Book
The Amateur Gentleman
First published 1913
Barnabas Barty, son of a retired champion boxer, unexpectedly inherits a vast fortune and decides that money should give him the chance to become a gentleman. His father doubts that gentility can be purchased, so Barnabas leaves the family inn for London determined to discover the rules of a social class into which he was not born. His education involves fashion, friendship, fighting, love and the dangers attached to being rich and inexperienced.
Farnol makes the Regency social order the subject of the adventure rather than merely its decoration. Barnabas repeatedly encounters the difference between manners and character, testing aristocratic assumptions against the practical honour he learned from his father. The novel helped establish the model of the modern Regency romance: courtship, social comedy and physical adventure are joined to a sustained argument about what makes a gentleman.
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