New Men in Trollope's Novels (The Nineteenth Century Series)

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NEW MEN IN TROLLOPE’S NOVELS

To John Letts, who illuminated so many forgotten corners of the Victorian age 1929–2006

New Men in Trollope’s Novels Rewriting the Victorian Male

MARGARET MARKWICK University of Exeter, UK

© Margaret Markwick 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Margaret Markwick has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Markwick, Margaret, 1945– New men in Trollope’s novels : rewriting the Victorian male. – (The nineteenth century) 1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882 – Characters – Men 2. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882 – Criticism and interpretation 3. Men in literature 4. Masculinity in literature I. Title 823.8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Markwick, Margaret, 1945– New men in Trollope’s novels : rewriting the Victorian male / by Margaret Markwick. p. cm. – (Nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. (alk. paper) 1. Trollope, Anthony, 1815–1882–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Men in literature. 3. Masculinity in literature. I. Title. PR5688.M44M37 2007 823’.8–dc22 2007008439 ISBN 978-0-7546-5724-8

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents General Editors’ Preface List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction: Trollope Past and Present

vii ix xi 1

1

The Making of Victorian Manliness

15

2

Men in Fiction

37

3

Telling Masculinities

61

4

The Preux Chevalier: ‘Sans Peur et Sans Reproche’

83

5

From Birth to Man’s Estate

101

6

Sex and the Single Man

117

7

Husbands, Fathers, Sons

141

8

Smoking Rooms: Bawdy Jokes

175

Trollope Editions used in this Book Select Bibliography Index

199 201 211

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The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester

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List of Figures and Tables Figures 1.1

Punch Cartoon, December 10 1859

16

1.2

Tom Brown, the Archetypal Muscular Christian pays Homage at Dr Arnold’s Tomb. (Macmillan, 1869)

31

5.1

The Infant Silverbridge Sits on his Great-uncle’s Knee. (Virtue and Co, 1869)

107

Devices to Inhibit Masturbation and Nocturnal Arousal. Taken from Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience (Oxford University Press, 1984), facing p.183.

119

7.1

Distribution of Births in 1860

143

8.1

Plantagenet Palliser Perhaps Disguising – or Discovering – ‘A New Vein in his Body’. (Elder and Co, 1864)

179

6.1

Tables 4.1

Manliness in The Duke’s Children

85

4.2

Men’s Appearance

90

5.1

Education

110

7.1

Family Structure

146

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Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the University of Exeter, who awarded me an honorary fellowship while I wrote this book. Professor Regenia Gagnier has been a steady source of encouragement and support, and the library has been constantly helpful and resourceful. In her capacity as visiting professor, Isobel Armstrong’s advice on the structure of the opening paragraphs of chapter 3 was invaluable. The great feminist Trollope scholar Deborah Denenholz Morse has also been an inspiration to me when self-belief wavered. In this project, as in so many in the past, Clare Bainbridge has unstintingly offered me her refreshing critique of my ideas and composition. Robin Brierley has helped me to greater clarity in understanding the deeper recesses of the male psyche. And the research for this book would never have got off the ground without the enthusiasm, stimulation, affirmation and encouragement of the late great Chris Brooks. My greatest debt however, is to my husband Chris, who through my years of pronounced physical disability was the most assiduous independent-living volunteer. He has typed my script in all its revisions and has only rarely grumbled about my handwriting. Trollope said that mistakes do not creep in, in ones and twos, they march in, in battalions and in this book they are all my own. A small amount of the material in this book has already been published as ‘Hands-on Fatherhood in Trollope’s Novels’, a chapter in Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Helen Rogers and Trev Broughton (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) and appears with the kind permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

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Introduction

Trollope Past and Present The women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s demanded equality in access to education, jobs, pay, representation and health, with recognition for the value of childcare, and an end to men’s physical and emotional abuse in their superior physical strength and monetary power over women. In scrutinising sexual inequalities, in examining the skewed valorisation of men’s behaviours, a great deal of enquiry concentrated on man as dysfunctional. The term ‘emotionally illiterate’ became short-hand for all the anti-social tendencies which tend to be found more often in men than women, with hooliganism and violence at one end of the spectrum and keeping one’s emotions firmly under wraps at the other. There were few areas of life that were untouched by the insistence of these voices. Was it true that the pursuit of corporate power inexorably atrophied men’s nurturing selves? Was the lawlessness found in groups of teenage boys indeed the end product of a generation of boys raised with distant, disengaged fathers who had never taught their sons how to be men? The late 1970s and 1980s were marked by a consequent formation of a men’s movement, as men addressed the charges that they suppressed meaningful feeling, lacked emotional resources, feared intimacy and left little room for tenderness. This fed the development of masculinity studies, which are now a vigorous field of study in the humanities. Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics,1 which was published in the summer of 1970, and which dissects the sub-texts of a group of major novels written by men is, arguably, responsible for changing for ever the nature of literary criticism.2 In exposing the masculinist assumptions and attitudes of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jean Genet and Norman Mailer, Millet gave the academic profession a new imperative vocabulary for the deconstruction of familiar texts. Feminist critical theory revealed new insights in old texts when they were subjected to gender-sensitive enquiry. By foregrounding women, the pertinence of theories in a wide range of disciplines was shown to have been skewed by an unquestioning masculinist approach. Over the ensuing years, it became the norm to establish Schools of Women’s Studies where the canon across the humanities – sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, history and literary studies – was reassessed. Schools of Women’s Studies set out to expose masculinist patterns of thinking and to establish a woman’s canon.3

1

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970). See, for instance, Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (London: Aurum Press, 2000) 43 and 148–51. 3 See, for instance, Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 good women writers before Jane Austen (London: Pandora Press, 1986). 2

2

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

Initially they were the enclave of women. However, as the wider implications of the women’s movement were acknowledged by a growing number of men, so increasingly did men recognise that the methods developed by Women’s Studies analysis could, with equal potency, be applied to examine the cultural defining of masculinity. This gave rise to a plethora of studies about masculinity which reached industrial proportions by the 1990s. Lynne Segal’s 1997 revised introduction to her 1990 Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, declares that there were 400 new books on masculinity published in the previous ten years, ranging over all disciplines.4 Her own book has a socio-psychological perspective. David Gilmour’s Manhood in the Making (1990) combines a sociological and anthropological view.5 Gerald Fogel’s collection of essays in The Psychology of Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (1996),6 uses a psychological approach, while David Rosen examines a variety of texts from Beowulf to Sons and Lovers in constructing masculinity within a framework of critical theory in Changing Fictions of Masculinity (1993).7 John Tosh clearly articulates the impoverishment of historiology caused by the absence of a gender-sensitive approach in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1998).8 Anthony Clare, from his psychiatrist’s chair, has written On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (2000).9 Coming from an entirely different perspective (described by Segal as ‘mytho-poetic’) is Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), a text which examines man’s need to return to tribal patterns of initiation rites.10 Today, Schools of Gender Studies offer an arena to everyone interested in exploring the cultural determinations of sexuality, be it male, female, gay or lesbian. One of the first tasks of the women’s school of literary criticism was to reappraise the existing canon and reinterpret the delineation of women’s lives in these texts. Elaine Showalter,11 and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar,12 are outstanding in their authoritative approach to this task. When the Victorian novel was subjected to particular scrutiny, Trollope’s work proved to be a remarkably fruitful field of feminist study, because of some unexpected depths that were revealed. The new approach of feminist critics uncovered a Trollope who writes about strong-minded women in touch with their sexuality. Trollope’s women refuse to conform to the cultural demands of 4 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago Press, 1997) xii. 5 David Gilmour, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press 1990). 6 Gerald Fogel, Frederick Lane and Robert Liebert, eds, The Psychology of Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 7 David Rosen, The Changing Fictions of Masculinity (Urbana and Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 8 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 9 Anthony Clare, On Men: Masculinity in Crisis (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000). 10 Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1990). 11 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 12 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic and the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Trollope Past and Present

3

their times (and certainly to our stereotypes of what those cultural demands were) and he can bleakly expose the paucity of their choices. That he manages to present his subversive message about women’s position, while on the surface appearing to support the status quo, is just one aspect of Trollope’s particular subtlety. It is now time to re-read Trollope’s novels to reassess how he constructs his men, for he can be equally unconventional in his presentation of the cultural stereotype of the orthodox male psyche. This quest to re-discover Trollope’s men will examine how the Victorians themselves constructed masculinity. Who were the great arbiters on how a man should comport himself and who of these can be detected influencing how Trollope shaped his men? The industrial revolution fuelled a debate about the operation of man in the market-place. Men like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham strove to establish a vocabulary with which to explore their new thinking about the structure of society and the nature of cash and capitalism. The diction that emerged, devoid of sentiment and excluding a moral dimension, has been interpreted by many as masculinist. The tenor of their writings was confronted by the ethical asceticism of Thomas Carlyle and tempered by the populist writings of Samuel Smiles. Meanwhile there was an overarching ecclesiastical debate which set the evangelical low church against the high Anglicanism of Pusey, with a powerful voice urging a moderate middle way, led by F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, but drawing heavily on the theologies of Dr Thomas Arnold and Samuel Coleridge. These four commentators spoke explicitly about Christian manliness and led directly to the formation of the movement for muscular Christianity.13 These were all topical themes that were explored in much of the popular fiction of the time and have contributed to our view of who the Victorians were. Just as we cling to myths about the Victorians in general, so there is a powerful and persistent myth about Trollope that resists confrontation with certifiable facts. There is a standard view that after an inauspicious start with his first three novels, his fourth novel, The Warden, published in 1856, met with some critical acclaim. He consolidated his reputation with his next four books and it was an indicator of his success and popularity that his next novel, Framley Parsonage, was the opening serial in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, which made its first appearance on 23 December 1860. Through the 1960s, he was the matinee idol of the circulating library and book-reading public, publishing 23 novels, travel books and volumes of short stories in a decade. E.S. Dallas famously wrote: He is at the top of the tree; he stands alone, there is nobody to be compared with him. He writes faster than we can read, and the more that the pensive public reads, the more does it desire to read. Mr. Anthony Trollope is, in fact, the most fertile, the most popular, the most successful author – that is to say, of the circulating library sort.14

That final qualification, a significant put-down, foreshadowed, so the story goes, the falling off of his popularity through the 1870s, either because public tastes changed, 13 This is the subject of Norman Vance’s definitive study, The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Chapter 1 in particular draws largely on his argument. 14 Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) 103; E.S. Dallas, The Times 23 May 1859: 12, but quoted widely.

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

4

or Trollope’s books changed. By the time of his death in 1882, the price he could command for a novel had halved and his autobiography, published posthumously in 1883, with its frank declaration that he wrote to a timetable, saw writing as no different from shoe-making, and was proud of the money he made, put paid to what faltering loyalty remained and he sank into obscurity.15 His reputation rallied in the 1920s thanks to the efforts of Michael Sadleir and he experienced a further renaissance during the second world war as the comfort zone for a besieged nation seeking the reassurance of an age of certainty. As V.S. Pritchett wrote in 1946: Since 1918, Trollope has become one of the Great Air Raid Shelters. He presides over the eternal Munich of the heart, and Barsetshire has become one of the great never-never lands of our time. It has been the normal country to which we all aspire.16

Any remaining aspiration to serious recognition was firmly squashed by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948)17 and Stephen Spender is thought to have reflected the views of most people with any literary pretensions when he said, in 1966, that he had never read the Palliser novels and he did not think that anyone in the Department of English at U.C.L. had either.18 As if to emphasise that this was the official version, Terry Eagleton wrote that Trollope’s work ‘bathes in a self-consistent, blandly undifferentiated ideological space’, whose aesthetic is ‘an anaemic, naively representational “realism”, which is merely a reflex of common-place bourgeois empiricism’.19 R.C. Terry,20 James Kincaid and N. John Hall21 are in the vanguard of those who have vigorously rebutted this account. In The Artist in Hiding (1977), Terry produces concrete evidence of Trollope’s unfading popularity with the reading public in the years after his death, by examining the stock records of Mudie’s circulating library. In 1888, six years after his death, far from suffering a decline, 49 of his works were available on Mudie’s subscription, and 12 years later, in 1900, 52 titles were being offered, implying that it was not just his novels, but his minor works as well that were being requested by his readers.22 As Terry points out, the speed with which Julia Kavanagh, Anne Manning and Elizabeth Sewell dropped out of the listings demonstrates that Mudie only stocked what was in demand. Terry also draws our attention to the number of new editions and re-editions of the novels that continued to appear, here and in America, in the 20 15

For the account list of Trollope’s earnings as a writer, see An Autobiography, 363–4. V.S. Pritchett, New Statesman 8 June 1946, 415, quoted by Donald D. Stone, Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 130. 17 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948). 18 Quoted by James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 175, taken from a column in Radio Times, 24–30 May 1974. 19 Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: New Left Books, 1976), 181, quoted by Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) 1. 20 R.C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (London: Macmillan, 1977). 21 N. John Hall, ‘The Truth about Trollope’s “Disappearance”’, Trollopiana 22 (1993) 4–12; drawn from Hall’s lecture ‘Finding Anthony Trollope’, British Museum (August 1993). 22 See particularly Terry, chapter 3, 48–65, and appendix V, 261. 16

Trollope Past and Present

5

years after Trollope’s death. John Lane started producing the novels in the New Pocket Library edition in 1904 and the Oxford University Press began its World’s Classics series in 1907, which continues to this day.23 While some of the novels have been rarer than others (Rachel Ray, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Fixed Period, for instance) a good proportion of his novels have been continuously in print from their publication to the present day, and all were republished in paperback through the 1990s by Penguin and Oxford University Press. Lance Tingay notes how readily recognised and how popular were radio adaptations of Trollope’s novels through the 1940s and 1950s, targeting an audience already familiar with his work.24 The 1970s saw a lavish BBC television serial production of the story of Glencora and Plantaganet Palliser and the 1980s the recreation of the first two novels of the Barchester series. The Way We Live Now was dramatised by Andrew Davies for BBC2, and broadcast in 2001 with an all-star cast, and in 2004, He Knew He Was Right received the same treatment. The Trollope Society, inaugurated in 1987 to produce the first complete uniform edition of his novels in partnership with the Folio Society, together have printed around 12,000 copies of each novel in their expensivelybound volumes of his fiction.25 This bears little relation to the myth which has been peddled and which can still be found in circulation today.26 His critical reputation has similarly opposing tellings and may indeed throw some light on the misleading impression not only that people stopped reading him at his death, but that he was somehow not a writer of the first water. David Skilton gives a lucid and thoughtful appraisal of critical opinion on Trollope through the years of his writing career in Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972)27 and the following paragraphs draw heavily on his marshalling of his material. He shows how, in spite of Trollope’s demonstrably enduring popularity in the hearts of 23

Terry, 53. Lance O. Tingay, ‘Trollope’s Popularity: A Statistical Approach’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 11, No. 3, 1956: 223–9. Radio adaptations of the novels: The Warden 1942 and 1948 Barchester Towers 1943 and 1951 Framley Parsonage 1944 Doctor Thorne 1945 The Last Chronicle of Barset 1945 and 1951 Orley Farm 1945 and 1947 The Vicar of Bullhampton 1947 The Small House at Allington 1948 and 1949 Dr Wortle’s School 1949 Is He Popenjoy? 1949 The Eustace Diamonds 1952 The Prime Minister 1955 25 Information from Anthony Juckes, editor of The Trollope Society, Nov. 2001. 26 Reviewing Markwick, Trollope and Women in Victorian Studies, Spring 1998, 523–8, Lynette Felber says: ‘ ... his value for academic study is unfortunately still deprecated. As a dissertator in the late 1980s, I was told that it would be difficult to pull any meaningful patterns out of Trollope’s “chatty” novels’ (523). 27 David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (London: Longmans, 1972). 24

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

6

the reading public, his critical acclaim vacillated. While the critics of the early novels from The Warden onwards largely welcomed the newcomer to the fold, by the time he hit his stride in the 1860s, when his novels were coming out thick and fast, many commentators had a sniping edge to their views. Their grumbles focused on their misappreciation of his use of realism, but they were also flummoxed by how to keep writing something new about a novelist whose output demanded a review every few months. His greatest sin was his popularity and the reviewers seemed reluctant to praise something that seemed so easy to do. Trollope’s insistence that writing novels was like making shoes seemed like ‘low art’. Instead they claimed that his ‘realism’ was too much founded in the mundane, too often about what was all too clearly around them, with nothing of the sublime. The British Quarterly Review said: Like all Mr Trollope’s writings, [He Knew He Was Right] is uncompromisingly realistic – the flaws of his heroes and heroines are remorselessly exhibited. It is no justification of this Pre-Raphaelitism that it is true to life. A work of art should not be true to life, but should idealise – that it may elevate it.28

R.H. Hutton, writing widely about constructions of ‘realism’, regularly contrasts Trollope with Charlotte Brontë at one end of the spectrum, and with George Eliot at the other, but fails to find the measure of Trollope’s genius by using such idiosyncratic practitioners as his yardstick. However, of all Trollope’s contemporary reviewers, Hutton came the nearest to recognising Trollope’s original genius: Mr Trollope’s intellectual grasp of his characters ... is nearly perfect; but then he chooses to display that grasp almost exclusively in the hold they get, or fail to get over other characters, and in the hold they yield to other characters over them. It is in his command of what we may call the moral ‘hooks and eyes’ of life that Mr Trollope’s greatest power lies.29

It was nearly 100 years after Hutton’s incisive analysis before anyone refocused on this quality and made a full study of it. It is true that his later books commanded lower prices, though he was still paid between six and seven times the going rate of around £250.30 After his death, and the publication of his remaining extant works, there was a slight lull in the outpouring of critical assessment, but it was well under way again by the 1890s, and has never stopped. Ambivalence to Trollope held sway for many years. Henry James is most famous for his Janus-like appraisal. He denounced Trollope’s ‘suicidal satisfaction’ in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only make-believe,31 while declaring that as a realist, Trollope was breaking new ground with the French School.32 28

Smalley, 333 (British Quarterly Review, 1869, L, 263–4), quoted by Skilton, 88. Smalley, 198 (The Spectator, 1864, xxxvii, 421–3); Skilton refers closely to this passage in his chapter analysing Hutton’s contribution to the body of Trollope criticism (100–125 and particularly 114). 30 John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers (London: Macmillan, 1995) 161, says that the average payment for a novel was around £250. 31 Henry James, ‘Anthony Trollope’, Century Magazine (New York, 1883 n.s. iv, 388–95) Smalley, 525–45, 535. 32 Smalley, 529. 29

Trollope Past and Present

7

At the turn of the century, in an otherwise appreciative essay, Frederic Harrison apologised for including so unfashionable a novelist as Trollope in his survey of early Victorian fiction.33 George Saintsbury, as Skilton points out, is bent on sabotaging the reputations of the previous generation34 and Trollope falls under his wide-sweeping scythe, ‘proof that powers of observation are not enough if a writer lacks genius’. He recanted in later life.35 Two years later, in 1897, Herbert Paul declared Trollope’s books to be dead, only to be rebutted four years later by Leslie Stephen declaring that he was not dead, but in a state of suspended vitality.36 Stephen’s analysis posits Trollope as an analgesic to numb the stresses of the world, ‘a genial, peaceful world, oblivious to the intellectual, political and social revolution that was in the air’.37 The brickbats continued; the commentators might disagree on exactly how low was their estimation of his art, but he was always there needing to be brushed aside. However the critics were never indifferent to him, which would have been the true death. This may of course be a reaction to their perplexity in accounting for his continuing popularity among readers. Terry, after all, demonstrates that in 1900, Mudie’s had more Trollope books on their shelves than at any other time. His critical fortunes in the twentieth century teetered on a similar knife-edge of ambiguity, as some critics were spurred on to patronise him with faint praise, while others staunchly attempted to address his genius. W.P. Ker in 1912 reiterated Trollope’s genius for a realism as innovative as Balzac’s.38 In 1913, drawing heavily on his own recollections and those of his contemporaries, T.H.S. Escott published a partial biography.39 This was somewhat balanced by the more accurate record of his life written by Sadleir in 1927,40 but his painstaking work of bibliography and biography is marred by his patronising tone as he declares that Trollope is not from the top drawer of British novelists, merely one of the best of the rest. Lord David Cecil, in 1934 continued to cocker up this by now tired cliché,41 while the reading public turned to him in ever greater numbers through the 1930s and 1940s. The end of the war marks the beginning of some serious academic respect and acclaim for Trollope’s work, a sea change indicated by the establishment in September 1945 of The Trollopian, a quarterly journal from the University of California.42 Its self33 Frederic Harrison, Studies in Early Victorian Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1910) 183. 34 Skilton, 102. 35 George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions (1895) 172–7, quoted by Stone, 129. 36 Stone, 129. 37 Stone, 129. 38 Stone, 129. 39 T.H.S. Escott, Anthony Trollope: His Work, Associates, and Literary Originals (London: John Lane 1913). 40 Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable, 1927). 41 Lord David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (London: Constable, 1934). 42 The Trollopian was founded by Bradford Booth, who wrote Anthony Trollope, Aspects of his Life and Art (London: Hutton, 1958). Booth, in spite of his enthusiasms, could be as patronising as any of the detractors. Kincaid quotes him saying: ‘His work resists the kind of formal analysis to which we subject our better fiction’ (Preface).

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

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professed purpose was to provide a platform for the informed discussion of the Trollope oeuvre and associated subjects. It rapidly broadened its remit, in March 1947, to become Nineteenth Century Fiction (and more recently, in 1986, Nineteenth Century Literature) and it has consistently discharged its brief. While the efforts of this august body of opinion were insufficient to swamp entirely the voices of Spender and Eagleton referred to earlier, such views were the last vestiges of a body of opinion facing extinction. Today, Trollope’s reputation as a great novelist and fertile field for research is unshakeable. This is due in no small measure to a raft of scholarly research from which a more complex view of Trollope’s creative processes began to emerge. A.O.J. Cockshut’s Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (1955) gives us the first detailed full-chapter analysis of individual books, and he is prepared to go outside the core works of the Barchester Chronicles and the Palliser novels, examining An Eye for an Eye, Dr Wortle’s School, Kept in the Dark, and Mr Scarborough’s Family to support his thesis of a shift in the novels around 1870 to a darker view of life.43 Cockshut initiated the shift of perspective necessary to deepen readings of his texts, to change who Trollope was widely thought to be and while Bradford Booth’s Jamesian Trollope: Aspects of his Art and Life (1956) still tended to support earlier views of limited genius, Mario Praz in The Hero in Eclipse (1956) makes it clear that Trollope is at last being taken seriously.44 By the 1970s, Trollope study had the feel of being a conveyor-belt production line.45 In 1968, Hillis Miller’s The Form of Victorian Fiction gave us another view of the novelist as dark and subversive.46 In 1969, Trollope was the fifth literary giant to receive the Critical Heritage treatment, beaten only by Austen, James, Tennyson and Thackeray. In the English canon, Trollope is now clearly in the vanguard. Ruth apRoberts set the tone for the 1970s with Trollope: Artist and Moralist. She begins with a brief account of how all commentators like Sadleir and Cecil have ill-served Trollope. While she acknowledges Sadleir’s bibliographic scholarship, she says ‘there are nevertheless qualities in Sadleir’s work that have vitiated the study of Trollope ... His delighted connoisseurship impedes actual analysis ... however much Sadleir actually admires Trollope, he has a basically condescending attitude’.47 She goes on to demonstrate how the yardsticks established by James, Lubbock and Leavis prove inadequate and resistant to Trollope’s style and points to Wayne Booth’s theories of narratology set out in The Rhetoric of Fiction48 as the way forward. He has, she says: ‘enfranchised us from the yoke of Jamesian formalism’ and freed us to be able to analyse what it is in Trollope’s narratives that make him so deeply satisfying.49 In her chapter ‘The Shaping Principle’, she re-reads The Warden without the previous generation’s shackles to reveal the conscious and 43

A.O.J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1955) 9. Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956). 45 The British Library catalogue lists 13 works published on Trollope between 1975 and 1979. 46 Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 47 Ruth apRoberts, Trollope: Artist and Moralist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971) 13. 48 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961 (revised and republished London: Penguin Books, 1983). 49 apRoberts, 27. 44

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subtle structures of this early work. She blows away the cobwebs of ‘the persistent tradition that Trollope is a naive writer, that he has no control over his material, and that his material serves to give him away’.50 In its place we have a Trollope who consciously and artistically layers the construction of his protagonists. ‘Trollope’, she says, ‘insists on the incongruities by sharp juxtaposition of different perspectives. This is the function of his “realism”’. In this, she picks up the threads identified by Hutton 100 years previously.51 The space that opened up in the wake of apRoberts’ deconstruction of his technique was readily filled by, most notably, Terry’s The Artist in Hiding and Kincaid’s The Novels of Anthony Trollope, both weighty pieces of scholarship constructing a Trollope whose distinctive and innovative use of realism put him on a par with Flaubert and Zola. Kincaid argues that Trollope was both tied to and separated from the realist tradition: ‘He had little in common with his great contemporaries: the real ties are backwards to Jane Austen and forwards to late James and Virginia Woolf.’52 Terry likens Trollope’s realism to the full detail of the paintings of his friend Frith: It is an art that depends on time, space, and cumulative effect … The Trollopian mode of undramatic disclosure is a process of gradual revelation through the many insignificant actions and a host of tiny observations which, with the author’s genial presence as commentator and host, creates a sense of well-being and ease, like opening one’s own front door.53

This has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s, ‘We believe in Barsetshire as we believe in our weekly bills’.54 Both Kincaid and Terry retell a selection of novels in the light of their theses of enhanced reality. Both of them are sceptical of Cockshut’s neat compartmentalising. Trollope is much more slippery than that, says Terry, and their methodologies have been taken up by most serious commentators since. Special mention needs to be made of Michael Riffaterre’s outstanding essay on Trollope’s metonymies, a meticulous examination of his tropes, focusing on food in Rachel Ray in particular, which cemented Trollope in that canon of works whose sub-texts are susceptible to the close examination of the great twentieth century structuralists.55 Millet’s Sexual Politics, with its exposé of the misogyny of the great male writers of the twentieth century, insisted on a re-evaluation of many earlier certitudes, including those held in every dusty corner of the Academy and her work encouraged a re-interpretation of Trollope’s themes in the light of feminist theory. Juliet McMaster’s Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1978), is the first of these.56 Her declared intention is to 50

apRoberts, 35. apRoberts, 34–44. 52 Kincaid, 51. 53 Terry, 94. 54 Virginia Woolf, ‘Phases of Fiction’, Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1966–1967) vol. 2, 57. 55 Michael Riffaterre, ‘Trollope’s Metonymies’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 37, 1982: 272–92. 56 Juliet McMaster, Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern (London: Macmillan, 1978). 51

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explore the six Palliser novels and The Small House at Allington, where we first meet Plantaganet Palliser, to establish a unity of theme. Her re-telling of the plots and sub-plots (and she points out that she is unusual in giving prominence to subplots) foregrounds the action of the women. This opens out a new fertile and insightful interpretation of the Trollope oeuvre, even though she posits no explicit feminist agenda. She opens the way for further analyses that were more rigorously feminist in their approach. Deborah Denenholz Morse’s Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels, of 1987, specifically challenges earlier masculinist interpretations. She refutes Sadleir, who claimed that Trollope’s ideal woman is ‘modest of mien, low voiced; claiming nothing of equality’ and Praz, who said: ‘Trollope’s novels are designed to encourage gentle, modest, not very passionate girls’, amongst others, as a backdrop to a study exploring Trollope’s subversive sub-text as he exposes the paucity of women’s choices.57 Terry and Kincaid both noticed, but only in passing, that there was ambiguity in Trollope’s characterisation of his women. Their sketchy anomalies become integrated themes in Trollope’s plots when examined with a gender-specific hand. This is particularly relevant to Morse, who analyses both plot and sub-plot in The Prime Minister from the point of view of the female protagonist. She comments: Both stories are about a woman’s attempt to gain some sense of herself, to create a distinctive identity ... the struggles of both women are sympathetically chronicled, with the result that the subversive implications of the narrative conflict with the novel’s conclusion. This tension seems to reflect Trollope’s ambivalence about the cultural ideals of femininity that the book indirectly questions, but eventually upholds.58

Morse, in analysing what Glencora actually says, discovers a woman questioning her capacity to commit her life to a husband, when they are of such disparate natures: ‘These statements through the Palliser novels, spoken by the woman Trollope most admires, undermine all those fictional Victorian heroines who sacrifice themselves in order to be the salvation of some erring man.’59 Morse’s balanced and measured re-telling of the plots from the point of view of the female protagonists in the Palliser novels is taken up by Jane Nardin in He Knew She Was Right: the Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, where she pursues similar themes in the novels written in the first half of his career, but with a much more hard-line agenda. Nardin argues that after Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage, Trollope began to undercut the conventions of comic form and turned to a form of black comedy which subverted the Victorian notions of male and female, perhaps echoing Cockshut’s earlier study.60 Priscilla Walton’s 1995 extreme approach leads her to an entirely different conclusion. Her Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels attempts to apply a Lacanian discourse to a reading of Trollope as a masculinist writer pushing 57

Deborah Denenholz Morse, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987) 1. 58 Morse, 83. 59 Morse, 97. 60 Jane Nardin, He Knew He Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1989) Intro. xvii.

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patriarchal power. Whereas Morse and Nardin argue, in varying degrees, for a Trollope whose books empathise with woman’s plight and reveal poorly acknowledged truths about the position of women at the time, Walton brings the wheel round full circle. She constructs a Trollope who conforms to the stereotype of the male novelist wielding his phallocentric pen to consolidate patriarchy. Ironically, Walton’s reading brings us back to the pre-feminist era of Trollopian dominant men and compliant women and serves to emphasise the need for a genderised study of the novels examining his men. Historical constructions of masculinities and particularly Victorian masculinities, have been a recognised area of study for 40 years. David Newsome’s Godliness and Good Learning in 1961 is one of the earliest62 and the standard work is widely accepted to be Norman Vance’s The Sinews of the Spirit, published in 1985. This has been followed by, among others, Mangan and Walvin’s Manliness and Morality: Middle Class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, in 1987,63 and Donald Hall’s Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age of 1994.64 Historians are now beginning to reassess our understanding of what it was to be a man in the nineteenth century through genderised filters. Here Tosh leads the field. His informal study group, begun in 1988, produced the papers edited by him and Michael Roper and published as Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991).65 This has been followed by his influential and originative work, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (1999). Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (2005)66 flags up further areas that cry out for gender-sensitive appraisal, notably Empire and emigration. Another avenue of study explores masculinity as a problem area of social functioning. Adrienne Burgess’s Fatherhood Reclaimed lucidly reviews the changes in opinion and belief about fatherhood over the past 400 years and points the way forward for men to re-assert themselves as effective and nurturing parents.67 There has been a welter of self-help books; Steve Biddulph, a family therapist whose early books on child care were more gender-neutral, has now written entire books on maleness as a problem area; Raising Boys was published in 199768 and Manhood in 1998.69 These commentators are sharing the re-positioning of a newer understanding of masculinity within the context of how masculinity has been understood in the 61

Priscilla L. Walton, Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995). 62 David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London: Murray, 1961). 63 Mangan and Walvin, eds, Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 64 Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 65 Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds, Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991). 66 John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2005). 67 Adrienne Burgess, Fatherhood Reclaimed: The Making of the Modern Father (London: Vermillion Press, 1997). 68 Steve Biddulph, Raising Boys (London: Thorsons, 1998). 69 Steve Biddulph, Manhood (London: Hawthorne Press, 1998).

