© 2012 by Washington & Jefferson College. All rights reserved. 0049-4127/2012/5801-004 “He a Cripple and I a Boy”: he Pirate and the Gentleman in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island Chamutal Noimann he deinition of a gentleman had been occupying English thought for cen- turies. Eminent Victorian thinkers and artists joined this debate, each ofer- ing his own idea of what a gentlemen was and how he must be educated. In doing so, they produced an extraordinary collection of philosophical, theo- logical, and intellectual rhetoric. In Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman efectively summarizes the complexity of the issue. His study is based on the notion that “masculinity [is] an historical construction rather than an essen- tialist given.” 1 He demonstrates how each artist and writer “shapes the possi- bilities of manliness available to him within his cultural moment into a very personal coniguration that necessarily participates within the more general discourse of the masculine.” 2 homas Carlyle, for example, promoted the idea of the gentleman as arti- san with his belief in the profundity of manual work as illustrated in novels like Adam Bede and Great Expectations; the masculine gentleman also showed 1. Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14. 2. Ibid.