Situated at the crossroads of gender history and the history of literary genre, my study explores the key role of male friendship in nineteenth-century British narratives of male development. Challenging the influential model of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men, I contend that these nineteenth-century texts openly celebrate male intimacy, rather than expressing otherwise prohibited same-sex desires through tropes of secrecy or through the exchange of women. In order to account for this literary pattern, I re-examine well-known examples of the Bildungsroman genre (Scott's Waverley, Thackeray's Pendennis, and Eliot's Daniel Deronda) alongside stories of male youth from other genres (Tennyson's narrative poem In Memoriam, Dickens's multiplot novel Our Mutual Friend, and Thackeray's panoramic satire Vanity Fair). Situating these close readings within a wider survey of nineteenth-century novels, I show how male friendship repeatedly emerges as the relationship that links the hero's "public" career with his "private" trajectory toward marriage. For nineteenth-century authors, male friendship thus functions as a "third sphere," an intermediate zone between the "separate spheres" of the feminine private home and the masculine public world.

The "third sphere," I suggest, is necessary because both the domestic and the public spheres pose problems for nineteenth-century narratives of male development. While the domestic sphere is associated with feminization, the masculine public sphere also has negative associations for many nineteenth-century British writers: ungentlemanly ambition and competition, sexual temptation, and selfish motives unsoftened by domestic community. Therefore, nineteenth-century writers turn to plots of male friendship as a way of creating a masculine sphere which nonetheless remains private and domestic, governed by affection rather than self-interest. Through this association between male friendship and disinterested affection, I argue, plots of male intimacy promote the British ruling-class ideology of the "gentleman" as well as the values of Victorian domesticity. In order to understand the social and political implications of nineteenth-century male friendship plots, I place my close readings within a variety of historical contexts: changing concepts of gender, sexuality, class, and nationhood, as well as more specific institutional histories of ruling-class male communities such as the Cambridge Apostles and the Inns of Court.