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past and advance the thesis that men will enhance their experiences when they embrace their nurturing selves. This is particularly relevant to a re-examination of Trollope in the light of new thinking about men today, where attentiveness to the contemporary manhood debate heightens our sensitivity to Trollope’s nineteenthcentury appreciation of just these issues. The ‘new man’ construct rapidly filtered into popular culture. An early sighting was Kramer vs Kramer, Robert Benton’s 1977 film, where a big-noise advertising executive turns to raising his seven year old when his wife leaves him.70 It all ends in tears when his ex-wife successfully sues for custody. Tony Parson’s best-seller Man and Boy re-works the same story, but 20 years on, Parsons’s protagonist recognises the importance of conciliation, rather than indulging in man’s angry pain.71 Evidence of men expressing their masculinity through their nurturing side became increasingly commonplace through the end of the 1990s. In Britain, broadsheet newspapers ran columns promoting hands-on fatherhood. Tim Dowling wrote a weekly column ‘Man’s World’ for The Independent on Sunday from late 1998 to 2000, where he diaried the day-to-day challenges of a man grappling with the childcare of three little boys under five. For a while it seemed as though a baby in a mini version of the team’s strip was every footballer’s fashion accessory, as Dennis Wise took his six-month old up to receive the FA Cup for Chelsea in May 2000 and David Beckham got hauled over the coals for missing a Manchester United training session because he had been up all night with his infant son Brooklyn. Martin Johnson, captain of England’s 2003 World Cup-winning rugby team, has written an autobiography which gives masculinist fulfilment to every stereotype of the bruised and bruising hard man’s game, but he takes time out from that narrative to articulate his deep feelings of grief at the death of his mother and his great joy and satisfaction in the physical care of his new-born baby daughter.72 Of all the novelistic examinations of male angst in the 1990s, probably Nick Hornby’s have been the most revealing of the darker recesses of a man’s psyche. His three fictions, Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy, though in no sense a trilogy, do, when examined together, display a unity and completeness in the exploration of how men come adrift in forging permanent relationships with women and of the areas of their functioning which can become blocks to good understanding.73 In his fictions, Nick Hornby constructs a masculinity which posits emotional closeness and commitment as the route to a happier and fulfilled life. Fever Pitch’s protagonist increasingly comes to realise how his obsession with Arsenal excludes him from significant interaction with his friends. In High Fidelity, it finally dawns on Rob that if he wants to be happy and fulfilled in his life, he has to make a permanent commitment to Laura, instead of responding to every competing flicker of sexual attraction to each woman he meets. These themes are developed further in About 70

Kramer vs. Kramer, dir. Robert Barton, perf. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, 1977. Tony Parsons, Man and Boy (London: Harper Collins, 1999). 72 Martin Johnson, Martin Johnson The Autobiography (London: Headline, 2003), 184–7, 205 and 329. 73 Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch, 1992 (London: Indigo, 1996), High Fidelity, 1995 (London: Indigo, 1996), About a Boy, 1998 (London: Indigo, 1999). 71

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a Boy, where Hornby confronts the paradox that sensitive boys need to shield their feelings to survive secondary school, whereas grown men need to re-connect with their vulnerability in order to form meaningful and lasting relationships. Will Fielding has coasted over life for 36 years, his glorying in his laddish behaviour covering up his lack of emotional resources and fear of intimacy. A brief and sexually satisfying relationship with a single mother launches him on a course of deceit, when he invents a two year old son to gain entry to the local single-parent social group. Marcus, aged 12, is an only child brought up by his lone mother. The closeness of their symbiotic and somewhat parasitic relationship hampers him in the formation of normal adolescent relationships based on street-cred and superficiality. The interlacement of Will and Marcus’s lives re-places them on the continuum of masculine behaviour. Hornby summarises the changes in his final paragraph: Marcus had friends, he could look after himself, he had developed a skin – the kind of skin that Will had just shed ... Will had lost his shell, and his cool, and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel.74

This masculinity is a paradox: to survive in the world, men need a shield of toughness, but they have also to learn to drop that shield to make deep and significant relationships with women, in order to experience the fulfilment of that primal bond. In packaging these three works with themes overtly appealing to men – football, hi-fi and laddish good times – Hornby reveals himself as the propagandist of our times. His appeal as a best-selling novelist declares his success in placing his thesis before his audience and that it is a view that is widely recognised and accepted. It epitomises the zeitgeist, the embodiment of the anti-sexist men’s movement, where men adopt new non-oppressive, life-affirming ways of being men. What goes around comes around. Trollope, writing in the 1860s and 1870s, constructs a masculinity based on an almost identical premise and similarly packages his goods to ensure an attentive male audience. There is indeed a veneer of masculinist behaviour in the novels, of men relating to men in their workplaces, in their clubs, in their vestries and on their estates, and this has been explored by Mark Turner in Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain.75 However, beneath the veneer, Trollope’s masculinity is explicitly grounded in a man being in touch with his nurturing side. Men need to learn the language which puts feelings into words. The pleasure of physical expression of married love will be immeasurably deepened by a relationship founded on equality and respect. Expressing love for one’s children and closeness to them in practical and physical ways will bring a satisfaction that transcends the exercise of power in public and political life. My intention is to expose these threads in his novels and his manner of doing it. The New Man, so heralded by our generation, is alive and well in Trollope’s novels, changing the nappies, making the gravy, pushing the pram, hugging his sons and his daughters. Victorian men are not who we have popularly constructed them to be.

74

Hornby, About a Boy, 285–6. Mark W. Turner, Trollope and the Magazines: Gendered Issues in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 75

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Chapter 1

The Making of Victorian Manliness When Benjamin Spock the child-care guru died in 1997, his son John in a post-obit interview said, ‘He was very Victorian. He’s never been a person who gave me a hug. He wouldn’t kiss me’.1 In describing the cold detachment of his father as ‘Victorian’, he fed into a nexus of assumptions and associations that people commonly hold about Victorian men in general and fathers in particular. He anticipated that we would all know what he meant. Victorian men have been commonly believed to be harsh, stern fathers, subjugating their families by exploiting their legal, financial and often their physical powers over their dependants. They have been viewed as emotional illiterates, domestic despots, bolstering their phallocentric view of the world in the men-only institutions of their professions, bastions of the privilege of their sex. Their era has been seen as the age of the stiff upper lip, when feelings, especially sexual feelings, were kept firmly under wraps. This stiff upper lip, so necessary to survive the daily floggings of the English Public School, has been closely linked with the Age of Empire, when Britain ruled the world; in the face of catastrophe, a Briton could be relied upon to cope with characteristic British phlegm and understatement. ‘Victorian’ has become an adjective of derogation; applied to sex it implies suppression and denial; applied to morals it implies hypocrisy; apply it to religion and we perceive a culture where what is seen is more important than the creeds that underlie it. What has informed these beliefs? The popularity of deprecating Victorian values, and encouraging their caricature, started soon after Victoria’s death. Lytton Strachey, in Eminent Victorians,2 shifted the hagiography of the heroes and heroines of the era to revelations of their feet of clay. As subsequent generations continued to distance themselves from the era, it became increasingly acceptable to belittle the institutions of the time, and we are only now beginning to recognise this for what it was, as modern enquiry gets the record straighter. There has been a good deal of focus on Victorian masculinities over the past 40 odd-years, starting with Newsome’s Godliness and Good Learning, in 1961. Newsome constructs his Victorian masculinity by examining the shifting precepts of the education offered in the public schools and he draws heavily on the memoirs of Archbishop Benson and his family. Mangan and Walvin’s collection of essays, published in 1987, similarly posits a masculinity largely assimilated through schooling, while the contributors to Hall’s Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, in 1994, pursue some of the theological debates through contemporary fiction, particularly Kingsley and Hughes. Vance’s seminal work, The Sinews of the Spirit, of 1985, unites threads of education, philosophy, the new economics and theology. 1

‘Growing up the Hard Way’, BBC2, Wednesday 11 June 1997, 9.00pm. Listed in The Guardian, 11 June, 1997, G2, 20. 2 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918 (London: Folio Society, 1967).

16

Figure 1.1

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

Punch Cartoon December 10 1859

Tosh has adopted a significantly different stand and in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, he has reframed many of the earlier commentators’ core material. His thesis proposes that domesticity is central to the Victorian culture of masculinity and that this has been given scant attention in the past because of the skewed positioning of historical commentators. He argues that pre-feminist historical research (that is, before 1970), by confining women to

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hearth and home, denied them any meaningful role in society. In identifying the domestic as the sphere of women who exercised no power, historians overlooked it as an area which defined so much of a man’s power. Tosh posits that it was in the home, the seat of patriarchy, or ‘father-rule’, that men usually wielded power and drew self-respect from their exercise of it. This masculinity defined by domesticity is beset by contradictions. As Tosh says, the expectation that men spend non-working hours at home assumes a companionate marriage, based on love, common values and shared interests, but this was at variance with a belief in rigid sexual difference and in innate female dependence and inferiority.3 Tosh, in common with other commentators like Newsome, and the contributors to Mangan and Walvin and Hall’s anthologies, draws heavily on the archives of families like the Bensons to furnish his theory. In all he explores seven families in some depth, but the Benson family dominates, perhaps because of the sheer volume of memoirs and diaries left behind by Edward Benson, the schoolmaster who became Archbishop of Canterbury, his wife, three sons and two daughters. A.C. and E.F. Benson, two of the sons, between them wrote ten books about their family affairs.4 Both parents kept meticulous diaries and Edward Benson assuaged his grief when his eldest son Martin died of meningitis, at 17, by writing an account of his son’s life and the growth of his faith. Such a welter of fine detail about the functioning of one family can cloud judgement of more common practice. The Bensons’ devotion to Godliness and good learning is not necessarily an indicator of the established order of the time, in spite of Newsome’s declaration that they give ‘a wonderfully clear picture of Victorian life’5 and Tosh’s assertion that Edward Benson’s exercise of patriarchal power, and the dissimulation of demonstrations of love for his children, was a mid-Victorian norm. Tosh takes care to present both sides of the argument. He assembles an impressive array of empirical evidence of fathers involving themselves closely in the care of their children in infancy. He balances works advocating commitment to active and involved fatherhood, such as William Cobbett’s 1830 Advice to Young Men6 with Carlyle’s outspoken revulsion at his friend David Irving’s close attention to his new baby: Irving’s talk and thoughts return with a resistless biass [sic] to the same charming topic, start from where they please. Visit him at any time, you find him dry-nursing his offspring; speak to him, he directs your attention to the form of its nose, the manner of its waking and sleeping, and feeding, and digesting.7

This passage, quoted in full by Norma Clarke in her closely argued essay ‘Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as Hero’ in Manful Assertions, and abbreviated by Tosh in A Man’s Place, leads him to the view that it was Carlyle’s standpoint that gained ground through Victoria’s reign, not the example of the Prince Consort’s close involvement with the royal nursery. But he does make an important point about the centrality of the hearth in understanding Victorian masculinity. The 3 4 5 6 7

Tosh, A Man’s Place, 11–27. Newsome, 150. Newsome, 149. William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, 1830 (London: Davies, 1926). Roper and Tosh, 33, quoted in abbreviated form, Tosh, 88.

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Industrial Revolution, and the creation of a manufacturing industry, had given rise to a new middle class who earned their living with their heads in counting houses instead of with their hands in the fields, but Tosh points out that in 1851 more of the middle classes still lived over, or adjacent to, their work premises than went beyond the home to work.8 For many children, fathers were an ever-present influence in their daily lives. As Mark Girouard makes clear in The Return to Camelot, there are several other equally powerful forces which interplay in this complex of masculinities. Girouard focuses on the nineteenth-century slant given to traditions of chivalry and explores how both chivalry and Christian manliness were influenced by rising socialist ideals.9 The Return to Camelot is a compelling account that traces the European chivalric code through its metamorphosis into an Anglo-Saxon behavioural maxim which believed that if a man was behaving badly (such as panicking in the face of death) he was probably an Italian, or other foreign Johnny. The Italians were a popular target for Trollope’s wit. Miss Altiflora, whose great-grandmother was a Fiasco, and her great-great-grandmother a Desgrazia, in Kept in the Dark,10 is typical. The principle that the ideal knight was brave, loyal, true to his word, courteous, generous and merciful lived on in codes of gentlemanly behaviour, particularly in how gentlemen behaved towards women. The celebration of these ideals found expression in what might be termed a designer style, a growing taste for medieval styles of architecture and decoration, which starts to merge imperceptibly with the Gothic, as the eighteenth century came to a close. Windsor castle was remodelled on medieval lines in the 1830s and Scott’s novels, Ivanhoe especially, spread the taste to a very wide audience. Its apogee was reached with the Eglinton Tournament, the extravaganza of parade and jousting held in 1838, most certainly the inspiration for the Thorne’s fête champêtre in Barchester Towers, and itself inspired by the tournament that opens Scott’s Ivanhoe.11 Girouard stresses the importance of Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour, first published in 1822, in the development of the spread of chivalric ideas, propounding the thesis that a prosperous middle-class man cannot become a gentleman.12 For Digby, this is where England lost her way, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when men who might have lived as gentlemen turned to commerce. The belief that it was ungentlemanly to betray an interest in money owed much to Digby. The Broad Stone of Honour gave rise to an entire genre of Victorian fiction writing (largely in defiance of his principles) which explored themes around gentlemanliness and whether it came from birth, breeding, or an innate characteristic that transcended factors of wealth, descent, or poverty. These are the explicit themes of such novels as Dinah Craik’s Jack Halifax, Gentleman,13 Edna Lyall’s Donovan14 8

Tosh, A Man’s Place, 17. Girouard, The Return to Camelot (Yale: Yale University Press, 1981) 132. 10 Kept in the Dark, 205. 11 Girouard’s chap. 7 (87–110) is a detailed account of the inspiration, preparation and presentation of the Eglinton Tournament. 12 Kenelm Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour (London: Rivington, 1823). 13 Dinah Maria Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman, 1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1914). 14 Edna Lyall, Donovan, 1882 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1889). 9

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15

and, of course, Dickens’ Great Expectations. Mrs Henry Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles16 and Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago17 explore similar territory, with an explicit Christian message. It is an issue regularly addressed by Trollope, for instance in Lady Anna, where the heiress heroine sticks to her decision to marry her tailor–lover and in Marion Fay, which debates whether a Post Office clerk should, per se, be barred from pressing his suit with a member of the British aristocracy. In a nice ironic shot across the bows, he is accepted into the bosom of her family when he discovers he is the heir to an ancient Italian title. It forms part of an implicit debate on so many of Trollope’s plots: is Mary Thorne gentle-born, through her father’s kinship with the Thornes at Ullathorne, or base-born because of the circumstances of her birth? Her uncle says ‘I wish … that her birth were equal to her fortune, as her worth is superior to both’,18 valuing her character above blood and money. The Crawleys, on the other hand, remain genteel in spite of their poverty by virtue of their ancestry so graphically clear in Grace’s face, full of ‘the other beauty, which shows itself in fine lines, and a noble spirit, – the beauty which comes from breeding’.19 Archdeacon Grantly frames this specifically in chivalric terms when he says to Mr Crawley ‘We stand on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen’,20 a status denied to Mr Prong in Rachel Ray, who was ‘deficient in one vital qualification for clergyman of the Church of England; he was not a gentleman’.21 This seems a clear if intuitive grasp of the concept. Plantagenet Palliser is more equivocal. When he says to Frank Tregear ‘I never yet gave the lie to a gentleman’,22 he implies this is a concept he is both familiar and comfortable with. However, when Mary defends her choice of suitor saying he is a gentleman, Palliser’s retort suggests a more plastic view. ‘So is my private secretary. There is not a clerk in one of our public offices who does not consider himself to be a gentleman … The word is too vague to carry with it any meaning that ought to be serviceable to you in thinking of such a matter’.23 His remarks reflect the fluidity of the age, when a man such as Edward Benson, the son of a bankrupt chemical manufacturer whose death left the family destitute, could rise to become Archbishop of Canterbury.24 Through The Broad Stone of Honour too, the threads of influences on the composite of Victorian manliness begin to merge, since Digby was at Cambridge with Tennyson, whose influence on the Victorian interpretation of chivalric codes was spread wide

15

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911). Mrs Henry Wood, Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles, 1862 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1897). 17 Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago, 1857 (London: Macmillan, 1891). 18 Doctor Thorne, 603. 19 Last Chronicle, 613. 20 Last Chronicle, 885. 21 Rachel, 77. 22 Duke’s Children, 39. 23 Duke’s Children, 67. 24 Such social mobility is the explicit theme of Samuel Smiles’s Self Help, 1859 (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1996). 16

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into middle-class culture with The Idylls of the King.25 Forty thousand copies of the first series were sold within weeks of its publication. Tennyson’s poems gave birth to a generation of little boys called Arthur, predestined to carry the standard of honesty, valour and integrity through to a noble and worthy death. However, the men in the poems, far from having the deeds of glory as their main story line, are wracked with misgiving about women, full of anxieties about their honour and their chastity (in the sense of chaste to their marriage vows). It is certainly an interesting contribution to the manhood debate, where Tennyson’s medievalism is his back-drop, a popular style statement to his real subject, an exploration of uncertain masculinities. Digby was also at Cambridge with Arthur Hallam, whose standards in his short life inspired so many who met him to celebrate his life in literary testimonial, and with F.D. Maurice, commonly acknowledged by commentators to be formative in the thinking of those who later articulated ideas of Christian manliness. Victorian masculinity was also shaped by the articulation of the ‘hard’ discourses of political economy that emerged to describe the changes in society brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The rapid shift from a rural to a manufacturing economy changed the way the national economy worked and former models of economic theory proved inadequate to describe these changes. A generation of economic commentators was born, who had to find a new vocabulary with which to describe the transformation. In order to describe the implications of the new economy, these commentators of the developing industrial economy formulated their views in a debate that turned away from addressing the individual and focused on a wider macrocosmic field of study. Their writings promoted a great surge of interest in economic theory, evidenced by the popularity of articles on such topics in the weightier periodicals. The vocabulary used to frame these writings, devoid of sentiment, and with little moral conceptualisation, can be experienced as masculinist, but it did not, per se, exclude women. Harriet Martineau wrote an extremely successful collection of what she called ‘fables’ to present these ‘hard’ texts in a form that was accessible and understandable to a wider audience unschooled in economic theory.26 While economists like David Ricardo published their papers in weighty journals, such as The Westminster Review, interpretations of their ideas found a ready audience in family-targeted journals, such as The Cornhill, which regularly carried articles on economics and science alongside softer material. The major players in these new disciplines took their lead from Adam Smith, whose An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776.27 Ricardo assumed Smith’s reins when he wrote The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in

25

Alfred Tennyson, The Idylls of the King, 1842–1885 (London: Penguin Books,

1996). 26

These were published between 1832–1834, with titles such as ‘Berkley the Banker, or Banknotes and Bullion: a tale for the times’, ‘Dawn Island’ (about the Corn Laws), and ‘French Wines and politics: a tale of the French Revolution’. They were published collectively as Illustrations of Political Economy, 2 vols (London: C. Fox, 1832–1834). 27 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776 (London: Penguin Books, 1974).

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1817. This work explores the relationship between cash, capital and commerce, a nexus we now know as capitalism, and he was the first to formulate the theories that link money supply and the management of a national economy. Such thinking particularly challenged politicians in their views about the role of the State in a nation’s prosperity and play a large part in the way Trollope frames Plantagenet Palliser’s political creed. From his earliest youth, Palliser’s greatest ambition had been to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, a position he had to relinquish on inheriting the Dukedom from his uncle. At the end of The Duke’s Children, he says: If I could have my way, – which is of course impossible, for I cannot put off my honours, – I would return to my old place. I would return to the Exchequer where the work is hard and certain, where a man can do, or at any rate attempt to do, some special thing. A man there, if he sticks to that and does not need to travel beyond it, need not be popular, need not be partisan, need not be eloquent, need not be a courtier. He should understand his profession, as should a lawyer, or a doctor.29

Let the Chancellor of the Exchequer be an economist, he is saying, not a politician. In the same book, the body of knowledge of economic theory that Plantagenet learned from his serious and structured reading as a young man (as demonstrated in The Small House at Allington), regularly reveals itself in his lectures to his wayward sons. When Gerald loses £3,400 at cards, he (Palliser) demands, ‘Do you ever think what money is?’. After some considerable hesitation, Gerald replies, ‘Cheques, and sovereigns, and bank-notes’, before his father embarks on a measured account of the relationship between money, labour and the accumulation of wealth. In a nice self-referential broadside at Gerald’s lack of direction in life, Trollope has Palliser hankering after a son like Lord Buttercup, ‘only a few months older than Silverbridge, who was already a junior lord, … [and who] had already written an article in The Fortnightly on the subject of Turkish finance’.30 The Fortnightly, an enterprise of high endeavour, financed by Trollope and friends like Frederic and Edward Chapman, Frederic Harrison, and E.S. Beesly, with George Lewes as editor, was launched on 1st May 1865 and while it always carried a novel (starting with The Belton Estate), its avowed aim was to be a forum for views on politics, literature, philosophy, science and art.31 The lead article in the first issue was the first instalment of Walter Bagehot’s ‘The English Constitution’. Jeremy Bentham was another of the major formulators of theoretical politics and economics. His principles of utilitarianism, first expounded in Fragment on Government of 177632 and expanded and developed through his career, strove to link the motivation of enlightened self interest as a means to achieving the common good with an exact quantification of pain and pleasure. His wish to give his moral philosophy the credibility 28

David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817 (London: Dent, 1973). 29 Duke’s Children, 622–3. 30 Duke’s Children, 519. 31 For an account of the establishment of The Fortnightly, see Autobiography, 189–94. 32 Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries; and, A Fragment on Government, eds J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1977).

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of scientific proof makes him one of the chief proponents of the masculinist voice of his age, and Plantagenet Palliser, in expounding his own Whig philosophy to Silverbridge in The Duke’s Children gives his son a clear lesson in Benthamite philosophy: ‘Then the Duke gave his son a somewhat lengthy political lecture, which was intended to teach him that the greatest benefit of the greatest number was the object to which all political studies should tend.’33 Such examples show Trollope aware of, and interacting with, these hard-edged disciplines. Thomas Malthus, the father of modern demography, infiltrates Trollope’s texts to an even greater degree: ‘No, I won’t be plucked. Baker was plucked last year ... he got among a set of men who did nothing but smoke and drink beer. Malthusians we call them.’ ‘Malthusians?’ ‘“Malt” you know, aunt, and “use”, meaning that they drink beer.’34

Thus does Frank Gresham twit Lady de Courcy with an undergraduate humour that has changed little over the years, twisting contemporary academic debate into a joke she cannot understand. The joke works on several levels and has perhaps even gained the odd one over the past 140 years. It implies an awareness in the masculinist milieu that there was an on-going debate about Malthus and demography. It is a joke about class, about the working man with his tobacco and beer and his position in the market place and the parallels for Frank in the market place of marriage. It may very possibly, for Trollope, have held reverberations of the debate about birth control,35 as it does for us, since Malthusian theory was, and is, often spuriously connected with the advocacy of the prevention of conception and Trollope regularly advises his heroines to marry, have two children and live happily ever after.36 Malthus felt travestied by such interpretation of his views, as is clear from this extract from his essay: I should always particularly reprobate any artificial or unnatural modes of checking population, both on account of their immorality and their tendency to remove a necessary stimulus to industry. If it were possible for each married couple to limit by a wish the

33

Duke’s Children, 57. Dr Thorne, 72. Skilton glosses this as ‘Followers of T.R. Malthus (1766–1834) who proposes that population naturally tended to increase faster than food-production; hence advocates of family planning’, 626. 35 Exactly when Malthusian thinking became synonymous with the birth control movement is a moot point. Yves Charbit, ‘The Fate of Malthus’s Work: History and Ideology’, Malthus Past and Present, eds J. Dupâquier, A. Fauve-Chamonix and E. Grebenik (London: Academic Press, 1983) 17–30, suggests that it started as early as 1820, advanced by the proselytising of Francis Place, though the movement that he began only became known as ‘neo-malthusianism’ many years after Place’s death. Petersen, in Malthus (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1979), points to Place’s own work, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population, published in1822. The linkage is certainly well-forged by the foundation of the Malthusian League in 1877, the year of the trial of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant for the publication of Charles Knowlton’s The Fruits of Philosophy, the 1832 pamphlet on contraceptive techniques. 36 For instance, Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 110, and Framley Parsonage, chapter 48, ‘How they were all married, had two children, and lived happy ever after.’ 34

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number of their children, there is certainly reason to fear that the indolence of the human race would be very greatly increased, and that neither the population of individual countries nor of the whole earth would ever reach its natural and proper extent.37

It is heavily ironic that Malthusianism grew to become synonymous with the birth control movement (particularly in the syllogism ‘neo-Malthusianism’), a point made by William Petersen, whose seminal work on Malthus was translated into French under the title Malthus, le Premier Antimalthusien.38 It adds to the confusion that after Malthus published his first Essay on Population in 1798, his subsequent Essays, as they were published, were titled as subsequent editions, instead of free-standing works that pursue the development of his thought. Later ‘editions’ of his Essay are so at variance with the first, for instance as he expanded and shifted his view on Poor Law reform, that they might be considered entirely different works. Malthus’ shifting views on the operation of out-relief for the poor, the Speenhamland system, are contradictory and have been described as the opposition between Population Malthus and Pastor Malthus.39 His view expressed in the Essay of 1798 is that the positive checks of disease, poverty, famine and war, as opposed to the preventive checks of postponed marriage, moral restraint and vice (which includes the use of contraception), were the ‘natural’ constraints on the labouring population. At times he can also be detected advancing a view that the operation of out-relief within the Poor Law militates against these ‘natural’ positive checks. He argues that if the augmentation of family size guarantees a labourer additional relief, the labourer has no incentive to adopt the preventive checks of postponed marriage and moral restraint and the land owner has no incentive to pay his married labourer a sufficient wage. The hardest line he takes, disavowed in later ‘Editions’, is that entitlement to out-relief related to family size should cease after a period of due notice. This view was regularly and enthusiastically taken up by rate-payers (and Malthus’ own Poor rates were particularly high40) and it does form the foundation of the thinking behind the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, which gave rise to the workhouse system, pilloried by Dickens in Oliver Twist. Modern analysis of family size set against income and dependence on parish relief, before and after the 1834 Act, using modern demographic resources and techniques refutes these assumptions.41 From such views it might be thought that the situation of the labouring poor in Ireland might have been viewed as a working experiment into the effects of the positive checks of famine and poverty. However, it is clear that Malthus’ views on the Irish problem were informed by compassion, a desire for social equality and a modicum of anti-imperialist instinct: ‘Let the Irish Catholics have all that they have

37

Petersen, 192 and Dupâquier, preface, ix. Dupâquier, preface, viii. 39 M.W. Flinn, ‘Malthus and his time’, Dupâquier, 92, enlarged on by Anne Digby, ‘Malthus and the Reform of the Poor Law’, Dupâquier, 97–109. 40 B. Stapleton, ‘The Local Evidence and the Principle of Population’, Dupâquier, 54–5. 41 Flinn, 91; Petersen (121) examines the same data, but considers the results less conclusive. 38

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demanded, for they have asked nothing but what justice and good policy should concede to them.’42 Trollope’s personal quandary posed by the problems of the Irish famines, graphically laid out in Castle Richmond, is remarkably similar. He felt that the bottom line should be that no able-bodied person should be able to claim relief from the rates, so as to set them on a par with a working labourer. This is the thesis of the road-building exercise in Castle Richmond.43 On the other hand, the pursuit of such principles was causing suffering and death to women and children. In the end, says Trollope, of course the money to feed them had to be found.44 In The Fixed Period, his exploration, from a utilitarian viewpoint, of a future society where universal euthanasia at 67 is advocated, connects even more strongly with Malthus. Malthus’ work established him as the father of modern demography and the instigator of properly conducted censuses. His researches in the 1790s on the population of England were of necessity empirical and led directly to the establishment of a formal and official system of censuses. While Malthus was not the first to comment on demographic issues, it was his work that sparked a widespread interest in demography, which underpinned the acceptance of the need for a census, the emerging skill of census-taking and the interpretation of the results. It was John Rickman who conducted the first census in 1801, and under his aegis, each successive census became a little more accurate. The greatest step forward in consistent methodology came in 1837, in the setting up of the office of Registrar General and the appointment of T.H. Lister45 to the post. That there was a Committee of the Statistical Society of London46 to advise him says much about the amount of current professional and amateur interest in demography. Lister’s primary responsibility was to establish a comprehensive and compulsory system for the registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Lister’s census in 1841 produced ages, occupations and birthplaces of the population, and their totals, and marked the transition to ‘modern’ censuses. The next, in 1851, enabled the publication of population tables which included ages, civil condition, occupation, birthplaces and infirmities; separate censuses of religious attendance and education were held, for the one and only time, in this year. There is plenty of evidence that Trollope had a direct interest in censuses, and the demographic information in these reports is a fascinating yardstick by which to measure the society that Trollope creates in his novels. In The American Senator, he says, ‘At every interval of ten years, when the census is taken, the population of Dillsborough is always found to have fallen off in some slight degree’.47 For Dillsborough the census is the signifier of the air of proletarian decay which pervades the place, the proof that the good old days when ‘The Bush’ was an important posting inn have passed, and have not been replaced by a new prosperity built on industrial resources. 42 43 44 45 46 47

Petersen, 109. Castle Richmond, 201. Castle Richmond, 346. Richard Lawton, ed. The Census and Social Structure (London: Frank Cass, 1978) 16. Lawton, 16. American Senator, 12.

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In The Vicar of Bullhampton Frank Fenwick studiously seeks a topic of conversation away from the pain of Harry Gilmore’s broken heart: ‘He talked of church services, of ritual, of the quietness of a Sunday in London, and of the Sunday occupations of three millions of people, not a fourth of whom attend divine service’.48 Frank knows the population of London, and is clearly au fait with the report of the 1851 Church census, and the ensuing debate. The results of the religious census, tabulated by Horace Mann, and published in 1854, demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, more than half the population did not go to church on a Sunday.49 Mann’s chart is clearly the factual origin of Frank Fenwick’s observation while in London that less than a quarter of that great city are ‘constant in their divine worship’, as Mrs Prime, in Rachel Ray, so plaintively puts it.50 The religious census of 1851, and the publication of the close scrutiny of the returns in 1854, prompted a wide debate which dragged on interminably and was clearly still going strong in 1869 when Trollope was writing The Vicar of Bullhampton. An examination of some of his novels reveals that while perhaps, overall rather more than one in four of his characters can be found on their knees on a Sunday, a significant number declare that other things have a greater appeal. This becomes an issue explicitly concerning men and masculine discourse in novels like Framley Parsonage, where politicians like Nathaniel Sowerby and Howard Smith wish to align their causes to Christian observance. They engage Bishop Proudie to support their Saturday evening lectures and to find the theme of his Sunday sermon in their secular projects, the gap between their profane practice and the church service offering great opportunity for irony and humour.51 In Clergymen of the Church of England Trollope’s nostalgic yearning for an illusory past coupled with a mordant view of the contemporary cloth’s preoccupation with temporalities suggest him to be a sentimental cynic. By contrast, in his novels he is primarily occupied with the social reverberations within the Church of England and his great set pieces in the Barchester Chronicles explore the clashes between the old high-and-dries, the new Puseyites and the rising tide of the evangelical movement. Outside his clerical creations is a fine array of men who do not go to church, old pagans52 like Daniel Caldigate, Mr Scarborough and the old Duke of Omnium, godless rogues like the Marquis of Brotherton and Sir Hugh Clavering and 48

Bullhampton, 493. David. M. Thompson, ‘The Religious census of 1851’, Lawton, 241–85. The statistics drawn from the Religious Census of 1851 have promoted controversy ever since they were published in 1854, largely because the census was designed to assess the provision of accommodation, rather than a headcount of how many people went to church on one Sunday in March 1851. For this reason, there has been a constant reinterpreting of the figures for morning, afternoon and evening services, producing widely divergent projections of how many people regularly went to church. David Thompson’s chapter in The Census and Social Structure explores this graphically and coherently. 50 Rachel, 389. 51 Framley, chapters 2–8. 52 Both Daniel Caldigate and the old Duke of Omnium are referred to in the text as ‘old pagans’, though since the term is applied to the Duke before he takes communion shortly before his death, and Daniel Caldigate is heard to murmur ‘God bless you my son’, as John 49

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non-believers and free thinkers like Daniel Brattle and Hugh Stanbury. It is worth noting that even the most godless turn to the church for christenings, weddings and funerals. No child goes unbaptised, and even Mr Scarborough in Mr Scarborough’s Family needs the support of clerical documentation to pull off his marriage scam. The American Senator, an ironic appraisal of the paradoxes of British institutions from an outsider’s point of view, is particularly explicit about who does and who does not go to church. Reginald Morton, the hero, seldom goes to church.53 Mr Runciman refuses to go because of the Reverend Mainwaring’s sharp practice over some fields he rented.54 Mrs Morton declines to go to church a second time during her stay in Bragton because there was no fire in her pew.55 Of Arabella and Lady Trefoil we hear, ‘Of course they did not go to church’.56 Mr Gotobed laughs at the invitation to go to church again on his second Sunday57 and Lord Rufford hates being anywhere on a Sunday but travelling by train between meets.58 On the other side of the balance are John Morton, who goes whatever the weather, and Lady Ushant, who goes to two services each Sunday, certainly accompanied by Mary Masters when Mary is her guest.59 Since Mary is suspected of carrying a torch for the curate, one could safely put her down as a regular attender, and the expectation at Mistletoe, the family seat of the Duke of Mayfair, is that guests would go to church. Lord Rufford, true to form, declines church while at Mistletoe; while Arabella is criticised for ducking out of the afternoon service (for ‘ladies are supposed to require more church than men’60) no opprobrium sticks to him: ‘[The Duchess of Mayfair] would not have thought of repudiating such a suitor as Lord Rufford because he did not go to church.’61 The American Senator is a fine exposé of hypocritical and materialistic values and in a novel where church-going is a major signifier, Trollope accurately reflects a society where three quarters find other things to do on a Sunday.62 That young men particularly are prone not to go to church is regularly commented upon. ‘As for the girls, they go as a matter of course, but young men are allowed so much of their own way’, says Mrs Ray.63 Mrs Roper, Johnny Eames’ landlady, shows more knowledge of the ways of the world when she dodges Mrs Eames’ bid for support in seeing that young Johnny keeps up his church attendance: ‘“I don’t suppose I can look after that, ma’am”, Mrs Roper answered, conscientiously. “Young gentlemen choose mostly their own churches”’.64 And with heart-warming leaves for Australia, he is perhaps referring to their non-attendance rather than a literal adherence to an earlier creed. 53 American Senator, 31. 54 American Senator, 30. 55 American Senator, 77. 56 American Senator, 132. 57 American Senator, 133. 58 American Senator, 24. 59 American Senator, 204. 60 American Senator, 253. 61 American Senator, 254. 62 Lawton, 259. 63 Rachel, 389. 64 Small House, 40.

