space, marked by a relative earthiness and by the communal puncturing of pretension. A philosopher who tries to lecture the crowd at the 'Haunt,' for instance, is defeated by general banter, while an essayist who gives himself airs is 'silenced by the unanimous pooh poohing of the assembly.'
In their suspension of the vertical distinctions of rank, the taverns also recall the coffeehouses and clubs of the eighteenth century, which shaped what the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas calls the 'classical public sphere.' The phrase refers to the liberal, bourgeois sphere of discourse that formed in opposition to the power of the aristocracy and the state early in the eighteenth century. The classical public sphere consisted of a whole set of institutions (such as coffeehouses and journals) that allowed for the public exchange of ideas and offered (theoretically) a space where the ordinary hierarchies of social and political life were suspended in the interest of the free pursuit of rational discourse. The roots of the Thackerayan gentleman in fact lie in this classical public sphere, for they are to be found in the informal essays of Addison and Steele. Their essays in journals like the Tatler and the Spectator not only set in place the standard terms of the critique of the aristocratic gentleman in the eighteenth century but themselves played an important role in the formation of the liberal public sphere in England. Thackeray transforms the ideal rational space of the public sphere into the bohemian space of the tavern. This informal gathering place resists not so much the state as the domestic sphere; its members are drawn together less by reason than by gender; and its characteristic language is not the rationality of «discourse» but the sounds of song -424- (including a perennial favorite, 'The Old English Gentleman'). Thackeray's taverns, assertively places of the male body and of male speech, constitute the primary site of «manliness» in his novels, and define those within them as clearly masculine subjects.
In an important move, Thackeray associates this manliness with the world of letters. Indeed Thackeray's model of manliness is 'the manly, the English Harry Fielding.' This phrase concludes his lecture on the novelist in the series on The English Humourists (1851), and it sums up the image of hearty, rural «Englishness» and robust «manliness» that Thackeray has foregrounded in his portrait of his eighteenth-century predecessor. Appropriately, the 'Back Kitchen' of Pendennis meets at the 'Fielding's Head,' and a chair supposed to have been Fielding's is used by 'the president of the night's entertainment.' It is George Warrington who introduces Arthur Pendennis to the 'Back Kitchen,' and the occasion is part of Warrington's more general initiation of the aimless young protagonist into the world of letters. Warrington is the younger son of Sir Miles Warrington, and like many gentlemen he is ostensibly engaged in law. But he earns his living by writing for the periodical press, a fact he keeps generally quiet, given the low status of such activity. Although the example of Sir Walter Scott (poet, novelist, essayist) early in the century had done much to open up the higher genres of the literary profession to gentlemen, the lowly image of Grub Street still stuck. Thackeray himself was never quite sure that a literary career was indeed entirely suitable for a gentleman. All the same, its links to learning and to language made it a potential area of operation; moreover, its dependence on print culture meant that it offered a more modern career than a profession like that of soldier. Through the world of letters Thackeray in effect experimented with ways of connecting the gentleman more definitively with modernity.
Warrington himself is very much a «manly» gentleman. His first words in the novel are 'Is that the beer?' and he is introduced sitting at a table in worn clothes, 'unshorn and smoking a pipe.' 'He was drinking beer like a coalheaver,' the narrator comments, 'and yet you couldn't but perceive that he was a gentleman.' At Oxbridge he was known as 'Stunning Warrington,' famous for both hard living and hard reading, but he now lives an obscure life in the shabby chambers he shares with Pendennis. In contrast to the room of the dandy Pendennis ('rather coquettishly arranged'), Warrington's own bedroom is plain, containing a bed, a shower bath, and a pile of books of poetry and mathematics. -425-
Warrington thus partakes in the austerity and asceticism that mark the Thackerayan gentleman, and he shares the characteristic exclusion from desire and sexuality. He is a quasi bachelor, having married a woman of the lower class from whom he has long been separated. In the course of the novel he falls in love with the heroine, Laura (future wife of Pendennis), but he is of course prohibited from pursuing her. Unlike the soldier Dobbin, however, the literary Warrington exhibits a transgressive edge. He deliberately flaunts gentlemanly decorum, establishing in the process his 'manliness.' Warrington's desk is stained with circles made by ale pots, he drinks with boxers and other low status types, and he endorses marketplaces over Mayfair. All in all, Warrington explicitly prefers the world of low-class pubs to the society of his own class, 'whose manners annoyed him, and whose conversation bored him.' There is a conscious «slumming» in all this that reinforces Warrington's own status as a gentleman, and Thackeray knows it. His narrator reports that even though Warrington never thought of himself as in any sense superior to 'Jack and Tom,' nevertheless, 'the deference which they paid him might secretly please him.' Warrington, that is, engages in a sophisticated game of class whereby one can engage in activities considered «lowly» precisely because there is no danger that one will be defined by them. Everyone knows Warrington is a gentleman, so that his crossing of class lines (an apparent erasure of social difference) in fact works to affirm the point of social difference. As with asceticism, this kind of transgressive behavior functions primarily as a sign of the gentleman's freedom rather than as social critique.
