otherwise lacking in measures of heteronormative performance. George Vavasor, in Can You Forgive Her?, stands as testament to Trollope’s belief in the necessity for social bonding in order to develop a socially acceptable masculinity, rather than the violent excesses which mark Vavasor’s failed

222  Conclusion adolescence, lack of self-control, and social ostracisation. In providing such a warning in the person of Vavasor, however, together with the wastrel Dolly Longstaffes and unscrupulous Undy Scotts of his fiction, Trollope iterates the problematic character of adolescence, as well as its role in masculine formation. As a counter-­measure to these characters who pervert the positive opportunities for development that lie within the experience of male adolescence, Trollope indicates a vision of restorative masculinity in the hobbledehoy, which nonetheless highlights the weight of cultural expectation placed on male youth during this period. All three authors indicate, through their repeated isolation of this stage in individual development in novels such as The Newcomes, Harry Richmond, or The Duke’s Children, that this identity holds some special fascination for them and for their mid-Victorian readership. Male adolescence not only provides these writers with opportunities for self-­ reflection and social criticism, but it also becomes a paradigm for narrative and imaginative inquiry about motivation, egotism, emotional and physical relationships, sexual identification, and the possibilities of self-creation. Male adolescence as a process could be seen to promise the realisation of masculinising endeavours, although perceiving male adolescence as a diverse model of masculinity also establishes it as a locus for fears that such ideals remained unattainable. By isolating adolescence as a crucial role in the performance and development of masculinity, however, Thackeray, Trollope, and Meredith invest male youth with deliberate cultural significance, whether or not the virtues of manliness are fully achieved within the transition from child to adult. The struggle of formation that the project of mid-Victorian adolescence entails, as each author illustrates, can emerge as redundantly inflexible rather than fluidly exploratory, to the detriment of not only the individual who is directly affected, but also of society more widely due to the restrictive dogmatism of dominant outlooks which sought to limit and proscribe the experience. Each author views adolescence as an (equivocally) welcome challenge to circumscribed, clearly linear development – its oddness less a cause for anxiety than for celebration and greater cultural investment and support. Male adolescence is revealed as not just a transient mode of life to be passed through swiftly and unobtrusively – but also as crucial in its own right as a form of masculine identity: complex and rich, vivid and important. Albeit in different ways, these authors promote a complex and largely progressive understanding of Victorian male adolescence, embracing the lability of youth even while their work acknowledges the anxieties that it could provoke. In their work, adolescence materialises as a crucial category and type of identity, and these authors are also sensitive to the ways in which constructions of masculinity shaped, informed, and in turn was responsive to this experience. Transcending the boundary

Conclusion  223 between social interaction and private life, the concept of adolescence furnished Victorian ideas about masculinity with a modern and flexible new identity. Male adolescence emerges in these novels not only as a source of anxiety, but also as a defining and useful experience and a productive means of masculine self-formation.

Notes 1 Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, ­1850–1910 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 1. 2 ‘Our Modern Youth’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, 68.403 (July 1863), 115–29 (p. 115).

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Index

abjection 114 Acton, William 5, 146, 160, 205–6, 217n108 Adams, James Eli 12, 38, 79, 81 adolescence: as discrete experience 1–4, 26, 27n2, 211, 219–20, 222; as stage in the life cycle or period of transition 1, 4, 8, 15, 21, 136, 189, 198, 203; biological aspects of 5–6 see also puberty; medical profession; characteristics 6–8, 58; defined, as construct 2, 5, 17, 27n2; development of concept 2–3, 15, 27n4, 28n9, 219; extended, or protracted 104, 108–9, 127; gendering of 10–11, 29n31 see also manliness; identification of profession during 19, 56, 58, 60; independence, of behaviour 13; instability of 2, 6, 26–7, 94–5, 111, 153, 163, 166, 203–4, 211–13, 222; perversion of 119–20, 153, 174–5, 189, 203; potential in, or promise of 2, 9, 23, 34, 63, 106, 110, 117, 128, 204–5, 219; scholarship about 4, 5, 7, 27n adulthood 7, 24, 27n, 109, 150, 196, 212 advertising and advertisements 24, 32, 48–54, 56–7, 59–62 advice literature 24, 72–3, 76, 89, 96, 155–6 see also conduct literature advice, transmission of 24, 69–71, 73, 81–2, 85 age studies and ageing 2–3, 17, 41, 47, 50, 174, 204 agency 14, 107, 135 alienation 177, 190, 193, 197–8 Allen, Emily 176 Allen, Peter 19