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bluntness, Oswald Standish tells Robert Kennedy, ‘That’s the sort of thing I never do’, when invited to go to church at Loughlinter.65 Fewer people went to church in the large towns than in the country. Contemporary opinion laid this down to the concentrations of urban working poor in new towns illserved by churches and the Baptists in particular made a good deal of noise about the need for urban missions.66 While Trollope rarely deals with the urban working classes at issue here, not going to church is a common occurrence in his London society. Trollope’s view, from the patterns of attendance in the novels, is that a more likely reason is that there are more entertaining alternatives in the larger towns. In Phineas Finn, a trip to the zoo is a popular attraction and even Robert Kennedy, the Calvinist whose dour Scottish Sabbaths give Lady Laura a headache, is found amusing himself there one Sunday afternoon before his marriage.67 In The Duke’s Children, Plantagenet Palliser, while implying a criticism of his son for his backsliding, is actually not intending to go himself,68 like 77 per cent of the population of London. The articulation of the new economic theories so widely disseminated, offered a legitimacy to the new moneyed class, who found social mobility through their wealth, a generation of immensely rich factory owners, merchants, bankers, who had risen from humble beginnings. The very success of these entrepreneurs led to a growing anxiety about the morality of the market-place. How could a man keep his integrity and succeed in business? Was it, indeed, possible to combine integrity and financial success? That ambition and self-betterment could be honourable in themselves is the thesis of the immensely popular Self-Help, by Samuel Smiles, which sold 20,000 copies in 1859, its first year of publication, and which offered modern-day parables of industry and ambition succeeding when moderated by integrity. He recommends the study of the lives of the great and the good. His book is a collection of potted biographies of great men, many from his generation, interspersed with homilies on the virtues of honest and hard work. His precepts are the antithesis of accepting one’s estate, a theory of social structure pressed with more enthusiasm by the aristocracy on the working classes than embraced by the lower orders themselves. Sir Richard Arkwright was the son of a barber, Dr David Livingstone the son of a weaver, Sir Cloudesley Shovel (‘a great admiral’) the son of a cobbler.69 This was a topic dear to Trollope’s heart. Is He Popenjoy? is a close examination of whether Dean Lovelace can ever quite shake off his humble origins as the son of a livery stabler, but also of whether it is any poor reflection on him that he can still demonstrate the robust health of his ancestors, since there is a parallel debate which strongly argues that the effete peerage needs the re-invigoration of good yeoman blood. It is impossible to overestimate the contribution of Thomas Carlyle to all aspects of this debate, from the specifics of Samuel Smiles’ works, to the wider polemic brought by the social changes of the Industrial Revolution. Carlyle, born in 1795, grew up through this era of social change; indeed, his own family history epitomises 65 66 67 68 69

Phineas Finn, 387. Lawton, 245. Phineas Finn, 45. Duke’s Children, 236. Smiles, 5.

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the cultural shift. His father was a mason, earning his living and supporting his family by the sweat of his brow, while Carlyle went to Edinburgh University (allegedly walking there) to study for the ministry when he was 15. When his faith proved unequal to his calling, he turned first to the Law, and then pursued a literary career. His recognition of the self-respect that his father gained from his honest toil, and the principles of manliness that he assimilated in his childhood form an obstinate layer of insecurity and anxiety in the adult man which lies at the heart of the Old Testament thunderer advocating the man of letters as Hero. Carlyle could allow no space in a man to address his nurturing side. When he saw his friend David Irving absorbed by his infant son, he was both revolted and enraged at the sight of a man nursing, feeding, bathing, dressing a baby. When he met Coleridge, who, in fact, openly cherishes his nurturing side in poems such as Frost at Midnight, he had wanted to discover a father-figure in a man of letters, but instead met the physical antithesis of his father. Coleridge’s shambling unmuscular frame revolted him: ‘a flat, flabby, incurvated personage … He never straightens his knee joints, he stoops with his flat ill-shapen shoulders, and in walking he does not tread but shovel and slide – my father would call it skluiffing.’70 Carlyle’s anger as his idols showed their feet of clay fuelled a fiery rhetorical style which matched the zeitgeist. When he moved to London in 1834, his series of public lectures made him the literary giant he sought to be. The fourth series, On Heroes and Hero Worship,71 in 1840, confirmed his position as the articulator of a moral manliness, at one and the same time puritan, charismatic, intellectual, spiritual, creative and ascetic. He gave the debate a vocabulary that was robust, rousing and emphatically masculinist. Norma Clarke’s essay ‘Strenuous Idleness’ argues that by constructing the hero as poet, divinity, man of letters and inevitably masculine, Carlyle offers ‘a construction of the literary worker that explicitly excludes women from the definition’.72 He used the same rhetoric to decry the immorality of the market place (while lauding the Captains of Industry73) and to scorn the self-promotion, the puffery of trade. That Trollope lampooned him in The Warden as Dr Pessimist Anticant is an indication of how widely-recognised his stand was. As Vance says, ‘Almost every important Victorian writer seems to have felt his influence at some point, even if disillusionment set in later on’.74 Samuel Smiles’ widely-read and influential SelfHelp can be read as a populist version of On Heroes and Hero Worship, though perhaps while Smiles urges all men to become heroes, Carlyle presses the mass of men to be hero-worshippers. Vance argues convincingly that Carlyle was also a major influence on the lives and philosophies of the group of men who endeavoured to form

70 Norma Clarke, ‘Strenuous Idleness. Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as hero’, Roper and Tosh, 29. 71 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. Archibald MacMechan, 1841 (Boston and London: Ginn and Co. 1901). 72 Roper and Tosh, 25–43. 73 Carlyle coined this phrase, and used it regularly. See, for example Past and Present, 1843 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897) 192. 74 Vance, 42.

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a middle road in an over-arching ecclesiastical debate that dominated the century and the following paragraphs are drawn from his argument. There is some irony in Carlyle’s distaste for Coleridge’s ‘unmanly’ physical form, when Coleridge’s seminal work, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character,75 later commonly abbreviated to Aids to Reflection, had so explicitly addressed Carlyle’s anxieties. Although the roots of the contemporary theological debate reached back to Bishop Joseph Butler’s 1736 Analogy of Religion,76 it was Coleridge who breathed life into the discourse and it is his writing that inspired the great leaders of the liberal Christian movement – Dr Thomas Arnold, F.D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. As Vance describes, Coleridge’s theology embraced his ‘instinctive love of nature, his delight in physical manliness, and his scientific and humanitarian interests’. From Unitarian beginnings, Coleridge articulated an intuitive Deity, which affirmed ‘the natural world as the translucence of the Invisible Energy’. He set out a context for scientific pursuit and discovery to be placed in spiritual experience. Aids to Reflection proposes that true enlightenment comes about when man opens himself to and reflects the light of God as the seeing light of his existence. This moral strength is specifically identified with manliness. It is this explicit identification of religious belief with manhood and manliness which underpinned the beliefs of those members of the Anglican Communion who sought to mitigate the extremes of the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical wings.77 The polarity of the debate has been well mapped. John Keble, John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey and Richard Hurrell Froude were all at Oriel College, Oxford. They were the primary figures in the movement to realign Anglican thinking, and to resist what they saw as the compromising of belief to accommodate the increasingly materialistic and capitalistic world around them. In particular they sought to uphold the creed of apostolic succession, and the integrity of the prayer book. Newman and Pusey were the primary contributors to the Tracts for the Times,78 a series of pamphlets published between 1833 and 1841. Tracts on Baptism (1835) and the Eucharist (1837) made their mark, but the most controversial was Newman’s Tract 90, in 1841, where he sought to reconcile the Thirty Nine Articles of Anglican belief with Catholic theology. Newman crossed to Rome in 1845, but Pusey and Keble continued to lead the Anglo-Catholic movement at Oxford. We find Trollope using Oriel as his signifier of high-church affectation. The ‘High-Church Rector’ of Greshambury,79 who ‘delighted in lecterns and credence tables, in services at dark hours of winter mornings, when no-one would attend, in high waistcoats and narrow white neckties, in chanted services and intoned prayers ...’80 is called Caleb Oriel. Francis Arabin ‘took up the cudgels on the side of the Tractarians, and at Oxford he 75 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge, 1825 (London: William Pickering, 1843). 76 Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed, 1736 (London: Rivington, 1791). 77 Vance, 46–52. 78 Tracts for the Times, by members of the University of Oxford, 5 vols (London: J.G. and F. Rivington, 1834–1840). 79 Doctor Thorne, 18. 80 Doctor Thorne, 418.

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sat for a while at the feet of the great Newman’.81 Arabin’s debate with Slope in the columns of The Jupiter about apostolic succession firmly identifies him with the Tractarian cause, as does his preference for the rubric in his prayer book.82 At the opposite end of the religious divide were the Low-Church Evangelicals seeking to distance themselves from all ritual that suggested proximity to the belief and practice of the Roman Church, laying more stress on faith and the direct inspiration of the Gospels. They preached a hard line on salvation for the few and damnation for the many. F.D. Maurice is commonly seen as the central figure in leading a vanguard for the defence of a middle ground which, in eschewing the holding of either of the extremes, proposed an interpretation of Anglican belief which offered a spiritual home to the many for whom the asceticism of one side and the brimstone and hellfire of the other disinclined them to see any relevance of such beliefs to their day-to-day lives.83 However, it is probably useful to start the exploration of the advancement of this middle road, signified by what became known as muscular Christianity, by looking at Thomas Arnold, and the way his influence on a generation made fertile ground for Maurice’s ideas to grow in. Dr Thomas Arnold (1795–1842) was an Oxford man, a Professor of Modern History there and part of the intellectual debate where Pusey, Keble and Newman established their differing interpretations of the Christian creeds. He and Keble were lifelong friends; both men had spent their undergraduate years at Corpus Christi before being awarded fellowships at Oriel. The actual detail of Arnold’s thinking has been overshadowed by the success of his fictionalised presentation in Tom Brown’s Schooldays84 and in the latter half of the nineteenth century he was widely credited with introducing the ethos of competitive sport into the English public school system. The correcting of this image began with Lytton Strachey’s account of him as the devout clerical schoolmaster striving to bring Godliness to pagan schoolboys. This is echoed by Vance who says: Arnold proposed a rather austere Christian manliness as his educational objective, not the physically vigorous manliness of Tom Brown and Tom Hughes, but a self-reliant moral maturity which recalls the Coleridgean ideal of self-superintendant virtue.85

Arnold was known to hold liberal views both in politics and religion; it was these views that dissuaded Kingsley’s parents from sending their sons to Rugby.86 His support for social reform was at least as strident as his desire to see change in the teaching of Christ’s message. This links his doctrines to those of Carlyle, whose 81 Barchester Towers, 188. N. John Hall in Trollope: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 150, recounts from Newman’s diaries that he ‘woke himself up laughing one night in 1858 at the memory of the book he had been reading – Barchester Towers’. 82 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 127, and vol. 2, 269. 83 Vance, 38–41. 84 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 1857 (London: Penguin Books, 1994). 85 Vance, 71. 86 Vance, 70.

The Making of Victorian Manliness

Figure 1.2

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Tom Brown, the Archetypal Muscular Christian, pays Homage at Dr Arnold’s Tomb. (Arthur Hughes’ Illustration, 1864 Edition)

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secular belief in the necessity for social change influenced the thinkers seeking a new way to make the tenets of the Church more relevant to the challenges of their age. As Dean Stanley said in his Life of Arnold: ‘The complementary tasks of education and social improvement were the plain duty of the Church of Christ in the present circumstances.’87 By all accounts, Arnold was a powerful preacher at Rugby, and Hughes spoke for a large number of the boys who passed through his regime when he recalled the shaping of his thinking brought about by the Sunday afternoon sermons, which made him open to influence by Maurice in his adult life. Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), in contrast, was a Cambridge man, who nonetheless led the debate to confront the challenge of Pusey and the Tractarians at Oxford. Maurice’s beliefs drew heavily on the Greek theology of the centrality of Christ’s incarnation, and the mystery of His presence. This was viewed with antagonism by the High Anglicans, who adhered to the Augustinian and Latin dogma of the centrality of the atonement of man’s sin through the suffering of Christ on the Cross.88 This debate became focalised on the nature of baptismal regeneration and led to the Bishop of Exeter’s famous and confrontational examination of a priest in his diocese in 1847. The Bishop, Henry Phillpotts, though he was thought to have shown some pliability in his views to further his clerical career, was a staunch proclaimer of High Anglicanism, whereas the priest, George Cornelius Gorham, appeared somewhat Calvinistic in his expounding of baptismal doctrine. It was not the first challenge of his orthodoxy. The Bishop of Ely had considered refusing to ordain him priest because of his unsoundness on the subject of baptismal renewal. Phillpotts examined Gorham for seven days, but Gorham avoided the outright declaration of views that would confirm his heterodoxy, and after a protracted ecclesiastical court case, Phillpotts finally conceded and installed him as Vicar of Brampford Speke.89 The case captured great public attention, and prompted the publication of over 50 books on the subject over the four years while the court case ran.90 In 1844 Phillpotts had instructed that the surplice must be worn for all ministrations of the office. This sparked riots in the congregations, notably at St. Sidwell’s, Exeter. In Barchester Towers, Slope is described as wearing ‘dirty surplices’ in rebellion against such high-church practices91 and Dr Proudie is judged equal to ‘such foes as his brethren of Exeter and Oxford’.92 Phillpotts is commonly believed to be lampooned in the description of Dr Grantly’s second son Henry in The Warden.93 In a confrontation as bitterly fought as Phillpotts’, Maurice was driven to resign his post as Professor of English and History at Kings College, London because he insisted that a God of Love could never condemn man, his creation, to eternal damnation. He rejected the serpentine twistings of the Anglo-Catholics equally with the lurid hell-fire theology 87

Dean Stanley, Life of Arnold, vol. 1, 351. quoted by Vance, 75. S.C. Carpenter, Church and People 1789–1889 (London: SPCK, 1933), 527. 89 O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, 2 vols (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966), vol. 1, 219–20. 90 Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee, 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921–1922), vol. XV, 1108–1111. 91 Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 270. 92 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 20. 93 The Warden, 99–100. 88

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of the Evangelical Low Church, believing that retribution for sin was immediate, in the alienation from God of the sinner in his life. This is particularly pertinent to the humanitarian beliefs that underpin Trollope’s jokes at the expense of the Evangelical movement. His hints at Mrs Proudie’s possible Calvinistic leanings in describing her as ‘the niece of a Scotch earl’94 support the impression (implied, never declared) that she sees herself as one of the elect. He explicitly pokes fun at her Sabbatarianism through Barchester Towers, Framley Parsonage and The Last Chronicle of Barset. Maurice supported the Chartists, and as the fire fizzled out from their campaign, he declared he would pursue the rights of the working man as a Christian Socialist95 and to this end joined with like-minded men to found the Working Men’s College, to offer working men access to the liberal education and opportunities not granted to those who came from such a background. His organisation rivalled similar worthy movements, like the Mechanics Institutes, the later Workers’ Educational Association and myriad charity night schools, but only the Working Men’s College offered courses leading to degree-type study in the humanities, with validation by the Universities.96 Maurice’s main supporters in his venture were J.M. Ludlow, E.V. Neale, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) went to Oriel, Oxford, but it was the influence of Dr Arnold’s Christian socialism on him as a schoolboy that was instrumental to the development of his views. He is mainly known today as the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the memoir of an idealised pastoral childhood and a school career, exemplifying the route to glorious manhood through playing cricket and standing up to bullies. It draws heavily on his experiences at Arnold’s Rugby and Hughes, like his alter ego, was a fine sportsman. Indeed, when Maurice suggested that Hughes would be a useful man to invite to join the Working Men’s College committee, the idea was at first derided. They were not, after all, planning to play cricket. He was, however, also a Queen’s Counsel noted as an equity draughtsman; he became a County Court Judge and was a Liberal Member of Parliament for nine years. Maurice’s contact with Hughes had shown him these other talents. They had met at a meeting in Lincoln’s Inn, convened to discuss Irish Famine relief. This led to Hughes offering to help Maurice in his current night-school projects. Maurice read parts of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in draft, and advised on theological points, to the degree that Macmillan’s reader observed that ‘Dr Arnold was presented preaching Maurician doctrines which he did not actually profess’.97 In this Maurice recognised a depth in Hughes which often escaped those who knew him less well. Hughes, in a tribute to his mentor in later life, wrote The Manliness of Christ,98 which firmly places the expression of His manhood in His meekness, patience and long-suffering, the courage He showed in owning these qualities and His steadfastness, a rebuttal 94 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 18. In a further jibe at her possible Celtic ancestry, he also gives her red hair (p. 23), though this should also be considered in the context of Richard Altick’s illuminating section on the significance of red hair in The Presence of the Present (Ohio: Ohio State University, 1991), 315–29. 95 Vance, 53. 96 J.F.C. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 1854–1954 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). 97 Vance, 53. 98 Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ, 1879 (London: Macmillan, 1894).

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of all those who thought that Muscular Christianity was limited to the precept of a healthy mind in a healthy body – though it is true that he introduced boxing into the curriculum at the Working Men’s College and organised the cricket team. Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was also drawn as a young man to be an acolyte of Maurice. Kingsley had been beset by doubt as an undergraduate at Cambridge, but was greatly influenced and confirmed in faith by studying Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. In Coleridge’s articulation of his belief, he found the inspiration to unify his enthusiasms (and considerable knowledge) as a natural scientist, his humanitarian sympathies and his enjoyment of his physical body. The significance of what Vance calls ‘delight in physical manliness’99 has been discussed at length in Susan Chitty’s biography The Beast and the Monk,100 which sets the progress of Kingsley’s ecclesiastical career and his theological development in the context of his celebration of the joys of sexual union with Fanny Grenfell, ultimately his wife.101 Kingsley detected in the creeds of both the Tractarians and the Evangelicals a contempt for the world; for Kingsley, the denial of corporeal life and the pursuit of celibacy was the denial of the God-given attributes of sexuality. His acquaintance with Maurice began when he wrote to him in appreciation of his book The Kingdom of Christ.102 They corresponded at length and became colleagues when Queens College, London was founded in 1848. Like Maurice, he had been deeply affected by the Chartist Movement and declared himself a Christian socialist. The strongest link between Hughes, Kingsley and Maurice was the perception that the Tractarians and Evangelicals, in advancing a rarefied spiritual life at one extreme and preaching hell-fire and torment at the other, made holding Christian belief less and less relevant to the everyday life of the man in the street. Esau, the strong, hunting, ‘manly’ man, tricked out of his God-given birthright by the clever talking of Jacob (clearly linked in Kingsley’s mind with the arcanities of the Puseyites and what he commonly called Manichaeism), was for them a model of manliness to which all men could aspire. In seeking to rehabilitate Esau, physical activity and pride in physical prowess was granted the same value as intellectual agility. Godliness could be expressed through celebration of God-given physical pleasure. The three men interpreted this Godliness, this Christian manliness, in subtly different ways. Maurice and Kingsley were both priests who expressed their views in terms of their calling. Maurice shared much of Coleridge’s view, in equating manliness with the fulfilment of one’s potential in the living of a higher, better and more useful life and shied away from the language of discipline and rigour in discussing faith. He drew on the vocabulary of ‘family’ to express his theology. Kingsley’s views attacked the ascetics in their own terms; he saw their views as leading to effeminacy and his Christian

99

Vance, 46. Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk. A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974). 101 For evidence of the extent of Kingsley’s pre-marital sexual relationship with Fanny Grenfell, see Chitty, 82. 102 Frederick Denison Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ, 1838 (London: SCM Press, 1958). 100

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manliness is a refutation of that effeminacy. For Hughes, Christian manliness was a positive exhibition of robust energy, spirited courage and physical vitality. Proclaiming this Gospel of Christian manliness and Christian socialism was their life work. Ideas formulated in charity night-schools grew into the Working Men’s College, recognised as Maurice’s unique memorial. Hughes strove to advance cooperative workshops, the main practical application of the Christian Socialist movement, largely effected by Ludlow, also a founder of the Working Men’s College.103 Hughes’ commitment to the co-operative cause was perhaps fired by his first-hand observation of agricultural distress in Berkshire in his childhood, aggravated, if anything, by the New Poor Law of 1834 and continuing unabated through the ‘hungry forties’. He was the chairman of the first Co-operative Congress in 1869 and his Utopian scheme for a co-operative colony of ex-Public School boys in Tennessee in 1879 nearly brought him (and Ludlow and Neale) to financial ruin. And, of course, Hughes and Kingsley disseminated their beliefs through their fiction. This has particular resonance for Trollope. The construction of Christian doctrine in his novels argues for the upholding of traditional forms of rite and belief. The clergy of Barchester diocese, until the Proudies arrive, all belong to the old ‘high and dry’ church: They all preached in their black gowns, as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats, they had no candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions, and were contented to confine themselves to such ceremonial observances as had been in vogue for the past hundred years.104

Bishop Proudie, meanwhile, has gained preferment by being all things to all men: Dr Proudie was one among those who early in life adapted himself to the views held by the Whigs on most theological and religious subjects. He bore with the idolatry of Rome, tolerated even the infidelity of Socinianism, and was hand-in-glove with the Presbyterian Synods of Scotland and Ulster.105

In his fictional dioceses, while Trollope indulgently tolerates high-church tendencies, he is vitriolic in lambasting the evangelical wing of the Anglican church. Dr Grantly’s response to the Sabbatarian onslaught of Mrs Proudie and Mr Slope is to foment sedition and sabotage: He would not willingly alter his own fashion of dress, but he could people Barchester with young clergymen dressed in the longest frocks, and in the highest-breasted silk waistcoats. He certainly was not prepared to cross himself, or to advocate the real presence, but without going to this length, there were various observances, by adopting which he could plainly show his antipathy to such men as Dr Proudie and Mr Slope.106

103 N.C. Masterman, John Malcolm Ludlow; the Builder of Christian Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 104 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 50. 105 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 19. 106 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 46.

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‘It is not the dissenters or the papists that we fear’, Dr Grantly says, ‘... but the set of canting, low-bred hypocrites who are wriggling their way in among us; men who have no fixed principle, no standard ideas of religion or doctrine, but who take up some popular cry, as this fellow has done about “Sabbath travelling”’.107 Decrying the evangelicals is a popular pastime throughout the novels. Their clergymen are regularly portrayed as lacking in integrity and motivated by greed. Slope schemes and plots for preferment and Eleanor Bold’s fortune. In Rachel Ray, Mr Prong thirsts after power and control, particularly over Mrs Prime’s few pounds. In Miss Mackenzie, Mr Maguire pursues Miss Mackenzie for her modest competence. Evangelical women are shrews. Mrs Bolton in John Caldigate will either incarcerate her daughter, or banish her in her troubles. Mrs Prime persecutes her sister in Rachel Ray. Mrs Proudie, like the Calvinists she is implicitly linked to, excludes from salvation all who deviate from her straight and narrow: ‘She had been known to accuse a clergyman’s wife, to her face, of idolatry because the poor lady had dated a letter, St John’s Eve.’108 As this quotation signals, high-church leanings are viewed benignly by Trollope. In Doctor Thorne, once Caleb Oriel drops his commitment to celibacy (when he falls in love with Beatrice Gresham) his promotion of Anglo-Catholic symbolism in his manner of administering the offices is benevolently tolerated. That Francis Arabin, after youthful earnestness nearly converted him to Rome, in his middle years still affects a ‘silken vest’ and adheres to the rubric in the layout of his prayer book109 is evidence offered in playful and teasing fashion of sincerely and deeply held views. As Susan Grantly and the authorial narrator proclaim, ‘Welcome kneelings and bowings, welcome matins and compline, welcome bell, book, and candle, so that Mr Slope’s dirty surplices and ceremonial Sabbaths be held in due execration’.110 Significantly, Trollope’s portrayal of the dissenting minister, Mr Puddingdale, in The Vicar of Bullhampton is much kinder, but he does challenge head-on the methodistical and evangelical emphasis on the tenets of eternal damnation as a punishment for sin in this world. Frank Fenwick confronts Mr Puddingdale with showing a lack of Christian charity for Carry Brattle’s misfortune: And isn’t my case very bad, and yours? Are we not all in a bad way, – unless we believe and repent? Have we not all so sinned as to deserve eternal punishment? ... Then there can’t be much difference between her and us. She can’t deserve more than eternal punishment. If she believes and repents, all her sins will be white as snow.111

Frank Fenwick’s advocacy of Christian forgiveness for all sinners is a fine exposition of Maurice’s doctrine of God’s love for the whole of his creation and it firmly places Trollope’s discourse within the parameters of the Broad Church movement. Trollope’s heroes are regularly sons of Esau, living the Lord’s message in their lives rather than in their liturgical observances and, as close examination will show, Trollope’s favoured physique for his heroes resembles nothing so much as muscular Christianity. 107 108 109 110 111

Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 44. Last Chronicle, 168. Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 269. Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 270. Vicar of Bullhampton, 124.

Chapter 2

Men in Fiction Trollope’s success as a novelist began in 1855 with the publication of his fourth novel, The Warden. By the time The Small House at Allington came out in 1865, his position as a writer of best-sellers, the matinée idol of the circulating libraries, was unassailable. This chapter looks at four other best-selling novels written between these dates: Two Years Ago (1857), by Charles Kingsley, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), by Thomas Hughes, Eric, or Little by Little (1858), by Frederic W. Farrar1 and Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles (1862), by Mrs Henry Wood. All four books openly address the issue of what it meant to be a man in mid-Victorian Britain, with implicit and explicit messages about the behaviour of men and boys growing into men. The idea of overtly moral and improving fiction has somewhat lost its flavour today, but all these writers wrote their novels in an age of anxiety about the enervating impact of novel-reading on moral development.2 In An Autobiography, Trollope himself makes a defensive response to the charge that novels were not conducive to purity of thought and clean living. Trollope was at pains to place himself in this coterie of writers who took their purpose seriously: … I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience. I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some may have learned from them that modesty is a charm worth preserving. I think that no youth has been taught that in falseness and flashness is the road to manliness; but some may have learned from me that it is to be found in truth and a high but gentle spirit.3

His targeted audience is both male and female and young, middle-aged and old; he is assuming, or at least hoping, that his tale-telling may modify behaviour. The era of explicitly improving fiction had probably run its course by the end of Victoria’s reign. While Stalky and Co, published in 1899, is still a school-life story, with good advice for growing boys on how to survive the rigours of a public school education, Kipling explicitly pokes fun at Farrar’s novel, Eric, or Little by Little, coining the verb ‘“to Eric”, – to do voluntarily that which a lad believes a grown-up would have him do, – as in, “We ain’t going to have any beastly Erickin”’.4 It is clear though that in 1899 Eric was still a popular purchase and we would be unwise to assume that while so often bought and given, it was not sometimes read in the spirit 1 Frederic W. Farrar, Eric, or Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School, 1858 (London: A. and C. Black, 1898). 2 This concept is explored at length in chapter 8. 3 An Autobiography, 146. 4 Rudyard Kipling, Stalky and Co, 1899 (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1994) 123.

38

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in which it was intended. Reginald Farrar, writing his father’s biography, includes letters from men who claimed that reading Eric as a child set them on the straight and narrow for life.5 Cautionary tales for children, exhorting boys to embrace middleclass models of masculine behaviour and integrity, and to live up to the expectations of their mothers in Christian piety, gave a livelihood to a generation of scribblers. Some were more enduring than others. Ascott R. Hope Moncreiff’s Hero and Heroine: The Story of a First Year at School6 (said by The Daily Graphic reviewer to be ‘not merely one which boys will like, but one which boys should have’) and Andrew Home’s From Fag to Monitor; or Fighting to the Front7 have disappeared from view. Eric, or Little by Little went into 40 editions before the overtness of its message lost favour. Kingsley and Hughes are exceptions in their time, in that two of their books for children, The Water-Babies8 and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, have stayed in print for 140 years and are still read by their intended audience. All four novels are written with a varying amount of proselytising zeal about models of masculinity. In spite of Trollope’s high-minded claims, in this they are of a different genre from Trollope’s novels, which explore the behaviour of men from the point of view of a more worldly and urbane universe. One of the most striking differences that will emerge is found in their respective treatments of sexuality. Eric, or Little by Little seethes with a suppressed sexual energy, which dares not speak its name, but which threatens to erupt at every juncture. Both Farrar and Hughes resort to extremes of circumlocution to discuss masturbation as a problem area of behaviour in all-male institutions. Kingsley and Wood, writing for adults, show diametrically opposed viewpoints on male sexuality which still have reverberations today. Kingsley’s men have sexual drives that are urgent and at times irrepressible, even in a hero. When Tom Thurnall’s passions get the better of him, the devil is said to have tempted him while his better angel was off-guard. Mrs Wood, in common with many feminist commentators of today, fails to see why there can be any excuse for a man’s sexual appetites not being kept firmly in check. This is all in stark contrast to the view advanced in Trollope. While he unequivocally condemns sexual licence without responsibility (and Fred Neville gets pushed over a cliff when he declines to marry the pregnant Kate O’Hara in An Eye for an Eye9) a young man’s discovery of his sexual appetites in puberty and early manhood is a cause for celebration. When Will Belton, Frank Gresham, Hugh Stanbury et al. steal kisses, it is evidence of healthy red-blooded manliness, not a dark secret fuelled by man’s instinct for sin. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, ‘written by an old boy’, was published in 1857 and dedicated to Thomas Arnold’s widow. It is commonly described as the first of the genre of schooldays novels written for boys. It was an immediate success. While 5 Reginald Farrar, The Life of Frederic William Farrar, Sometime Dean of Canterbury (London: Nisbet, 1904) 74–82. 6 Ascott Robert Hope Moncreiff, Hero and Heroine: The Story of a First Year at School (London: A. and C. Black, 1898), advertised in A. and C. Black’s 1898 edition of Eric, or Little by Little. 7 Andrew Home, From Fag to Monitor, or Fighting to the Front (London: A. and C. Black, 1896), advertised in A. and C. Black’s 1898 edition of Eric, or Little by Little. 8 Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, 1863 (London: Penguin Books, 1995). 9 Eye for an Eye, 194.

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its target audience was ostensibly boys, it appealed to a wider audience of men, encouraging them to look back with nostalgia on their schooldays, offering them rosecoloured glasses to reframe bleak experience into a positive time when they learnt the business of growing into men in the best possible circumstances. In writing Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Hughes for the first time gave people, and men in particular, a drama of their own childhood; he gave them a narrative within which to construct their own memoirs. This gap between memory and reality was entertainingly exploited some years later by F. Anstey in Vice Versa.10 It was while laughing uproariously as his niece, Edith Tilley, read Vice Versa aloud round the hearth that Trollope suffered his fatal stroke in 1882. Tom Brown’s Schooldays carries a positive message that school can be fun; Tom gets into all manner of scrapes, some of which can be defined as ‘manly’; he learns how to cope with bullies and how to avoid homosexual overtures; there is a great deal of cricket, not much Latin or Greek and a good sprinkling of philosophical reflection on the nature of Christian commitment. The text is peppered with ‘manly’ references, – ‘The village boys were full as manly and honest, and certainly purer …’,11 – ‘drinking isn’t fine or manly’,12 – ‘Striving against whatever was mean and unmanly’,13 – ‘Whatsoever is true, and manly, and lovely’,14 – ‘I shan’t let them stay if I don’t see them gaining character and manliness’,15 – ‘How frank, how kind and manly was his greeting to the party by the fire’,16 – ‘Arnold’s manly piety’,17 – ‘Schoolboy reasoning made him think that Arthur would be softened and less manly for thinking of home’,18 – ‘He had battled with it like a man, and got a man’s reward’,19 – ‘A manly respect’,20 – ‘to feel I might be a man and do manly things’.21 The text, which has an explicit narrator, is a third-person, past-tense account of Tom Brown’s childhood and adolescence, which switches into the present tense for cricket matches and fights, with regular time out from the story for the authorial first person adult voice to run a commentary on the significance of an incident, or a retrospective assessment of the theology of a sermon by Dr Arnold, or of a homily by Tom’s fellow pupil, George Arthur. It is unashamedly proselytising in tone. Indeed, in his preface to the sixth edition he says: ‘My sole object was to preach to boys’,22 though this examination will show that there is also a regular authorial voice addressing an explicitly adult audience. It is also worth noticing that Tom’s journey from rural innocence to young man ready to take his place in the new industrial-age world is mirrored by his arrival at Rugby by stagecoach and his departure nine years later by train. 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

F. Anstey, Vice Versa, 1882 (London: Murray, 1931). Hughes, Tom Brown, 63. Hughes, Tom Brown, 110. Hughes, Tom Brown, 125. Hughes, Tom Brown, 144. Hughes, Tom Brown, 178. Hughes, Tom Brown, 183. Hughes, Tom Brown, 187. Hughes, Tom Brown, 197. Hughes, Tom Brown, 198. Hughes, Tom Brown, 198. Hughes, Tom Brown, 258. Hughes, Tom Brown, 14. (This preface is printed in the Penguin 1995 edition.)

