{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03332151719248493, 'fraction_numerical': 0.01098901098901099, 'mean_word_length': 5.215859030837004, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
‘Gentlemen of the world, unite!’: A vindication of the ways of Chappism

In 2001, Gustav Temple and Vic Darkwood published The Chap Manifesto. Revolutionary Etiquette for the Modern Gentleman, a volume designed to expose the extent of contemporary Britain’s obsession with an ‘unholy trinity of aspiration, vulgarity and selfregard’ and urge a return to the seemingly long-forgotten arts of ‘courtesy and savoir-faire’ (Temple and Darkwood 2001, inside dust jacket). Commonly located in the humour section of most large national bookstores alongside such popular works as The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Extreme Edition (2005), Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK (2003) and Barry Trotter and the Dead Horse (2004), Temple and Darkwood’s text can clearly be read as a satire on twenty-first-century pop culture. Upon closer inspection, however, The Chap Manifesto seems to be concerned with something much more complex than the kind of sneeringly opportunistic humour that informs the Crap Towns franchise and the parodies spawned by the fiction of J.K. Rowling and others. Appropriating and overturning the bumbling image of modern manliness advanced by the female authors of The Young Fogey Handbook (1985), Temple and Darkwood present both a civilized vision of life as it might be in the aftermath of a ‘Tweed Revolution’, and a step-by-step guide as to how the aspiring Anarcho-Dandyist should conduct himself in public and in private. Drawing heavily upon the English etiquette book tradition, The Chap Manifesto distils a bizarre collage of dada aesthetics, anti-capitalist sloganizing, Luddite technophobia and esoteric symbolism into a comprehensive blueprint for living that ultimately rejects both the ‘New Man’ and the ‘New Lad’ as paradigms of modern English masculinity. In recent months, Chappism has come under savage attack from commentators in The Guardian and The Mind’s Construction Quarterly, who have insisted that it amounts to little more than a front for all manner of ‘anachronistic’, ‘sexist’ and ‘reactionary’ tendencies (O’Hagan 2005, 1). Consequently, it seems that a growing number of readers have started to take The Chap Manifesto all too seriously, ignoring the three-inch high ‘humour’ label under which it is sold by Waterstones and Borders in their determination to establish a coherent – and therefore readily dismissible – ideology of ‘Chappism’. However, the very appearance, style and form of the Manifesto would appear to undermine such polemically motivated readings of its contents, and suggest a variety of alternative approaches to this controversial, but ultimately humorous, text. In the essay that follows, I will seek to outline a number of possible approaches to Temple and Darkwood’s text, treating Chappism as a literary-cultural phenomenon, a