History Literature / TheLateGeorgeApley

* TheMan: Thomas Apley tells his son in no uncertain terms that Thomas and his peers ''are'' TheMan.
--> "You do not understand, and I fear you never will understand, that affairs will always be controlled by a small group."

--> '''Thomas Apley''': It is not a pleasant thing for me to feel that the Irish are going to run the affairs of this city, and 1 do not see anyone in your generation who has the force and skill to guide them.
* YourCheatingHeart: It seems that George had an affair with Clara Goodrich, wife of a friend, although the prudish and gullible Willing can't believe it.

''The Late George Apley'' is a 1937 novel by John Marquand.

* EpistolaryNovel: Sort of. A good chunk of the novel is Willing in the first person sharing his memories of George Apley, but at least half is letters written to and by Apley, as well as diary entries and the like.

* MoralGuardians: Horatio Willing himself, as shown when he's discussing the apparently too steamy letters that George wrote to the love of his youth, Mary Monahan.

--> '''Thomas Apley''': It is not a pleasant thing for me to feel that the Irish are going to run the affairs of this city, and 1 do not see anyone in your generation who has the force and skill to guide them.

--> "Once in this Club, much of George Apley's period of experimentation was over and his interests necessarily became centered in the Club itself.

* WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant: The Apleys, old money from colonial days. The novel recounts the era in which the mass immigration of Irish was pushing aside the old WASP elite; the conflict between [=WASPs=] and Irish Catholics is a main theme.

* SmokyGentlemensClub: George's club, which is so old and musty that it's apparently just called the Club among the people who belong to it. His accession to his father's club is a milestone in George's free spirit being crushed.

** Willing can't begin to imagine that the men of his generation visited whorehouses. After all, there were so many opportunities "to meet girls of one's own class at the social assemblies of the Boston season."
* InWhichATropeIsDescribed: All the chapters are titled this way. Chapter VIII, when we read of George's youthful romance with an Irish girl, is titled "Interlude: Dealing with a Subject Which Would Not Ordinarily Be Discussed in a Work of This Nature." This was already an old-fashioned, outmoded style by the 1930s, and serves to mark Willing as an old fogey out of touch with the times.

* SmokyGentlemensClub: George's club, which is so old and musty that it's apparently just called the Club among the people who belong to it. His accession to his father's club is a milestone in George's free spirit being crushed.

* InnocentInaccurate: Willing comes across as a particularly dimwitted form of UpperClassTwit who clings to Victorian conventions and never gets a clue as to what is really going on. His description of the "Apley Mills" milltown make the Apley CompanyTown sound like a place where the workers are ruthlessly exploited. In one scene we have George's dotty old aunt say out of nowhere, "Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast." Willing writes it off to senility but the reader figures out that the Apleys were slave traders.

* InnocentInsensitive: Willing comes across as a particularly dimwitted form of UpperClassTwit who clings to Victorian conventions and never gets a clue as to what is really going on. His description of the "Apley Mills" milltown make the Apley CompanyTown sound like a place where the workers are ruthlessly exploited. In one scene we have George's dotty old aunt say out of nowhere, "Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast." Willing writes it off to senility but the reader figures out that the Apleys were slave traders.

* MadonnaWhoreComplex: "[[ThereAreTwoKindsOfPeopleInTheWorld ...there are two kinds of women in this world, good women and bad women." So says George Apley in a letter to his son.

--> "Once, in later years, she shocked the table with an incredible tale of illegitimacy and a
forced marriage in a distant branch of the family, which caused a pall of surprise and embarrassment to hover over the entire table."
* TheTalk: Didn't happen in 19th century Boston, according to Willing, who thinks it's perfectly OK for privileged youth to trundle on over to TheWrongSideOfTheTracks and learn things for themselves.

It is a satire of the insular, stultifying lifestyle of the upper class WASP Apley family of Boston. At the start of the novel George Apley (1866-1933) has recently died. His children have hired George's old school friend Horatio Willing to compose a biography of their father. Willing does so, complementing his own memories and impressions of the Boston smart set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with numerous quotations from George Apley's own journal entries and letters written and received.

Willing admires George Apley uncritically and is also a social conservative who loves the stuffy, hidebound traditions that circumscribe Boston Brahmin life. But peeking in through the gaps in Willing's narrative is a portrait of a man whose sense of duty and responsibility and what he was expected to do wound up costing him his freedom and happiness.

* EpistolaryNovel: Sort of. A good chunk of the novel is Willing in the first person sharing his memories of George Apley, but at least half is letters written to and by Apley, as well as diary entries and the like.
* InnocentInsensitive: Willing comes across as a particularly dimwitted form of UpperClassTwit who clings to Victorian conventions and never gets a clue as to what is really going on. His description of the "Apley Mills" milltown make the Apley CompanyTown sound like a place where the workers are ruthlessly exploited. In one scene we have George's dotty old aunt say out of nowhere, "Young man, should you ever go blackbirding, be sure to select Negroes that are brought down from the mountains, they are stronger and healthier than the Blacks from the coast." Willing writes it off to senility but the reader figures out that the Apleys were slave traders.

* OldMoney: George's great-aunt Jane says "In a sense, indeed, we are nobility." The Apleys do in fact belong to Boston Brahmin culture, although in RealLife much of their fortune came from slave-trading.

* WhiteAngloSaxonProtestant: The Apleys, old money from colonial days. The novel recounts the era in which the mass immigration of Irish was pushing aside the old WASP elite; the conflict between [=WASPs=] and Irish Catholics is a main theme.