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Hughes advances his theories of manly behaviour through a variety of male models, who each reflect different aspects, positive and negative, of his thesis. Tom’s father’s position is articulated as he returns from setting Tom on his way to school: What is he sent to school for? Well, partly because he wanted so to go. If he’ll only turn out a brave, helpful truth-telling Englishman and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.23

This benchmark of masculine aspiration is echoed by Tom towards the end of his tale, as he reflects on how he wishes to be remembered at the end of his school career: ‘I want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy, or turned his back on a big one.’24 Tom’s father is offered as archetypal, feeling things deeply, but struggling to put his feelings into words. He accepts his ten-year-old’s suggestion that ‘kissing should now cease’,25 while seeming not to recognise the next day that Tom feels ‘rather chokey, and would liked to have hugged his father well, if it hadn’t been for the recent stipulation’.26 This collusion that grown men, and growing boys learning to be men, should hold their affections in check seems to contain a narrative voice which maintains that Tom must achieve this if he is to make the most of his school experiences. One might suggest his father is setting him on the road to a lifetime of suppressed feelings, confirming some stereotypes of Victorian masculinity. Though a ‘true blue Tory to the back-bone’, Squire Brown held advanced egalitarian views that he fostered in Tom: ‘... it didn’t matter a straw whether his son associated with lord’s sons or ploughman’s sons, provided they were brave and honest’.27 Fighting skills learnt from these rural companions serve him well with Flashman. There is, however, some smack of superiority in some of Tom’s mingling with working men, in spite of the authorial and adult declaration where he recommends making friends with men of the working classes ‘tailors, engineers, carpenters, engravers – there’s plenty of choice. Take them home to your wives and sisters, give them a good dinner, talk to them about what is really at the bottom of your heart, and box and run and row with them’.28 In conforming to the convention that the function of characters from the lower orders is to provide comic relief (and Trollope was criticised for not making the working classes in The Way We Live Now comic enough29), Hughes’ handling of the hooligan behaviour of Rugby boys on the coach, the mocking of Stumps and Tom’s bettering of the servant’s tea-making skills (with the hint that the servants were ripping off their employer), while high on comedy, undermine the Christian Socialist stance made explicit by the narrator’s voice earlier. Once at school, Tom develops his part as a son of Esau with his alter ego, East. Both boys have sufficient natural ability, but as they leave obedient childhood, both sail close to the wind in their preference for high-spirited scrapes over academic 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Hughes, Tom Brown, 73. Hughes, Tom Brown, 256. Hughes, Tom Brown, 71. Hughes, Tom Brown, 72. Hughes, Tom Brown, 57. Hughes, Tom Brown, 49–50. Meredith White Townsend, The Spectator, 26 June 1875, xlviii. 825–6; Smalley, 399.

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application. While Dr Arnold makes a nice discrimination between climbing the school roof to scratch their names on the hands of the clock and poaching, or going to the fair when directly forbidden, for some time their unchannelled animal energies threaten to end their school careers. For his misdemeanours Tom is regularly flogged and takes his punishment with good grace. It is ironic that one flogging from Dr Arnold carries the comment, ‘the flogging did them no good at the time’,30 while the following page is a lengthy defence of a good sound thrashing as an effective remedy for bullying. The bully years afterwards said, ‘it had been the kindest act that had been done upon him, and the turning point of his character’. It does not appear that Flashman was flogged for his bullying, though everyone was aware of it. Indeed, the only physical challenge to Flashman comes from Tom, who uses the wrestling throw learnt from his yokel playmate to floor him and Flashman is finally expelled for being drunk, not for being a bully. The message is ambivalent. We are directed to admire Tom for putting up with the initiation rites (after a long speech from Brooke on the evils of bullying), for not spilling the beans about who roasted him because of his lottery ticket (this is indeed how Tom earns his spurs), though constantly a voice in the text says it shouldn’t happen in the first place. The preface to the sixth edition shows that this was a problem, particularly for his adult readers; one of Hughes’ correspondents had pointed out that bullying is common assault, and tells of a judge refusing to extend the protection of the law to a child ill-treated at school, because if such cases were brought to him he might have 50 a day from one town alone.31 Brooke says, ‘You’ll be all the better footballers on learning to stand it, and to take you own parts, and fight it through’.32 That we first meet Flashman in a football match as the school bully33 seems to imply that bullying, though one would like to eradicate it, is an inevitable part of the fabric of the institution and while one should strive to minimise it, the best solution is to develop the personal resilience to withstand it. This Panglossian view, that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, extends to Hughes’ view about fighting in general and echoes Carlyle’s troubled identification of manliness with physical exertion: After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man.34

Boxing and fighting merge, the arguments for the one defending the other, and it is regularly unclear whether Hughes is defending the spontaneous outbreak of fighting when he says: ‘Everyone who is worth his salt has enemies who must be beaten’,35 or recommending settling a dispute with a boxing match: ‘Fighting with fists is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels.’ The adult narrative voice refers to a contemporary debate on the subject in The Times as ‘cant and 30 31 32 33 34 35

Hughes, Tom Brown, 176. Hughes, Tom Brown, 11. Hughes, Tom Brown, 110. Hughes, Tom Brown, 97. Hughes, Tom Brown, 232. Hughes, Tom Brown, 232.

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twaddle’ and declares, the ultimate vindication, ‘there’s no exercise in the world so good for the temper, and for the muscles of the back and legs’.36 Part of the discussion about bullying is that the system of fagging will help counter it. Here again Hughes’ text is ambiguous. In principle, fagging involves a sixth-former of moral probity (like Brooke) taking three or four 13 and 14 year-olds under his wing in exchange for cleaning his study and running errands; ‘each praeposter had three or four fags specially allotted to him of whom he was supposed to be the guide, philosopher and friend’.37 It is a system that mimics the chivalric code of knight and squire, but falls on its face when those called to perform the role of knight are young men like Flashman. The system is also open to an implicit homosexual abuse, where older boys ‘petted and pampered ... miserable little pretty white-haired curly-headed boys’, doing ‘all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next’.38 The undercurrent of homosexuality, and its identification with effeminacy, is clearly not an area where the narrator feels confident with his topic (in great contrast to his tone when talking about fighting). He says he has mentioned it because ‘many boys will know why it is left in’ – though any boy reading it who had not experienced it might be mystified. Areas of male behaviour where it touches the chivalric code, and with it touches on sex and relationships with women, have in common a powerful throb of sexuality, with a degree of denial that it is there. Tom is redeemed from his career of pranks and scrapes by being asked to look after a new boy, George Arthur, doubly predestined by his name to hold the shield of knighthood. Tom’s first fear is that he will be ‘always getting laughed at, and called Molly or Jenny, or some derogatory feminine nickname’.39 In an ironic twist, Tom comes to realise that George’s air of vulnerability masks a soul of Christian commitment that demands as much courage as ever Tom showed in standing up to Flashman. The benefits run both ways. Tom re-discovers the faith his mother instilled in him, missing from his wilderness years, and George learns to enjoy birds-nesting and getting into scrapes, ‘Rugby air and cricket’.40 His fears about George expose Hughes’ paradoxical attitude to women. While Tom gets kudos from outgrowing ‘petticoat government’,41 being more than a woman can control and, while having a visible caring side is seen as effeminate and exposing one to homosexual elements, it is mothers who deeply influence their sons. It is his mother that Tom feels he has let down by failing to pray each evening and to whom he writes to confess his backsliding. Hughes describes boys learning to be men in a man’s world; in exposing Tom’s conscience he demonstrates that how a man relates to women is an intrinsic part of his identity as a man. This is particularly pertinent to the passage where Tom meets George’s mother, a Madonna-like figure: ‘tall, slight and fair, with masses of golden hair drawn back from the broad white forehead ... and the lovely tender mouth that trembled while he looked.’42 Her 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

All from Hughes, Tom Brown, 246. Hughes, Tom Brown, 127–8. Hughes, Tom Brown, 193. Hughes, Tom Brown. 181. Hughes, Tom Brown, 183. Hughes, Tom Brown, 57 and 60. Hughes, Tom Brown, 261.

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slenderness suggests vulnerability and immaturity – no motherly curves here – her blonde hair her Anglo-Saxon ancestry (with some hints of the fair hair of childhood); broad forehead implies intelligence; white that she is both British and upper-class; however, it is his focus on ‘the lovely tender mouth that trembled’ that stamps Mrs Arthur as the object of the narrator’s sexual desire. It is perhaps the woman that a 36 year old narrator is attracted to, at once vulnerable, chaste, yet with the promise of eagerness. It is worth noting that we have no interiority of Mrs Arthur. She is entirely defined by male perception. George Arthur’s re-awakening of Tom’s Christian belief re-frames the last quarter of the book. From an unchannelled though good-hearted scamp, Tom becomes the model of upright manhood, the man who can lead a cricket team, give a moral lead to the lower school and bring his best friend, East, to Christ, with a confident reassurance that mirrors East’s own presence when Tom first arrived. Dr Arnold’s figure of Christian manliness presides over all these models of masculinity, an omniscient and omnipresent force, differentiating between scrapes and misdemeanours, preparing George to meet death with equanimity if his time comes, physically comforting East when he bares his unshriven soul. East tells how ‘he sat down by me and stroked my head’.43 Though he recognises that giving Tom responsibility will bring out the best in him, his involvement in the sports ethos of the school is peripheral (Brooke mentions his brief appearance on the sidelines of the football match). The Arnold who says that George needs ‘Rugby air and cricket’, may be a Hughesian projection and Tom’s sense of relief at returning to a fold of prayer and worship from his wilderness of alienation from God owes more to Maurice than to Hughes’ first mentor.44 Maurice had an even greater influence on Frederic W. Farrar, the author of Eric, or Little by Little. Farrar, whose career took him from schoolmaster at Marlborough to Dean of Canterbury, was taught by Maurice at King’s College London for three years before he went up to Cambridge. Their friendship flourished in Farrar’s adult years and Maurice became godfather to Farrar’s second son, Eric Maurice Farrar.45 Maurice’s belief in a forgiving God who would not condemn his creation to eternal damnation, which caused the rift resulting in the termination of his post at Kings College, is a central tenet in Farrar’s theology. His son’s memoir of him describes him as ‘the fearless preacher of “Eternal Hope”’,46 referring to a series of sermons preached, and subsequently published in 1878, while he was a Canon of Westminster and Rector of St. Margaret’s. He first expounded the doctrine of these sermons whilst a fellow at Trinity, Cambridge, in 1856, in an essay entitled ‘The Christian doctrine of Atonement is not inconsistent with the Justice and Goodness of God’, for which he won the Norissian prize.47 In his five sermons on Eternal Hope, Farrar sets out to demonstrate that much of the vocabulary of hell-fire and everlasting torment is drawn from an inflated and exaggerated translation of the Greek. Pusey responded with a paper ‘What is of Faith 43 44 45 46 47

Hughes, Tom Brown, 277. See chapter 1, 33, and note 97. Reginald Farrar, 25. Reginald Farrar, 263. Reginald Farrar, 47.

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as to Everlasting Punishment’; three years later Farrar published Mercy and Judgment, which crystallizes his beliefs about the connections between man, whose flesh is heir to sin, his capacity for repentance and God’s power of redemption.48 Like Maurice, he believed that God’s punishment for those who rejected Him and turned to sin, was alienation from His love. As he says in Mercy and Judgment: I believe punishment is effected, not by arbitrary inflictions, but by natural and inevitable consequences, and therefore that the expressions which have been interpreted to mean physical and material agonies by worm and flame are metaphors for a state of remorse and alienation from God.49

This is particularly pertinent when we begin to compare Eric with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. George Arthur, hovering between life and death as his fever reaches its crisis, has a vision. Frightened at first by death, seeing death as the end, feeling that he is going to die without achieving manhood through work and striving, he feels his heart cry ‘“... the dead cannot praise Thee. There is no work in the grave: in the night no man can work. But I can work. I can do great things. I will do great things. Why wilt Thou slay me?”’. He slips into ‘a living tomb’.50 Then the tomb is cleft in two, and he is lifted up by a bright light, and carried to the brink of a river, which he knows is death, but not the death of the black tomb. Beyond the river is a multitude working together at a great work. In the multitude is his father, and side by side with him, the people of the town that he worked with, the same men who had belonged to the Free-thinking Club, whose ideas his father had striven to counter, but who had asked to be his pall-bearers at his funeral. When the vision fades, he knows he will recover, but he also knows that God has a purpose for man beyond the grave and that death is not an end, but a gate to the next world. George now knows that it is no cause for grieving when a friend dies, because God planned it so and in death is reunion for all of us, what Vance refers to as ‘a Mauricean parable of manly work continuing on either side of the river of death’.51 This is critical to an understanding of Eric’s popularity as a book to give to young boys for over 40 years. It always was, as Reginald Farrar points out, fashionable for cynics to disparage Eric and compare it unfavourably with Tom Brown’s Schooldays.52 But Eric is the schoolmaster-cleric’s amalgam of school life with theology. While Hughes gives us a childhood we could identify with, Farrar tries to frame a complex religious debate in a medium that may be understood by young people. Like Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Eric tells of the journey from a prelapsarian childhood spent in a rural idyll to knowledge of the world and its temptations. It is recognised that boys of spirit rapidly outgrow the teaching skills of women, though, as in Tom Brown, it is the women who instil boys with Christian principles and whose disappointment when they lapse fills the heroes with most remorse. However, the sentimental pageant of Eric’s childhood is untinged by any expression of Tom’s vigorous energies: ‘The 48 49 50 51 52

Reginald Farrar, 271–4. Reginald Farrar, 272. Hughes, Tom Brown, 99. Vance, 58. Reginald Farrar, 72.

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small shining flower-like faces, with their fair hair, the thrustful loving arms folded round each brother’s neck.’53 Farrar, like Hughes, exposes the shortcomings of private schools before sending his protagonist off to public school, and like Hughes, presents a variety of male models of behaviour who will influence Eric. Eric’s father looms over the early pages, and while Mr Williams’ career in India keeps him physically remote, the text suggests there is emotional remoteness as well. When Eric has lost track of time when catching crabs in the rocks with his friends, and has returned home four hours late, his father’s reprimands are not about his anxiety, but about the pain Eric has caused his mother. His confrontation is cold: ‘Thoughtless boy’, said his father, ‘your mother has been in agony about you’ ... Eric saw her [his mother] pale face and tearful eyes, and flung himself into her arms, and mother and son wept in long embrace.54

This suggests a model of manliness where men learn to suppress the emotion that is there in the growing boy. Mr Williams displaces his anxiety onto his wife; Eric, at 13, expresses remorse in tears and the embrace with his mother. While Mr Williams’ concern for his son is manifested in his spending his year’s furlough near his son’s school so that Eric can live at home, his interventions to help Eric adjust to school life also seem to encourage the suppression of feeling. When Mr Williams thrashes Barker for bullying small boys, his advice to Barker’s victims is that the bullying would cease if they all confronted it, and the text suggests that he is proud of his son for not telling his parents that he was being bullied. Chapter III, entitled ‘Bullying’, attempts to address the issue, but the aguments are muddied with ambivalences. ‘Grin and bear it’ seems to be his best advice: ‘It is a far better and braver thing to bear bullying with such a mixture of spirit and good humour as in time to disarm it.’55 But there is no account of this method actually working. Russell’s much older and larger cousin threatens to beat Barker up if he does not stop bullying Russell. Owen goes to his teachers (effective, but frowned on by boys and teachers as sneaking); Eric’s father uses his superior size and strength to overwhelm Barker. One might wonder whether Mr Williams is not in his turn a closet bully in using his greater size and strength in this way. The authorial voice suggests that having a monitor system would go some of the way to resolve it, but the tenor of the chapter is that bullying is part of the human condition and Farrar shares Hughes’ perplexity. Just as Flashman is expelled for being drunk, not for his bullying, so Barker is ultimately expelled for forging the note that so nearly caused Eric’s expulsion and Brigson leaves at his father’s request. It gives a hollow ring to Farrar’s paeon of praise for sixth-form monitors: … what a Palladium it is of happiness and morality; how it prevents bullying, upholds manliness, is the bulwark of discipline, and makes boys more earnest and thoughtful, often

53 54 55

F.W. Farrar, 13. F.W. Farrar, 69. F.W. Farrar, 33.

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at the most critical periods of their lives, by enlisting all their sympathies and interests on the side of the honourable and just.56

There are undertones here of the chivalric code of the squire learning in valour from his knight, but neither Farrar nor Hughes argues with any conviction that it would be an effective antidote to the problem of bullying. Walter Rose, the saintly schoolmaster, does his best to counter the corrupting influences of Barker and Brigson. Christ-like, he constantly forgives Eric, always gives him a fresh chance to make amends, never loses faith in Eric’s better nature and ever seeks a spiritual solution to the challenge of Eric’s misdemeanours. His model of manly behaviour is to kneel down with Eric, and later with Vernon, and pray for forgiveness, and in acknowledging fault, seek strength to do better next time. He repeatedly turns the other cheek. When he reaches the end of his patience and flogs Brigson, the lashings and Brigson’s writhings have elements of sadomasochism, which are reinforced by Rose’s insistence on caning other boys on Brigson’s back. The episode ends with Rose on his knees in prayer: ‘The evening’s painful experiences had taught him anew the bitter lesson to expect no gratitude and hope for no reward, but simply, and contentedly, and unmurmuringly to work on in God’s Vineyard so long as life and health should last.’57 There are differing degrees of ‘bad’ influence, – from Upton, Russell’s cousin, good at heart, but the one who taught Eric to smoke: ‘They had a confused notion that there was something “manly” in it’,58 – and from the ‘plucky’ Wildney, who shows Eric how to get out of school at night to buy beer: ‘“How I begin to hate that word plucky” said Montague; “it’s made the excuse here for everything that is wrong, base, and unmanly”’,59 – to the thoroughly corrupt Baker, Brigson and Ball. It might have been unfortunate to call the boy who led the school in sexual incontinence ‘Ball’, the lad who ‘had tasted more largely of the tree of knowledge of evil than any other boy’.60 Farrar, like Hughes, has a problem in finding a vocabulary to describe Ball’s sin without mentioning sex, though both of them see masturbation as the path to hell. Hughes says it would ‘spoil them for everything in this world and the next’.61 Farrar says ‘this boy [Brigson] did much to ruin many an immortal soul’.62 A melodramatic authorial voice conveys that this is the most pernicious of evils: In pity, in pity, show him the canker which he is introducing into the sap of the tree of life, which shall cause its roots to be hereafter as bitterness, and its blossom to go up as dust.63

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

F.W. Farrar, 203. F.W. Farrar, 257. F.W. Farrar, 148. F.W. Farrar, 221. F.W. Farrar, 93. Hughes, Tom Brown, 193. F.W. Farrar, 201. F.W. Farrar, 95.

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It is worth noting that when Eric shares his concerns with Russell, the boy who was born to be good, Russell says that his father warned him against such things before he sent him to school, advice totally lacking from Mr Williams, and which Squire Brown also ducked away from: ‘Shall I go into the sort of temptations he’ll meet with? No, I can’t do that.’64 Perhaps the moral of Russell’s life was that he was, in everything, better prepared, in his sex education as in death. The headmaster has recently preached a sermon on ‘Kibroth-hattaavah’,65 but the significance of the parable seems to have escaped Eric, since he thinks masters have never offered advice on a subject with such profound implications (Russell understood the allusion). One wonders how many contemporary adolescent boys understood the allegory, when the nearest an adult can come to speaking directly about masturbation is through a parable about eating too many quail.66 However, the message about the dangers of abusing one’s manhood and masculinity is stark and unequivocal: May every schoolboy who reads this page be warned by the waving of their wasted hands, from that burning marle of passion where they found nothing but shame and ruin, polluted affection, and an early grave.67

Only with a close female relative is it safe to express deep feeling in a physical way. The animal spirits of little boys soon outstrip the control of women, and the growing boy must learn control of his potentially destructive basic urges in a menonly environment peopled by distant adults and antagonistic peers, where little guidance is given, and retribution is harsh and inflicted with a rod. Eric’s resolution, in confirmation of Russell’s happy end, is that Eric passes through this vale of tears into eternal happiness as he dies believing in the love of a forgiving God. Rose preaches the memorial sermon: Let none of you think that his life has been wasted. Possibly, had it pleased Heaven to spare him, he might have found great works to do among his fellow men ... But do not let 64

Hughes, Tom Brown, 73. Numbers XI v. 34. ‘And he called the name of that place Kibroth-hattaavah: because there they buried the people that lusted.’ 66 In view of the obscurity of the significance of Kibroth-hattaavah for Eric, and the diligence with which Eric was pressed on the impressionable young, we may wonder whether this was the inspiration for Hilaire Belloc’s cautionary tale about Henry King, with bits of string displacing quail, and becoming equated with all manner of unmentionable pursuits. The cautionary verse would thus become a subversive metaphor, understood by adults, but still not by children, for the pitfalls of masturbation. 67 F.W. Farrar, 102. That masturbation would lead to a certain and untimely death was a common fallacy, enthusiastically pursued, as Girouard makes clear in Return to Camelot, 258: ‘The first issue of the Alliance of Honour Record reported a “Monster Demonstration” in the great Assembly Hall, Mile End Road. The speakers included Sir Robert Anderson, K.C.B. He told “a harrowing story of an Eton boy, son of a colonel in the army, a brilliant lad ‘always ahead of his class, popular and successful both in his work and in the playing fields”, who had been reduced to drivelling imbecility as a result of a secret sin, induced by the sight of an obscene photograph exhibited by a scoundrel whom he met in the railway train. “I had the satisfaction”, adds Sir Robert, “of hunting the villain down and of procuring him a long stretch of penal servitude”.’ 65

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us fancy that our work must cease of necessity with our lives. Not so; far rather must we believe that it will continue for ever, seeing that we are all partakers of God’s unspeakable blessing, the common mystery of immortality.68

Eric’s death thus becomes the fulfilment of Eternal Hope. Having suffered great physical privations in his final weeks, he goes to God confident of Christ’s love for him, believing that he has been forgiven, and is about to be reunited with his mother and brother who wait for him in heaven to welcome him, not to extract a penance for his guilty contribution to their deaths. Eric needs to be read as an account of the progress of a soul, not a schoolboy yarn. Indeed, such a reading deepens one’s understanding of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and the significance of the change in Tom from loveable scamp to sincere and devout young man. Mrs Henry Wood published Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles in 1862. It is the embodiment of ‘the unbeatable combination of sin and sentiment’,69 a recipe that Mrs Wood found immensely profitable. The plot tracks the descent into moral dissipation and ruin of a family of means who stoop to deceit to protect their wealth, while the family they cheat rises to achieve material comfort and status. It has many of the ingredients of the sensation novel. It offers both an unfulfilled death-bed promise and a death-bed confession, larceny, murder, disguised identities and a suspicious foreign governess (of indeterminate nationality, but thought to be Italian). Weaving in and out of the tale is a good deal of didactic advice on the bringing up of children and exploration of contemporary issues about what makes a gentleman. In diametric opposition to the rationale of Eric and Tom Brown, Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles declares that a woman can successfully rear and educate sons to grow into reliable young men of integrity: It has been the labour of my life ... to foster good seed in my children; to reason with them, to make them my companions ... While others of their age think only of play, my boys have been obliged to learn the sad experiences of life; there is no necessity to make Frank and Edgar apply to their lessons unremittingly; they do it of their own accord, with their whole abilities, knowing that education is the only advantage they can possess.70

It is worth noting here that this is not a feminist text. In spite of creating a woman who can keep house on the oil of a rag, turn the skills of her middle-class accomplishments into earning an honest, if dry, crust, and develop entrepreneurial skills in education to rival Trollope’s Dr Wortle, Mrs Wood is clear that Jane Halliburton’s place is always in the home. As soon as her sons are financially secure, she gives up her career to sit at their firesides. The Dare daughters, criticised for having no skills that would contribute to the support of the family, brought up to believe that their role is to stay at home, ought nevertheless to have the resourcefulness of character and skill to support themselves in the home if the need arises: ‘The evils arising to women who go out to work in factories have been rehearsed over and over again; and the chief 68

F.W. Farrar, 391. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) 112. 70 Wood, 148–9. 69

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evil, – we will put others out of sight – is, that it takes the married woman from her home and family.’71 Her child-care principles are clear, and admirable. She treats her sons as her companions; she has high expectations of them; she instils principles of duty and industry in them, and she teaches them to trust the Lord. When Frank is justifying not asking for a holiday in the absence of the Dean because if he were there he would turn down their request, he says that if he did not do what he thought his mother expected him to do, another time she would tell him what to do, and not allow him discretion to choose. That all their boyish energies should be channelled into their studies is foreign to both Hughes’ and Farrar’s perception of the nature of boyhood, though Farrar would be entirely approving of her principles and purpose. Hughes would be concerned at the lack of balance between academic application and physical prowess, but judging by the development of Hardy’s character in Tom Brown at Oxford,72 Hughes would approve of Frank going to Cambridge as a servitor. Many of Mrs Halliburton’s precepts for education are a direct challenge to the public-school Classics bias. The Cathedral School in Helstonleigh is no different from Rugby or Roslyn in teaching Latin and Greek but little else. ‘Unless I can organise some plan, my boys will grow up dunces’, she says. Her remedy is to take two hours out from her glove-making ‘every night but Saturday’, and teach them from the knowledge base of her own education: ‘History, Geography, Astronomy, Composition, and so on. You can fill up the list.’73 In this way they learn to write grammatically and to spell, so cogently demonstrated by the exchange of notes with Philip Glen (an early model for Nigel Molesworth). Ironic metaphor runs through the boys’ moral and academic development. When their honesty at work, their regularity at prayer, their application at their lessons are being noticed, the explanation is that they learnt ‘at a good school’, when the truth is that school institutions failed the boys on all these counts. When the Glen boys join Mrs Halliburton’s classes, it is to learn Spelling, Composition, Geography and History; within three months, ‘from being boisterous, self-willed and careless, they became more considerate, more tractable; and Mr Glen actually once heard Philip decline to embark on some tempting scrape, because it would “not be right”’.74 Farrar, the schoolteacher, shares many of Mrs Halliburton’s principles. Dr Cotton, who was the Headmaster of Marlborough and who invited Farrar to join his staff said of him: ‘I never knew anyone who had a greater power of stimulating intellectual exertion and literary tasks ... When boys first joined us they seemed imbued with a new intellectual life, and a real desire for knowledge and improvement for their own sakes.’75 Like Eric and Tom, William, Frank and Edgar are subjected to bullying from other schoolboys, and Mrs Halliburton has no more idea than Hughes or Farrar of how to put a stop to it: ‘Patience and forbearance ...

71 72 73 74 75

Wood, 96. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford, 1861 (London: George Routledge and Sons, nd.). Wood, 202. Wood, 209. Reginald Farrar, 59.

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76

You will outlive it in time’, she says. The leader of the bullies is Cyril Dare, whose attacks on the Halliburton boys stem from his claim that they are not ‘gentlemen’. What constitutes a gentleman is explored at length (if not in depth) through the tale. Mrs Wood’s thesis is that a moneyed lifestyle is no guarantee of gentlemanliness, nor does its absence imply preclusion – a theme so popular amongst contemporary novelists it nearly forms a discrete genre. The chivalric codes of Scott and Digby, and the Tennysonian angst of the Idylls of the King, provide a yardstick for the measuring of the modern knight. Digby argues that one must have qualities of honour, duty and integrity as well as being nobly born. Books like Donovan and John Halifax, Gentleman, and Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles argue that honour, duty and integrity are the only true determinants of gentility; nor are impoverishment, lowly beginnings, or engagement in trade any impediment to the man who values the standing of the office. What these novelists’ heroes have in common is a desire to educate themselves, a courtesy and respect for others, particularly women, and honesty and integrity in their dealings in trade. These are themes that Carlyle endorses, particularly in Past and Present, where he says, ‘All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble’.77 As Mrs Halliburton says: ‘No work in itself brings disgrace, be it carrying abroad parcels, or sweeping out a shop. So long as we retain our refinement of speech, of manner, our courteous conduct to one another, we shall still be gentlepeople.’78 It is pertinent to question what Mrs Halliburton meant by ‘gentlepeople’. Is her gentility synonymous with chivalry, or one aspect of it? For Digby, Scott and Tennyson, gentility is part and parcel of the chivalric code, which also encompasses duty to God, to one’s country, to one’s family. To be a gentleman implied the possession of all these qualities in equal degree and a failure on any count disqualified. The question is turned on its head by the Dares’ view of gentlemanliness, which betrays every aspect of the chivalric code; the sons are deceitful, inconsiderate, bad-tempered, profligate, arrogant, sexually incontinent and bullying. As Mrs Dare says: ‘They may be a little wild; but it is a common failing of those of their age and condition. Their faults are only those of youth and uncurbed spirits … If Cyril is a little wild, it is a gentlemanly failing.’79 In the Dares’ belief system, the qualification for gentility is money to spend, which gives them licence to betray every other principle. The Dares embody the antithesis of the chivalric code. Like Digby, Mrs Halliburton advances duty with great vigour, particularly duty to God, but this seems part of a code that is separate from gentility. For Mrs Halliburton, to be God-fearing is demanded of everyone; it is part of the discipline of life that William brings to Honey Fields. By example, and without preaching, this is the gospel he advances in his evening institute. But her enthusiasm for genteel behaviour is separate from her zeal for religious conviction. Mrs Halliburton’s gentility leads not to chivalry, but to a code of ethics that differentiates the middle from the working classes. Mrs Halliburton sees her family’s gentility defined by their manners, but the bulk of her moral premises lie within a Christian construct. Her belief in a personal 76 77 78 79

Wood, 153. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, 153. Wood, 129. Wood, 343.

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God who cares about the individual who puts his trust in Him, supports her through every trouble, and underpins her theories of child care: When they did anything wrong – all children will, or they are not children – she would take the offender to her alone. There would be no scolding, but in a grave, calm, loving voice she would say, ‘Was this right? Did you forget that you were doing wrong and would grieve me? Did you forget that you were offending God?’80

The theology of this points to much common ground with Farrar, as expressed in Rose’s precepts, laid out in his letter to Eric, that knowing what God requires, when faced with evil, equips one to resist its temptation: The true preparation for life, the true basis of a manly character is not to have been ignorant of evil, but to have known it and avoided it; not to have been sheltered from temptation, but to have passed through it and overcome it by God’s help.81

And Mrs Halliburton’s preparation of her daughter to meet death with an easy heart fits broadly with Hughes’ and Farrar’s belief that our destiny does not end with the grave. There are further notable similarities. While one might struggle to come up with evidence that Mrs Wood was part of the powerful coterie whose principles of Christian Socialism led them to form the Working Men’s College, William Halliburton’s evening institute is based on the same altruistic principles of volunteer leadership. His father, before he was beset by his health problems, had been a professor at King’s College, so it should perhaps come as no surprise that his son should establish an improving nightschool in the slums of Helstonleigh on Maurician principles. As in its illustrious model, the members share responsibility for its continuance and development. The benefits fall not only to the community, but even to Henry Ashleigh, who finds meaningful occupation to fill his empty life. Its purpose is to counter ‘waste, discomfort and evil’,82 with ‘books and rational conversation’.83 However, it is clear that while Mrs Wood welcomes ‘the social improvements of an advancing and thinking age’,84 she has no ambition for her working-class creation to rise through education and leave Honeyfield. Cleaner houses, temperance, well-disciplined children (‘who do not vandalise gardens because they are trusted not to’85), better hygiene, ventilation and drainage – these are the limits of the improvements she aspires to for them. And her theology owes more to Calvinism than Farrar’s and Hughes’. Mrs Halliburton’s favourite text is the parable of the talents. For those who are saved, like Mrs Halliburton’s sons, the rewards come here on earth. A vicar with a living of £400 a year, a barrister boasting that he earns £1000 a year and the eldest the partner of the owner of the largest factory in town, are not young men waiting to get their rewards in Heaven, while when the Dares lose their material wealth, there is no suggestion that they may ultimately find redemption. There is no Eternal Hope in Helstonleigh. 80 81 82 83 84 85

Wood, 201. F.W. Farrar, 196. Wood, 254. Wood, 256. Wood, 449. Wood, 456.

