ABSTRACT
Trollope's success as a novelist began in 1855 with the publication of his fourth novel. The Warden. By the time The Small House at Allington came out in 1865, his position as a writer of best-sellers, the matinee idol of the circulating libraries, was unassailable. The idea of overtly moral and improving fiction has somewhat lost its flavour today, but all these writers wrote their novels in an age of anxiety about the enervating impact of novel-reading on moral development. All four novels are written with a varying amount of proselytising zeal about models of masculinity. In spite of Trollope's high-minded claims, in this they are of a different genre from Trollope's novels, which explore the behaviour of men from the point of view of a more worldly and urbane universe. Hughes advances his theories of manly behaviour through a variety of male models, who each reflect different aspects, positive and negative, of his thesis.