ambition 59, 119–20, 133 aphorism 24, 69, 74–5, 83, 85–8, 91, 97 appearance see dandy Argyle, Gisela 156 Ariès, Philippe 3 Arthur, Timothy Shay 76, 97n5 aspiration 57, 119 authenticity 51, 54 authorship 16, 20, 59 autonomy 13, 25, 135, 149–51, 155–6, 170, 184 Babbage, Charles 57 bachelor 107, 185 Bakhtin, Mikhail 93 Banerjee, Jacqueline 150 Baxter, Kent 4 Beer, Gillian 82 behaviour: anti-social 26, 192–3; expectations about 24 Bell, Bill 46 Berger, Courtney C. 105 betting see gambling bildung 23, 24, 33, 38, 40, 41, 50, 55, 62, 156 Bildungsroman: European tradition 33; features of, as genre and definition of 32, 33, 37, 40, 42; significance of the ending 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42–3, 48, 220 Blair, Hugh 97n5 body, esp. male 175–7, 182–4, 202 Bourdieu, Pierre 106, 125 Brooks, Peter 177, 186 Broughton, Trev Lynn 144, 146 Brown, Hugh Stowell 97n5 Brummell, George “Beau” 179, 181, 214n15 Buckley, J. H. 150

240 Index Bulwer Lytton, Edward 182 Butler, Samuel 98n8 Byron, George Gordon 182 capital (cultural) in male adolescence 20, 25, 106–7, 125–6, 135, 221 capitalism 106, 113, 119, 121, 130, 132, 135 career see work Carlyle, Thomas 33, 83, 183 Carpenter, William 205 celebrity 16, 58–60 Chatterton, Thomas 22, 30n53 childhood 1, 4, 15, 30n44, 109, 115, 203, 212, 220 class 10, 23, 76, 80, 130, 140, 148–9, 189, 197, 213 clothes see dandyism clubs 123–4 Cobbett, William 75, 90, 97n5 Cohen, William A. 105, 202, 207–8 commodities 31, 33, 50–1, 54, 57–8, 60 competition 120, 159, 193–4, 199 conduct literature, or conduct book 69–70, 74–5, 77, 80, 84–5, 91, 96, 100n62, 101n82, 221 conversation 78–9 Cornhill Magazine 16, 44, 50–1, 56, 58, 66n46, 139 corporal punishment 208 courtship 36, 110, 113, 130 Craig, Randall 167 cross-dressing 210–11, 213 Custody of Infants Act (1839) 146 Dames, Nicholas 80, 83, 86 Danahay, Martin 14, 79, 99n39 dandy, or dandyism 26, 174–6, 178–82, 212, 214n10, 214n16, 220 Darwin, Charles 151–2 Davis, John 4 daydream see imagination death 39–40, 154 DeLuzio, Crista 11 Demos, John and Virginia Demos 4 dependence 155 detachment 177, 190, 194, 197 deviancy 174, 203–4 dialogue see dialogism; speech dialogism 23, 93–5, 161 Dickens, Charles 16, 31, 36, 46, 48, 137n31, 141, 166, 211 didacticism 40, 88–91

Dilthey, Wilhelm 33 discipline: self-discipline 12, 27, 200, 211; surveillance 168–9 disillusionment 34 Disraeli, Benjamin 182 domesticity 144–5 doubleness, or duality 95, 106, 164 dress see dandyism education 91, 103, 146, 156, 204 effeminacy 113, 183–4, 186, 199, 214n10, 220 effort 41 egotism, egoism 42, 78, 120, 122, 147, 152–3, 160, 167, 180–1, 189, 198, 219 Eliot, George 50, 66n46, 83, 100n69, 141 Elliotson, John 56 epigram see aphorism erotic 113, 116, 174, 209, 211–12 evolution 151–2 failure 2, 19, 23, 34, 105–8, 112–14, 142, 210 family unit 145, 171n17, 193 fatherhood: paternity, lineage, descent, and il/legitimacy 147, 151–3, 173n96; damaging 139–40, 148, 150, 154–6, 170; performance of 140, 151, 153; responsibilities of, or as mentor 25, 96, 129, 140–4, 146, 155, 169 Feldman, Jessica 182 Fellman, Anita and Michael 75 femininity 11, 113, 123, 148, 211 female adolescence see adolescence: gendering of Ferrall, Charles and Anna Jackson 4, 203 Fielden, Kenneth 89 fighting see competition; violence filial responsibility 140, 154, 169 finance 106, 120–3, 126, 130, 132, 153–4 Fisher, Judith L. 56, 182 Foucault, Michel 203 fragmentation, of the novel 86, 89, 92 Franklin, J. Jeffrey 106, 124 Fraser’s Magazine 6, 54, 179 friendship 39, 69, 72–3, 156–7, 184–6, 199, 217n108 Furneaux, Holly 211

