Margaret Markwick. New Men in Trollope’s Novels: Rewriting the Victorian Male. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. ISBN: 9780754657248. Price: US$99.95/£52.25

Margaret Markwick has produced a long-awaited study of the coding of masculinity in Trollope’s oeuvre. Using close reading in the novels and in the area of gender studies she shows that Trollope problematized the Victorian notion of manliness and developed rich, static-busting characterizations that won Trollope his considerable reading public. There is also a gem of critical appraisal that punctures the dicta of Henry James. This study follows Markwick’s previous book, Trollope and Women (1997), one of many books written on this subject in the last two decades. The writings of John Tosh, Mark Rutherford, Elaine Showalter, and Mary Poovey establish that British Victorian culture celebrated a brusque, domineering, and sometimes brutal male character, and that, as Rutherford cogently argued, it was the British male’s mother who instilled unconscious incivility, unquestioned superiority, and perpetual boyishness in the male of the period. This is, as it is asserted, the norm not the exception. Markwick catalogues this history of critical opinion, and then challenges the conclusions of her precursors. Markwick announces that the “New Man, so heralded by our generation, is alive and well in Trollope’s novels, changing the nappies, making the gravy, pushing the pram, hugging his sons and his daughters” (13). The work of Anthony Trollope has resisted the usual catalogue of period literary social norms. Whereas there are many different kinds of Trollopian hero, none quite fits the rigid profile of dogmatic force. Markwick identifies Trollope as an author defining masculinity out of a larger cultural anxiety about who is socially appropriate, or clubbable, but she distinguishes Trollope from his contemporaries in her main thesis: Trollope grants his male and female characters highly similar agendas, that is, agendas for reclaiming autonomy, or agendas for reclaiming a place outside of the bitter and brittle male-over-female hierarchy. In this way, she fulfills the object of the Ashgate Nineteenth Century series which sets out to enhance “our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity” (v). Markwick’s introduction expertly summarizes the critical history of Trollope scholarship, recovering along the way such jewels as Virginia Woolf’s remark: “We believe in Barsetshire as we believe in our weekly bills” (9). Markwick interweaves criticism with the geography of manliness in the years 1817-70, and she brings up texts that serve as touchstones, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character (1825) and Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship (1840). As part of the question of manliness, she describes the broad debate on the question of who deserves to be called a gentleman, extending from the Broad Stone of Honour (1822) which proscribed laboring for money and thus excluded the entire middle class, to the confusion expressed by Plantagenet Palliser in The Duke’s Children (1879): “There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman….The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable.” Manliness in the nebulously-defined gentleman class becomes Markwick’s focus for the rest of the book. Her second chapter studies four novels that articulated norms of manliness between the years 1855-1862, at the beginning of Trollope’s most successful period of publishing. She seeks to work out exactly how Trollope aligns with his fellow writers in the field. The authors and their respective novels are Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (1857); Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857); Frederic W. Farrar, Eric, or Little by Little (1858); and Mrs. Henry Wood, Mrs. Halliburton’s Troubles (1862). For the most part, a certain amount of male bravado and strong-arming …