Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Hobbledehoy's Choice: Anthony Trollope's Awkward Young Men And Their Road To Gentlemanliness, Mark King

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study reads the rise, reign, and fall of the English gentleman through the lens of the hobbledehoy novels of Anthony Trollope. It explores Trollope’s use of the hobbledehoy (a term, now almost archaic, for an awkward young man) in eight novels appearing between 1857 and 1879: The Three Clerks (1857), The Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), Phineas Finn (1869), Phineas Redux (1874), John Caldigate (1879), The Way We Live Now (1875), and The Prime Minister (1876). Since the hobbledehoy figure serves as a cultural reference point or touchstone, then by examining the permutations …