A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

2. Conduct Befitting a Gentleman

 &2 Conduct Befitting a Gentleman Mid-Victorian Clubdom and the Novel As for modern friendship, it will be found in clubs. —Disraeli, Tancred I carried the Carlton. —Disraeli, to his sister When Pip moves to London to realize his great expectations , he aspires to join a club, “The Finches of the Grove,” as part of his plan to become a smart young gentleman. This longing to belong is only one of Pip’s “lavish habits,” which include hiring the servant the Avenger, purchasing new furnishings that place himself and his friend Herbert in a “quantity of debt,” and keeping “late hours and late company” (270). Even Pip cannot fathom the object of this club, where men spend recklessly on dinners and quarrel, leading servants to drink—what Dickens facetiously calls the club’s “gratifying social ends.” It seems fitting that the first fullfledged Finch Pip meets is his rival and nemesis, Bentley Drummle, to whom Pip cannot measure up. Not yet fully a man, Pip must wait to join until he comes of age. In the novel David Copperfield, Micawber is a member of the club, a club in debtors’ prison over which he presides as a “great authority .” At his grandiloquent best, Micawber presents to the club a petition he has authored that will eventually go to the House of Commons, requesting a change in the law of imprisonment for debt. While members file in to sign the document in a show of solidarity, Micawber’s club brother Captain Conduct Befitting a Gentleman: Mid-Victorian Clubdom and the Novel  & Hopkins performs a recitation of the document as Micawber beams in selfimportance and David, straight from his dispiriting work at Murdstone and Grinby, looks with a son’s wonder upon this ceremony—this pantomime, this burlesque—of male pomp and circumstance. Such moments of ritualized passage, of longing to pass as a gentleman, serve up Dickens’s gentle satire of Victorian manliness. Consumed with what ittakestobeaman,bothPipandMicawberareneverthelessfailingatit,indeed making spectacles of themselves, as literalized by David’s observation of the presiding Micawber. In such moments of failed affiliation, Dickens exposes his characters’ class pretensions: although both desire influence and prestige and seek out the company of their peers, the young Pip and the insolvent Micawber are figures of dislocation, in debt and lacking financial resources. In the immediate context of their respective novels, these scenes of men in their clubs serve the important function of featuring initiations gone awry, where ambition is baffled, redirected, or chastened, so that the telos of the bildungsroman—that is, authentic selfhood—can remain in view. Yet these scenes also provide more broadly the focus of this chapter: an examination of Victorianclubland’sroleintheiconicnineteenth-centurynovelof professional ambition, what James Eli Adams in Dandies and Desert Saints has called “the masculine plot” or the “narrative of initiation into manhood” (63). Within works written during the period of financial stability occasioned by mid-Victorian achievement and expansion, clubland can cement social position, provide social cohesiveness in the urban chaos, and erect standards for conduct, fueling an esprit de corps through mythologies, rituals, and invented traditions. Literary representations of clubland are charged with this potent sense of opportunity, yet they also bristle with the risk of fraud and failure raised by mid-Victorian economics—an instability mirrored in the range of treatment (from the didactic to the idealized to the satirical) that clubland receives in the works of the mid-Victorian novelists Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and William Makepeace Thackeray.1 Activated by the mid-Victorian boom and further agitated by Victorian franchise reform, the investment in clubland registers what Adams identifies as the “fragility of masculine identities” or, as he recasts his point in a more balanced and perhaps more useful way, not only the “anxieties” but also “the energies of masculine self-legitimation” (3, 1). Yet, most simply, midcentury novelistic renderings of male clubdom prove a fundamental point: in the lives of the age’s great male novelists, club life mattered. Dickens biographer a room of his own  & Michael Slater captures the life of male sociability that Dickens enjoyed, which included in the 1830s “meetings of the Trio or Cerberus Club which consisted of three members only, Forster, Ainsworth, and Dickens” (127). Slater goes on to explain that this club was the descendant of an earlier fraternity with two members only, Dickens and Forster—for which Dickens “had drawn up a set of mock rules and...