The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia (review)

The image of the gentleman haunts the English imagination and informs ideas of “Englishness” both inside and outside Britain. In this lucid and engaging study, Berberich demonstrates that the term organizing this image is so variously used and historically mobile that it is difficult to establish even a working definition. It encompasses ideas of heredity and behavior, wealth and manners, so that it can refer both to a privileged elite and “nature’s gentlemen,” whose courtesy does not depend on wealth or position. In theory, the gentleman combines these qualities. He is “well born,” though not necessarily aristocratic, prosperous, cultured, elegant, honest, and so forth, much in the mold of the reformed Darcy. As such, he embodies a chivalric ideal of masculinity, at once gentle and commanding, sensitive and restrained, active without seeming effort. In practice, he rarely achieved this combination of qualities, in life or art. Ill-educated, dissolute, or simply impoverished aristocrats on the one hand, and intelligent, well-mannered, socially and economically mobile men from the middle and working classes on the other undermined the notion that the ruling class owed its privileged position to its superior breeding and ability. To identify oneself as a gentleman might have involved insisting one possessed certain inherent virtues, but the term was nonetheless contested, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century. It was claimed by the impoverished sons of good families that had fallen on hard times, by the public school-educated children of the prosperous middle classes, by dissolute young men who believed their inherited privilege exempted them from even basic social conventions and courtesies, and by a host of others, many of whom had little in common save their gender and desire for social status. This ambiguity has perhaps supported the category’s longevity, enabling a variety of otherwise disparate individuals to identify themselves with a cluster of evolving ideas, and, crucially, to look to these when they assumed positions of power, or prepared their sons for the same. Wells’s Kipps is only one of many characters who satirize the desire of the newly wealthy for the status of the gentleman and their attempts to redefine themselves in order to secure it. Those researching the concept of the gentleman and its impact on Englishness do not confront a clearly defined object but a continuously evolving myth. The Image of the English Gentleman describes the complexities and problems involved in such analysis, traces the shifting figure of the gentleman through the work of four twentieth-century authors, and outlines a number of avenues for future investigation.

The Image of the English Gentleman is divided into three sections, which together offer both a broad survey of the field and close readings of particular texts. The first section concisely traces the major problems in defining the gentleman, the evolution of the term from Chaucer to the twentieth century, and the book’s major theoretical foundations and critical concerns. In particular, it develops a model of nostalgia that underpins the readings of Sassoon, Powell, Waugh, and Ishiguro that make up the second and largest section of the text. Berberich argues that the idea of the gentleman is interwoven with an attachment to the past and the notion of a fall away from a better age. He is consistently represented as a fragile or even lost ideal, a symbol of a past social coherence and stability. However, such nostalgia is neither homogenous nor necessarily unreflective. The case studies consider the different ways in which four writers have represented the gentleman and in so doing explored questions about their social function, the ways in which this has changed, and their relevance to twentieth-century English society. Each of these authors achieves a different critical distance from the myth of the gentleman, but although Ishiguro emerges as more skeptical than, say, the later Waugh, all interrogate rather than simply reproduce the images they inherit. The relentless energy of early novels such as...