The main theme in this ‘biography’ of Francis Chegwidden Cornish is the giving and receiving of loyalty, superfluous loyalty and lack of it. The main character is the most loyalty-giving character in the novel and so the reader takes a liking to a personality. At the same time, however, the various representations of loyalty in the novel also serve to undermine the seemingly stable meaning of loyalty as a desirable quality in all circumstances. What‘s Bred in the Bone thus perform the double trick of seducing us by appealing to our unreflected assumption and informing us by calling the assumption in doubt.