accumulating debts and gambling, while he waits for the inheritance he expects from his aunt. He has fought three duels, and he is adept at boxing, rat hunting, and other sports that were 'the fashion of the British aristocracy' at the time. Like his disreputable old father, Rawdon operates within the older mode of masculinity, based on body rather than mind, which stands in direct contrast to the newer disembodied and mental mode exemplified by his elder brother. As in his father's case, Rawdon is uncomfortable with language as either spoken or written sign. Where his elder brother is immersed in textuality, Rawdon can barely read or write or articulate. The will that he writes before leaving for the battle of Waterloo is written in 'big schoolboy handwriting'; and later in the novel when he sends a challenge to Lord Steyne after his traumatic discovery of Becky's betrayal, he and his second, Captain Macmurdo, compose the letter of challenge 'with great labour and a Johnson's Dictionary, which stood them in much stead.' Not surprisingly, Rawdon is regularly routed by those who do possess skill in language, as do Becky herself and Wenham, the fluent politician sent by Lord Steyne to get his lordship out of the duel. Wenham spins a smooth lie; Rawdon knows he is lying, but he does not know how to discredit or disprove the story.
Rawdon's failure in language, however, points to a simplicity of character that is potentially, if not necessarily, virtuous. Uncomplicated characters often possess qualities necessary for the Thackerayan gentleman, and Rawdon demonstrates in his response to Waterloo a military sense of honor that could be put to use in civil and domestic society. Waterloo in effect marks the beginning of the slow, halting move that he makes in the course of the novel from the social category of gentleman-by-birth to the ethical category of gentleman-by-virtue. The catalyst in his reformation is domesticity: love for his wife, Becky, begins the process, but fatherhood accelerates and confirms it. Rawdon's love -416- for his son is absolute and all the more moving for being so inarticulate. Through this love Rawdon discovers a motivation other than self-interest, and learns the important moral idea of consequences.
Appropriately, Rawdon's relationship to money plays a key role in signaling his change of status. He spends his early life gambling and fleecing the naive and the snobbish (like George Osborne) by entrapping them in games they cannot win. He leaves unpaid his debts to tradesmen and landlords, never worrying about the consequences to them. As for his own frequent arrests for debt, Rawdon regards these as being in the normal course of things, and simply looks for someone to bail him out. But after the shock of Becky's perfidy, Rawdon assumes a new relationship to others and to the world. Becky's hoard of money is a crucial signifier here. Where Becky's lies about and her secret hoarding of money confirm her mercenary nature, Rawdon's subsequent dispersal of the funds she had reserved for herself confirms his status as a genuine gentleman.
The key scene is the interview with Pitt on the morning after the confrontation with Becky. Rawdon's brother assumes that he has come to borrow money, and starts to put him off. Rawdon interrupts: ''It's not money, I want, Rawdon broke in. 'I'm not come to you about myself. ' He has come in the first place to ask Pitt to look after his son, and in the second place to ask him to help him settle accounts. Rawdon has with him Becky's funds. He gives Pitt over six hundred pounds to pay back Briggs, the companion whose legacy Becky borrowed and never replaced, despite having obtained money from Lord Steyne for that express purpose. He gives another portion for his son's upkeep, holding back 'a few pounds' for Becky herself 'to get on with.' As he hands over this money, Rawdon drops some banknotes, including a thousand-pound note recently given to Becky by Lord Steyne. This note, Rawdon tells Pitt, is not included. He has other plans for its dispersal, planning to wrap the bullet he will use to kill Steyne in the note as an act of 'fine revenge.' The aristocratic code of revenge and honor moves into foreground at this moment, and it does so favorably, setting Rawdon apart from the mean-minded modern Pitt, who characteristically «stooped» to pick up the fallen banknotes. In his handling of money in this scene, Rawdon reinvigorates for a moment the old aristocratic rank of gentleman, restoring to it the sense of moral value from which he had severed it at the outset of his career. But confirmation that he has indeed been reformed is provided only by his subsequent behav-417- ior as governor of Coventry Island. From his post, Rawdon «punctually» remits money for his debts, and he «regularly» writes to young Rawdon. Newly disciplined but no bourgeois, Rawdon in this whole sequence enacts the combination of virtues (including the old landed virtues of disdain for money for its own sake, duty to dependents, and sense of honor) that Thackeray identified with the complete gentleman.
