I first read Trollope’s
Barchester Towers nearly fifty
years ago, on the island of Ithaca, while travelling with a friend during a
long vac. We had rented a little room overlooking the sunny harbour at Vathi,
the port to which Odysseus at last returned. The room had an en-suite of a sort:
you walked out onto a flat rooftop to find a privy and a shower consisting of a
head-height tap from which dangled a tin can with holes punched in its bottom.
The water was cold but, in the Ionian heat, welcome.
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) may have been
the first novelist to write about a shower. When Alice Vavasour, heroine of Can
You Forgive Her? (1864), arrives
to stay with her aunt in Cheltenham, she is hardly through the front door
before Lady Macleod starts berating her for having broken off her recent engagement.
Her aunt certainly does not intend to forgive her, and Alice struggles to
defend herself, after which Trollope’s narrator comments:
Perhaps it was
better for them both that the attack and defence should thus be made suddenly,
at their first meeting. It is better to pull the string at once when you are in
the shower bath, and not to stand shivering, thinking of the inevitable which
you can only postpone for a few minutes.
I came across this interesting analogy
while preparing a talk on ‘Past and Present in the world of Trollope’ to give
to the Woodstock
Literature Society last weekend. It
is always a pleasure to come back to Trollope; but when I mentioned this
lecture to an old friend, he replied , ‘Why has Trollope never quite made the
A-list of required reading?’ It’s a question to ponder. I raised it with my
audience on Saturday, suggesting that Barchester
Towers was possibly the finest comic novel of the 19th century,
and that two at least of Trollope’s books, The Last
Chronicle of Barset and The
Way We Live Now, deserve a place
in anyone’s Top Ten list of Victorian fiction.
Trollope himself is often held responsible
for his failure to keep a secure foothold in the Premier League. In his
posthumously published Autobiography
(1883) he had spelt out – much too bluntly for some – the economics of being a
novelist, publishing the exact sums he had earned in royalties and fees for
every one of his forty seven novels. Then, in describing his working methods,
he had startled readers by dismissing that idea that great writing requires
great inspiration (preferably to be found by a starving author shivering in a
garret); Trollope was unapologetic about sticking to a strict regime:
I have allotted
myself so many pages a week. The average number has been about 40. It has been
placed as low as 20, and has risen to 112. And as a page is an ambiguous term,
my page has been made to contain 250 words; and as words, if not watched, will
have a tendency to straggle, I have had every word counted as I went.
Confessing he had been warned ‘such
appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius’, he cheerfully admitted
he’d never thought of himself as a genius, but was sure that, even if he were,
he would have subjected himself to what he called ‘these trammels’ because ‘A small daily task, if it be really daily,
will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always
catches the hare.’ (Echoes of Samuel Smiles?)
Trollope is sometimes too hard on himself,
and no doubt some critics (such as F.R. Leavis) and some of his fellow authors
(Henry James, for instance) have been too ready to take him at his own
estimation; but his analysis of what makes for a successful novelist is worth
our attention. Describing how he came to write The Warden,
the first of the Barchester novels and the first book of his to receive much
recognition, Trollope explains how he wanted to expose – or at least to
describe – two contrasting evils. The first of these was ‘the possession by the
Church of certain funds and endowments which had been intended for charitable
purposes, but which had been allowed to become incomes for idle church
dignitaries.’ In the novel a young radical, John Bold, exposes the scandal of a
clergyman, Mr Harding, who lives comfortably as the Warden of Hiram’s Hospital,
an almshouse for twelve old men: shouldn’t these bedesmen have been receiving
the accumulated benefits of the original endowment, instead of the Warden?
The second evil against which Trollope
inveighs is by contrast the ‘undeserved severity of the newspapers towards the
recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered to be the chief
sinners in the matter.’ In the novel the Times,
disguised as The Thunderer, launches
a campaign so scathing against Mr Harding – one of life’s innocents, a man
devoted to God and his daughter, to music and to the old men of Hiram’s
Hospital – that he resigns, to the despair of his daughter (who is,
inconveniently, in love with John Bold) and of the Cathedral clergy, who regard
him as a weak-willed traitor to the Church of England for allowing its
privileges thus to be undermined.
Trollope wanted to see, and sympathize,
with both sides of the argument. However, he concedes:
I was altogether
wrong in supposing that the two things could be combined. Any writer in
advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of an advocate, – or his
writing will be ineffective. He should take up one side and cling to that, and
then he may be powerful. There should be no scruples of conscience. Such
scruples make a man impotent for such work.
But here I think Trollope is wrong. The genius
of The Warden, and what makes it
compulsively and provocatively readable, is that it does have ‘scruples of
conscience’ about both sides; this is what sets Trollope apart, for example,
from the Dickens of Hard Times or Nicholas Nickleby – Dickens, the
novelist whom he lampoons in The Warden
as Mr. Popular Sentiment. Trollope was almost incapable of seeing only one
side: when he stood for Parliament in 1868 he described himself as a
Conservative Liberal, and was roundly jeered by both parties.
In speaking last week at Woodstock, I
referred to Trollope’s own account of The Vicar of
Bullhampton, a novel in which he
does place all his sympathy behind a single character: Carry Brattle, the
miller’s daughter, whom he politely calls a ‘castaway’ but others do not
scruple to call a prostitute. This novel, Trollope declares, ‘was written
chiefly with the object of exciting not only pity but also sympathy for a
fallen woman, and of raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of
other women.’ He felt so strongly about this that he reprinted the novel’s
Preface in his Autobiography; but his
own final verdict on The Vicar of
Bullhampton was as absurd as it was unsparing, and, alas, did all that was
needed to keep this fine novel, and Trollope himself, off the A-list:
As regards all
the Brattles, the story is, I think, well told. The characters are true, and
the scenes at the mill are in keeping with human nature. For the rest of the
book I have little to say. It is not very bad, and it certainly is not very
good. As I have myself forgotten what the heroine does and says – except that
she tumbles into a ditch – I cannot expect anyone else should remember her. But
I have forgotten nothing that was done or said by any of the Brattles.
Adrian Barlow