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In the telling of her story, Mrs Wood’s theories of raising sons to responsible manhood have some air of radical challenge to the stereotype. Treating your sons as your companions is the antithesis of the saw that children should be seen and not heard. Have high expectations of their behaviour and morality, instil them with principles of duty and honesty and teach them to trust the Lord, for the message in Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles is that the Lord helps those who help themselves. Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles is a book written by a woman, with a message targeting women bringing up sons. Two Years Ago, by Charles Kingsley, published in 1857, and another best-seller of its time, raises the inverse proposition; this is a book written by a man, about men, for men. Kingsley gives us a novel peppered with literary allusion, particularly poetic allusion, which adds a layer of irony to his parody of the effeminate lifestyle and outlook of Elsley Vavasour. The authorial voice quotes Shelley, Chaucer, Spencer’s Faerie Queene, Byron and quantities of Tennyson. Mrs Heale is said to have ‘a novel-bewildered brain’,86 but the evidence of the text is that it is men who read novels. Tom Thurnall refers to The Pickwick Papers,87 Charlotte Bronte’s novels (referred to as Currer Bell’s88) and Balzac.89 Frank Headley’s view of a wife’s role is modelled on Paget’s The Owlet of Owlstone Edge;90 Mellot discusses Emerson and Melville with Valentia and Frank Headley91 and wishes to bowdlerise The Fool of Quality for Valentia (Grace having read the original, protected from its depraving influence by her virtue92). Scoutbush teases his sister by calling her Baby Blake, ‘after that dreadful girl in Lever’s novel’.93 One chapter is entitled ‘The Broad Stone of Honour’. This is not just a book about men, it is a book about men who read widely and who also read fiction. It is a book about a man’s life and how he should lead it. It has an explicit didactic purpose, which draws heavily on the Christian Socialist principles of Maurice’s followers; it owes much to Carlyle’s precepts of the manliness of physical exertion, which are tempered by a Coleridgean fascination with the natural sciences. Two Years Ago is the story of Tom Thurnall, a son of Esau if ever there was one, who has everything a man should have – determination, application, humour, courage, resilience, compassion, integrity – except the grace of God, which he finally achieves when he confronts his own limitations in a Turkish prison; his epiphany is completed when he returns home to marry Grace Harvey, who has been trying to show him God’s grace for 400 pages. Tom Thurnall has been thought to be modelled

86

Kingsley, Two Years, 119. Kingsley, Two Years, 154. 88 Kingsley, Two Years, 124. 89 Kingsley, Two Years, 387. 90 Kingsley, Two Years, 200. 91 Kingsley, Two Years, 327. 92 Kingsley, Two Years, 260. This may be ironic. The Fool of Quality, by Henry Brooke, was published between 1766–1772. It was re-issued in 1859 and Kingsley wrote an enthusiastic preface for it. John Wesley had earlier edited it for his followers (see Oxford Companion to English Literature, 1946 edition). 93 Kingsley, Two Years, 183. 87

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on Kingsley’s well-travelled and amateur-naturalist doctor brother George; he may also have drawn on the life of William Cotton Oswell (1818–1893), who was at Rugby with Tom Hughes, though a few years ahead of him. At school Oswell was tall, athletic, good-looking, remembered for the stand he took against bullying. He started his career in India and re-surfaced some years later in Africa. His exploits with Livingstone earned him the sobriquet ‘The Nimrod of South Africa’. He was an accomplished linguist. He studied medicine and it was reported that he once single-handedly rescued an entire tribe from starvation. The French geographical society awarded him their gold medal. He returned to England in time to answer his country’s call in the Crimea, where he volunteered to go behind enemy lines with Secret Service money for Lord Raglan. On his return, he married and spent the rest of his life serving the community around Tunbridge Wells.95 Tom Thurnall is the embodiment of ‘Muscular Christianity’, a phrase probably coined by T.C. Sanders in his review of Two Years Ago, in The Saturday Review.96 He describes Kingsley’s ideal as ‘a man who fears God, and can walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours – who, in the language which Mr Kingsley has made popular, breathes God’s free air on God’s rich earth, and at the same time can hit a woodcock, doctor a horse, and twist a poker round his fingers’. While this parody of Kingsley’s theology contains much truth, it obscures the subtleties of Kingsley’s attempt to work his theological views into the framework of a novel. Kingsley found his doctrinal home at the higher end of the Anglican rite and the manner in which Frank Headley worships reflects Kingsley’s own practices. Much of Frank Headley’s theological stance is a reflection of Kingsley’s view. Kingsley shared Maurice’s belief in a benevolent and forgiving God, and all these views weave through his novel. The ascetic Frank Headley’s fastings, mortification of the flesh and celibacy, ‘the curate’s Puseyism’, which isolate him from his congregation, are moderated by Tom Thurnall’s prescription of hearty physical exercise, which promptly actuates his attraction to Valentia and his recognition of the place in his life for the love of a woman. As already noted, Kingsley believed that physical pleasure of the body was a God-given gift and it behoved man to enjoy it;97 when Headley can acknowledge his carnality, he is able to relate to his parishioners and fill his pews. At the other end of the doctrinal divide is Kingsley’s abhorrence of the Evangelical belief in an angry and vindictive deity, who would condemn all but the chosen few to hell-fire and those who see disease here on earth as a punishment for sin. His attack on the preaching that the cholera in Aberalva is a divine punishment, and that all those not destined for salvation will die in this modern plague, is part denunciation of their belief and part advancement of Kingsley’s scientific learning about the nature

94

Vance, 91, drawing on Susan Chitty, 182, and G.H. Kimpley, Notes on Sport and Travel (1900). 95 Hughes, Manliness of Christ. The 1894 Macmillan edition contains the texts of four addresses to Clifton College and Rugby. The final one, delivered at Rugby on 24 June 1894 is a fine eulogy of an old boy, William Cotton Oswell. 96 T.C. Sanders, ‘Two Years Ago’, The Saturday Review, 21 Feb 1857, 176–7. 97 Chitty, 82 particularly.

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of cholera. Edwin Chadwick, the public health and sanitary reformer, was a regular visitor to Kingsley’s Eversleigh Rectory.98 Tom Thurnall, who could certainly walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours if any man could, embodies Kingsley’s own incorporation of Coleridgean theology with Carlylean robustness. Kingsley’s ‘delight in physical manliness’ shines out every time he describes Tom, ... of that bull-terrier type so common in England; sturdy, and yet not coarse, middle-sized, deepchested, broad-shouldered; with small well-knit hands and feet, large jaw, bright gray eyes, crisp brown hair, a heavy projecting brow, his face full of shrewdness and good nature.99

He preaches his gospel of rationalism through Aberalva, promising new life to those who will turn to physical exercise, and enjoy the pleasures of a healthy physique. It is stressed that Tom has not yet turned to God: not that we are to assume he is entirely Godless: But of godliness in its true sense, – of belief that any being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life – that it was worthwhile asking that Being’s advice, or that any advice would be given if asked for; ... Tom was as ignorant as thousands of respectable people who go to Church every Sunday ... 100

This does not prevent Tom from arguing in fine Maurician form against the concept of eternal damnation: But when a preacher tells his people in one breath of a God who so loves them that He gave his own Son to save them, and in the next, that the same God so hates men that he will cast nine-tenths of them into hopeless torture for ever (and if that is not hating, I don’t know what is) ...101

Tom first recognises Grace’s unique skill in comforting the dying, in helping them leave this life with an easy heart, when he meets her at the bedside of a farmer’s young consumptive daughter, helping her accept her pain and wait patiently for death and the life to come. By the time the cholera epidemic arrives, he knows that dying people need her skills to help them die peacefully as much as those who can recover need his medical skills. Yet Tom resists the message that Grace holds, and struggles to focus his mind on the living and today. As Willis dies, taking the sacrament, with Grace kneeling at his side, Tom seems to be on the verge of opening his heart to Christ at last, only to be hurried back to present urgency by the recognition that Frank Headley is now sick with cholera.102 Not till he is brought face to face with the shortcomings of his secular philosophy in a Crimean prison does he open his soul to God’s grace. On his return, in a moving tableau that replicates the aged Isaac feeling for the hair of his elder son, his father Dr Thurnall says: ‘My son! my son! Let me 98 99 100 101 102

Vance, 92. Kingsley, Two Years, 20. Kingsley, Two Years, 35. Kingsley, Two Years, 224. Kingsley, Two Years, 298–9.

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feel whether thou be my very son Esau or not!’, at once affirming Esau’s claim to his rightful inheritance and the fitness of the sons of Esau to be the sons of God. Tom’s prescription for happiness in this world through maximising physical fitness is measured first against Frank Headley, the high-church curate having problems keeping a congregation. It is made clear early on that Frank’s ministry is fired by the grace of God, the one quality so lacking in Tom, ‘Frank Headley was a good man in every sense of the word’.104 His High Anglicanism, in spite of the cavills about his Puseyism, is part of his courage: ‘For there are High Churchmen there [in Bethnal Green, Headley’s former parish] who are an honour to England.’105 The authorial voice addresses Tom: You will find some day, Thomas Thurnall, that, granting you to be at one pole of the English character and Frank Headley at the other, he is as good an Englishman as you, and can teach you more than you can him.106

This last extract, and the lengthy paragraph which precedes it, is striking in several ways. It contains powerful chauvinism. But the chauvinism attaches not to Tom’s bull-terrier physique so admired earlier, but to Frank’s moral superiority, his ‘inner life of doubts, struggles, prayers, self-reproaches, noble hunger after an ideal of moral excellence’.107 This is a more significant reflection of the state of his soul than ‘his bowings and his crossings, and his chantings’.108 His preference for the rites of Anglo-Catholicism is but a veneer, and his failing is his slowness to recognise the solid oak underneath that unites him with the common man. Under Tom’s guidance this physical weakling, ‘all but consumptive’,109 adds muscular strength to his moral strength. By following Tom’s advice on physical exercise and practical ways to relate to his parishioners, he comes through the cholera epidemic as a hero, but one who never loses his humility, as he berates himself for only lately recognising that meeting his fellow men as human beings is more important than his church ritual: ‘And now, the first time that I forget my own rules, the first time that I forget almost that I am a priest at all! that moment they acknowledge me as a priest, as a Christian.’110 Kingsley’s attack on Puseyite leanings to celibacy, and his view of its remedy, are, like Tom, down-to-earth and practical, if a little simplistic. Priests should all feel the love of a good woman and marry – if only to understand more fully the lives of their parishioners.111 Frank’s discovery of the wisdom of this advice, and its effect on him, is set against other relationships between men and women. Kingsley explores the obstacles that stand between a loving communion and it is significant that Frank

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Kingsley, Two Years, 465. Kingsley, Two Years, 46. Kingsley, Two Years, 47. Kingsley, Two Years, 88. Kingsley, Two Years, 87. Kingsley, Two Years, 40–41. Kingsley, Two Years, 46. Kingsley, Two Years, 296. Kingsley, Two Years, 104.

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Headley’s wooing and winning of Valentia St. Just is Kingsley’s template for good relationships between the sexes. The shy, ascetic, monkish Frank, having been unable to conquer his sexual attraction to Valentia (‘he fasted, he wept, he prayed’112), confesses his delight in her company. He requests a token, a memento, to take with him through the cholera epidemic. Bibliomancy takes a hand. A book of Tennyson’s, The Princess, falls open at an appropriately indicative passage. She gives him her ring, a worldly talisman that acquires the status of relic as he makes the sign of the cross with it in accepting it: ‘And so did Frank Headley get what he wanted; by that plain earnest simplicity, which has more power than all the most cunning wiles of the most experienced rake.’113 The strength of Frank’s physical attraction to her has sacramental power for Valencia, who turns from her frivolous ways to a life of helping others, particularly her sister and the children. When Frank comes to convalesce at Beddgelert, seemingly having overcome his passion, it is she whose feelings show. He observes her reformed behaviour and confesses he has never conquered his passion. They fiercely argue who is the less worthy of the other’s love; she tries to persuade him not to go to war; he declares that that would betray his duty to God. With this evidence of his superior manliness, they plight their troth and walk home, hand in hand, in a passage pulsating with the displacement of sexual passion into landscape. The contrasting manhoods of Tom and Frank are the yardsticks by which Elsley Vavasour the poet, otherwise John Briggs, and Trebooze, a local landowner, are measured and found wanting. Elsley Vavasour is thought to have been modelled on Philip James Bailey (1816–1902), a poet of considerable verbosity, regularly credited with being the founder of the ‘Spasmodic’ school of poetry.114 These poets were noted for celebrating great feats of human endeavour, but which they only experienced vicariously. This certainly has clear reverberations for Elsley, whose whole life is based on sham; he starts life as John Briggs, the incompetent apothecary assistant to Tom Thurnall’s father. He runs away to London, and insinuates himself into metropolitan salon life, where he ultimately makes a name for himself with his poetry. He elopes with a young woman of slender means and is living in Aberalva, in a house charitably lent by his brother-in-law, when Tom is shipwrecked off that coast. Elsley determines to write a poem about the storm and the disaster and, even as Tom is being hauled out of the sea, more dead than alive, is standing on the shore line, getting in the way of the rescue effort. This echoes with Carlyle’s pronouncement on the poet as hero: ‘The poet who could merely sit on a chair and compose stanzas would never make a stanza worth much. He couldn’t sing the Heroic Warrior unless he himself were at least a Heroic Warrior too’.115 Kingsley is at pains to construct him as a poet of some talent: ‘is he the wiser and stronger man for being a poet at all, and a genius?’,116 but also as one who has betrayed his gifts through degeneracy. He is granted to be handsome ‘His eye, which was very large, 112 113 114 115 116

Kingsley, Two Years, 200. Kingsley, Two Years, 163. Vance, 92. Carlyle, On Heroes, 90. Kingsley, Two Years, 55.

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dark and beautiful, with heavy lids and long lashes, had that dreamy look so common among men of the poetic temperament’,117 though his sedentary life gives him spots as a teenager.118 However, while Frank’s undeveloped physique is no criticism of his manliness, Elsley is regularly described as less than a man: ‘Nasty, effeminate, un-English foppery’;119 the ‘un-English’ is perhaps the greatest insult, implying that foreign equals inferior manhood: ‘He was vain, capricious, over-sensitive, craving for admiration and distinction’,120 ‘a self-indulgent, unmethodical person, whose illtemper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own effeminacy’.121 Tom gives him his usual prescription of exercise and a healthy diet. He suggests he takes long walks with Frank Headley. But while such medicine heals the body, Elsley’s problem is a sickness of the soul. He emphatically refuses to join Headley’s congregation. His moral decline is inevitable. He mistakes Major Campbell’s chivalric worship of Lucia for evidence of his wife’s infidelity. He turns to laudanum to deaden his spiritual pain and creeps back to his roots in Whitbury, his childhood home, to die. His death bed is a fine Mauricean set piece, with his all-forgiving wife at his side, and Mark Armsworth commending to God the soul of Elsley Vavasour, with Tom kneeling at the bedside, a tableau that promises Eternal Hope, the belief that there is the opportunity beyond death to repair spiritual health. Elsley Vavasour’s ultimate death through the ravages of laudanum highlights the limitation of Tom’s prescription of healthy exercise as the universal panacea. He can heal the body but not the soul. Tom Thurnall, before he turns to Christ, exemplifies that Muscular Christianity demands more than the celebration of the healthy body. His mixture of common-sense and homespun philosophy is more effective with Trebooze, the ‘crapulocomatose’ dandy squire: ‘without an object save that of gratifying his animal passions’.122 His lack of manly models of behaviour (‘never sent to school, or college, or into the army’123) excuses his worst excesses and points Tom to his remedy: he should join the militia, where he will find more appropriate models of male behaviour. A bad attack of delirium tremens frightens him into sobriety and he follows Tom’s advice, and grows into, if not a pillar of society, at least a man with self-respect. It is intriguing that Kingsley says of his four-year-old son ‘there was on him the curse of his father’s sins’.124 Tom counsels Mrs Trebooze that only her care and influence will ensure that he grows to adulthood with any health, ‘I can only give you palliatives’. This seems to be hinting at congenital degenerative disease. If indeed Trebooze has got syphilis, and has passed it to his wife and son, Tom and contemporary medicine would have little to offer.125 117

Kingsley, Two Years, 20. Kingsley, Two Years, 20. 119 Kingsley, Two Years, 31. 120 Kingsley, Two Years, 53. 121 Kingsley, Two Years, 122. 122 Kingsley, Two Years, 117. 123 Kingsley, Two Years, 117. 124 Kingsley, Two Years, 125. 125 The possibility for obfuscation in the symptoms of alcohol abuse and syphilis is explored in chapter 4. 118

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Trebooze attempts to assault Grace as she walks home through a wood on a summer afternoon, confirming his reputation as ‘a drunken profligate blackguard’. She is rescued by Tom. The implications for Tom’s behaviour when he forces his sexual attentions on her later the same afternoon suggest something more ambivalent and ambiguous in Tom’s manner of relating to women. It is a serious limitation that all the women in Kingsley’s scheme are presented as victims. Indeed, Kingsley regularly describes woman’s taste for the position: ‘that strange woman’s pleasure in martyrdom, the secret pride of suffering unjustly’126 and: ‘there is a secret feeling in woman’s heart that she is in her wrong place; that it is she who ought to worship the man, and not the man her.’127 Lucia is a victim of Elsley’s vanity; Valentia is a victim of her class’s shallowness and frivolity. Mrs Trebooze is a victim of her husband’s drinking and animal passions. Grace is the victim of Tom’s suspicion and lack of faith. Maria is the victim of her birth as a slave. Even the foolish Heale women are presented as victims of their prosperity which just lifts them out of the necessity of having to have purposeful activity. Few of the men have mothers alive. Frank’s mother is a powerful non-appearer – having told her he wishes to volunteer for service in the Crimea, and obtained her sanction, he cannot withdraw, no matter what Valentia’s wishes are.128 Of Tom’s mother there is never a word. His father would seem to have brought up his three sons entirely single-handedly. This is a world with no female mentors to teach men how to relate to women, or women how to relate to men. All instruction, all advice, stems from men. However, the absence of pertinent secular advice is only half of the explanation for Tom’s poor empathy for Grace that afternoon. Tom’s adventures before he is cast up on the beach at Aberalva construct him as an entire man, facing physical danger and death with courage, using his intelligence and skills for the betterment of whatever community he finds himself in. Kingsley makes it clear that in living life to the full, Tom is also sexually experienced: ‘He had his passions, his intrigues, in past years, and prided himself, – few men more – on understanding women.’129 Kingsley seems almost morally neutral in giving us this information about Tom, but a closer examination of what we are told of Tom and Grace’s developing relationship, and particularly the commentary on the episode in the wood, integrates Tom’s behaviour with Kingsley’s theological thesis. The text has already told us that they both feel powerfully attracted to each other. Grace identifies her feelings for Tom as love: ‘She loved that man intensely, utterly. She did not seek to deny it to herself.’130 Tom recognises the stirrings in his loins as something different from anything he has felt in his past: ‘a feeling of chivalrous awe and admiration, which no other woman had ever called up.’131 However, with his manhood unperfected as yet because of his failure to acknowledge the grace of God, his animal spirits are unconsecrated; the text says, ‘[the devil] entered into the heart of 126 127 128 129 130 131

Kingsley, Two Years, 167. Kingsley, Two Years, 196. Kingsley, Two Years, 342. Kingsley, Two Years, 77. Kingsley, Two Years, 220. Kingsley, Two Years, 77.

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Tom Thurnall’. At the point where Tom is forcing his kisses on Grace, he is morally as corrupt as Trebooze. Sexual drive and sexual pleasure, so celebrated by Kingsley as part of God’s great gift to man, if unhallowed by spiritual belief are reduced to mere animal spirits, bestiality. Kingsley invites us to contrast Tom’s desire for Grace with Frank’s sanctified passion for Valentia. A passage which might be interpreted as Trebooze behaving as a wicked sinner through and through, while our hero gives in to temptation because his guardian angel’s attention is momentarily distracted (for a little later, ‘the devil came and tempted him once more: but this time it was in vain. Tom’s better angel had returned’133), is thus integrated into the Kingsleyan creed. Trollope regularly constructs heroes that have much in common with Tom Thurnall, with his animal good spirits, his comely frame, and his secularity, and with a goodly layer of experience of the ways of the world. Like so many of Trollope’s heroes he too gains stature as a man by his pleasure in playing with children. As Mark Armsworth says, ‘the boy’s heart cannot be in the wrong place while he is so fond of little children’.134 But the similarity goes no deeper. Evidence of Trollope’s young men giving in to red-blooded passion is never interpreted as the temptation of the devil and, while Trollope’s novels show him to be caught up in the same clerical debates as Hughes, Farrar, Wood and Kingsley, his metonymic style frames this discourse in a much more secular fashion. Instead of explicit debate, Archdeacon Grantly’s position on rite and doctrine is inferred from his enthusiasm for land, tradition and fox hunting, views that place him firmly in that old High Church which held sway before Keble and Newman began their debate. Each of these four books, published in the late 1850s and early 1860s, as Trollope’s reputation gained its ascendancy, advances an overt treatise of masculinity. In perceiving that Trollope, like Hughes, Farrar, Wood and Kingsley, also writes novels where manliness is an express theme, we acknowledge that he writes within a common and popular genre. However, by examining the manner in which he reveals the inner world of his men, followed by a close examination of the specific masculinities he advances, I hope to demonstrate that Trollope is radically different from those of his contemporaries who were also concerned to present their readership with a thesis of manly behaviour. On the surface, Trollope’s men function in the world of men, in their vestries, in their offices, in their ministries and on their estates. On the surface, they endorse a code of ethics based on chivalric honesty and integrity, clearly proscribing the immorality of the market place, while acknowledging that it is hard to avoid. His portrayal of men living in a man’s world has been constructed as evidence of a masculinist text that excludes women, but I intend to demonstrate that beneath this veneer of conventional allocation of gendered roles, Trollope subverts many of our assumptions about the Victorian male.

132 133 134

Kingsley, Two Years, 226. Kingsley, Two Years, 228. Kingsley, Two Years, 25.

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Chapter 3

Telling Masculinities He went on expounding to me his theories, according to which the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him author of his fictions. (Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller)1 He never played with a subject, never juggled with the sympathies or credulity of his reader, was never in the least paradoxical or mystifying. (Henry James, ‘Anthony Trollope’)2

In these quotations, both Calvino and James are commenting on narrative technique, and both of them speak as practitioners as well as theorists. Both of them understand the complexities of narrative voice and know that its manipulation is intrinsic to the creative process of fiction. An examination of James’s pronouncement, so belittling to Trollope’s understanding of the process, leads into a particularly fertile field for the study of Trollope’s masculinities, since it is in the exercise of those very qualities which James denies to him that we can detect Trollope’s methods of wrapping his personal doctrine inside an outer shell of conventional masculine behaviour, so that while a surface layer presents men in masculinist dialogue with other men, it peels away to reveal layers where men are in touch with their feelings, comfortable and effective in the domestic sphere. Trollope took pains in the mastery of this art, as we can discover by examining and comparing the manipulation of narrative voice in his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and in Rachel Ray, written at the height of his popularity and powers in 1863. For while James was formulating his aesthetic of high modernism, Trollope was experimenting with avant-garde narrative techniques that lead directly to the post-modernism of Calvino. James served an apprenticeship as a journalist while he established his career as a novelist and his reputation as the father of literary criticism. As a greenhorn reviewer for The Nation,3 an American periodical dedicated to advancing the cause of American fiction and criticism at the expense of literature from Britain, he had been famously scathing about many nineteenth-century novelists whose work is well-regarded; for instance, of Dickens he wrote: ‘Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr Dickens’ works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration.’4 Trollope had to contend with a more brutal onslaught than most. Miss 1

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Turin, 1981), trans. William Weaver (London: Minerva Press, 1992) 180. 2 Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism ed. Roger Gard (London: Penguin Books, 1987) 176, 1st published as ‘Anthony Trollope’, Century Magazine, July 1883. 3 Nation (New York: Nation Associates. 1st published July 6, 1865). 4 Nation, 21 December 1865, i. 786–7 (James, 49).

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MacKenzie was ‘the vulgarisation of experience’.5 Of Can You Forgive Her? he remarked that the more pertinent question would be Can You Remember Her?6 His demolition of The Belton Estate was comprehensive. Its one virtue was that it was comparatively short. Will Belton, while acknowledged to be ‘realistic’, in the flesh would bore us after half an hour in his company. James built up to a final blitz: ‘The Belton Estate’ is a stupid book; and in a much deeper sense than that of being simply dull, for a dull book is always a book which might have been lively. A dull book is a failure. Trollope’s story is stupid and a success. It is essentially, organically, consistently stupid; stupid in direct proportion to its strength ... Mr Trollope is a good observer; but he is literally nothing else ... That minds like his should exist, and exist in plenty, is neither to be wondered at nor to be deplored; but that such a mind as his should devote itself to writing novels, and that these novels should be successful, appears to us an extraordinary fact.7

James was 22 when he wrote these reviews and his penchant for mocking abasement never left him. His post-obit appreciation of Trollope in 1883, though slightly more commendatory in tone, passed the withering judgement on Trollope’s technique quoted above, that he never played with a subject, never juggled with the sympathies or the credulity of the reader, was never the least paradoxical or mystifying. What is at issue here is an early Jamesian attempt to theorise a view of realism, and as we saw in the Introduction, this is a concept that many of the commentators of the day, particularly those who reviewed Trollope’s novels, grappled with. Realism, its manifestations, and how its examination is articulated, is a massive field today and these paragraphs are only intended to establish enough of the debate to facilitate the exploration of Trollope’s narratology. It must first be acknowledged that there can be no clear summarising of James’s position on the role of ‘realism’ and its part in narrative technique, since his views developed and changed over the years of his writing; this is particularly pertinent to the expression of his views about Trollope. Nearly 50 years separate the embryonic theories of realism in his early reviews of Trollope’s novels and his disenchantment at the state of the art in The New Novel of 1914.8 The articulations of realism that James uses to measure Trollope’s novels for the nearly 20 years from the early reviews of the novels in the 1860s when Trollope was in his prime, until the post-obit appraisal of 1883, encompass disparate and contradictory elements. In his early reviews, while he concedes that plots like that in The Belton Estate and characters like Will Belton do accurately reflect ‘reality’, he dismisses them for being ‘as dull as a Dutch landscape’.9 Will Belton is true-tolife, but boring: not a fitting model for James’s premise of high art. As he says: ‘Mr Trollope is a good observer, but he is literally nothing else.’ James’s ‘realism’ is an elusive commodity; Trollope does have ‘realism’, but not one which suits James, who covertly insinuates an aesthetic of a superior ‘realism’.10 5 6 7 8 9 10

Nation, 13 July 1865, i. 51–2 (Smalley, 233–7). Nation, 28 September 1865, i. 409–10 (Smalley, 249–53). Nation, 4 January 1866, ii. 21–2 (Smalley, 254–8). TLS, 19 March and 2 April, 1914 (James, 595–614). Nation, 4 January, 1866, ii. 21–2 (Smalley, 255). This is, of course, a concept endorsed by other critics aspiring to high art. See intro, 6.

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Twenty years later in his post-obit appraisal, James is still troubled by Trollope’s realism, which he now says is marred by his ‘suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was, after all, a make believe’;11 Trollope’s failing is, in Jamesian terms, a paradox; his constant reminders that he is making up a story that so betray James’s concept of ‘realism’ are in fact evidence that he did indeed ‘juggle with the sympathies [and] credibility of his reader’. And the implication that Trollope lacks artistry in his representations of ‘realism’ hangs around like an unpleasant odour. His novels are ‘full of the echoes of voices which are not the voice of the muse’.12 What eludes James so completely is that Trollope creates tension between reality and mimetic representation. In Barchester Towers, we read: But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr Slope or Bertie Stanhope. And here, perhaps, it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his views on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes so far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage … Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of the dupe is never dignified.13

This is Trollope writing metafiction. His novels have narrators talking about the narrating of stories. They are conscious manipulations of narrative structure, selfparodies that anticipate Calvino by a century. Trollope’s appreciation of a higher ‘realism’ that openly acknowledges a writer sitting down to write and a reader picking up the book to read makes James’s ‘realism’ in his writings about Trollope seem naïve and simplistic. James continued to the end to wrestle with the contradictions of making believe that a make-believe was a representation of ‘reality’, paradoxes that made him so uncomfortable with Trollope’s authorial voices intervening and engaging in a dialogue with his narrative voices and with his reader. While his premise of the high moral purpose of the novelist, and that both his subject matter and his characters should reflect this (the undoing of Will Belton as fitting material for a novel) lost its cachet in the late twentieth century, his view that the novelist should interpret and illuminate the ‘truth’, rather than passively reflect or mirror actuality, what might be called ‘simple mimetic accuracy’ in Aristotelian terms, was developed into an entire branch of the critical theorising of the twentieth century. James’s formulations of the superiority of this ‘showing’ over ‘telling’ were enthusiastically taken up by Percy Lubbock, whose The Craft of Fiction of 1926 attempts to offer the yardstick by which to measure all fiction. While posterity has tended to view his theory of telling and showing as rigid and excluding, it influenced the manner in which an entire generation approached novel theory. The Craft of Fiction swallows whole James’s premise that an explicit authorial ‘I’ diminishes 11 12 13

1st published Century Magazine, July, 1883, 385–95 (James, 177). James, 179. Barchester Towers vol. 1, 143–4.

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the illusion of real life and that novels with such an intruder are, ipso facto, inferior. Many novelists fail at this hurdle, most notably Thackeray (this being the 1920s, no critic who wished to be taken seriously would even mention Trollope): ‘[Thackeray] flourishes the fact that the point of view is his own, not to be confounded with that of anybody in the book. And so his book, as one may say, is not complete in itself, not really self-contained.’14 Lubbock analyses first The Ambassadors and then The Wings of the Dove to find his apogee of the novel. The face of Strether, he observes, is never turned to the reader. In James’s ‘showing’, the art of dramatising the picture of somebody’s experience touches its limit. There is indeed no further for it to go.15 Lubbock was not alone in maintaining this rarefied view of what might qualify a writer for the golden crown of novelist. Ford Madox Ford maintained that ‘The novelist must not, by taking sides, exhibit his preferences. He has ... to render and not to tell’.16 While Lubbock and Ford were rarifying James’s formulations of the Western European aesthetic of high modernism, the Russian Formalist school, led by Victor Shklovsky, with his Art as Technique of 1917,17 was engaged in a much more openended exploration of similar issues. Mikhail Bakhtin’s work through the 1920s explores the concept of textual voice, which he calls polyphony, recognising and separating out existent author, authorial voice and narrative voice. He seeks to find a new way to describe how Dostoevsky’s novels operate, a study that would be identified as narratology in the second half of the twentieth century. His culminating work, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in 1962,18 but drawing together the strands from his earlier work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, of 1929, brings us closer to unravelling Trollope’s technique. He identifies a ‘plurality of independent and merged voices as consciousnesses, and the genuine polyphony of fullvalued voices’ as characterising Dostoevsky’s work. This variety and plurality of discourses or voices he called ‘heteroglossia’. In his examination of Dostoevsky’s manipulation of projected authorial voice, narrator’s voice and internalised voices, he says: ‘Dostoevsky created not voiceless slaves, but free people who are capable of standing beside their creator, of disagreeing with him, and even rebelling against him.’19 This bears a remarkable likeness to Trollope’s own account of his methods in An Autobiography, where he says of the novelist’s creations: ‘They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them, and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them.’20 14

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926) 115. Lubbock, 165–71. 16 Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (London: Constable, 1930) 121. Quoted Booth, 25. 17 Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, Formalist Criticism: Four Essays trans. and intro. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb. 1965), reprinted David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), 16–30. 18 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963 trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973). 19 Bakhtin, 4. 20 An Autobiography, 233. 15

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These dialogic themes are explored at length by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction, first written in 1961, and revised in 1983. He gives a language and a framework to explore how all novels are constructed. He begins by exposing in his first chapter the limitations of narrow qualitative judgement on ‘telling and showing’; ‘telling’ is now posited as a valid and powerful narrative technique. Subsequent chapters expose other sham totems of novelistic theory, – ‘True novels must be realistic’ – ‘All authors should be subjective’ – ‘True art ignores the audience’. In exploring what is excluded by these shibboleths, Booth affirms the power of the observant reader and installs the author, every author, as the major protagonist in his own novel. The myriad ways this protagonist makes himself felt, the voices of this player and the dialogues between the voices (Bahktin’s ‘heteroglossia’) are uncovered on Booth’s lucid and accessible exploration of narrative technique. The importance of this narrator has long been recognised. Edward Dowden, in 1877, writing on George Eliot, said that, ‘the form that most persists in the mind after reading her novels is not any of the characters, but one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that second self who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them’. That second self is emphatically not the flesh and blood author. Dowden goes on: ‘Behind it lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism.’21 The invisibility of the historical author, and the visibility of the second self, are contrasted at length. As Booth says: ‘It is a curious fact that we have no terms either for this created “second self”, or for our relationship with him.’22 ‘Our relationship’ writes up the other significant protagonist in every text – the reader, a concept grasped and exploited by Trollope (and a hundred years later, by Calvino). ‘“Persona”, “mask”, and “narrator” are sometimes used, but they more commonly refer to the speaker in the work who is after all only one of the elements created by the implied author.’23 There are far more interesting distinctions to make about narrative than to proclaim it first-person or third-person: ‘perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator is dramatised in his own right, and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author’.24 It is also critical to recognise that even the most reticent narrators, the most undramatised, are nonetheless there, as ‘an experiencing mind whose views of the experience will come between us and the event’.25 Dramatised narrators equally come in many guises – sometimes observers, sometimes participants. The distance between the second self and the dramatised narrator, and the dialogue between them, opens up great opportunistic canyons to be filled with irony. The difference between the omniscience of authors, the omniscience of narrators and the ‘inconscience’ of narrative voices26 unravels Trollope’s 21 Kathleen Tillotson, in her inaugural lecture to the University of London, published as The Tale and the Teller (London, 1959), quotes Dowden writing about George Eliot in 1877 (Booth, 71). 22 Booth, 73. 23 Booth, 73. 24 Booth, 151. 25 Booth, 152. 26 Booth, 151–65. ‘inconscience’ is James’s coined term for the unreliability of narrators.