Index  241 gambling 25, 121–2, 124, 130–1 Garcha, Amanpal 55, 57 Gay, Peter 189 gender fluidity and subversion 11, 27, 209–13 gentleman 78, 81, 124, 130, 147–8, 195 Gilbert, Pamela K. 183 Gillis, John 4, 11 Gilman, Rebecca 86–9, 91 Gissing, George 98n8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 33 Goodlad, Lauren 133 Green, Stephanie 148 Griffin, Ben 199 Griffin, Christine 11 Gurfinkel, Helena 113–4 Halbertsam, Judith 210 Hall, G. Stanley 7 Handwerk, Gary 91–2 Harden, Edgar F. 67n67 Hardy, Thomas 98n8 Hayward, Jennifer 45, 50 Heath, Kay 3 Henley, W. E. 85–6 Hensley, Nathan K. 123 heternormativity and heterosexuality 113–4, 174, 184, 202–3, 208–9, 211, 220 Hill, Charles 78 hobbledehoy 14, 19, 20, 23, 25, 103–19, 126, 130, 134, 136n18, 219, 222 Hollander, Anne 178 Holt, Jenny 4–5, 10, 11, 29n31, 189 homoerotic 159, 175, 184–7, 205 homosocial 13, 15, 156–7, 159, 185, 197, 199, 205, 212 Horn, Ann 56 Hughes, Clair 180 Hughes, Linda, and Michael Lund 46–7, 55, 66n53 illustration 16, 17, 18, 66n53, 186, 187 imagination, and fantasy 115–9, 158, 206–7 immaturity 13, 24, 103–4, 108–10, 128 immorality 119, 124, 129, 180, 195–6, 201 improvement 79, 83, 133 independence 13, 25, 110, 133, 140, 150 see also autonomy individualism 25, 80, 96, 133, 136, 219

Infant Custody Act see Custody of Infants Act inheritance 123, 129 intertextuality 56, 219 investment 106–7, 123, 125, 127–30, 133–5 Iser, Wolfgang 45 Jaffe, Audrey 106–7, 130–1 James, Henry 32 James, John Angell 97n5 Jenkins, Melissa Shields 90, 98n11, 101n82, 210 juvenility see immaturity Karl, Frederick R. 80 Kingsley, Charles 160 Knox, Vicesimus 87 Koepke, Wulf 33, 40 Kokkola, Lydia 204 Langbauer, Laurie 108, 111, 118 Leighton, Mary Elizabeth, and Lisa Surridge 66n53 liberalism 105–6, 131–5 Litvak, Joseph 188 male adolescence see adolescence; manliness; masculinity manliness: cultivation of 19, 24, 69, 79, 92, 125, 150, 193, 219, 221; expressions of, or qualities of 14, 59, 68, 79, 174, 193; lack of 11, 19, 24, 104–5, 108, 112–14, 119, 123, 128, 131, 135, 144, 146, 153–4, 161, 180, 188, 190, 199–200, 221 see also effeminacy; failure; hobbledehoy Mannheimer, Monica 141 marginalisation 1, 19, 195, 197, 202, 212 marriage 21, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 117, 145–6 masculinity: alternative or non-normative 27, 104–7, 111–13, 119, 134, 174–5, 209–12; anxieties about 26, 64, 95, 119, 143, 151–2, 169, 220–1; autonomy and 25, 150–1; dominant or aggressive masculinity 78–9, 105, 111–12, 119, 136, 147, 152–3, 155, 160–1, 168, 196, 212; fragility and 108, 212 see also failure; manliness; gentleness