The case of Warrington points to the way in which the nineteenthcentury discourse of the gentleman at once opened up the category and closed it. Gentlemanliness was severed from outward signs to become an intangible property, an essence that one intuitively perceives: no matter what Warrington does, 'you couldn't but perceive that he was a gentleman.' To make the category viable for the modern world and yet to retain the exclusiveness on which its authority depended, Victorian writers like Thackeray stratified the category itself, allowing entry into the lower strata of gentlemanliness (primarily through education) but reserving the upper strata (or inner 'spirit'). This lies outside acquirement and is not open to definition; discourse can only gesture toward it. In a symptomatic moment early in The Newcomes, Colonel Newcome asks the young Clive what makes a gentleman: ''I can't tell you what it is, or how it is, the boy answered, 'only one can't help seeing the -426- difference. It isn't rank and that; only somehow there are some men gentlemen and some not, and some women ladies and some not. ' If it isn't 'rank and that,' what is it? Gentlemanliness remains finally elusive: somehow some are, and some are not.
In that «somehow» the category becomes remystified. Indeed, it achieves a new level of mystification, for gentlemanliness is now an elusive but real quality of moral superiority rather than a relatively straightforward designation of social position. It becomes the ultimate insider notion, more exclusive than if birth or money or education were definitive grounds of entry. One may be of high birth and good education and still not be a «true» gentleman, though one's chances are certainly better than if one is of low birth and poor education. In the latter case, it is impossible to be a gentleman of any sort, «true» or not. Witness J. J. Ridley of The Newcomes. He is a gifted artist who achieves success; more important, he possesses the very qualities of character officially endorsed as gentlemanly (simplicity, honesty, modesty, kindness, and so forth). But. J. J. Ridley is the son of a butler, and so he cannot be a gentleman.
In effect, the redefined category of the gentleman in the nineteenth century infused class with virtue, providing for distinction and difference a moral argument that was nevertheless finally elusive. Socially authoritative, the category had real effects but could not itself be located either in a material or in a discursive grid. Witness the contrast, for example, with the old category of the landed gentleman, which was rooted in an argument about the dependence of public virtue on private property. Like money, the modern gentleman was a form of intangible property. This, in turn, meant that the category was in constant contestation, and it produced a complicated discourse that remained prominent throughout the century.
The Victorian period saw an outpouring of commentary on the «true» gentleman, on 'nature's gentleman,' on 'the English gentleman,' and so forth. Writers and painters drew on models from chivalry, from militant and nonmilitant forms of Christianity, from Nordic sagas, from the lore of combat. Others, like Thackeray himself, worked out of the domesticated model adapted to modern civil society developed in the eighteenth century, countering what they saw as its emasculating force through vigorous notions like 'manliness.' The amount of discourse suggests the ambiguity and flexibility that made this so compelling a category for men of several classes and different class fractions, — 427- as they engaged in the complex negotiation of social power and authority. The self-made prophet of self-help, Samuel Smiles, preached that a poor man might be a 'true gentleman' by virtue of his virtues; Cardinal Newman saw in the gentleman a secular ethic of withdrawal that undermined religious commitment; Charles Kingsley sought to harness the powers of the male body to a socialist conscience in his notion of 'muscular Christianity'; and Thomas Carlyle urged 'Captains of Industry' to adopt a 'Chivalry of Work.' Thackeray's voice in all this is often troubled-and troubling-but for his own generation he was very much the novelist as gentleman. Indeed, writes John Cordy Jeaffreson in Novels and Novelists from Elizabeth to Victoria (1858), Thackeray was not only 'the true gentleman of our generation,' but the figure who 'made us once more 'a nation of