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story-telling technique. Trollope’s novels, studied chronologically, demonstrate his growing skills in his manipulation of narrative possibility and Booth’s dissections offer a way to examine the seamless and seemingly effortless performance of his most prolific years. The irritations that James expresses with Trollope’s insistently present narrator are robustly refuted by other influential and contemporary commentators. Leslie Stephen writes: We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to the reader. Why not? One main advantage of the novel is precisely that it leaves room for a freedom in such matters ... A child ... dislikes to have the illusion broken ... But the attempt to produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.27

Trollope clearly then writes books for grown-ups, who not only could cope with his reminders that what he is writing is a fiction, but who also might think that this was an indicator of maturity. Trollope did not immediately emerge as a fully-fledged, teasing, playful narrator, playing adult games with his reader, employing a sophisticated dialogue between explicit narrator and narrative voice. It was a craft he learnt and a study of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, his first novel, gives up, quite freely, some of the indicators to the development of his technique. Trollope started to write The Macdermots in 1843, when he was 28, and when he had been in Ireland for two years. Public acclaim was not granted him for another 12 years, with the publication of The Warden, his fourth novel, in 1855. While he was latterly famous for his speed of production in novel writing (and proud of it), The Macdermots took him two years to write. It was begun in September 1843 and Trollope vividly recalls its conception in An Autobiography.28 By the time he married in June 1844, he had written one of its three volumes. A letter from his mother in 1844, to his wife, in welcoming its discovery, suggests that the manuscript may well have been mislaid at some point in the first year of its life. Perhaps marriage focused the mind: certainly the next two volumes were completed between the finding of his manuscript in August 1844 and July 1845. The original manuscript has not survived; however, Hall has found no evidence that Trollope’s manner of composition changed over the years, and that it is most likely that having sat down with a clear idea of what he wished to write, he did not make major revisions to his text before committing it to the publishers.29 Trollope says in his Autobiography that, while he re-read his scripts to check his grammar (and his critics were fond of pointing out how many faults he missed), he tended not to re-work his text, considering that this led to a writing that sounded as though it was ‘on stilts’.30 Trollope opens The Macdermots of Ballycloran with an assumed author, his ‘second self’, telling about finding the ruins of the house in Ballycloran. The text advances a persona who is purposeful, a man about his commercial business, pragmatic about his lot, a man somewhat travelled in small country hotels, but who is nonetheless affected 27 28 29 30

Leslie Stephen, Hours in a Library, vol. 4, 150–52 (Booth, 471). An Autobiography, 70. N.J. Hall, Biography, 91–6. An Autobiography, 135 and 177–8; N.J. Hall, Biography, 92.

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by the ‘moss and lichens’ of a ruin, who has a soul that can be touched by romance, but not without some cynicism: ‘The usual story, thought I, of Connaught gentlemen, an extravagant landlord, reckless tenants, debt, embarrassment, despair and ruin.’31 Keen to learn the story behind the desolation, he is directed to the coach-driver, who takes him from Ballycloran that evening and who is installed as the narrator of the rest of the book. Robert Tracy, in his introduction to The Macdermots of Ballycloran, observes that pretending to be the transmitter of another’s narrative is a common device of novelists new to their trade.32 ‘ΜcC – ’s story runs thus’, the next chapter begins. It sets out the history of the Macdermots, their descent from the Irish Kings of antiquity, to the small-time gentry who in their prime built the house, the decay and ruin of the house mirroring the decay and ruin of the family. The narrator/coachdriver identifies himself in his account with regularly-occurring first-person-singular pronouns, and first-person-plural pronouns when he is addressing the second self of the first chapter: ‘by which I mean to signify’ and ‘In order that we may quickly rid ourselves of encumbrances’.33 However, when the narrative voice says: ‘I will not further violate the mysteries of Feemy’s wardrobe’, it may be that the ‘I’ has reverted from coach-driver to Trollope’s ‘second self’, since we have just been told ‘her chin was well-turned and short, with a dimple on it large enough for any finger Venus might put there’,34 dimples being a consistent code for female sexuality throughout Trollope’s work, commonly placed in the assumed author’s observations. The ‘I’ that ends the chapter: ‘I hope they have charms enough to make a further acquaintance not unacceptable’,35 could possibly still be the coach-driver, but is more credibly the second self of the authorial voice of the opening chapter. The manner of telling shifts significantly in chapter 3. Instead of hearing what happened in the past tense, we are placed as observers in the present, eavesdroppers on the breakfast conversation. The conversation breaks off while Larry Macdermot’s interior narrator accounts for the parlous state of the family’s finances from Larry’s point of view. Larry’s interior voice, however, is in the control of another narrator who can say, ‘but himself he never blamed; people never do; it is so much easier to blame others’.36 This other voice, worldly, slightly cynical, takes over the paragraph and re-tells the story, briefly and pithily from the Macdermots’ creditor’s view – the builder, ‘who had spent a long life of constant industry but doubtful honesty’ – then follows Larry’s son Thady to his day’s work cajoling rent out of destitute tenants, with the support of his right-hand man Pat Brady: ‘When I add to the above particulars that Pat was chief minister, adviser and confidential manager in young Macdermot’s affairs, I have said all that need be said.’37 It seems that this ‘I’ is an explicit narrator 31

Macdermots, 3. Macdermots, vii. 33 Macdermots, 10 and 9. 34 Macdermots, 11. 35 Macdermots, 12. 36 Macdermots, 15. Booth writes widely about what he terms ‘inside views’, and its implications for the reliability of the narrator. See particularly chapter 6 ‘Types of Narration’, 163–5, and chapter 9 ‘Sympathy Through Control of Inside Views’, 245. In his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady James explains his use of interiority (James, 493). 37 Macdermots, 17. 32

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concerned with telling, who has the last word over implicit narrative voices that show in a more subtle way what drives the protagonists and what that other major character, the reader, might make of it. As the book progresses, the interplay between the voices matures and a further narrative voice emerges, an English voice, that comments on and interprets the action. This first emerges at the opening of chapter 4. ‘Everyone knows that Ireland, for her sins, maintains two distinct, regularly organised bodies of police’; this narrator could be external, or still the coach-driver/story-teller. When he adds, ‘the duties of the one being to prevent the distillation of potheen or illicit whiskey, those of the other to check the riots caused by its consumption’,38 an element of the English rulers laughing at Irish peasants’ foibles has crept in. This is a significant narrative shift, since it marks the arrival of an ambivalent voice that equivocates over the justness of the Irish cause, the seeming impossibility of an Irish solution to Irish troubles and the right of the colonial administration (of which Trollope himself was part) to exercise power over the Irish. By the opening of chapter 5, the Irish narrator has all but disappeared: ‘The Rev. John McGrath was priest of the parish of Dromona at the time of which we write.’39 The ‘I’s and ‘We’s of the text are now regularly an English voice, an informing voice, interested in Irish political history. The ‘We’ who requests the reader’s company to Mohill in chapter 9 is a social anthropologist, examining the economy, the reasons for the poverty, declaiming against the neglect by those in power, the greed of the landlords, the dereliction of the duty to care for one’s fellow men. The narrator spends five pages examining the poverty of Mohill and the economic structure that denies the Irish poor any escape from their misery. Bald statement is interspersed with polemic. ‘Mohill is a country town standing on no high road’ is followed up by ‘destitute of anything to give it interest or prosperity – without business, without trade, and without society’. This narrator uses a present continuous tense to suggest problems that are without end: ‘The very scraughs of which the roofs are composed are germinating afresh and, sickly green with a new growth, look more like the tops of long-neglected dung heaps than the only protection over Christian beings from the winds of Heaven.’40 His unsectarian ‘Christian’ advances one of the themes of the novel, developed in the character of the priest, Father John, that these problems transcend the bickerings between Protestant and Catholic, illustrated by the politicisation of Ussher’s killing, making a crime of passion into political murder and making Thady’s death on the gallows yet another pointless waste of life. A long paragraph expands on ‘the dark misery within [which] hides itself in thick obscurity’, detailing the poverty and squalor of the peasant, his wife and family. The tone switches from the wretchedness of: ‘suckling a miserably dirty infant’, to the ironic anger of: ‘Squatting on the ground – from off the ground, like pigs, only much more poorly fed – his children eat the scanty earnings of his continual labour’, to the baldly abrupt: ‘And yet for this abode the man pays rent’, to the epigrammatic: ‘Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.’41 38 39 40 41

Macdermots, 25. Macdermots, 40. Macdermots, 125. Macdermots, 127.

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The present tense continues: ‘See that big house ... Here lives Mr Cassidy, the agent.’42 The social commentator interjects rhetorical questions about whose responsibility it might be to relieve this man’s (this hard-working man’s) poverty and exposes the sham of the absentee landlord, Lord Birmingham, drawing his rents out of Ireland, and nurturing his reputation for philanthropy by subscribing to every cause that has fashionable appeal, with his wealth from ‘squalid sources’. This is Trollope’s narrator ‘telling’, not ‘showing’, and in spite of Lubbock’s assessment of the superiority of ‘showing’, as Booth says, a ‘told’ passage can feel more fully realised than a scrupulously ‘shown’ passage. ‘But we are getting far from our story.’43 This is a significant ‘We’ rather than an ‘I’, which hints at an alliance between the narrator and his reader, and implies a reader now converted to the narrator’s cause. It feels powerful; it suggests a narrator in control of his reader, knowing that what he next ‘shows’ – the disaffected peasants drinking in Mrs Mulready’s illicit poteen shop – will be interpreted through what he has just ‘told’. The tension of the story lies in the gaps between what is known and not known by different characters. Keegan knows that Brady’s loyalty to Thady has a price, but is not privy to Brady’s manipulation of the disaffected peasants – which ultimately will lead to their attack on him. Brady, setting Joe Reynolds up as the leader of insurrection, underestimates the loyalty of the peasants to the Macdermot family. Thady realises that the peasants would bind him into their plottings, but is ignorant of Brady’s duplicity, both with them and with Keegan. Feemy’s sexual relationship with Ussher is known to everyone but her brother, while Ussher’s exploitation of Feemy is known to everyone but Feemy. The complexities of this are most powerfully conveyed in passages of interiority, when characters reflect inwardly on events as they perceive them, and in dialogues between two protagonists where they reveal their partial understanding of the action. Thus the action of chapter 10, ‘Mr Keegan’, is largely dialogue between Keegan and Larry Macdermot and between Keegan and Thady; what is shown is Larry’s dementia, Thady’s honour and Keegan’s malicious connivings, ending in Keegan’s assault on Thady. As he withdraws, we are inside Thady as he reflects on the implications of what has just been said and done; as the next chapter opens, we go into Keegan’s inner world. There is a nice contrast between the innocence and honour of Thady’s reflections and the corrupt half-plottings of Keegan to suborn Brady. In comparison, the voice which says: ‘I cannot but think the system of secret informers – to which those in positions of inferior authority too often have recourse – has greatly increased crime in many districts in Ireland,’44 appears to come from an external observer from across the water telling the Irish how they should conduct their affairs, further evidence of narrative colonial equivocacy. It is interesting that this paragraph, with four such ‘I’s in, is followed by an ‘I’ narrative that has the air of ‘explicit’ author, where the ‘I’ relates an anecdote outside the plot. This authorial persona, a person outside the story, commenting and making generalised 42 43 44

Macdermots, 127. Macdermots, 129. Macdermots, 174.

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asides, makes regular appearances in Trollope’s novels. That it is an assumed mantle is clear from The American Senator, where a narrative voice complains about guests who do not appreciate good wine: ‘I, – I who write this, – have myself seen an honoured guest deluge with the pump my, ah! so hardly earned, most scarce, and most peculiar vintage.’45 While the ‘I who write this’ may or may not be the man sitting at his desk, the implication is clear: other ‘I’s are assumed masks. As the novel progresses, Trollope increasingly exploits the possibilities of interior exploration. After Mary Brady’s wedding to Dennis McGovery (where Trollope demonstrates that his facility for slapstick developed early in his apprenticeship), Thady’s thought processes are explored in a manner which anticipates stream-ofconsciousness. He reflects on the events of the previous night; he remembers the attempts to recruit him to the plots of insurrection; he recalls the humiliation of Keegan’s attack on him, and his thoughts swing between the humiliation of being struck without the opportunity to return the blow, and his wish to deal with Ussher, and his thoughts turn to his sister and the family honour. The narration is implicit but directed: ‘And he thought of his position with Keegan and Ussher. There was something manly in his original disposition.’46 ‘Something manly’ instructs us to read Thady’s mind with sympathy and respect. His life has given him limited horizons but they are honourable and chivalrous one, ‘though Thady had never known the refinements of a gentleman’.47 Whose voice has made this apology for Thady? It slips seamlessly in, like the instruction to view his musings as ‘manly’ and runs into his own appraisal: ‘He already felt as though he was unworthy of either of them, and was afraid to look them in the face.’48 The nudging of the reader to interpret Thady’s actions in the best possible light is important in relation to the future action of the plot, since Thady goes on to wonder – what if? What if he did kill Keegan; what if he did join with John Reynolds and kill Ussher? The long exploration and its interpretation by Thady’s apologist ensures that when Thady does kill Ussher, we, as privileged reader, will acquit Thady, knowing his interpretation of events. Trollope is one of our great comic novelists, and in spite of the desolation of the story of the Macdermots, there are some fine comic episodes – Mary Brady’s wedding, a duel where the better shot contrives to fire his bullet to graze his opponent’s buttocks so that he cannot sit down for several weeks. Even Thady’s trial has its own black humour. An imagined ‘you’49 joins the crush of people crowding into the assize town, lucky to find a bed, likely to have to share it. ‘You’ is revealed as a witness at another trial, for breach of promise, and the lesser action parodies the greater tragedy about to be played out, as witnesses’ evidence is discredited by slippery barristers – Mr Allewinde is the precursor of many cross-examiners of satirical appellation. It

45

American Senator, 286. Macdermots, 268. 47 Macdermots, 269. 48 Macdermots, 269. 49 Booth, 150, f.n. 2, re Michel Butor, La Modification (Paris 1957); second person narrative is a rare feat, but ‘it is surprising how quickly one is absorbed into the illusory “present” of the story, identifying one’s vision with the “vous” almost as fully as with the “I” and the “he” in other stories’. 46

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may be a joke in poor taste as the story approaches its tense critical climax. It is also an experimental manipulation of the pronoun; the voice has been ‘I’, – coachman blending into English narrator, social commentator, interpreting Irish history to a sceptical audience. It has been ‘We’, – narrator making an alliance with the reader, with conspiratorial edge to the tone. Such passages include a specific ‘You’ and an ‘I’, who together make the ‘We’. This ‘You’ may be a ‘You’ that ‘We’ address. It may equally be the ‘You/reader’ in the sense of an everyman; the Mr Allewindes will make monkeys of whoever comes to the witness box, even one so well-versed in the ways of the world as you, dear reader. This suggests an altogether more selfassured author than the one who set pen to paper 500 pages earlier. As Booth says: ‘The novelist discovers his narrative technique as he tries to achieve for his reader the potentialities of his developing idea.’50 The novel that Trollope finished in July 1845, published by Newby in March 1847, ends with a return to a narrator telling the story we heard from the coachman: ‘It now only remains for the narrator of this sad story to tell in as few words as he can the fate of one or two of the principal actors.’51 He tells us how Larry’s dementia deprived Keegan of his ambition to possess Ballycloran, how the good Christians throve, and how the malicious got their just deserts. Father John’s anguish at Thady’s execution is gradually assuaged over the years and he is granted a comfortable old age in Dublin with the comforts he so readily passed up in Drumona, in the bosom of nephews and nieces. The visible narrator concludes rather apologetically, almost disowning the text: ‘My story is finished, and I fear it will be thought to be too sad a history; but fearful as it is, I do but tell the tale as it was told to me.’52 The novel was not a commercial success, though this may have been due in part to Newby’s notorious ineptness, as much as the problem of selling a new author.53 Writing about it in An Autobiography, Trollope said: ‘I am aware that I broke down in the telling, not having yet studied the art.’54 Thirteen years and nine novels later, with his reputation riding high, Trollope regained his copyright from Newby and prepared his text for re-publication by Chapman and Hall, where it enjoyed a modest success. He tidied up his grammar and, significantly, took out three chapters, including the final one. The 1860 The Macdermots of Ballycloran finishes not with Father John in comfortable, slippered old age, but with Thady on the scaffold and Ballycloran observing appropriate silence. Ending the story at this point changes the reading diametrically. It is an ending full of despair about the Irish problem. The reader, brought by the narrative voice to be an active protagonist, must wrestle with the bleak message of Thady’s death and the waste of his life, that there is no solution, no resolution of the troubles. It has that air of desperate hopelessness that anticipates Joyce, particularly in Dubliners. It implies a writer who has matured from one who disowns the sadness of his story into one who is confident enough to 50

Booth, 165. Macdermots, 670. 52 Macdermots, 675. 53 For an account of Newby’s sharp practices see Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (London: Athlone Press, 1976) 44–9. 54 An Autobiography, 186–7. 51

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give a challenging ending, an ending that says that life is never pat, that life is full of loose ends and full of pain that is beyond human solving.55 It is particularly interesting that he made this significant change in 1860, since the 1960s herald Trollope’s most prolific period, when his writing powers were matched by his popularity. An examination of Rachel Ray, written and published in 1863, demonstrates how his early appreciation of the possibilities of narrative voice matured and how he developed a dialogue in his voices to express subversion, while on the surface appearing to proffer a conventional view. There is a certain frisson to be had from the reading of Rachel Ray, the story commissioned by the evangelical periodical Good Words, but dropped like a hot potato when Norman Macleod, the editor, read the proofs of the opening chapters. When first approached by Mcleod, Trollope claims he made it clear that he would not change the nature of his plots: ‘I could not undertake to write either with any specially religious tendency, or in any fashion different from that which was usual to me.’56 Macleod had written to Trollope in April 1862 saying: ‘I think you could let out the best side of your soul in Good Words.’57 However, far from letting out the best side of his soul, Trollope offered them a novel specifically lampooning the beliefs and vocabulary of the low-church movement in the Church of England. Mrs Prime and Mr Prong converse in a sort of ‘Calvinspeak’. Action is transmuted either into toiling in the vineyard, or shepherding the sheep. The novel is set in Devon in high summer and much of the toiling in the vineyard is done literally in the heat of the noon-day sun and at times the two metaphors run together: ‘It is well for the sheep that there are still a few left who do not run from their work, even in the heat of the noon-day sun.’58 Mr Prong perceives his congregation as ‘the elect of Baslehurst’ and Mrs Prime, the helpmeet of his soul, is ‘the most elect’.59 If Mr Prong’s name has undertones of the suppressed passion he holds for Mrs Prime, so does the Reverend Comfort’s cognomen suggest his line of weakness: ‘He liked to have all his temporalities, and make them go as far as they could be stretched.’60 Mrs Prime does not exclude Mr Comfort entirely from the sheepfold; he ‘had been regarded as a Calvinist when he was young, as Evangelical in middle life, and was still known as a Low Churchman in his old age’.61 For Dr Harford there is no pardon: ‘He does keep two curates, – but what are they? They go to cricket matches and among young women with bows and arrows!’,62 clearly very 55 The Macdermots of Ballycloran is very under-examined, but see Terry, the first to notice the text differences between the 1847 and the 1860 editions, in ‘Three lost chapters of Trollope’s first novel’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 27, June 1972, 71–80: Robert Tracy, ‘The Unnatural Ruin’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 37, no 3, December 1982, 358–32; Robert Donovan, ‘Trollope’s Prentice Work’, Modern Philology, vol. 53, no 3, February 1956, 179–86. 56 An Autobiography, 186–7. 57 N.J. Hall, Biography, 251–3. 58 Rachel, 78. 59 Rachel, 79. 60 Rachel, 62. 61 Rachel, 53. 62 Rachel, 66.

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muscular Christians, supporters of the Broad Church and the middle ground. Michael Riffaterre has lucidly explored Trollope’s metonymic style in Rachel Ray, where one aspect of a subject stands in for the whole, and the way he uses it for comic effect: ‘... how he can be at one and the same time an objective observer, faithfully depicting reality, and a satirical one, artfully distorting it.’63 It is an important component of his burlesque, used with variety and force in Rachel Ray. It took Trollope two years to write The Macdermots of Ballycloran. Trollope began writing Rachel Ray on 3 March 1863, and finished it on 29 June 1863, having finished writing The Small House at Allington on 11 February that year. He was at his most prolific and most financially successful at this time, publishing six novels, two volumes of short stories and one travel book in four years, from 1860 to 1864. It is worth noting that he wrote Rachel Ray hard on the heels of The Small House at Allington, since both deal with the slips between cup and lip in a young woman’s romance. Rachel Ray opens with an assertion: ‘There are women who cannot grow alone as standard trees.’ It is a statement of how life is; it is not a passing judgement on all women. It is reinforced by enlargement: ... [women] who in their growth will bend and incline themselves towards some such prop for their life, creeping with their tendrils along the ground till they reach it when the circumstances of life have brought no such prop within their natural and immediate reach.

This is said, then, by someone with an ear to the possible poetry of prose, and by someone who rapidly personalises himself– ... ‘the women of whom I now speak’ ... This ‘I’ narrator is a person of wit: ‘A woman in want of a wall against which to nail herself will swear conjugal obedience sometimes to her cook, sometimes to her grandchild, sometimes to her lawyer.’ ‘Swear conjugal obedience’ suggests a narrator who enjoys circumlocution to reinforce his comic vision (marriage to a cook or a child). ‘Such a woman was our Mrs Ray.’ This feels like the narrator establishing an alliance, a rapport of common ground with his reader. ‘Our Mrs Ray’ – yours and mine. I, the reader, am thus installed as Mrs Ray’s supporter, though prompted to maintain some ironic detachment, since the narrative voice, in mock-heroic tone, teaches us not to take the events of her life too seriously: ‘Her heaven had been made black with storms – the heavy winds had come, and the warm sheltering covert against which she had felt herself so safe had been torn away from her branches ...’64 Booth comments that Henry Fielding’s ‘telling’ can be more fully worked than James’s ‘showing’.65 In choosing direct telling to describe the preceding years of Mrs Ray’s married life, Trollope gives an account of the late Mr Ray which is urbane, witty (‘he knew what were the rights, and also what were the wrongs, of prebendaries and minor canons’66) and sharply focused. He places Mrs Ray very precisely in her class, genteel in spite of her poverty, with his presentation of the fine grading of Mr Ray’s station as ecclesiastical lawyer. What at face value is straight telling of circumstances

63 64 65 66

Riffaterre, 291. All from Rachel, 3. Booth, 8. Rachel, 4.

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is regularly interrupted by a narrator’s ‘I think’: ‘As regards Mrs Ray herself, I think it was well that poor Mr Prime had died.’67 This is quite a common ploy: Mr Prong was an energetic, severe, hard-working and, I fear, intolerant young man ...68 But her mind was straying, I fear, under the churchyard elms with Luke Rowan ...69 I think this was brought about quite as much by Mrs Butler Cornbury’s powerful influence as by Rachel’s beauty.70

In all these examples, the interjected ‘I think’, ‘I fear’, is an extra; the sentence would stand without it. The effect of the interjection is, paradoxically, to reinforce the power of the statement by reducing it from a generalised observation – ‘As regards Mrs Ray herself, it was as well that poor Mr Prime had died’ – to the personal view of one person, who has inveigled the support of the reader as well. Using the same device, when Trollope writes: ‘But we all have our pet temptations, and I think that Mrs Prime’s temptation was a love of power’,71 this strategy is even plainer. The alliance the narrator has already struck with the reader is drawn on – ‘we all have our pet temptations’ and supports the ‘I think’, which in its turn emphasises the irony of Mrs Prime’s love of power. When we read: ‘It was on this account, I protest, and by no means on account of that young man from the brewery, that Rachel had with determination opposed her sister’s request on this special Saturday’,72 it is clear that there is also a dialogue between the ‘telling’ voice of the text, ‘It was on this account ...’ and the narrator’s voice of, ‘I protest’, where the narrator’s voice is claiming a difference of opinion with the ‘telling’ voice, a vigorous example of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. Nothing at all sensational happens in the 400 pages. Rachel goes for a walk; the Tappitts hold a party; Luke Rowan quarrels with Mr Tappitt and leaves Baslehurst. This constitutes the action of the first half of the book. Every incident however, has several tellings. Thus, we hear Mrs Prime’s version of Rachel’s walk, – a stepping out into sin with a dissolute young man given over entirely to worldly concerns; Mrs Ray’s version given to Mr Comfort – a ravening wolf attacking her lamb; Mr Comfort’s version – normal healthy behaviour of two young people; the Tappitt girl’s version – ‘That girl is a flirt after all’73; and Rachel’s version – he walked a few hundred yards with her and they stopped and looked at the sunset. It is from the manner of these tellings that we are both coached in our responses and manipulated in our allegiances; we are also significantly left in the dark about Luke Rowan’s own telling, since his version is notably absent. The dialogue between the different narrative voices is particularly subtle, in the way it allows Trollope to play games 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Rachel, 5. Rachel, 52. Rachel, 65. Rachel, 95. Rachel, 9. Rachel, 16–17. Rachel, 38.

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with our responses to Luke; our belief in him as a fitting suitor for our Rachel ebbs and flows, and it is revealing to track how this is done. Trollope’s burlesque of evangelical denial of pleasure in this life in anticipation of rewards in the next diminishes the credibility of the fundamentalist view. Their world is ‘a vale of tribulation in which no satisfaction can abide, a valley of tears’,74 ‘the path down the shores of Avernus’,75 ‘a vale of tears’;76 the text regularly reminds us of the tenets of their creed. One effect of this is that each time we hear of Rachel’s walk, or the Tappitt’s party from Mrs Prime or Mr Prong’s point of view, we want to believe in Luke. On the other hand, Mrs Ray’s inclination to judge him on how he takes his tea tends to make believing in Rowan seem rather naive and artless. On another level, Trollope is also showing us a Luke Rowan who is skilled in negotiating domestic and feminised spaces and who is comfortable with female discourse. We could contrast Luke’s easy accommodation in the Ray sitting room with Adolphus Crosbie’s proud discomfiture in Mrs Eames’ cottage.77 Chapter 2 exploits this very ambiguity and shows how Trollope manipulates his material. Chapter 1 has ended with our hearing of Luke (from Mrs Prime’s point of view), and Mrs Ray’s view of young men in general: ‘They were all regarded by her as wolves, – as wolves, either with or without sheep’s clothing.’78 Chapter 2 is called ‘The Young Man from the Brewery’. It opens with two paragraphs about Mrs Prime’s good works at her Dorcas meetings – told from Rachel’s point of view. The narrator’s voice quickly interprets this as unrelated to the arrival of a young man on the scene: ‘It was on this account, I protest, and by no means on account of that young man from the brewery, that Rachel had with determination opposed her sister’s request on this special Saturday.’79 ‘Protest’ is perhaps a little strong. Perhaps there is a grain of truth in what Mrs Prime has said. This is quickly followed by six brief exchanges of dialogue between the two sisters. At this point, it is worth noticing the chronology of the chapter. This conversation, given on the second page of chapter 2, took place before the disclosures of the end of chapter 1 – the antecedents have followed the consequences. We then recap Mrs Prime’s account of Rachel’s duty of obedience, before hearing again that Mrs Prime has gone to Baslehurst in a huff, leaving Rachel and her mother to their freshly brewed tea, hot toast and batter cake, an exit Mrs Prime first made four pages earlier in chapter 1.80 This happens very smoothly. There is no sense of disjointedness; no sense of the narrative jumping about. But within the four pages we have three tellings of Luke’s arrival, from different viewpoints. This tension between different tellings, reinforced with flexible chronologies, is exploited in the following chapter. Chapter 3 opens with an exterior narrative voice querying Rachel’s propriety: ‘The hour was late for any girl such as Rachel Ray to be

74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Rachel, 7. Rachel, 87. Rachel, 119. Small House, 137. Rachel, 14. Rachel, 16–17. Rachel, 13.

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out alone.’ Mrs Prime’s probable diatribe about Rachel is summarised somewhat cursorily with: ‘There had been a long discussion.’ A brief exchange between Rachel and Mrs Prime – and the narrative is suspended while we hear a longish account of brewing history and the Tappitt/Rowan connection. The narrative is taken up again, and told from the Tappitts’ point of view, until Luke arrives to walk with them, when it is Rachel’s point of view we hear: ‘[she] heartily wished that she was seated with the Dorcas women at Miss Pucker’s’.82 The narrative voice flips briefly back to the Tappitts, as Luke and Rachel walk away: ‘Augusta saw with some annoyance that he had overtaken Rachel before she had passed over the stile, and stood lingering at the door long enough to be aware that Luke was over first. “That girl is a flirt, after all”, she said to Martha.’83 This jaundiced interpretation of what she sees contributes to the undermining of the Tappitts’ view – and supports our vindication of Rachel when we hear this first full account of the walk from Rachel’s point of view. The chapter ends where it begins, with Rachel’s arrival home. In this manner, Trollope creates an initial view of Luke Rowan made entirely of other people’s conflicting opinions. Not until Mrs Ray and her daughters have spent a thoroughly miserable Sunday in the aftermath of the evening walk do we return to Luke after Rachel has left him and hear what he has been thinking about or, more accurately, what our narrator friend wants to tell us about him. As Rachel’s champion, we might want to learn, or to be told whether or not this young man is steady and reliable. We will be disappointed: ‘He did not ask himself what he meant by assuring her of his friendship and claiming hers.’84 What we gather is that this is a young man like other healthy young men; he admires Rachel and respects her, but she is only one of the occupations of his mind, one of the others being the challenge of making good beer. At this point the external narrator steps in to mark the spot, as it were, and tell us what we can reasonably expect to observe in a young man of 26 who has met a young woman three times and once walked 100 yards with her on her own: ‘He was a young man, by no means of a bad sort, meaning to do well, with high hopes in life, one who had never wronged a woman, or been untrue to a friend, full of energy, and hope and pride.’85 This is no eulogy for ‘he was also conceited, prone to sarcasm, sometimes cynical, and perhaps sometimes affected. It may be that he was not altogether devoid of that Byronic weakness which was so much more prevalent among men twenty years since than it is now’, continues the narrator, in satirical and speculative mood. ‘He probably wrote poetry in his bedroom’, he tells us, balancing Rowan’s practical attributes in the workplace and in the world at large with his romancing other self. Beginning with ‘Byronic weakness’ hints at the possibility of licentious proclivities. That he ‘probably wrote poetry in his bedroom’ limits the allusion to Byron’s lyrical faculties, though the innuendo of moral laxness still hangs in the air. Trollope’s strategy is all playfulness. This narrator maybe is only telling us half the tale. 81 82 83 84 85

Rachel, 26. Rachel, 36. Rachel, 38. Rachel, 54. Rachel, 54–5.

