Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2005 The hobbledehoy's choice: Anthony Trollope's awkward young men and their road to gentlemanliness Mark King Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation King, Mark, "The hobbledehoy's choice: Anthony Trollope's awkward young men and their road to gentlemanliness" (2005). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 3930. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3930 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE HOBBLEDEHOY S CHOICE: ANTHONY TROLLOPE S AWKWARD YOUNG MEN AND THEIR ROAD TO GENTLEMANLINESS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Mark King B.S., Towson State University, 1983 M.A., DePaul University, 1998 May 2005 Dedication To Bear and all the other women who never lost faith in their hobbledehoys. ii Acknowledgements The author gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the following organizations and individuals without whose generous support and kind help this work would not have been possible: the staff of the Hill Memorial Library at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the staff of the John Forster collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office of the Troy Middleton Library at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, the staff of the Rare Books Room of the British Library in London, Dr. Anne Coldiron of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Dr. Kristine Garrigan of DePaul University in Chicago, Ms. Katherine Ressie King of Baton Rouge, Dr. Elsie Michie of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Ms. Nickianne Moody of Liverpool John Moores University in Liverpool, Dr. Daniel P. Novak of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and Mr. Henry Vivian-Neal of the Trollope Society, London. Though all help is warmly appreciated, perhaps two individuals merit special acknowledgement: Laura Lee King and Dr. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman of LSU. Ms. King provided an endless supply of good cheer, shrewd commentary, and sound advice. An exemplary mentor in the classroom as well as in the research library, Dr. Weltman provided warm encouragement and generous counsel that consistently motivated me toward better scholarship and teaching. iii Table of Contents Dedication ...ii Acknowledgments ..iii Abstract v Chapter One: Introduction: The Fruit That We Keep for Our Winter Use ....1 Chapter Two: That Most Hopeless of Human Beings : Truth, Fiction, and Reading An Autobiography as a Hobbledehoy Narrative ..33 Chapter Three: To What Heights a Dull Boy Might Grow : Trollope s Hobbledehoy Ur-Texts ...62 Chapter Four: It s Gude to Be Honest and True : Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and the Triumph of the English Gentleman . ..91 Chapter Five: Hobbledehoy Upside Down Cake: The Topsy-turvy World of John Caldigate .119 Chapter Six: Most Fellows are Bad Fellows : The 1870s, The Way We Live Now, The Prime Minister, and the End of the Victorian Gentleman .147 Chapter Seven: Shards: Reading Hobbledehoy Narratives as Critiques of Victorian Conduct Literature ...176 Works Cited .188 Works Consulted ..204 Vita ...206 iv Abstract This study reads the rise, reign, and fall of the English gentleman through the lens of the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope. It explores Trollope s use of the hobbledehoy (a term, now almost archaic, for an awkward young man) in eight novels appearing between 1857 and 1879: The Three Clerks (1857), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), John Caldigate (1879), The Way We Live Now (1875), and The Prime Minister (1876). Since the hobbledehoy figure serves as a cultural reference point or touchstone, then by examining the permutations and adjustments in Trollope s hobbledehoy, the study clarifies and challenges existing suppositions regarding Victorian notions of class, gender, and nationality. For example, the work argues that the crisis of gentlemanliness, identified by Robin Gilmour in The Idea of the Victorian Gentleman as developing in the final years of the century, actually begins much earlier as early as 1871. Not only is this argument important for Trollope scholars, but it also has ramifications for the larger world of Victorian studies and the discipline as a whole. For instance, The Hobbledehoy s Choice argues that Trollope s hobbledehoy tales form a distinctive sub-genre of the bildungsroman. Additionally, by examining Trollope s hobbledehoy figure within the larger framework of Victorian texts, the dissertation illustrates the shifts in connotations of gentlemanliness from mid to late century. Furthermore, the arc of Trollope s hobbledehoy narratives illustrates the author s initial