Dickens and the Idea of the Gentleman

The ideal of middle class British masculinity and the representative of the new Victorian respectability, the ″gentleman″ was difficult to define amidst the class mobility and social change of the nineteenth century. Was the gentleman to be identified by class and by money\ulcorner By behavior and clothing\ulcorner By religion and morality\ulcorner This essay focuses on the problem of the ″gentleman″ as it was debated in the Victorian era and as it was reflected in the biography and work of the mid-nineteenth century's most important English writer, Charles Dickens. I examine the critical debate surrounding the Victorian idea of the ″gentleman″ by comparing the arguments of Shirley Robin Letwin's The Gentleman in Trollope(1982) and Robin Gilmour's The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel(1981). Letwin views the ″gentleman″ as largely transcending class structure, while Gilmour's more historically-conscious view locates the gentleman as emerging out of, and even enabling, the class negotiations of this period. Against the backdrop of such debates, I discuss Charles Dickens's struggles with the idea of the gentleman in theory and in practice. In his novels, especially his semi-autobiographical bildungsromane about the growth and development of boys into adulthood, Dickens prominently engages with the identity and definition of the gentleman. As I demonstrate in this essay, this interest originated from Dickens's own childhood trauma and his subsequent drive to attain gentility, a necessity complicated by the vicissitudes of his personal and professional life.