The Victorian Gentleman In Great Expectations By Charles Dickens
INTRODUCTION:
THE CONCEPT OF VICTORIAN GENTLEMEN
The concept of gentleman was not only a social stage or class designation it was always about respect and honor along with style possessed by the individual. Victorian gentlemen were known to have a great reputation that they had to withhold to gain such a standard and mark of the ‘gentlemen’.
The British aristocrats were gentlemen from their birth as it was considered as their right, the new industrial and mercantile elites, inevitably attempted to have themselves designated as gentlemen as a natural consequence of their growing wealth and influence. Other Victorians — clergy belonging to the Church of England, army officers, members of Parliament — were recognized as gentlemen by virtue of their occupations, while members of numerous other eminently respectable professions — engineers, for example — were not.
Charles Dickens, like Kipling, recognized as a gentleman, and insisted, in consequence, upon the essential dignity of his occupation. Great Expectations, is at once a portrait or a definition of Dickens 's concept of the Gentleman and a justification of his own claim to that title. Thackeray , insisted that a writer of novels could not be a gentleman. The debate over just what constituted a gentleman raged on in many contexts, but nowhere was it contested so fiercely as within Victorian literature itself, appearing in works as different as Tennyson 's ‘In Memoriam’ and the novels of Dickens and Thackeray.
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