The British cultural critic Robert Irvine described the appeal of Mr. Darcy to women as that of an "absolute and unconditioned male need for a woman". Irvine argued that this was a female "fantasy" that was only possible in a context of general powerlessness on the part of women. At the time of the French Revolution when elites all over Europe felt threatened, there was a tendency in British literature to glorify the aristocratic and gentry classes as the personification of British values in contrast to the French who guillotined their old elite to create the grasping, vulgar new elite of Napoleonic France. For the British middle class or "middling sort" as Austen called them, to emulate the landed elite, however, retained its social superiority. The character of Mr. Darcy reflects this trend. When Mr. Bingley suggests that he might like to one day build an estate like Pemberley, he is informed by Mr. Darcy that it is not the estate itself, but rather what it contains, its cultural heritage like the family library that makes Pemberley special as Mr. Bingley cannot be the heir to a family library built up over generations like the one Mr. Darcy is the heir to. In this way, Austen suggests that there is more to Mr. Darcy than the proud and sneering man at the Meryton assembly, that there is a deepness to him as people like him are custodians of the national culture. The scholar C. C. Barfoot described Pemberley as the "marvelous accretion of all the choices made by his predecessors", providing as the novel calls it "a kind of model" for how to live properly. Barfoot argued that for Austen "civilization is not a gift, but is a possession that needs to be earned and sustained by practice"; in this regard, the fact that Darcy takes good care of his estate shows his basically civilised nature which he hides under his veneer of snobbery and coldness.