Describe the the gentleman and the type of people who might belong to this social class?

The concept of the nineteenth-century Gentleman is a complex one, though it is one which is, as one recent critic has noted, "the necessary link in any analysis of mid-Victorian ways of thinking and behaving." The Victorians themselves were not certain what a gentleman was, of what his essential characteristics were, or of how long it took to become one. Why, then, were so many of them so anxious to be recognized as one?