Anthony Trollope: The Rich Man’s Dickens

I’ve read several Trollope novels over the years, but never ended one with the urge to go on a binge of his ouevre. A recent reading of Barchester Towers (1867), one of his best-known novels, reminded me of his limitations.

Anthony Trollope, 1815-1882

Trollope has always tended to divide opinion. One of the most oft-cited critical essays on him came from Henry James in 1883, a few months after Trollope’s death. James opens up with a judgment on Trollope’s quality as a litterateur:

The author of The Warden, of Barchester Towers, of Framley Parsonage, does not, to our mind, stand on the very same level as Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot; for his talent was of a quality less fine than theirs. But he belonged to the same family—he had as much to tell us about English life; he was strong, genial and abundant.

Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 p. 535.
(also here: https://victorianweb.org/authors/jamesh/trollope.html)

This is a conversation that still follows Trollope around: a good novelist, certainly, but perhaps not quite a great one. On the 200th anniversary of Trollope’s birth, The Guardian ran an article including various eminent persons’ choices for his best novel. The article opened with the rhetorical but revealing question: “Poor man’s Dickens, or master of motives and manners?” Whatever about a master of motives and manners, Trollope was not a poor man’s anything. Poverty was not one of his major concerns as a novelist.

Barchester Towers opens with the chapter title “Who will be the new Bishop?“ This chapter title tells us a lot about Trollope, his priorities and the questions that interest him. The chapter opens with the death of Dr. Grantly, otherwise Bishop Grantly; his son, Archdeacon Grantly, otherwise Dr. Grantly (yes, as well), is the favourite for the position. “The prime minister”, the narrator notes, his given the Archdeacon reason to believe the position is his. He has given no firm assurance but, the narrator says:

those who know anything either of high or low government places will be well aware that a promise may be made without positive words

Barchester Towers, Barnes & Noble, 2005 [1857], p. 10

This is a rather narrow and alienating reference. What of those unfamiliar with high or low government places? Why are they absent from Trollope’s consideration? Yet the reference is indicative of the book’s frame of reference because in the opening few pages we are introduced to a host of titled persons and very few untitled. The narrator also uses various references to prime ministers, ministries and cabinets in these pages to create the impression of inside knowledge of the world of politics and positions. The casual reference to knowledge of “high or low government” places is a typical Trollopian device to situate his narrator in the place of knowledge of and casual access to worldly and elitist things.

As to the death that takes place in these early pages, Trollope is unsentimental about it:

The archdeacon’s mind, however, had already travelled from the death chamber to the closet of the prime minister. He had brought himself to pray for his father’s life, but now that that life was done, minutes were too precious to be lost. It was now useless to dally with the fact of the bishop’s death—useless to lose perhaps everything for the pretence of a foolish sentiment.

Barchester, p. 13

Trollope is unjudgmental about his character’s lack of sentiment. The archdeacon is not intended as an unlikeable figure. Obviously in this treatment of death, he differs markedly from Dickens. Death is always momentous for Dickens, while for Trollope it is an opening of a new position for somebody or other.

Trollope gives great detail about the bishopric in question, particularly financial. Of the archdeacon he notes:

His preferment brought him in nearly three thousand a year. The bishopric, as cut down by the Ecclesiastical Commission, was only five. He would be a richer man as archdeacon than he could be as bishop.

Barchester, p. 17

Archdeacon Grantly is not motivated by money, then, but by power and position. Trollope, however, is conscious of both. He cannot mention a position without also specifying the wages thereof. We know not only the salary that goes with the bishopric, but that of all the positions associated with Barchester Hospital:

it had been ordained that there should be, as heretofore, twelve old men in Barchester Hospital, each with 1s. 4d. a day; that there should also be twelve old women to be located in a house to be built, each with 1s. 2d. a day; that there should be a matron, with a house and £70 a year; a steward with £150 a year; and latterly, a warden with £450 a year, who should have the spiritual guidance of both establishments, and the temporal guidance of that appertaining to the male sex.

Barchester, p. 21

Such detail is eminently Trollopian. One of his USPs among the Victorian literary world was his familiarity, which he accentuated whenever possible, with matters financial and professional. Here, clearly, was a man of the world, and proud of it. But not all men and women in the world are of the world in the Trollopian sense, and this wealth of detail comes at the expense of narrowing the author’s sphere of interest and sympathy. These details can also not fail to lose their interest for posterity’s reader, much as they may have been relevant to Trollope’s contemporaries.

