it offers Thackeray's most elaborate investigation of Victorian commerce and 'respectability.' The novel is dominated by Colonel Newcome, a quixotic old soldier (much beloved by Thackeray's first readers) who has returned to England after thirty-five years of service in the East India Company. Himself unfulfilled in love and long the widower of a wife he did not much care for, the colonel dotes on his only son, Clive. Ominously, Clive falls hopelessly in love with a cousin who is out of his social reach, threatening to repeat the paternal pattern of romantic frustration. The colonel, simple and straightforward and always a gentleman, distrusts the complicated world of finance and commerce, and he lives frugally, his own wants being modest. But in a misguided attempt to gain the money he thinks will help his son win the bride he desires, Colonel Newcome invests in a new Indian bank (and naively encourages others to invest as well). Huge dividends pour in, the colonel buys a splendid mansion in Tyburnia, Clive fails to win the woman he loves and marries (unhappily) to please his father. The inevitable crash soon comes. When the creditors go through the nowempty mansion, they come upon the colonel's room. In a house filled with lavish rooms and furnishings, they discover, the colonel himself maintained the spartan habits of an old soldier: he slept on an iron bedstead in a 'bare room' at the very top of the house.
Most of Thackeray's gentlemen live in a 'bare room,' often literally but usually metaphorically, operating under the sign of austerity. But the austere space of gentlemanliness is not a vital space, and Thackeray's gentlemen tend to be marked by a lack of energy and a profound melancholy. Dobbin himself suffers a long weariness of spirit, and he gains Amelia only after he has ceased to desire her. The life of Colonel Newcome is essentially a long disappointment, stoically borne; in its final days, it sharpens into acute suffering as the colonel is harrowed by -420- recriminations and his own gnawing guilt over the matter of the bank. Another colonel in another Thackeray novel, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of her Majesty Q. Anne, Written by Himself (1852), is similarly distinguished by melancholy and weariness. Henry Esmond's story may be set in the previous century, but neither the turn to the past nor the adoption of first-person autobiographical narration releases Thackeray in this novel from his brooding over the dilemmas of gentlemen in his own day. For all that Henry Esmond is caught up in dramatic intrigues of eighteenth-century European war and politics (including a plan to restore the Stuarts that almost succeeds), he tells his own story in a curiously detached tone, often speaking of himself in the third person as if he were already dead. His life is a series of renunciations: he renounces the title that is his birthright (so as not to displace his cousin), the hereditary loyalty to his king (who has behaved without honor and so forfeited allegiance), and the passionate love for the worldly and willful Beatrix (who has persistently refused him). Like Dobbin, Esmond marries after desire is all but played out.
For Thackeray the gentleman has to be austere, independent, controlled, apart from his body. The difficulty is that this tends to position him also outside energy, sexuality, and action.
What, then, is a gentleman to do? The issue of action for the Thackerayan gentleman is a serious one, for he is detached not only from the energy of «nature» (the body, desire) but from that of modern commercial civilization as well-at least in terms of direct participation. Gentlemen may handle money with integrity, but they do not make it; nor do they engage in manufacture. For Thackeray the whole realm of money and finance is particularly dubious, as indicated by his persistent activation of the demeaning typology of race to characterize it: moneyhungry Jews, untrustworthy Indians, flashy West Indians, and so on. The Bundelcund Bank in which Colonel Newcome naively invests, for example, is run by a shady character named Rummun Loll (denounced by the gentlemanly Fred Bayham as a 'mahogany-coloured heathen humbug'). The bank turns out to be a huge swindle (Loll dies, appropriately enough, on the night he planned an elaborate 'masquerade'), and the narrator records his outrage at the whole affair. The Bundelcund Bank, he then goes on to say, was but 'one of many similar cheats' that have victimized people like the colonel, 'the simple folks' who 'pass years of long exile and gallant endurance in the service of our empire in India.' Imperial «service» opposes the «cheat» of commerce, — 421- reinforcing the incompatibility of the two codes that was made apparent earlier when Colonel Newcome responded to a crisis in the shares of the bank by invoking the military analogy of desertion: the colonel claimed that 'to desert' the bank 'at the hour of peril' was 'like applying for leave of absence on the eve of an action. He would not see that the question was not one of sentiment at all, but of chances and arithmetic.'