242 Index and 113; honour or morality and 25, 69, 180, 184, 199–200; ideals or types of 1, 14, 15, 18, 23, 25, 112, 121, 141, 181, 184, 189, 220, 222 see also bachelor, fatherhood, gentleman; patriarchy and 75, 78–9, 90, 140, 145, 212; constructed, and characteristics of 9, 10, 13, 15 16, 17, 20, 38, 92, 188, 222; as performance 26, 38, 153, 172n48, 175–6, 188, 222; responsibilities of 71–2, 75, 81, 96, 151 see also fatherhood; violence and 127, 188, 190, 192–3, 195–6, 199, 203, 212 see also violence masturbation 205, 208–9 maturity, or maturation and 1, 13, 23, 25, 34, 38, 48, 61, 95, 108–9, 124, 126–7, 129, 220–21 McKenzie, Callum 193–4 McKnight, Natalie 166 medical profession, and medical discourse 204–7, 2010 memory 30n44, 41, 115 Meredith, George: family, and 21, 68, 71–3, 142, 145; Chapman and Hall, Meredith as reader for 71; correspondence 21–22, 71–3, 88, 141, 205; Henry Wallis, and 22; works: Adventures of Harry Richmond, The 21, 69, 75, 93, 139–41, 143, 145, 150–1, 162, 165–6, 222; Amazing Marriage, The 30n50, 77, 89; Beauchamp’s Career 21, 70, 80–3, 151, 219; Diana of the Crossways 30n50, 74; Egoist, The 21, 30n50, 42, 70, 72, 75, 77–9, 81–2, 84, 89, 92, 146–8, 151–3, 159–61, 167–8, 221; Evan Harrington 21, 69, 75, 80–1, 145, 221; Farina 20; Lord Ormont and His Aminta 77, 80; Notebooks 23, 207, 217n119; One of Our Conquerors 77, 80, 92; Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The 6, 21, 26, 68, 73–4, 86–7, 89–90, 93–4, 116, 132, 140–1, 145, 151, 154–9, 168–9, 174–5, 203–13, 221; Poems 20; Rhoda Fleming 13, 21, 30n50, 87–9, 95, 140, 145, 148–9, 156–7; Sandra Belloni (Emilia in England) 21, 30n50, 95, 140, 145, 153–4, 162–3; Shaving of Shagpat, The 20; Vittoria 80

midlife 3 modernity 3, 23, 31, 54, 105, 135, 221 Moers, Ellen 180 Moody, Ellen 112 monologism 94, 97, 160, 165–7 morality 84 Morgenstern, Karl von 33 More, Hannah 90 Moretti, Franco 23 Morss, John 7 motherhood 140, 145–6 Murkerjee, Pablo 193–4 naivety 121 naming 165, 173n96, 196, 209–10 narration 23, 32, 36, 45–7, 81 nature 109, 204 Nelson, Claudia 152, 219 Newcomb, Harvey 97n5 Newton, Sarah E. 69–70 nostalgia 16, 30n, 39, 105 novel of development see Bildungsroman Obscene Publications Act (1857) 68 old age 121 Olsen, Stephanie 4, 29n31 Osteen, Mark 210 O’Toole, Sean 91–2 Ouida 98n8 paternal role see fatherhood Payne, Susan 154 performance 182 see also masculinity: as performance; spectacle physical activity 193–4, 208 Pilgrim’s Scrip, The 74–5, 87–91, 94, 155 Podwell, G. Herbert 50 Polhemus, Robert 167 polyphony 93–5, 97, 161, 164 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 171n19 precocity 12–13, 132, 158, 206, 212–3 Preyer, Robert 91, 93 Price, Leah 87, 89, 100n69 privacy, desire for, or expression of 26, 38, 174–6, 181–2, 185, 188, 199–202, 212 Prospective Review 31–2 puberty 176, 220 puffing 57 Punch 17–18, 54, 61