A curious habit of Trollope’s was heavily criticised by James in the 1883 essay:

He took a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, make-believe.

Critical Heritage, p. 535

In Barchester Towers Trollope not only makes reference to his story being a story, but also uses the related but somewhat inconsistent technique of repeatedly stressing his own honesty. He is very fond of formulations like “in truth”. In chapter 4, while introducing the character Obadiah Slope, Trollope includes two instances of “in truth” and one “to tell the truth” within half a page. In chapter 1, he asks a rhetorical question and answers himself: “No, history and truth compel him to deny it.” Yet he is also fond, as in an example used by James, of insisting on the made-up quality of his story:

The end of a novel, like the end of a children’s dinner party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.

Barchester, P. 507

Both of these techniques appear throughout Barchester Towers. They are each forms in which Trollope draws attention to himself as author. One demonstrates his honesty and fair-mindedness and the other reminds the reader of who is the guiding intelligence in the situation. Trollope delights in drawing attention to himself as a writer and, done too regularly, this can create a sense of a rather self-satisfied person.

Self-satisfied is a term that seems fitting for Trollope. He is happy with the status quo in society and with his personal status quo as a popular writer. He dislikes those who try to move above their station. Consider the one truly vituperative portrayal in Barchester Towers, that of Obadiah Slope. Trollope’s very first observation of Slope is:

Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much.

Barchester, p. 28.

Slope wants to upend church tradition and to rise from humble beginnings, and Trollope uses every rhetorical tool in his arsenal to discredit these goals. The portrait and its lack of balance is revealing of Trollope’s general outlook, one of comfortable indulgence towards all who do not rock the boat, and suspicion of those who threaten to interfere with the established order.

The Guardian asked if he was a poor man’s Dickens, but Dickens was more of a poor man’s Dickens than Trollope. A poor man, unless he had some immediate hopes of advancement, would learn little of relevance to his life from Trollope. Trollope was the wealthy man’s – or at least the comfortably-off man’s – Dickens.

Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875)

Apparently, Anthony Trollope’s 200th birthday was last Friday. As it happens, I was just finishing The Way We Live Now (1875). This once-neglected novel has become now possibly Trollope’s best known: for example, it has appeared in Robert McCrum’s ongoing Guardian list of 100 Best English-Language Novels. Quoth McCrum:

The Way We Live Now is a wonderful, melodramatic tale-of-the-times, by a master of his craft. It begins in satire and finally resolves into entertaining social comedy. As a savage commentary on mid-Victorian England by a marvellously addictive writer steeped in every aspect of an extraordinary society, it could hardly be bettered. No wonder the first reviews were atrocious.

I think its status as tale-of-the-times is important. It is both a good narrative and, equally importantly, a historical document, as is clearly announced by the book’s title. However, it is not really considered a part of the Condition-of-England genre of the mid-19th century, because despite its length, scope and interest in politics and economics, the issue of class doesn’t come in strongly. Trollope was a writer of the middle and upper classes, and though there is a sub-plot about Ruby Ruggles, a working-class woman who is embroiled in a relationship with aristocratic ne’er-do-well Felix Carbury, there is no questioning of the relationship between the classes on a larger scale, no forays into industrial relations, trade unions, strikes and the like, as in Hard Times, North and South, et al.

That’s the curious thing about Trollope. He’s able to get inside his characters’ heads without regard for class or gender (especially gender, he seems to give more time to his female characters’ thoughts than the male ones), but his empathy stops at the individual. He’s able to be sympathetic to all characters, without questioning any of the social conditions that creates the inequitable relationships he describes. Thus I disagree with McCrum’s use of the adjective “savage”: Trollope is the very opposite of savage, being unerringly mild and even bland in tone, in contrast to say, Dickens.

