Cecil, or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb

The Novel

Cecil, or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel Cecil, a Peer epitomize the dandy novel in its purest form — a rambunctious six-volume romp through the scandalous high life of the Regency and its prolonged aftermath, presented in the guise of first-person memoirs. When the two novels were published anonymously by Richard Bentley in 1841, the flurry of speculation about their unknown author centered on prominent literary figures as well as on members of the peerage. The young William Makepeace Thackeray, to his mingled irritation and envy, found himself unexpectedly caught up in the guessing game: "it appears that the whole town is talking about my new novel of Cecil. O just punishment of vanity! How I wish I had written it-not for the book’s sake but for the filthy money’s, which I love better than fame." - Winifred Hughes, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1995


The Author

Catherine Grace Frances Gore (1799–1861) was a British novelist and dramatist, daughter of a wine merchant at Retford, where she was born. She is amongst the well-known of the silver fork writers - authors of the Victorian era depicting the gentility and etiquette of high society. There is something of Jane Austen’s influence to be traced in her novels. She had an adroit power of masking — witness Cecil, a book which, for its week deceived London,—a book which, coming after some forty novels by the same hand, contrived to beguile the majority of readers into the idea that a new, dashing Unknown had burst into literature.


Contemporary Reviews

Arcturus, 1841 — The recent novel of Cecil, or the Adventures of a Coxcomb, is brilliant, pert, witty, jesting with every thing respectable or ridiculous, full of folly, mischief and insolence, yet by the very lightness of its aim, never wounding us, while its sallies provoke our admiration. Its frivolity never quite degenerates to heartlessness; its laughter is gay, thoughtless and familiar, never congealed into the hardness and malevolence of a sneer. If its coxcombry is at all in earnest, it only proves that the coxcombry of the nineteenth century is a great deal better than the coxcombry of any other period. It is the coxcombry of the head, not of the heart.


Bentley's Miscellany, 1841 — Cecil Danby is not a coxcomb, and in so far, therefore, the title of the book is a misnomer. True, he is fond of show and dash; entertains a good opinion of himself; and even aspires to the enviable reputation of a lady-killer; but this is the mere outside coating—the superficies of his character; a warm, manly heart beats within his breast; he is shrewd, observant, and of an intellectual order of mind; generous himself, and able to appreciate generosity in others. His adventures abound in stirring incident, detailed in that arch, laughing, and occasionally satirical manner, which tells so well in light fiction. But his serious vein is his best, for it is evidently the most native to his mind.