Many of Thackeray's exemplary gentleman are (like Colonel Newcome) soldiers, a traditional profession for gentlemen. Through soldiering they not only are reattached to the world of action and energy but become a sign of the nation itself: gentlemen of England. Indeed, one outlet for the gentlemanly ethic was patriotic service, and later in the century the public schools were to turn out hundreds of young men who identified themselves with the nation, learned 'to play the game,' and filled the civilian and military posts of empire. Thackeray's military gentlemen have a less corporate (and sporting) identity, and they are rather less aggressive in their imperialism. Their activity as soldiers takes place on the periphery of the narratives, and the novels in general contain a strong antimilitary note. Thus Vanity Fair deliberately refuses the glamour of war and conquest, assailing the 'Devil's code of honour' that produces 'alternations of successful and unsuccessful murder' between nations; while Henry Esmond is scathing about the whitewashing of a 'bloody and ruthless' campaign in Joseph Addison's wellknown poem called The Campaign.
At the same time, physical courage and prowess are important in a gentleman, and the code of the soldier gives positive value both to exemplary types like Dobbin and Colonel Newcome and to flawed figures like Rawdon Crawley and the vain George Osborne. Moreover, through the code, gentlemen not only attest to their sense of duty to the nation but also confirm a certain masculinity. Of the behavior of the characters at Waterloo, for example, the narrator reports: 'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great field.' But fighting 'like a man' may not always be compatible with acting 'like a gentleman,' a discrepancy that underlines the way the category of gentleman encompasses competing forms of masculinity whose collision accounts for the kind of paralyzing impasse in which Thackeray's gentlemen so often find themselves.
Indeed the category of gentleman raises not just the question of action but the question of gender, for the masculinity of the gentleman -422- lies in uneasy proximity to the femininity of the domestic woman, perhaps the central cultural icon of the period. The gentleman is modest, simple, honest, and pure; he is motivated by duty to family and nation; he takes care of the weak and vulnerable; and he endures the fortunes of life with stoicism. He sounds in fact very much like the domestic heroine of so much realist fiction, and the image of Dobbin carrying shawls while others party at Vauxhall underscores his affinity with the long-suffering women of the Victorian novel. In important ways the authority of the gentleman overlapped with feminine authority in the period, and this helps to account for the insistence on «manliness» in the discourse on gentlemen. Thackeray himself repeatedly invokes this resonantly Victorian quality as an adjunct to gentlemanliness, setting it up as the «natural» core of the gentleman (much as «womanliness» functioned as the «natural» core of femininity). Typically accompanied by adjectives like open and frank and honest, manliness operates outside the self-restraint and self-consciousness of gentlemanliness. It regains for the gentleman access to emotion ('manly tears'), expression, and the body. But most of all it anchors him to virility; manliness, that is, guarantees the masculinity of the gentleman.
The frequent tavern scenes in Thackeray assume their significance precisely in relation to this question of gender and the gentleman, for they provide sites outside the domestic space of femininity in which men (including gentlemen) can establish themselves as properly masculine subjects. If race marks one limit of gentlemanliness, gender marks another. In both cases, however, the gentleman, inhabiting as he does a blurred and nebulous category, must actively strive to maintain the boundaries of exclusion. The tavern (and, to a lesser extent, the club) comes into play here, for it allows for the clear demarcation of gender, even as it plays with demarcations of class. In the pubs men from different spheres of life regularly meet to sing and drink and eat, creating informal clubs with names like the 'Cave of Harmony' or the «Haunt» or the 'Back Kitchen.' Such places begin to play their prominent role in Thackeray's second major novel, The History of Pendennis (1848–1850), where they are part of the urban life of London bachelors and men of letters. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Pendennis, is introduced to them by George Warrington, a déclassé gentleman, who takes him to the 'Back Kitchen' where 'men of all sorts and conditions' meet in amity. The list includes country tradesmen and farmers, apprentices, medical students, university bucks, young -423- guardsmen, members of Parliament, and even peers from the House of Lords.
Temporarily suspending the rules of everyday life, such places define masculinity as sociability and freedom from the routine constraints of life, notably those of domesticity. Here men smoke and drink and joke. The narrator of The Newcomes (who is the very Pendennis introduced to the 'Back Kitchen' in the earlier novel) recalls entering the «Haunt» in his youth and being greeted 'with a roar of welcome from a crowd of men, almost invisible in the smoke.' In «haunts» like this, he continues, sculptors, painters, men of letters, and others would pass 'pleasant hours in rough kindly communion.' Allowing for freer forms of language and behavior than more formal public places or the domestic space, Thackeray's taverns take on something of a carnivalesque air. They are intervals in time and