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This narrator encourages us to mistrust everyone. We might foster a hope that Mr Comfort may prevail with some common sense. However, before Mrs Ray turns to him for a second advice session, we have already listened in on a fine piece of male discourse where five men (Mr Comfort, Butler Cornbury, Dr Harford, Dr Harford’s curate Mr Calclough and Captain Byng, an old bachelor) sit round after dinner with their port after the ladies have left them. True to masculinist stereotype, the dialogue bats round politics and religion; the dialogue is grounded in the metaphor of the armed forces and military victory. There is some significant placing of Mr Prong in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which becomes attached to a discussion of Mr Tappitt’s vote in the coming election and whether Jews should be allowed to stand for Parliament. The rights and wrongs of Tappitt are discussed in terms of economic theory. In a discourse that parodies Mill’s political economy and Carlyle’s contempt for the immorality of the market-place, the men consider Tappitt’s merits as a brewer of bad beer. ‘Why should not a man enjoy himself, openly and legitimately, in the brewing of bad beer, if the demand for bad beer were so great as to enable him to live by the occupation?’86 they argue. Luke Rowan is vilified because of his attempt to destabilise a man with a family to support going about his business honestly. Dr Harford says: ‘I hear he’s in debt. I believe he behaved very badly to Tappitt himself ...; and he has certainly threatened to open a new brewery here.’87 It is worth noting that the men are measuring Rowan’s public persona, unlike the women, who judge him by his domestic and spiritual life. The effect of this is to compound our feeling that Rachel’s path is not destined to run smoothly. When the narrator comments: ‘I grieve to say that public opinion, as expressed in Dr Harford’s dining room, went against Luke Rowan’,88 there seems to be an implied view that the situation is beyond the narrator’s control now. Mr Comfort, far from encouraging Mrs Ray to allow the relationship to flower, is going to say that Rachel must discourage him. Luke Rowan’s sudden departure is read by the men as running away from the fight. The women, on the other hand, with his mother, perceive his behaviour as hasty, foolish, thoughtless, all of a piece with the behaviour of young men not ready to settle down. This is compounded by Mrs Ray’s administrator’s view of him as ‘a rather harum scarum sort of fellow’.89 The reader feels rather despondent about Rachel’s chances as she carries her lonely torch. Are the outside voices in the narrative, of the men, the women, and the multiple personalities of the narrator, going to be allowed to stifle the relationship? Rachel, interestingly, accounts for his behaviour, not as unreliability, but as in the nature of manhood: He, her lover had not deserted her. He had done for her all that truth and earnestness demanded, and perhaps as much as love required. Men were not so soft as girls ... Let a man be ever so true, it could not be expected that he should stand by his love after he had been treated with such cold indifference as had been shown in her letter! ... A man, she said to herself would be more proud but less staunch.90 86 87 88 89 90

Rachel, 234. Rachel, 233. Rachel, 233. Rachel, 276. Rachel, 272.

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This immediately precedes Mrs Ray’s account of meeting Luke in Exeter, when he says: ‘I won’t send her any message. As things are at present, no message would be of any service.’91 Again Trollope is using altered chronology to heighten suspense. The observations on Luke Rowan as a man by members of his own sex also show Rowan to be a man of his time; the digression in chapter 3 about his incompatibility with Mr Tappitt’s manner of business, given to us partly in telling, verified by snippets of dialogue, suggests Luke to be a man of intelligence and integrity, keen to bring the benefits of modern science to the brewing of beer: ‘He desired to learn the chemical action of malt and hops upon each other.’92 Tappitt’s methods caricature the mathematical economics of Bentham: ‘Tappitt wished that Rowan should learn brewing on a stool, and that the lessons should be purely arithmetical.’ When Luke says, ‘Let us brew good beer’, it sounds almost like an invitation to prayer and implies that he wants to bring morality into the market place. Corruption and lack of principle in commerce is a common Trollopian theme. His treatise The New Zealander, written in 1855–1856 but not published till 1972 after N.J. Hall had studied the manuscript and realised its significance, is packed with Carlylean despair at the state of the nation. Trollope advocates taking a stand on morality and social institutions. The manuscript was rejected by Longmans, but the ideas form a consistent thread through many novels over his writing life. The Three Clerks (1858), The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson (1862), The Way We Live Now (1875), The Prime Minister (1876), The American Senator (1877), are explicitly about corruption in public life, while integrity, and the loss of it, is a theme in others – The Warden (1855), The Bertrams (1859), Framley Parsonage (1861), Lady Anna (1874).93 Trollope’s little-known biography of Palmerston praises his probity, truth and industry. There is, in Rachel Ray, an explicit theme of the interface between commerce and politics: ‘Nor were they [the Tappitts] new, pink, and prosperous, going into Parliament for this borough and that,94 just as they pleased, like the modern heroes of the bitter cask.’95 ‘Modern heroes’ has a Carlylean ring to it,96 and ‘bitter cask’ a nicely ironic ambiguity. Implicit in this is the debate about whether going 91

Rachel, 276. Rachel, 30. 93 When Longmans turned down The New Zealander, their reader wrote, ‘All the good points in this work have already been treated by Mr Carlyle, of whose Latter Day Pamphlets this work, both in style and matter, is a most feeble illustration’. Trollope continued to work on his script for over a year, and there is some evidence that sections of it not included in the extant manuscript were used in The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson and The Three Clerks (N.J. Hall, Biography, 140; The New Zealander ed. and intro. N.J. Hall, xii). 94 Trollope perhaps has Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786–1845) in mind. From an unprepossessing childhood Buxton went on to have an illustrious university career, after which he joined the firm of Truman, Hanbury and Co., brewers of Spitalfields. He was M.P. for Weymouth from 1818–1837 (Samuel Smiles, 158–60). 95 Rachel, 28. 96 An inter-textual reference to Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History. Trollope was well-versed in Carlyle’s work. As mentioned earlier he lampooned him as Dr Pessimist Anticant in The Warden, and wrote to his mother, ‘I have read – nay, I have bought! – Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets and look on my eight shillings as very much thrown 92

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into trade is compatible with being a gentleman, though Luke Rowan’s professional training in law helps him duck the issue.97 Making Luke Rowan a modern man with aspirations to moral integrity in the public domain is not necessarily going to ensure that he will turn out well, however. Alaric Tudor in The Three Clerks begins as the rising star in the Civil Service and ends in prison. Adolphus Crosbie in The Small House at Allington, another prodigy from the Civil Service, while continuing his rise in public life, nonetheless jilts poor Lily; mental agility and respect in professional fields is no guarantee that Luke Rowan might not turn out to be another cad. It is implied by Butler Cornbury’s narrow victory in the by-election, that those with their money on Luke Rowan may hold onto their stake; however, though the evidence is enough to hearten Mrs Sturt, the scales only tip in Luke’s favour in chapter 26, ‘Cornbury Grange’, where, for the first time, we see extensively into Luke Rowan’s heart. It is a short chapter – 12 pages – and it observes a three-day house party after the election. Luke’s voice predominates. Until this point, it is a moot point whether Luke will become the hero we desire, or be revealed as another Adolphus Crosbie. We finally see directly into his heart, to learn what sort of a man he is, and what form of manliness he aspires to. The structure of the chapter is again deceptively complex. It opens with an account of how Luke came to be invited to be Cornbury’s guest, with interesting observation on Luke’s qualities that qualify him for friendship with Cornbury. Chronology flits backward to five lines of dialogue between Mr and Mrs Cornbury agreeing to invite Luke before returning to reflections on the friendship, but this time as perceived from Luke’s inner world. We argue his politics with him and the rub that this causes in a friendship with the gentry. This deeper exploration is broken with retrospective short dialogue of the invitation and Luke’s acceptance. This barely breaks the flow, but the gear-change moves us from the general to the actual. We are now inside Luke’s head as he reflects on the invitation the day before he goes. Significantly he is sitting on the stile where he and Rachel watched the sunset and where Rachel sat to review her feelings about him. Here he re-tells the story of their courtship from his point of view and accounts for the impact of its twists on him. Five pages on, nearly half-way through the chapter, he sets out to Cornbury Grange with his host. Extracts of dialogue interweave with telling. The description of the setting for the picnic, where the river deepens into a pool for bathing, feels like a paradigm for falling in love. This is reinforced by the following shift into dialogue between Mrs Cornbury and Luke, where Luke speaks of his surreptitious visits there to bathe, to taste unseen the delights of the spot. Mrs Cornbury presses him about Rachel. Were his approaches to her surreptitious, or is he prepared to declare openly his love for her? The dialogue closes, Luke returns to the river alone later and re-tells his reading of his love, in the light of Mrs Cornbury’s words. This switching between incident and dialogue, and between telling and interiority, allows Trollope to change the view of Luke without betraying the integrity of what away ... I look on him as a man who was always in danger of going mad in literature, and who has now done so’ (Letters, vol. I, 29). 97 But see also Altick, Presence of the Present, 629–31. Altick argues that brewers seemed to occupy a unique position in Victorian society, in not being tainted by their trade.

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we have already learnt. It re-accounts for the qualities we have already observed, but dresses them in different clothing. Thus the new man who wants to brew good beer, but who may not have the tenacity to persist with his task, is revealed as a deeper and more considered thinker as we observe the processes of his political thought. For this is no youthful revolutionary, but a man who has considered his position and arrived at a view. In embracing radicalism, he nonetheless eschews revolution and republicanism: ‘It is in this point that he is a radical; that he desires, expects, works for, and believes in, the gradual progress of the people.’98 This is Bungall’s great nephew, wishing to work his way up in the world by his own efforts, knowing that his worth is equal to the next man’s – or Butler Cornbury’s: ‘But within, – is it in his soul or his heart? – within his breast there is a manhood that will own no inferiority to the manhood of another.’99 It is significant both that this self-esteem is linked to manliness and that the voice of the text asks where it is seated – in the soul – territory defined by a masculinist Church – or in the heart – the wellspring of female response. When the argument comes to rest on ‘breast’, Trollope again locates true manhood within the nurturing side of a man’s nature. Having been shown Luke’s political soul by the narrator, we now see his heart from his own standpoint. Significantly, he recalls sitting on the stile where he and Rachel watched the sunset, and where Rachel sat to find words to express her heart: ‘Of course, as he sat there he was thinking of Rachel.’100 We can follow the direct expression of his thought as it weaves through the text: ‘... he had thought of her daily, almost hourly, since he had been with her at the cottage, when she had bent her head over his shoulder, and submitted to have his arm round her waist’ – with the observations of a voice from outside: ‘But his thoughts of her were not as hers of him. Nor is it often that a man’s love is like a woman’s.’ This voice from outside examines the qualities that mark a woman’s love as different from a man’s. A woman’s love is ‘restless, fearful, uncomfortable, sleepless, timid, and all-pervading’; while a man’s love is different from a woman’s love, it is no less ‘passionate, constant, and faithful’. Luke Rowan owns the anger he felt at receiving her letter, and feels justified in standing aloof, taking retribution for the community’s lack of trust in him. While his love is ‘passionate, constant, and faithful’, being a manly man, he is able to suspend this while he resolves his position at the brewery: His love for Rachel was as true and more strong than ever; but it was of that nature that he was able to tell himself that it had for the present moment been set aside by her act, and that it became him to leave it for a while in abeyance.101

Then, almost as a demonstration of how men can love and yet concern themselves with other things, his thoughts return to the brewery, his decision to go into trade, and the modern view that a real man ‘or a woman either in some form’102 should wish to earn his bread. 98 99 100 101 102

Rachel, 331. Rachel, 331. Rachel, 333. Rachel, 334. Rachel, 335.

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Manliness in the expression of feeling is a consistent theme. Mrs Cornbury’s cross-examination of him confronts him with the impact of his behaviour on Rachel; he keeps stony-faced. His words are: ‘There are things on which a man should not allow himself to speak without at first considering them’; the narrator’s comment is; ‘His heart was very tender at that moment towards Rachel, but there was that in him of the stubbornness of manhood which would not let him make any sign of tenderness’.103 While Luke seeks to conform to the expectation of the manly stiff upper lip, and to conceal his emotions, to be pro-active rather than re-active, the narrative line shows us his underlying nurturing side and suggests that its suppression is driven by ‘stubbornness of manhood’, not some lofty superior male quality. Luke Rowan’s final self-examination shows him measuring his behaviour prompted by ‘stubbornness of manhood’ against its impact on Rachel and acknowledging that he had been harsh: ‘There was some manliness in this, but there was also a hardness in his pride which deserved the rebuke which Mrs Cornbury’s words had conveyed to him.’104 This re-affirms that the norms of masculine behaviour are not necessarily reliable guides to finding and giving happiness. The masculinities that equip a man to fend for himself in a world of men work less well in the sphere of men and women and a man must learn to follow his heart as well as his head. Love demands greater considerations for the feelings of the loved one. When Luke has his epiphany, we know that Rachel will have the resolution we seek for her. And to demonstrate he is no milk-sop, in true masculinist style, he externalises the causation of his introspection, and walks away with his pride intact. ‘“Spoken ill of me, have they?”, said he to himself ... “Well that was natural too. What an ass a man is to care for such things as that”.’105 What we observed in The Macdermots of Ballycloran was a writer learning the measure of his craft as he went along, achieving some notable peaks, but reverting to a safer line for his ending. Thirteen years later he extracted the safe ending and gave his audience a more challenging and demanding book. What we can perceive in Rachel Ray is the delivery of a virtuoso performance. Self-assurance and confidence in his skill run through the whole. This flexible fluid style of narration, where a variety of voices gives way seamlessly to dialogue, and where those narrative voices establish a dialogue between themselves while playing a teasing game with the reader, so quintessential of Trollope, feels decidedly modern. The extent to which Luke Rowan is a man of unusual subtlety becomes plainer if we hark back to Tom Thurnall, another young man moulded by the new renaissance of science, fit and lusty, who ultimately acknowledges his love for a woman. I think Luke Rowan too could walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours. Both men rebut the suspicion that working with one’s head will lead to effeteness, but while Tom Thurnall sees physical stamina and its cultivation as necessary to counter effeminate tendencies, Luke Rowan is much more secure in his sexual identity. Luke Rowan knows that attraction between the sexes is healthy and normal. The sexual chemistry between Luke and Rachel is everything that is natural. Luke’s urges are never the 103 104 105

Rachel, 341. Rachel, 342. Rachel, 342.

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temptations of the devil. Tom Thurnall can only give expression to his tender feelings in some impossibly sentimental outpourings about his ageing father. Luke can listen to a woman’s advice, and in the light of it examine his heart honestly, and conclude that it is manly to acknowledge he has been in the wrong and merited the rebuke. This is effected without any recourse to theology or great moral epiphany; indeed one explicit theme is that good Christian men do not need to wear their creeds on their sleeve. Luke knows he values the space to explore the feelings of his heart. Initially, a teasing narrative voice pokes fun at him for this – ‘he probably wrote poetry in his room’. This chapter demonstrates he is more of a man because he can own his tender side. The remaining pages of the book play out a Luke Rowan who is everything we hoped he would be (but feared he might not be). In a brief paragraph at the end that is witty, discreet, decorous and elegantly phrased, we gather that the euphoria of Luke and Rachel’s love endures beyond the honeymoon and lasts through a long and happy life together: It was cold weather for pleasure-travelling; but snow and winds and rain affect young married people less, I think, than they do other folk. Rachel when she returned could not bear to be told that it had been cold. There was no winter, she said, at Penzance, – and so she continued to say afterwards.106

In Luke Rowan, Trollope unites the integrity of heart and hearth with morality in the market place, and he firmly identifies this unity as a central quality of manhood.

106

Rachel, 391.

Chapter 4

The Preux Chevalier: ‘Sans Peur et Sans Reproche’1 Though the study of Kenelm Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour could daunt the tenacity of the most assiduous reader, it does offer an unequalled and comprehensive survey of the chivalric code which must impact on the modes of conduct of those who would claim the privileges of rank. Digby’s concept of noblesse oblige demands superhuman dedication from the man defined by such a manhood. His battalions of knights whose lives bore witness to the code were drawn from a history constructed to demonstrate their mythology. Did any man human ever display their courage, loyalty, devotion, self-effacement, compassion, tenderness and generosity? Yet it is clear that Digby’s archetype informs Trollope’s thinking when he writes about ‘manliness’ or describes someone as ‘manly’. This is cogently demonstrated in Phineas Redux, when Trollope seeks to define what he means to imply: ‘The property of manliness is a great possession, but perhaps there is none that is less understood.’ Trollope follows this with a long digression on manliness, its qualities, and the sham manifestations of its absence: A composure of the eye, which has been studied, a reticence as to the little things of life, a certain slowness of speech unless the occasion calls for passion, an indifference to small surroundings, these, – joined, of course with personal bravery, – are supposed to constitute manliness,

he continues. And moreover: A man cannot become faithful to his friends, unsuspicious before the world, gentle with women, loving with children, considerate to his inferiors, kindly with servants, tender-hearted with all, – and at the same time be frank, open of speech, with springing eager energies, – simply because he desires it. These things, which are the attributes of manliness, must come of training on a nature not ignoble ... Let a man put his hat down, and you shall say whether he has deposited it with affectation or true nature. The natural man will probably be manly. The affected man cannot be so.2

Phineas Finn has just been acquitted of murder, and having faced his trial with courage and bearing, finds that he has exhausted his inner strength. In the two chapters recounting this, ‘The Verdict’ and ‘Phineas after the Trial’, ‘manly’, ‘manliness’, ‘manhood’, are significant and recurring terms, whose application shifts according to the perception of personal view; for although Phineas faces up to his ordeal with 1 2

Last Chronicle, 293. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 251.

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fortitude, his composure breaks down when he is freed and he has problems in facing the world again. The narrative voice contrasts his bearing before and after the verdict; it speaks of ‘the manly beauty of his countenance’. He had been ‘supported by a manhood sufficient for the emergency’. There seem to be several threads here; ‘manly’ describes visible appearance of control – courage showing in his face. ‘No mark of fear had disfigured his countenance.’ It refers to how he carries himself: ‘the general courage and tranquillity of his deportment.’3 This seems also to imply that this manliness so admired infers certain qualities of the heart. Phineas keeps his composure as he walks from the dock, but when he is finally alone with his closest friends, he bursts into tears. Tears in themselves, in a man, in Trollope’s novels, are commonplace. Men are regularly moved to tears at times of heightened emotion. Sometimes men seek to conceal their tears: ‘... as he [Mark Robarts] spoke he turned away to the window and Lord Lufton knew that the tears were on his cheek’4 and: ‘Then he [Arthur Fletcher] turned away, so that his old friend might not see the tear in his eye.’5 But more frequently, the emotion of the moment is openly visible: ‘Two tears coursed their way down his [Harry Clavering’s] cheeks.’6 Fathers are regularly moved to tears by expressions of love from their sons: ‘Mr Gresham put his hand on his shoulder, and half caressed him [Frank Gresham], while the tears stood in his eyes’;7 ‘As he [Daniel Caldigate] read it, the tears rolled down his cheeks.’8 And older men in their role as father figures are moved to tears in their dealings with young women: ‘Mary, looking into his [Doctor Thorne’s] face, saw that the big tears were running down his cheek’;9 ‘As he [Dr Grantly] looked down upon her face, two tears formed themselves in his eyes and gradually trickled down his old nose.’10 Men pressing their suit may understandably overflow with feeling: ‘She [Ayala] glanced round upon him [Jonathan Stubbs] and saw that a tear again was in his eye.’11 Tears get the better of Silverbridge, pleading for a second chance for his younger brother12 and John Caldigate, like Phineas, finds the stress of criminal proceedings overwhelming.13 The frequency with which emotion overflows into tears in Trollope’s men was noticed between the Wars by Hugh Walpole in Anthony Trollope, where he writes of Will Belton’s tears: ‘We wish we had not been told of this. It makes us uncomfortable’,14 a significant observation which may influence the dating of male reticence. What is remarkable about Phineas’ tears is their copiousness and their frequency. His friends’ first response is compassionate and understanding, but as the days and 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Phineas Redux, 233–4 Framley, 519. Prime Minister, vol. 1, 138. Claverings, 222. Doctor Thorne, 79. Caldigate, 117. Doctor Thorne, 198. Last Chronicle, 613. Ayala, 489. Duke’s Children, 141. Caldigate, 270. Hugh Walpole, Anthony Trollope (London: Macmillan and Co, 1928) 144.

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weeks go by, their tolerance wanes. Lord Chiltern tells him plainly that he is weak and womanly. Phineas agrees with him – ‘I am womanly’.15 He writes to Marie Goesler, – ‘What has occurred has so unmanned me that I am unfit for the interview. I should only weep in your presence like a school girl’.16 Mrs Low is clear that in her view his loss of composure is specifically linked to a deficiency in manliness that goes beyond bravery or courage: ‘I thought that he could face the world with dignity ... Nobody has had better friends. I thought he would have been more manly.’17 The narrator’s voice, in refuting these interpretations of manliness, also explains with compassion and sensitivity why this is an understandable reaction to trauma, which reflects well on Phineas’ capacity for fine feeling: ‘Had his imagination been less alert in looking into the minds of men ... he would not now have shrunk from contact with his fellow creatures as he did.’18 In explaining why Lord Chiltern so misunderstands his closest friend, Trollope uses the analogy of the clock whose ‘works were somewhat rough and the seconds were not scored’. Chiltern, continuing the metaphor, says: ‘You’ve been knocked out of time’19 and is confident that Phineas will right himself. Meanwhile Phineas ‘creeps out’ to see his friend Lady Laura, and ‘knocks timidly’20 at her door, until he can regain his decisiveness, his manliness. This manliness, so closely, and yet so intangibly defined by Trollope some pages earlier, is undiluted by Phineas’ tears. If anything it is enhanced. For Trollope, Phineas is more of a man because he can give expression to deep emotion. Ultimately he is restored by trusting his heart to the love of a woman, Marie Goesler. When he faces Table 4.1

Manliness in The Duke’s Children

Type

Page

A

15

‘And he is manly and handsome.’

A

20

… a mouth in which was ever to be found that expression of manliness.

B

20

… how poor in spirit and how unmanly that other one had been

B

79

‘That is ill-natured and almost unmanly.’

C

144

‘I feel as if I could go and hang myself.’ ‘That is absurd, – and unmanly.’

B

294

‘Men are so unmanly. They take such mean advantages.’

B

294

‘It is all unmanly,’ she said.

B

296

‘Unmanly is a heavy word to hear from you.’

15 16 17 18 19 20

Quotation

Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 250. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 248. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 251. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 252–3. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 250. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 254.

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Page

Quotation

B

297

‘Oh, – so unmanly again! Of course I have to marry.’

A

301

There was a manliness about his face which redeemed it.

B

322

There was a steady manliness in this which took Lady Mabel by surprise.

A

382

‘… has he not that perfection of manly dash without which I do not think I could give my heart to any man?’

C

403

Then he read the letter again and was gradually pervaded by a feeling of its manliness.

C

404

… Tregear had shown a certain manliness in his appeal.

A

470

There was a coming manliness about him which she liked, – and she liked even the slight want of present manliness.

C

520

Tregear’s conduct had been felt by the Duke to be manly.

B

543

To go back hot and soiled with mud, ... – that possibly he might ravish one more kiss, – would hardly be manly.

B

579

‘… you cannot deny it, and yet have not the manliness to own it to a poor woman …’

C

587

… having at his command a gift of manliness which enabled him to regard this marriage exactly as he would have done any other.

C

609

I think that he felt it would be unmanly not to be the same to the end.

C

615

‘And the sooner a man can do that the more manly he is. Is it a sign of strength to wail under a sorrow that cannot be cured?’

C

619

All that he had said as to the manliness of conquering grief had been wise enough

C

633

‘What do you think about him?’ ‘I think he is a manly young man.’

Key A = appearance B = behaviour to women, and courtship C = moral fibre

the world with her support, he has renewed inner strength, and the trauma of the trial fades to a shadow in the dark. In The Duke’s Children, a book about boys’ transition into young-manhood, manliness is a very explicit theme. As Table 4.1 shows, Trollope uses manly six times, manliness nine times, and unmanly eight times; of these, nine refer to treatment of

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women and courtship, nine to moral fibre, and five to appearance. Thus 18 out of the 23 refer unsurprisingly directly to a conventional chivalric code. It is the five that refer to appearance that reveal more of Trollope’s subversive code which forms part of his interpretation of manliness. That the Lady Mary and Isabel Boncassen should merge their respective lovers’ handsome appearance with their sterling qualities is perhaps not to be wondered at,21 but that the appearance of Reginald Dobbes the obsessive sportsman should be a marker of his masculinity is worth closer scrutiny: ‘He was not a handsome man, having a protrusive nose, high cheek bones, and a long upper lip; but there was a manliness about his face which redeemed it.’22 It seems likely that this idea of manliness is drawing on racially-determined features – his cheekbones, nose and upper-lip being distinctively Northern European. Popular belief in systems of phrenology and physiognomy and their status as new sciences often inform the framing of Trollope’s descriptions. In Barchester Towers he writes: It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men can be reduced to writing, and put into grammatical language with an unerring precision of truthful description.23

Paradoxically, while he strives to convey character through his attention to the fine detail of appearance, to find that ‘mental method of daguerreotype’ which so eluded him in Barchester Towers, his references to these inexact sciences have an edge of agnosticism to them. The description of John Caldigate tells us how attractive he is to women and how intelligence and strength of purpose can be recognised in his eyes. His forehead is square and well-formed, his mouth expressive and full of good humour. Trollope surmises that ‘altogether his face gave you the idea of will, intellect and kindly nature’ – qualities suggested by the descriptions of his eyes, brow and mouth. Indefinably, ‘there was in it a promise, too, of occasional anger’ and more ineffably, ‘a physiognomist might perhaps have expected from it that vacillation in conduct which had hitherto led him from better things into wretched faults’.24 The interpretation of the physiognomist is at odds with the sterling qualities suggested by his features and invites the view that the evidence to support physiognomy theory is perhaps spurious. Trollope similarly manages to acknowledge popular belief, while simultaneously laughing at it, in his description of Dr Thorne. The first two chapters of Doctor Thorne establish him as the standard-bearer of honest and true feeling, untainted by false pride or pretension; the writing is full of wry humour which confirms our doctor as hero as it lampoons his fellow characters. Chapter 3 continues in similar vein and phrenology becomes part of the joke in the description of the origins of the antagonism between Dr Thorne and Dr Fillgrave: ‘Then indeed there was war in Barsetshire. If there was on Dr Thorne’s cranium one bump more developed than another, it was that of combativeness.’25 However, while it is evident that there is plenty of self-mockery in Trollope’s attempt to convey character through 21 22 23 24 25

Duke’s Children, 15, 20, 382. Duke’s Children, 301. Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 185. Caldigate, 16. Doctor Thorne, 34.

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physical appearance, it is possible to discern both system and consistent code in his descriptions. This becomes clearer if we set out some of his descriptions of men in a chart (Table 4.2). The chart is broken up into leading men, subsidiary characters and villains. We can see that amongst his leading men, a significant number are fair and blue-eyed, what one might call typical Aryans. This is typically associated with Englishness, as when Trollope speaks of the Gresham family characteristics in Dr Thorne: ‘They were broad-browed, blue-eyed, fair-haired, born with dimples in their chins ...’26 We note they were ‘broad-browed’ – for foreheads are another significant feature in Trollope’s principles of physiognomy. Mark Robart’s square forehead ‘denotes intelligence rather than thought’.27 Squire Dale’s forehead ‘forbad you also to take him for a man of great parts’.28 And as if to drive home the significance of the point he says Bernard Dale looks like his uncle – ‘but his forehead was better’.29 Trollope is at pains to identify recognisable facial indicators for good breeding. Thus Arthur Fletcher, whose name resounds with Anglo-Saxon archetypes, has ‘just that shape of mouth and chin which men such as Abel Wharton regard as characteristic of good blood’.30 ‘Good blood’ is offered as evidence of aristocratic breeding, an important factor in the bloodstock market that is the marriage game, and also of health, which will be further explored shortly. That this is a somewhat intangible quality is clear from his description of Frank Fenwick, in The Vicar of Bullhampton, who ‘has more breeding in his appearance than his friend, – a show of higher blood, though whence comes such show, and how one discerns that appearance, few of us can tell’31 – though interestingly Fenwick is again fair and blue-eyed, while his friend, the lovelorn Harry Gilmour is dark-haired, grey-eyed, and ‘somewhat ordinary in appearance’.32 Mouths are a critical indicator of character for Trollope. John Grey has ‘a mouth like a god’.33 Arabin’s eyes, nose and mouth are ‘perfect’,34 while Squire Dale’s face was marred by ‘a mean mouth with thin lips’.35 However, we need to notice that while there are clear common denominators for heroic appearance, heroes do not have to look heroic. The appearance of Jonathan Stubbs in Ayala’s Angel is the antithesis of heroic, with his red hair and beard and his enormous chin and mouth.36 Nor are heroes necessarily closely described. We only know that Luke Rowan (Rachel Ray) is ‘well-grown and good looking’.37 We should also note that villains do not necessarily look villainous, for while in Can You Forgive Her? George Vavasor’s stature is ‘low’38 and there is ‘a low, restless, 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Doctor Thorne, 7. Framley, 37. Small House, 5. Small House, 12. Prime Minister, 134. Bullhampton, 6. Bullhampton, 4. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 113. Barchester Towers, 192. Small House, 5. Ayala, 146. Rachel, 31. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 42.

