By analyzing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given. The 19th-century male novelist offered a particularly graphic threat to manliness. Due to the feminization of the novel, the domestic location of the novelist's work, and the codes of "manly" speech that governed male behaviour, the Victorian male novelist was often seen, by both himself and others, as not sufficiently manly. Andrew Dowling argues that 19th-century novels featuring the male novelist reveal the fear of unmanliness that lies at the heart of many canonical texts, including works by Dickens and Thackeray.