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Gentility was increasingly characterised by behaviour and less by birth or wealth. Austen’s tellingly named Mr Knightley in Emma (1816) is among the last of a series of what Gerard Barker has called "Grandisonian heroes." No longer of noble birth, he is a member of the landed gentry, though of an old family, a born gentleman: "You might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so plainly written as in Mr Knightley." (Austen, Emma 33)

Including buying a coat of arms with considerable heraldic research going into the process of having one made.

Distinctions between aristocracy and plutocracy blurred.

This is an attitude which is becoming obsolete in Austen’s time.

In Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, by contrast, "the true gentleman" is solely defined by his actions: He has "a keen sense of honor [sic] – scrupulously avoiding mean actions. His standard of probity in word and action is high. He does not shuffle or prevaricate, dodge or skulk; but is honest, upright and straightforward" “If a man is obliged to take even the life of another, in the disharge [sic] of his duty, he should do it with perfect kindness and courtesy” Thomas Low Nichols, How to Behave, 1873)

Superficially, the gentleman owes much to Castiglione’s Courtier, but with an added moral dimension of dignity and integrity. David J. DeLaura points out, for Newman, "the insuperable defect of humanistic culture," appears in the limitations of the gentleman, who has 'no means for transcending the limits of the natural man (p. 238).'"

Now, when a gentleman is no longer necessarily defined by birth, property, or warfare, education becomes important. The idea of the humanist gentleman, the vir perfectus, is revived, and educational ideals were thoroughly classic (Latin, Greek, Geography, History), and the gentleman should now strive for personal and intellectual development, to be “all that he could be.”

Ruskin: “Gentlemanliness…must be taken to signify those qualities which are usually the evidence of high breeding, and which, so far as they can be acquired, it should be every man’s effort to acquire; or, if he has them by nature, to preserve and exult.” (Modern Painters, 1843)

•Tone indicates that the mature Pip knows that he progressed from urchin to snob to true gentleman as he is narrating the story. •Earlier signs of gentility such as good clothing and manners can be appropriated by lower classes. Magwitch retaliates against that class that injured him by introducing a “fake” gentleman (Pip) of his own fabrication into their midst. Similarly, Estella is a “fabricated” lady who in reality is the daughter of criminals. •Pip finds that this is a very complex matter, both because he finds violence, crime, and exploitation when he sets up in London as a gentleman, and because he uncomfortably recognizes that the one real good he has ever known, Joe Gargery, is a gentle man, but not a gentleman.