unswerving belief in the unconditional benefits of hard work ideas popularized by the essayist Thomas Carlyle. However, as the century wore on, Trollope s hobbledehoy narratives demonstrate a steadily increasing suspicion of this Carlylean gospel of work. Finally, I argue that Trollope s hobbledehoy novels negotiate a distancing from much of mid-nineteenth-century self-help literature, especially the work of Samuel Smiles. v This cultural infusion of the hobbledehoy narrative with the corpus of nineteenth-century conduct literature illuminates the manner in which Victorian conduct literature twists and distorts the traditions of its progenitor, courtesy literature. vi Chapter One: Introduction: The Fruit That We Keep for Our Winter Use At six p.m. on December 6, 1882, novelist, essayist, editor, and retired postal surveyor Anthony Trollope died (Sadleir 331; Hennessy 15, 13). In some ways, his life story formed a quintessential Victorian success narrative, and it is possible to view Trollope as a poster child for Victorian-era up-by-the-bootstraps optimism. Born into a family of limited resources and modest connections, but blessed with perseverance, resolve, will, and, most of all, an unflagging commitment to the redeeming qualities of work, Anthony Trollope had risen from disheveled and slovenly schoolboy to the very pinnacle of success. By any measure, Trollope s life had been a triumph. He had amassed a fortune (Trollope, Autobiography 319). He had traveled the world. He represented his nation on diplomatic missions to Egypt, the West Indies, and the United States (Hall, Trollope 159, 171, 316). He had been presented to the Prince of Wales (317). He had even been seriously considered for a peerage (515). He had helped raise two sons. He was a well-liked and important member of some of London s most fashionable gentleman s clubs (244). So popular and familiar was his writing style that it was lampooned in a full-length parody in the pages of Punch, which ran for almost a full year ( The Beadle! ). However, to declare that Trollope s life personified the Victorian spirit is not to say that his life was ordinary; on the contrary, Trollope s life was exceptional. For example, he excelled in not one but two distinct careers. His prodigious output of sixty-seven books (an estimated eight or nine million words) is all the more incredible when one considers that most of those millions of words were written while carrying out the responsibilities of a full-time career. To an 1 extent that still unfairly damages his reputation,1 Trollope made writing a business. As one critic notes, Trollope converted his desk into a portable production line (Overton 61). Once established, this portable production line provided the Trollope family with a comfortable income. For most of his life, Anthony Trollope could afford to hunt three days a week and lived in a succession of comfortable homes. His residences included Waltham Cross, Harrow Weald, Julian s Hill, and Garland s Hotel. Despite the frequency of his moves, Trollope ended his adult life not far from where it began; the location of his last home a nursing home at 34 Welbeck Street in London s Cavendish Square was a mere quarter mile from the dingy bachelor lodgings he had lived in upon arriving in London some forty years earlier (Super 434). Such proximity seems fitting. The period of Trollope s early adulthood, from 1834 to the time of his marriage to Rose Trollope in 1844 (Hennessy 60, 104), formed a seminal event in the author s life. Seminal, but not happy. This study examines that transitional period his hobbledehoyhood as it appeared in Trollope s work. Despite its prevalent place in Trollope s works, the hobbledehoy motif has received little attention from scholars and critics. For example, surprisingly, the word hobbledehoy does not even merit an entry in the six hundred twenty-four page Oxford Reader s Companion to Trollope. This dissertation fills that gap. It examines the role hobbledehoys play in Trollope s works and asserts that the hobbledehoy motif is both more prevalent and more significant in Trollope s fiction than previously shown. Furthermore, it shows how Trollope uses a set pattern to illustrate the growth and development of these awkward young men into Victorian gentlemen. I argue that Trollope s great social experiment of the hobbledehoy novel, an attempt to transfer 1 The assumption to which I allude to here that a novelist s output is necessarily inversely proportional to the quality of his or her work remains with us even today. However, the elitist sneering over Trollope s voluminous output began during his life. In one review, The Saturday Review chirped that Trollope wrote novels as fast as a hen drops eggs (qtd.