Volume 30, Number 1 · February 3, 1983
How Should a Gent Behave?
By Noel Annan
The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct
by Shirley Robin Letwin
Harvard University Press, 303 pp., $20.00
Shirley Letwin has written the best book on Trollope that I read during the past centenary year of his death. But her book is not only about Trollope. It is a subversive book about England—subversive, that is to say, of those who until very recently brought about a consensus between the center and the left of the Conservative Party and the center and right of the Labour Party. Her book explores Trollope's treatment of the characters in his novels but it also has undertones about the assumptions that Englishmen once made about the way people ought to behave at home, in love, in business, and in the House of Commons. Shirley Letwin is an American living in London who has a fondness for some British institutions and manners. But she gets exasperated when good old class-ridden England takes to the egalitarian bottle and has tipsy affairs with such foreign whores as socialism, sociology, scientism, and others who when you go to bed with them pick your pocket.
Review, 6224 words
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