The Image Of The Gelltleman In Eighteenth-Century English Novels

This thesis is divided into four chapters. It probes into the gentleman-image building by Eighteenth Century British writers, with particular reference to the writings of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. The first chapter lines the connotation development of gentleman in different historical periods from the angle of etymology. It also sorts out the changes of the gentleman culture from knight to the gentleman education in Nineteenth Century Public Schools. It discusses the inheritance and advancement of the spirit of gentleman in British as well. The second chapter focuses on the description of the gentleman in Colonel Jack by Defoe. The hero Jack described by Defoe was a complete English gentleman who had no possibility to be evil. Defoe gave him noble characters. He was kind-hearted, generous, righteous and so on. He was a thief in childhood and finally became a planter. Jack, a representative of lower class, succeeded through his efforts and achieved his class transformation, whose story has a thorough tendency of morality. The third chapter discusses Samuel Richardson’s moral ideal as well as the creation of moral images in his work. His presentation of the manners of this perfect gentleman--Sir Charles Grandison has strong preaching significance who can resist kinds of temptation, led a strictly moral life, was generous to his relatives and friends and chivalric to those in need. The forth chapter argues the life of the "natural person"-gentleman by Henry Fielding, who believed man couldn’t be perfect and people made mistakes due to social corruption and moral decay. He insisted natural morality was the root. Tom Jones in his writing is the prolocutor of kindness and the very embodiment of natural morality. Finally, it aims at concluding the images created by these three famous writers which express their responses to the moral arguments at that time. Gentleman qualities provide the new middle-class with a good reference for self building.