Index  243 queerness 21, 201, 203–5, 209–13 quotation, and excerptation 85–90, 97 readers, reading and 23, 32, 37, 40–1, 43–8, 55, 62, 64, 68, 81–2, 84–5, 206–7 recapitulation 7 Redfield, Marc 33 reputation 26, 31, 57–8, 60, 62–3 respectability 54, 115, 118, 220 responsibility 129 Richardson, Samuel 90, 209 risk 25, 121, 124, 135 Roberts, Neil 150, 167 Rogers, Helen 144, 146 Roper, Michael and John Tosh 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 7, 90 Sanders, Valerie 143–4, 165 Schreiner, Olive 98n8 secrecy 175, 199–202, 208 Sedgwick, Eve K. 201 self-discipline see discipline self-help 19, 24, 76, 80, 89, 96 self-reflection 41–2, 118, 129, 164, 181, 220, 222 selfhood 105, 110, 141, 175, 184 selfishness see egotism sentimentality 114, 163, 183 serialisation 23–24, 31–2, 43–8, 50–1, 54–55, 62, 220 sexuality: autoerotic see masturbation; experimentation and identification 26, 175, 203, 209–12; expression of desire 157–9; inadequacy 202; sexual interest and awakening 11–12, 26, 27, 116, 157, 203, 206–8; sublimation of desire 12, 203 Shuttleworth, Sally 146, 155, 208 sketch, literary 54–5 Skilton, David 193 Smedley, F. E. 48 Smiles, Samuel 10, 74, 76, 80, 83, 85, 89, 96, 97n5, 160 socialisation 13, 26, 38, 77, 162, 188, 190, 194, 197, 212, 221 solitude 116–7, 190 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 8, 11–12 Spånberg, Sven-Johan 208 spectacle 176, 179, 182, 188, 212 speculation 25, 106–7, 120–21, 124, 127–8, 130–2, 134–5, 221 speech, styles of 25, 79, 93, 160, 162–3, 165–70

sport see physical activity Springhall, John 4, 11 Steinlight, Emily 58 Stewart, Garrett 90 Stone, Donald 93–4 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 50 Surtees, R. S. 48 Sussman, Herbert 9, 183 Tarratt, Margaret 150 temporality see time Thackeray, William Makepeace: correspondence 15–16, 36, 67n77; family and marriage 36; works: Adventures of Philip, The 16, 18, 23, 32–3, 35, 37–8, 44, 50, 61, 66n46, 220; Fitz-Boodle Papers, The 54; History of Henry Esmond, The 16, 30n; History of Samuel Titmarsh, The 50; Irish Sketch Book 54; Luck of Barry Lyndon, The 16, 30n, 42; ‘Men and Coats’ 181–2; Mr. Brown’s Letters 16, 17, 18, 180, 182; Newcomes, The 16, 18, 23, 32–3, 35, 36–41, 44, 46, 48–52, 55, 59, 61, 220, 222; Paris Sketch Book 54; Pendennis 8, 13, 14, 16, 18, 23, 26, 31–6, 39, 41, 44, 47–8 50–1, 53, 58–61, 63, 66n46, 174–88, 219–220; ‘Punch at the Pyramids’ 61; Ravenswing, The 60; Rebecca and Rowena 56–7, 66n46, 67n67; Roundabout Papers, The 50; Shabby Genteel Story, A 35; Snobs of England, The 54, 58, 182; Vanity Fair 16, 34–5, 58, 61, 66n58 Thomas, Calvin 205 time, the passage of 16, 23, 30n45, 32, 43, 45, 47, 62, 126 Tosh, John 12, 15, 77, 79, 101n82, 144 Tracy, Robert 123–4 Trollope, Anthony: hunting 20, 193; Post Office, and the 19; works: American Senator, The 113; Autobiography, An 19, 104, 106, 114–6, 125, 132, 193, 200; Can You Forgive Her? 26, 129–30, 174–5, 188–203, 221; Doctor Thorne 113; Duke’s Children, The 128–9, 131–2, 222; Eustace Diamonds, The 105; Framley Parsonage 113; Hunting Sketches

244 Index 193; Phineas Finn 190; Phineas Redux 105, 125–6; Prime Minister, The 105; Small House at Allington, The 14, 42, 50, 104, 107–13, 116–9, 126, 200; Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, The 50; Three Clerks, The 104, 108, 115, 117, 119–21, 130, 133–4, 200, 219; Travelling Sketches 103–4, 109, 119; Way We Live Now, The 105, 108, 122–3, 127–8 Vance, Norman 79, 99n39 vicarious experience 42 violence 26, 174–5, 189–92, 195–6, 199, 203, 212, 215n51 see also masculinity: violence and virility 144–5, 159, 190

Wagner, Tamara S. 130, 197 weakness see failure Weeks, Jeffrey 204–5 White, Allon 94 Wicke, Jennifer 51 Williams, Carolyn 152 Wilt, Judith 101n90 wisdom literature 92–3 women, treatment or depiction of 21, 77, 114, 116, 208–11 Wood, Mrs. Henry 98n8 work 79–81, 110, 132 writing 207 Young, Linda 76 youth 8, 10, 16, 18, 19, 23, 27n2, 41, 63, 70, 73, 105, 114, 128, 150, 174, 189, 219