ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the radical New Man whose effects were everywhere felt in late Victorian society. The book, the first on the late Victorian New Man, argues that this figure presented ideological and narrative challenges for Victorian writers who sought to incorporate him into their fiction. It discusses that Dickens hyperbolizes the model of moral character and sexual abstinence with Tom Traddles and also discusses that these acts were motivated by public anxiety relating to prostitution and the spread of venereal disease, particularly amongst the army and navy. The book also presents what kind of environments could imaginatively support such unions. Many Victorian novelists imagined their characters leaving England in order to escape restrictive Victorian gender models. Yet the colonial New Man encountered his own set of limitations, as the fiction of Olive Schreiner demonstrates. Finally, the chapter presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
