ABSTRACT
In his series of Travelling Sketches, which appeared initially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1865, Anthony Trollope caricatures several familiar types of British tourist. Readers familiar with Trollope's work will recognise in this a defence of 'hobbledehoyhood', which is elaborated more fully in novels such as The Three Clerks and The Small House at Allington, together with his Autobiography. Hobbledehoy is a term used with some frequency by Trollope to encapsulate the awkward, gauche, shy, and undeveloped nature of the ineffective male adolescent. The prolonged experience of adolescence, in Trollope's writing, emerges as largely ameliorative; deferred conditions of self-realisation and character formation provide opportune circumstances in Trollope's narratives that foster correspondingly slow, leisurely growth and achievement. He envisages a society in which male youth – rather than being hustled into swift maturity with the aid of self-help mantras, educational cramming, and the weight of parental anxiety and expectation – should be allowed a greater flexibility and accommodation.