Thus, Trollope can present all sorts of situations in a fairly frank manner, without seeming to draw attention to or critique them. Looking through my notes on reading The Way We Live Now on Kindle, I came across a reflection on suicide. Typical Trollope, he goes into detail on the aftermath and the technical details of an inquest. The question is whether the suicide is mad; this is important because if not, (s)he has committed a crime and cannot be given Christian burial. The narrator reflects:

Perhaps it would be well that all suicides should be said to have been mad, for certainly the jurymen are not generally guided in their verdicts by any accurately ascertained facts. If the poor wretch has, up to his last days, been apparently living a decent life; if he be not hated, or has not in his last moments made himself specially obnoxious to the world at large, then he is declared to have been mad. Who would be heavy on a poor clergyman who has been at last driven by horrid doubts to rid himself of a difficulty from which he saw no escape in any other way? Who would not give the benefit of the doubt to the poor woman whose lover and lord had deserted her? Who would remit to unhallowed earth the body of the once beneficent philosopher who has simply thought that he might as well go now, finding himself powerless to do further good upon earth? Such, and such like, have of course been temporarily insane, though no touch even of strangeness may have marked their conduct up to their last known dealings with their fellow-mortals.

The narrator is contemplating the absurdities of criminalizing suicide, and his suggested remedy is not any questioning of a bad law, but a suggestion that it can be quietly circumvented – implying that it is a bad law, but not directly confronting that fact. Someone like Dickens would have denounced the law, demanded its repeal, and mocked those who supported it. The impression created of Trollope here is one of excessive mildness and inoffensiveness, if not actual hypocrisy in calling for the apparent obedience to the law while quietly ignoring it.

He’s similar in his dealing with such matters as anti-semitism in this novel. He documents the anti-semitism shown by the English middle and upper classes towards the Jewish Brehgart, but explicit and even implicit critique is absent, just as assent is absent. He is curiously dissociated from his subjects, sympathetic but aloof. Perhaps it the relative aloofness from social problems that gives him the unshakeable reputation as a writer favoured by conservatives (see this, for example, from Conservative journal The New Criterion). It’s not that Trollope avoids such problems; he documents them, but not as problems, just as stuff that happens in society – in a society that he evidently takes such pleasure in viewing that it almost reads at times that he enjoys even the blatant injustices of it.

Spectacle of Privilege in The Way We Live Now (2001)

Andrew Higson wrote in the 1980s of the centrality of the “spectacle of privilege” (125) to the English period drama of that time. Through the 90s, this was increasingly evident in BBC serials, heavily foregrounded in Pride and Prejudice (1996) and the like. In P&P what is introduced first is not the set of characters, but the setting: one of opulence, wide open country spaces and a country house of massive proportions. The spectacle of this domain of privilege is the focus of the opening scene of P&P.

Somewhat similar is the opening of The Way We Live Now, the 2001 Trollope adaptation, also scripted by Andrew Davies. It is not the people of the story who are introduced, but their stuff. The viewer is invited to gorge him or herself on the sights of privilege, before he/she is initiated into the narrative. In this scene, a very large house is being furnished, and we watch as various movables are brought together to create a domain of privilege.

This is quite standard for the genre at this time. The twist comes when all of this privilege is seen in connection with its owner. This is Augustus Melmotte, and he is introduced at the end of the scene. Before he is seen, he is heard: a voice coming from a carriage gruffly shouts, “Get out!” at two females who come scurrying from said carriage; left inside, we see only a thick cloud of cigar smoke (through the serial, Melmotte is rarely seen without a fat cigar). The camera tracks him from behind as he enters the domain of privilege (i.e. his house, which he has evidently just bought), and on the soundtrack is heard a heavy, bestial breathing, but still we don’t see his face. Finally, having reached the inner parts of the residence, he turns to the camera, briefly disengages his cigar from his mouth, and says in an accent markedly foreign, if unplaceable (it eventually appears he’s either German or Austrian): “Well, let us see what we can do here.”

A closer look at the serial and Trollope’s source text would be necessary to reach any definite conclusions here, but certainly an important focus for the serial, alongside the obligatory romance between Hetta and Paul, is Melmotte’s attempted journey to the centre of English society, and the importance of the expulsion of this contaminative source. That the rejection of foreign degradation is assumed to be a theme of dramatic urgency for the audience by the makers of TWWLN is I think strongly suggested in the opening and throughout the serial and appears to support Higson’s reading of period adaptations, which can often seem to posit an idealized national identity, a real England belonging to the past but recoverable, at least temporarily in the medium of the period adaptation, in which Melmottian machinations may threaten to penetrate the surface and infect the heart of Englishness, but they are localized threats, and may be adequately counteracted from within the community.

• Higson, Andrew, “Re-presenting the National Past: Nostalgia and Pastiche in the Heritage Film”, in Fires were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp. 109-129