But Rawdon is linked to an archaic system, and so he cannot serve as exemplary modern figure. This role is played by William Dobbin, son of a wealthy grocer, who begins with neither social status nor much in the way of looks, being physically awkward and afflicted with a lisp. The point is reinforced by the illustrations that Thackeray drew for the early chapters, for they highlight the oddness of the young Dobbin's appearance. Clearly he is not born a gentleman. But he goes to a decent public school (where he endures ridicule for his lowly family connection), and he later enters the gentlemanly profession of soldier. Dobbin joins a line regiment, socially a long way from the aristocratic Guards of Rawdon Crawley, but his regiment does a good deal more soldiering, serving in various colonies of the empire where Dobbin spends years in worthy but not glorious service. He returns near the end of the book as Major Dobbin, more assured and also, at least according to the illustrations, more conventionally attractive as well.
If his appearance has changed, however, his character has not. Dobbin's keynote is fidelity; loyalty is his primary virtue. He is faithful to the vain and arrogant George Osborne, and even more so to Amelia Sedley, who becomes George's adoring wife and then his even more adoring widow. Dobbin loves Amelia from the first, but he refuses to court her for himself, even when the feckless George loses interest in her and their engagement is broken off. Indeed, it is Dobbin who, in a difficult demonstration of his lack of 'selfish calculation,' arranges the marriage of the two. He finds the negotiation 'about as painful a task as could be set to him, yet when he had a duty to perform, Captain Dobbin was accustomed to go through it without many words or much hesitation.'
Words like duty, honest, and faithful accompany Dobbin throughout the narrative, much of which he spends either on the periphery of scenes or outside them altogether. Always Dobbin controls his own desire, subordinates his will to that of others, and takes duty as his guide in both the public and the private spheres. In this way he is taken out -418- of the matrix of self-interest and desire routinely linked to trade and commerce, purged of the «special» interest of business and attached to the «general» interest of the nation. When the narrator comes to offer a definition of a real gentleman late in the novel, he cites Dobbin as exemplary. Gentlemen, the narrator comments, are men whose 'aims are generous, whose truth is constant, and not only constant in its kind but elevated in its degree; whose want of meanness makes them simple; who can look the world honestly in the face with an equal manly sympathy for the great and the small.' How many such men does one know? the narrator asks. For him, 'my friend the Major' tops the list, a list that, at this point at least, explicitly contains only the one name.
But if Dobbin is the exemplary Thackerayan gentleman, he also points to the problems inherent in that model, problems that will place an increasing strain on the novels following Vanity Fair. As Dobbins extraordinary patience and self-subordination demonstrate, the gentleman is essentially defined by negation-by what he does not do or desire or will. He identifies himself as a gentleman not so much by what he does as by how he responds to what is being done, and he is distinguished by a stoicism that borders on passivity. The gentleman, that is, represents an ideal that is essentially regulatory rather than productive; hence his ethic of reserve and restraint, and his difficulties with action. Hence too the curious lassitude and failure of energy that typically threaten the Thackerayan gentleman. Self-controlled and placing himself outside desire, the gentleman is detached from the passion of primary emotions and from sexuality. The Vauxhall episode early in Vanity Fair provides a symptomatic moment. At the gate to the park, George Osborne asks Dobbin to 'just look to the shawls and things, there's a good fellow' while the two couples wander off, leaving Dobbin to pay their entrance fee as well. During supper, as the couples engage in their very different courtships, Dobbin vainly tries to engage their attention. But he remains excluded from sexual-and communal-space: 'Nobody took any notice of him.'
The gentleman's ethic of restraint is essentially an ethic of distance. To prove his disinterestedness, the gentleman must first be detached from the impure motives that motivate ordinary persons; second, he must position himself outside or to the side of contentious events, so that his judgment is not clouded by prejudice or partisanship. Moreover, as the lean figure of Dobbin suggests, the nineteenth-century gentleman (at least in the Thackerayan mode) takes on something of an -419- ascetic cast. He has to set himself outside the culture of getting and spending, to make sure that he clearly distinguishes himself from the vulgar at both ends of the socioeconomic scale: that is, both from those who conspicuously consume and those who conspicuously have nothing to consume. A figure like Dobbin, who has wealth enough, defines himself as a pure and free gentleman precisely by choosing to live austerely.
The ascetic point is made even more clearly-and poignantly-by a telling detail in Thackeray's longest novel, The Newcomes (1853–1855). This is a complicated narrative of several generations of a London banking family, and
