ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts covered in this book. The book covers the period from the mid-1840s to the late-1870s, which saw fundamental changes in gender relations, social and political reforms, and reformations of class distinction and educational policy. It is within the Claudia Nelson's context that George Meredith, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope trace the cultural significance of male adolescence in their work, as a discrete identity and masculine type. These authors insist in their novels that adolescence provides a forum within which society designates the instruction of, and absorption of, masculinising values. Thackeray represents adolescence as a means of shared self-evaluation, and provides an analysis of where and how youth can fit into society. Meredith's youthful protagonists, while accentuating the significance of male adolescence, categorise it as a disruptive necessity, as it poses a threat to established patriarchal authority of the older generation.