Table 4.2

Men’s Appearance

Leading men

Height

Appearance

Hair

Eyes

Nose

Chin and Mouth

Forehead

Francis Arabin

above the middle height

pleasant to look at

jet black tinged with grey

perfect with lambent fire

perfect

perfect with gentle play about his mouth

too massive & heavy

Will Belton

over 6’

decidedly handsome

thick, short & brown

perfect & well-formed

large

John Caldigate

5’ 10”

sure to find favour

dark & thick

bright & dark

a little snubbed

full of expression & humour square

strong & very active

Frank Fenwick

tall

with a show of breeding

fair & balding

bright

good-humoured but could be severe

athletic

Phineas Finn

6’ 0”

very handsome

brown wavy

bright blue

silken beard

Arthur Fletcher

5’ 10”

handsome

fair

sharp & eager

characteristic of good blood

George Germain

tall

handsome

Harry Gilmour

tall

good-looking but ordinary

dark brown

small, quick, grey

fair

blue

The Greshams Frank Gresham

tall

Build

well-made

almost too perfect

broad & largelimbed

like a coal-heaver sparkling

rather thin

almost too white & perfect

strong

dark-browed

dimpled chin & aristocratic curl of lip

broad-browed

very handsome & manly

powerfully built

John Grey

tall

very handsome

brown

bright blue

Walter Marrable

2” short of normal 6’

no doubt handsome

black, curly & thin

black under heavy brows

Mark Robarts

tall

manly

fair

hideously ugly

very red & very short

Jonathan Stubbs

Teeth

like a god long & straight

large mouth square chin

broad & strong square

very bright

enormous

Subsidiary Characters

Height

Appearance

Hair

Eyes

Nose

Chin and Mouth

Oswald Chiltern

not tall

handsome

short & red

look of resolution

well-cut

red beard

Squire Dale

plain, dry man

short, grizzled

sharp & expressive

straight & wellformed

mean mouth with thin lips

Bernard Dale

looked like his uncle

Reginald Dobbes

5’ 10”

not handsome

Sir Peregrine Orme

tall

handsome

Peregrine Orme

short

Forehead

Teeth

Build strongly built

high & narrow. not a man of great part better than his uncle

protrusive

long upper lip

white

keen & grey

aquiline

lips too close pressed together

light

bright blue

something of the eagle’s beak

deep dimple, mouth was handsome in its curl

broad-shouldered. greatlydeveloped legs

not large, but wellformed

few

slight, well-made with small feet

good

very strong on his legs

Villains

Marquis of Brotherton

4” shorter than brother

once very handsome, now pale & worn

dyed black

like brother

Felix Carberry

5’ 9”

beautiful to look at

nearly black, soft & silky

brown

Adolphus Crosbie

tall

well-looking

pleasant

expressive mouth

Ferdinand Lopez

nearly 6’

handsome to women

very dark

bold, unflinching, combative

something of softness

Lord Ongar

little

looks older than his years

bald with black wig

Louis Scatcherd

short & slight

dissipated

dark red

sunken & watery

Obadiah Slope

tall

colour of poorquality beef

lank, dull palereddish

big, prominent & pale brown

George Vavasor

low in stature

handsome to women

black

full eyebrows

thin & unhealthy

fine symettry, to nose

perfect chin

perfect arch of, perfect eyebrow square

excellent figure

perfect in form, white teeth

very thin

thin, weak & physically poor red beard, dry lips, drawn mouth well-formed, spongey & porous like red cork

large thin lips & bloodless

puny, without any physical strength capacious, high, square & heavy

large hands & feet

low & broad

short, but well-made

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cunning legible in his [Matthew Mollet’s] mouth and eyes which robbed his countenance of all manliness’, in Castle Richmond,39 as we can see from the chart, there is no indication from his appearance that Adolphus Crosbie (The Small House at Allington) is a cad, or that Felix Carbury (The Way We Live Now) is an amoral wastrel; Ferdinand Lopez (The Prime Minister) has features that suggest lack of purpose, not that he is a rapacious bully. The implication seems to be that villains look like the rest of mankind; with villains, as with heroes, one should look to a man’s actions to judge him. When we look at Trollope’s descriptions of his profligates, details of appearance do seem to take on an extra significance. Lord Ongar is described as ‘weak, thin, and physically poor, and had, no doubt, increased this weakness and poorness by hard living’.40 The implications of ‘hard living’ are perhaps defined on the next page when he is described as ‘a worn-out debauché’.41 Trollope draws our specific attention to his baldness: ‘What misfortune had made him bald so early, – if to be bald early in life be a misfortune, – I cannot say; but he had lost his hair from the crown of his head, and had preferred wiggery to baldness.’ Thinning hair is usually a matter of passing comment, as with Theodore Burton42 and Archie Clavering.43 Trollope says in Ralph the Heir: ‘There is a baldness that is handsome and noble, and a baldness that is peculiarly mean and despicable.’44 Trollope is here talking about Neefit, the breechesmaker with ideas above his station. What exactly is being implied by ‘peculiarly mean and despicable’? Does Neefit try to disguise his baldness with an exceptionally ridiculous comb-over? One might expect Trollope in such circumstances to adopt a more mocking tone. ‘Peculiarly mean and despicable’ seems to invite the possibility of something more pernicious. It hints at some unpleasant irregularity in Neefit’s moral conduct. It is a differentiation that openly invites speculation and one interpretation that would hang in the air would be to connect this ‘mean and despicable’ baldness with venereal disease. In a similar way, Lord Ongar’s preference for ‘wiggery’ suggests he has something to hide and for the adult, informed mind, that something would be syphilis – a diagnosis nudged along, as it were, by the nuances of ‘weakness and poorness of hard living’ and ‘worn-out debauché’. If Trollope is indeed inviting us to draw such a conclusion, then the features that he highlights in his leading men take on an added significance. The manifestations of secondary syphilis were alopaecia, degeneration in the soft tissue of the nose, bad teeth, rheumy eyes, skewed mouth and ultimately the loss of the lower part of the cranium. In highlighting noses, foreheads, eyes, mouths and teeth, Trollope is telling as explicitly as he can that these young heroes have not got syphilis. Until the advent of antibiotics, there was no reliable cure for gonorrhoea and syphilis, the most aggressive of the venereal diseases. Their occurrence was widespread, particularly in the armed forces, where reviews regularly revealed a 39 40 41 42 43 44

Richmond, 57. Claverings, 27. Claverings, 28. Claverings, 65. Claverings, 108. Ralph, vol. 1, 263.

92

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quarter of the manpower to be infected.45 Syphilis had long been known as the disease of a thousand symptoms. In 1821, the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicals described syphilis as ‘a contagious disease which manifests itself in forms that are so various and numerous, that it defies philosophical definition’.46 Any number of degenerative conditions could be attributed to syphilis, and syphilis could be screened behind a diagnosis with no malign associations. Often the symptoms of advanced syphilis were very similar to those of alcohol damage. The widely-recognised group of symptoms which could indicate syphilis, – skin diseases, degeneration of soft tissue on the face and of the bones, and alopecia, led ultimately to tertiary syphilis and what is generally described as General Paralysis of the Insane, or GPI. Children born to syphilitic parents had poor bone construction and failed to thrive. Because there was no cure for syphilis and gonorrhoea and, because the damage caused by them was permanent, continence, chastity and marital fidelity were the only sure ways to avoid infection, though condoms had long been used as a protective.47 If airing the topic of fallen women and prostitution was difficult without censure, as Trollope complained in his preface to The Vicar of Bullhampton, finding a language to discuss venereal disease without offending both innocence and prudery was even more problematical. It had not been a problem in the robuster times of the eighteenth century. Smollett, a writer much admired by Trollope, translated Candide into English in 1761, soon after its publication. When Voltaire describes Candide meeting up again with Dr Pangloss after an absence of some years, Pangloss’s syphilis is trenchantly described: ‘His eyes were lifeless, the end of his nose had rotted away, his mouth was all askew and his teeth were black. His voice was sepulchral, and a violent cough tormented him, at every bout of which he spat out a tooth.’48 His condition is firmly attributed to sexually transmitted diseases: you remember Paquette ... In her arms I tasted the delights of Paradise and they produced these hellish torments by which you see me now devoured ... Paquette was given this present by a learned Franciscan, who had traced it back to its source. He had had it from an old countess, who had had it from a cavalry officer, who was indebted for it to a marchioness. She took it from her page, and he had received it from a Jesuit who, while still a novice, had had it direct from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.49

The Library of Congress National Union Catalog lists nine editions of Candide published through the nineteenth century.50 In the 1890s, Sarah Grand confronted the challenge in The Heavenly Twins – a best-selling novel with an explicit theme

45 ‘In 1860 one-quarter of the Foot Guards in London had syphilis and 46 per cent of surgical cases at the Royal Free Hospital were venereal, as were half of the outpatients seen at Bart’s in 1868. In the late 1860s 20 per cent of patients at Moorfield Eye Hospital were suffering from advanced syphilis.’ Glendinning, 397, footnote. 46 Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 109. 47 Condoms were invented in England in the early eighteenth century. Quétel, 99. 48 Voltaire, Candide, 1749, trans. John Butt (London: Penguin Books, 1947) 28. 49 Voltaire, 29–30. 50 In 1800, 1814, 1823, 1843, 1864 (2), 1884, 1886 and 1888.

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51

of syphilitic degeneration. Edith Menteith, a young innocent virgin is duped into marriage to an older man with a rakish past: ‘But Edith’s child, which arrived pretty promptly, only proved to be another whip to scourge her. Although of an unmistakable type, he was apparently healthy when he was born, but had rapidly degenerated, and Edith herself was a wreck.’52 This makes it clear that the symptoms of syphilis, and the manner of contracting it were well and plainly understood in Victorian Britain, and that the disease was spread through all levels of society. While there is certainly nothing quite so direct in Trollope, I think it can be demonstrated that within the constraints of his time, he addressed the issues in a language that would not be misunderstood. Trollope’s love of his clubs and his pleasure in the raucous company of men has been well chronicled by his biographers; it is probably safe to assume that part of that pleasure included the banter of sexual innuendo.53 There is some flavour of this in The Last Chronicle of Barset, where Trollope briefly introduces a character called Onesiphorus Dunn as an escort for Lily Dale when she goes riding in the Park with Emily Dunstable and Bernard: ‘He was actually called Siph by his intimate friends.’ The contraction ‘siph’ was the commonly-used term for syphilis54 and that Trollope wishes to make the connection we can deduce from his use of ‘actually’. The joke progresses as Trollope plays with his conceit. Lily ‘was in daily fear lest she should make a mistake and called him Siph herself’. So Lily understands the innuendo. Then Mrs Thorne, formerly Miss Dunstable, addresses him as Siph and we are told: ‘Everyone liked him, and it was admitted on all sides that there was no safer friend in the world, either for young ladies or young men, than Mr Onesiphorus Dunn’.55 Trollope is clearly enjoying his game. At other times, equally confident that he will be understood, Trollope treats syphilis with much more seriousness. The Marquis of Brotherton in Is He Popenjoy?, is the most unequivocally syphilitic of his men who live beyond the pale. He is initially described as ‘an idle, self-indulgent, ill-conditioned man’.56 ‘Self-indulgent’, I think, implies someone who will seek gratification for all his urges. When he makes his first appearance at Manor Cross, he is ‘pale, worn, thin, and apparently unhealthy’;57 ‘such a man as the Marquis would probably die early’.58 His behaviour in London scandalises the hotel where he is staying: ‘He’s a very “owdacious nobleman”’, the management comment, having tried to press him to leave because of his nocturnal habit of bringing prostitutes to his rooms; ‘We gave him to understand that all

51

Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 1893 (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1992) xvii. 52 Grand, 277. 53 See, for instance, Henry Silver’s diary accounts of Punch lunches, cited by John Sutherland, ‘In the smoking-room’, Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 3, 1997, 36. 54 Siph – also syph and siff. Oxford English Dictionary slang abbreviation of syphilis. 55 Last Chronicle, 561–2. Victoria Glendinning points out this joke in her biography of Trollope (397–8). 56 Popenjoy, vol. 1, 4. 57 Popenjoy, vol. 1, 203. 58 Popenjoy, vol. 1, 236.

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manner of people couldn’t be allowed to come here’.59 There are strong indicators that his infant son has congenital syphilis. We know from the time of his arrival in Brotherton that he is not strong60 and when he dies later that year, his father describes him as ‘a rickety brat who was bound to die’.61 ‘Rickety’ well describes the classic poor bone formation, and that he needs to see a dentist at the age of two,62 also suggests congenital syphilis. Again the manner of the Marquis’ death is consistent with tertiary syphilis. He is struck by paralysis, rallies briefly, before sinking into a decline.63 By the time George Germain has reached his brother, he has lost his speech, he is ‘alive but senseless’;64 death follows rapidly. In other portrayals of men with syphilis, Trollope exploits the similarity between the advanced symptoms of syphilis and those of excessive alcohol consumption, though he can be perfectly clear when a man has drunk himself to death, as has Sir Roger Scatcherd. The similarity in symptoms allows him to equivocate when he comes to describing Louis Scatcherd’s decline. For while drink is explicitly the primary cause of his death, descriptions of him, and of his life-style, hint at venereal disease. He is ‘short and slight, and now of a sickly frame’,65 ‘a close-fisted reprobate’, ‘not illmade by nature, but reduced to unnatural tenuity by dissipation’.66 This is tempered with ‘a life of dissipation, or rather, perhaps, a life of drinking’67 and information that ‘twice he was found raging in delirium tremens’.68 The opaqueness is continued to the final rites, where Trollope says: ‘It was found to be necessary that the interment should be made very quickly, as the body was already nearly destroyed by alcohol.’69 Two hundred pages earlier, the corpse of his father who finally drank himself to death, which would surely have been just as destroyed by alcohol, was laid to rest ‘some weeks after’.70 The presence of contagion was the common reason for hurried burial and it seems most likely that Trollope is adding another hint as to the nature of Louis Scatcherd’s life-style. When Roger Scatcherd suggests a marriage between Louis and Mary, Dr Thorne is outraged: ‘Not for all the wealth of India would he have given up his lamb to that young wolf.’71 The hints at sexual degeneracy compound the offence of the idea. Similarly, Lord Ongar’s inevitable death is veiled with the declaration that it was drink that killed him.72 While the adult mind would know that the manner of death is similar and make the connection, a younger, more innocent audience could take on an early lesson in temperance and the evils of drink. 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Popenjoy, vol. 2, 155. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 204. Popenjoy, vol. 2, 202. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 299. Popenjoy, vol. 2, 256. Popenjoy, vol. 2, 276. Doctor Thorne, 318. Doctor Thorne, 323. Doctor Thorne, 448. Doctor Thorne, 321. Doctor Thorne, 565. Doctor Thorne, 341. Doctor Thorne, 334. Claverings, 72.

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We can also perceive a further regular code for the sexually profligate life-style that leads to physical degeneration, though it is more frequently a quality noted for its absence, or with a partial disclaimer. Thus Sir Florian, the consumptive young lord who falls for Lizzie Greystock’s shallow charms in The Eustace Diamonds squanders what health he has in his dissolute life-style. It is entirely explicit that his early death will be due to tuberculosis: ‘They had all been short-lived, – the Eustaces. Consumption had swept a hecatomb of victims from the family.’ ‘He was vicious, and he was dying ... He was one who denied himself no pleasure, let the cost be what it might in health, pocket, or morals.’73 This could well imply a disregard for propriety. However, the passage also adds: ‘We have said that Sir Florian was vicious; – but he was not altogether a bad man, nor was he vicious in the common sense of the word.’ This appears to beg the question of what the common sense of vicious might be. Perhaps he indulges in every sin except sexual licentiousness. Such a supposition is validated by other references to viciousness. Thus, in The Belton Estate, Mr Amedroz, ‘an idle thriftless man’, who has so wasted his resources as to ruin Clara’s future security, is ‘not vicious’ – that is, he ‘was not self-indulgent to a degree that brought upon him any reproach’.74 And George Bertram, storming off in a fit of jealous rage, though ‘he was now living a life of dissipation’, did not give way entirely to sin. ‘He did not become filthy, vicious, callous and bestial’,75 – this would seem to link viciousness firmly with carnality. And in seeking to confirm that Frank Tregear is all a young man should be, except for his lack of fortune, Trollope says he is ‘subject to no vices’.76 By continuing to examine his texts closely for coded observations on the behaviour of men, we can also detect Trollope commenting on homoerotic behaviour. Michael Mason in The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1995)77 comments that evidence about homosexuality in the period up to 1880 is extremely meagre, which is borne out by Brian Reade’s anthology Sexual Heretics 1850–1900,78 which has 21 items for the first 30 years and 68 for the last 20. However, in his works, largely written between 1850 and 1880, Trollope shows us homoerotic behaviour taking place within the range of the sexuality of those we would otherwise describe as heterosexual and helps to fill the gap in the dearth of mid-nineteenth century material. The preponderance of later material is reflected in the tendency of discussion about nineteenth-century homoerotics to be dominated by fin de siècle aestheticism and the Oscar Wilde trial. But this creates an even more unbalanced picture, for Wilde’s trial in 1895 took place under very different circumstances from those that held sway for most of the century. Anal penetration had been a criminal offence since 1533 and, where proven, punishable by death until 1861, though this punishment

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Eustace, vol. 1, 6. Belton, 1. 75 Bertrams, 183–4. 76 Duke’s Children, 35. 77 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 6. 78 Brian Reade, ed. and Intro., Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850– 1900 (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1970). 74

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was meted out to very few, and unimposed after 1835.79 However, the rest of the gamut of sexual expression between two men fell within the law. It is difficult to perceive when anal penetration became synonymous with homosexual activity, but homoeroticism, then as now, encompassed a much wider range of behaviours. Such behaviour was then regularly seen as part of undifferentiated male lust, which, while perverse, was natural and unchangeable. This was the situation until 1885, when the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, largely as a result of the lobbying following William Stead’s revelations of the widespread procurement of young girls. As the bill went through Parliament, Henry Labouchère proposed an amendment offering the same protection to young boys. His amendment criminalised ‘acts of gross indecency’, a catch-all phrase replacing the strictly-defined buggery. While the amendment rapidly exposed a large swathe of men involved in homosexual activity to the possibility of blackmail, it also reduced the maximum sentence for a conviction from life to two years. The twentieth century then polarised, medicalised and compartmentalised sexual activity, as society insisted we were all at one extreme or the other, instead of viewing sexuality as a continuum along which we might find our comfortable home. Trollope’s narrator, in distinguishing between homosocial and homoerotic relationships, is a fine articulator and analyser of warm and lasting commitment in friendships between men. This is how the friendship between Frank Fenwick and Harry Gilmour is described in The Vicar of Bullhampton: He loved his friend dearly. Between these two there had grown up now during a period of many years that undemonstrative, unexpressed, almost unconscious affection, which, with men, will often make the greatest charm of their lives. It may be doubted whether either of them had ever told the other of his regard. Yours always in writing was the warmest term that was ever used. These two men had never given anything, one to the other, beyond a worn-out walking stick or a cigar. They were rough to each other, caustic, and almost ill-mannered. But they thoroughly trusted each other, and the happiness, prosperity, and above all the honour of one were to the other, matters of keenest moment.80

There is a very similar quality in the friendship between John Grey and Frank Seward in Can You Forgive Her?, while in Phineas Finn, we are briefly but tellingly told how deep was the friendship between the Earl of Brentford and Violet Effingham’s father, General Effingham. ‘When the General’s only son, then a youth of 17, was killed in one of our grand New Zealand wars, the bereaved father and the Earl had been together for a month in their sorrow.’81 There is great emotional literacy implied by this sentence – it conveys compassion, understanding of the nature of grief, the shared bonds of the joy and pain of parenthood. These are examples of warm and tender friendships between men and where there is no suggestion of sexual arousal. In The Eustace Diamonds, Frank Greystock, after he has engaged himself to Lucy Morris, embraces his cousin Lizzie Eustace on three occasions. The detailed 79 Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (London: Picador. 2003) 22–3. 80 Bullhampton, 440. 81 Phineas Finn, 92.

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descriptions of each kiss belie the accompanying epithet of ‘brotherly’. On the third occasion Trollope attempts to excuse Frank’s behaviour: It is almost impossible for a man, – a man under forty and unmarried, and who is not a philosopher, – to have familiar and affectionate intercourse with a beautiful young woman, and carry it on, as he might do with a friend of the other sex.82

‘Philosopher’, for anyone versed in the classics, immediately suggested Socrates and Plato, studies of whom formed the bedrock of the Public School education. The link between Socratic and Platonic thinking, ancient Greece and men-on-men sexual relationships had been made long before Walter Pater wrote his defining essay on Winckelmann for the Westminster Review in 1867.83 Socrates’ bisexuality, and his eroticisation of boys and youths, was widely recognised, as was Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which glorifies the love between a man and a boy. ‘Socratic art’ meant homoerotic pornography; when Trollope, with his classical education, says ‘a man who is not a philosopher’, he means us to understand ‘a man who is attracted solely to men’. However, it is important to understand that the concept of homosexuality, per se, and the vocabulary that is used today to articulate it, did not exist in Trollope’s day. The word ‘homosexual’ was coined in 1869 by a Hungarian physician, Karoly Maria Benkert and the word did not gain any currency in Britain until the mid 1890s.84 Prior to that such behaviour was referred to as Socratic or, contrary to sexual instinct, or invert. Slang terms of disparagement, such as Molly and, from the 1850s onwards, Margery and pooff, did exist,85 but for the full range of offence and vilification, we have to wait for the twentieth century. Trollope’s ventures into homoerotic territory were first explored by Mark Turner in 2000, in his decoding of the short story, The Turkish Bath, as a soft-porn tale of gay cruising.86 This was followed in 2003 by Mark Forrester’s examination of the links between exoticism and homoerotics in another short story, The Banks of the Jordan.87 This is one of a group of three humorous stories set in the Middle East and published in 1860 and 1861. Trollope had spent the first three months of 1858 in the Eastern Mediterranean on Post-Office duties and had taken a ten-day holiday to the Holy Land in the middle of it. It is possible that this voyage crystallised much of his thinking about ambiguous sexual orientation and its part in his plots, since all three

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Eustace, vol. 1, 230. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) is widely credited with inspiring the Classical Revival through his studies of Greek art and his adulation of the beauty of youths. See Robb, 91–4. Pater’s essay is reproduced in Reade, 76–104. 84 Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1979) 3. 85 See Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and the Cassell Dictionary of Slang. 86 Turner, chapter 5, ‘The Editor as Predator in St Pauls’, 183–226. 87 Mark Forrester, ‘Redressing the Empire: Anthony Trollope and British Gender Anxiety in “The Banks of the Jordan”’, Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature, Philip Holden and Richard J. Ruppel eds (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 2003) 115–31. 83

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stories treat with dissonant sexualities. A substantial part of The Bertrams, written on his return in April 1858 is set in the Holy Land, and Castle Richmond, the novel with the most explicit homoerotic relationship, was written in 1860. In The Bertrams, George Bertram wishes to make a pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The entrance to the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, was by a small tunnel only four feet high and one had to enter it bending forward and exit it in the same position backwards. ‘The struggle to an Englishman is disagreeably warm, though to an oriental it is probably a matter of interesting excitement’, says Trollope. This is a notion that had held considerable currency.88 Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890), intrepid explorer, linguist, anthropologist and classical scholar, wrote widely about the cultures of the societies that he had lived in all across the East. He translated an unexpurgated Arabian Nights and defended his insistence on authenticity in a Terminal Essay to his translation. In it, he determines a ‘Sotadic Zone’, where sodomy and pederasty have always flourished, which encompasses Mediterranean France, Iberia, Italy and Greece, with the coastal regions of Africa from Morocco to Egypt and running eastward through Asia Minor, Persia, Afghanistan and the Punjab and Kashmir and beyond. Within this zone, says Burton, the ‘vice’ is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo.89 This concept of racially- and culturally-determined sexual preferences is also found in Barchester Towers, when Bertie Stanhope is found at the end of the Thorne’s fête-champêtre in the bottom of the ha-ha, ‘eagerly engaged in conversation with some youngster from the further side of the county, whom he had never met before, who was also smoking under Bertie’s pupilage, and listening, with open ears to an account given by his companion of some of the pastimes of Eastern clime’.90 The tone here is of detached amusement. It has an air of live-and-let-live, of laissezfaire about Bertie’s probable proclivities. It is also worth noting that it is not an all-defining episode for Bertie’s sexual orientation. In the next paragraph his interior heart declares him capable of falling head-over-heels in love with a woman. That Bertie was in the ha-ha with a ‘youngster’, a lad on the brink of manhood, but considerably younger than himself has reverberations of the intense sexualised relationships between older and younger boys that Trollope would surely have observed in his time as a boy at Harrow and Winchester. In An Autobiography he speaks of his humiliation at being punished while a schoolboy for some ‘nameless wrong-doing’, of which he was entirely innocent, where the major evidence against him was that he had attended a public school, an incident widely acknowledged to be a reference to some homosexual transgression.91 Such contact was part of the psycho-sexual experience of so many growing boys who endured the peculiarly British system of boarding school education and that it might have permanent scarring consequences was acknowledged by many fathers as they contemplated sending their sons to face what they themselves had suffered. Sir James Stephen, 88 Forrester locates his excellent close reading of The Banks of the Jordan in the concepts of orientalism and colonialism explored by Edward Said in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1973). 89 Reade, 159. 90 Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 160. 91 Autobiography, 5, and Hall, 20.

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father of Leslie Stephen (and grandfather of Virginia Woolf), moved to Windsor so that his sons could attend Eton as day-boys.92 In his fiction, Trollope, takes a much longer and pragmatic view of the undifferentiated expression of emerging sexuality amongst schoolboys and young men. As Castle Richmond opens, Patrick Desmond is 15, his sister Clara 17 and Owen Fitzgerald 23. Patrick, fatherless, home from Eton, seeks male company and Fitzgerald responds, for friendship with Patrick brings contact with Clara, growing more lovely by the day. Owen declares his love for Clara. Her mother, herself inflamed with passion for Owen, banishes him from her house. Patrick is next home when Clara, now engaged to Herbert Fitzgerald, refuses to repudiate the alliance when Herbert is declared illegitimate and penniless. Patrick anticipates renewing the contact with his friend: Owen would be as tender with him as a woman, allowing the young lad’s arm round his body, listening to words which the outer world would have called bosh – and have derided it as girlish. So at least thought the young earl to himself.93

Patrick, then, is looking forward to seeing a friend who repulses neither his physical expression of affection, nor the verbalisation of tenderness, behaviour that would have exposed him to some ridicule with other young men. For his part, Owen’s open acknowledgement of the physical attraction in the relationship between himself and Patrick is equally undissimulated: ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you, old boy,’ said Owen, pressing his young friend with something almost like an embrace. ‘You will hardly believe how long it is since I have seen a face that I cared to look at.’94 Thus, alongside his patently heterosexual passion for Clara, Owen is also acknowledging a physical depth and attraction to his relationship with Patrick. Patrick squeezes his friend’s arm ‘with a strong boyish love’;95 later on we read: ‘throwing himself on Fitzgerald’s breast, he burst into a passion of tears.’96 There is a clear difference between these expressions of the bond between Patrick and Owen and those homosocial bonds described earlier. These scenes suggest a degree of homoerotic arousal between the two of them. This expression of affection between an adolescent and an older, physically handsome young man has overtones of a schoolboy crush, a passing phase perhaps in a lad’s growth from awkward schoolboy to mature manhood, though, as we have noted, there is also some evidence that Patrick’s feelings are returned by Owen; this is not a one-sided relationship. There is no suggestion that this is a relationship which either of them should shrink from acknowledging. Their love for each other is set against that other love, Owen’s love for Clara and Owen’s vision of a higher chivalric code of honour, his readiness to sacrifice all things material in his quest for Clara’s love. This nobility of character fuels Patrick’s love for Owen, who, for his part, puts his passionate friendship for Patrick on a par with his devotion to Clara: ‘… I, Owen Fitzgerald of Hap House, still 92 93 94 95 96

Ronald Pearsall, Worm in the Bud (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003) 454. Richmond, 378. Richmond, 401. Richmond, 403. Richmond, 408.

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love her better than all the world else can give me; indeed, there is nothing else that I do love, – except you, Desmond.’97 Patrick joins Fitzgerald travelling the world for two years before going up to Oxford. However the novel ends with Owen Fitzgerald still searching for adventure and the Countess Desmond still keeping alight the flame she carries for him. But no news of Patrick. Elsewhere in the book, the adolescent Patrick regularly declares that he will never marry.98 Did he keep to his word? Did he continue to prefer the company of men, or did he return home, with his father’s ravages to the estate somewhat repaired, to settle down to be a pillar of society with a wife and family? In Trollope, we find men in close caring bonds with other men; we find men that we might label effeminate expressing sexual attraction to young men and young women, and men who enjoy close physical relationships with other men, while consumed with passion for a woman. For these men, pleasure in homoeroticism is not an all-defining moment. And while there is nothing in the text to suggest sexual attraction between Frank Fenwick and Harry Gilmour, the narrator of a sequel might well have Harry spending time in the Sotadic zones while he assuages his broken heart and still credibly returning to Bullhampton to marry and raise a family. Nor is this articulation of dissident sexuality the only feature of Trollope’s pattern for masculinity which challenges our assumptions. Phineas Finn, through two novels, makes love to a series of women, including a passionate embrace with a married woman whom he declines to marry when she is finally free; his affections have the permanence of a butterfly, and yet he is rewarded, first with the choicest virgin and, following her death in her first pregnancy, with a second wife who has beauty, passion and intelligence and who brings him wealth and social standing. There is little challenge from any of the authorial voices to this behaviour (though Violet Effingham does make a cynical joke in dubious taste about him99). In exploring the behaviour of men who are his heroes, but who do not always behave heroically, Trollope extends the possibilities of ‘manliness’ beyond the convention. He demonstrates the shortcomings of the ‘manly’ creed, and creates in its place a masculinity for a modern society. The construction of this masculinity, and how it is woven into texts which superficially appear to conform to traditional values is the focus of the next three chapters. That Trollope does this seamlessly, almost invisibly, with no apparent disruption to the surface of convention, is remarkable. Trollope’s novels have baby boys being born, little boys growing up and bigger boys going to school. Boys achieve man’s estate, fall in love, marry and become parents themselves. In examining the novels to construct Trollope’s ages of man, a very individual view of manhood emerges which may challenge our preconceptions about being a man in the nineteenth century.

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Richmond, 407. Richmond, 404, 422, 425. Phineas Finn, 539. This joke is explored at length in Chapter 8.

Chapter 5

From Birth to Man’s Estate Though there had been earlier studies examining changes in attitude to childhood,1 Phillippe Ariès’ Centuries of Childhood (1962),2 was the first to construct a historiography of childhood. Although primarily a study of French childhood, Ariès’ thesis is that the concept, the very nature of childhood, has changed over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, he argues, children were part of a loosely-knit social community which held together for material purposes; a child’s place in that community was an economic, work-related one. The concept of close family bonds and bonding is, for Ariès, a comparatively modern phenomenon, growing and developing alongside a sentimentalising of childhood. Part of his supporting argument is that because infant mortality was so high, parents did not make major emotional investment in their children until they had survived long enough to make an economic contribution to the community. Apprenticeships for artisan skills began at an early age and this movement into a wider social community also militated against close bonds between parent and individual child. For Ariès, the sentimentalising of childhood had its roots in the increase of interest in education in the seventeenth century. This shift began to be reflected in the changes in the law relating to children in the nineteenth century, a process which has inexorably led either to the parlous state of affairs today, where parents pander to their children’s every whim, or to our own enlightened times, where children are accorded their proper respect. It is this latter premise that is propounded by de Mause in The History of Childhood of 1974.3 De Mause extrapolates from the improvements in the position, health, and care of children over the past 150 years, a thesis that this is part of a continuum of change, and that one can trace backwards a history of childhood where each preceding century increases the brutality to which children were routinely subjected, back to a point where, if his thesis held water, there would have been insufficient infant survivors to have allowed the continuation of the species. These lines of argument have had convincing detractors. Linda Pollock’s Forgotten Children: Parent-child Relationships from 1500 to 1900 (1983),4 is particularly readable and telling. Pollock draws on archives of personal testimony – 1 Pinchbeck and Hewitt, for example, cite R. Bayne-Powell, The English Child in the Eighteenth Century (1939), and M. Hopkirk, Nobody Wanted Sam; The Story of an Unclaimed Child 1530–1948 (1949). 2 Phillippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Cape, 1962). 3 Lloyd de Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, The History of Childhood ed. de Mause (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974). 4 Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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childhood diaries, parents’ diaries and informal autobiographies – to challenge both Ariès’ theories of parental indifference and de Mause’s theories of parental neglect, and she uses newspaper reports about child abuse from the eighteenth century onwards to rebut Pinchbeck and Hewitt’s 1969 assertion of widespread indifference to cruelty to children, in Children in English Society,5 which looks at children’s welfare from Tudor times to 1948. Pollock’s evidence that parents always have been closely bonded with their small children, and grieved at their deaths, while largely (though not exclusively) drawn from a middle-class literate cohort, is impressively marshalled and confirms other types of studies of childhood, such as bio-social studies, which point out that the human babe can only survive in circumstances of close primary bonding with a care giver. Grylls’ Guardians and Angels, of 1978,6 while primarily a study of children in fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has an even-handed examination of the thinking that influenced Victorian parenting styles and exposes the paradoxes of an age that could find the sentimental death-bed scenes of innocent children an ennobling example to all, while still upholding a belief in original sin, which demands constant penance. Though not targeted by Grylls, Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little is the example par excellence of this equivocation. Similarly the sanitised childhoods of the Halliburton lads, and the slippery slope to damnation taken by the young Danes in Mrs Wood’s Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles, share this common ground. As we saw in chapter 2, these two texts contrast sharply with the narrative of childhood posited by Hughes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, where the telling of Tom’s early years has no ulterior motive of improving text for erring children. There is, as already explored, a subversive thread that suggests that it would be irrelevant and that it is normal and healthy for boys to get up to mischief. Not until Tom reaches his teens (and, non-explicitly, puberty) does the tale turn moral and exhortatory. Tom Brown’s Schooldays is not the first book to give a narrative to childhood; for instance, The History of Sandford and Merton by Thomas Day, a very popular work for most of the nineteenth century, was published in 1783.7 It is, however, the first book to give a narrative to that age of man that is recognisable by us today as childhood. The narrative of childhood that can be constructed from Trollope’s novels is different again. Here there are no inspiring death-bed scenes of children too good for this world; there are no godly and devout teenagers. No lad expires confessing the sin of disappointing his mother. The cohort of children that can be assembled from the novels is, it must be said, on the small side. Children are, by and large, plot devices, rather than active protagonists. Their appearances are incidents in stories about grown-ups and any link between a child’s motivation and action is hardly made. This is true even of Florian Jones, the ten-year-old who plays a major part in The Landleaguers, Trollope’s final and unfinished novel. The focus of Trollope’s 5

Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). 6 David Grylls, Guardians and Angels: Parents and Children in Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). 7 Thomas Day, The History of Sandford and Merton, 1783–1789 (London: Routledge and Co. 1855).

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narrative is the death of Florian’s mother, the impact this had on his father and older brother and sisters and the change in the ways they relate to Florian, not the interiority of a ten-year-old who has been sucked into political sedition. However, from the commentaries of the authorial voices, and the observations made by the adults, it is possible to construct a composite whole from the variety of cameo appearances by small children and make a qualitative assessment of the childhood experience offered in the novels. A popular parlour game for Trollopians has always been spotting Trollope’s careless errors and the fluctuating number of children that Glencora and Plantaganet Palliser are blessed with is a regular chestnut. Exactly what did happen to the little Lady Glencora between The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children? There is, however, a mundane explanation for the disappearing Palliser offspring – infant mortality. In the mid-Victorian period, around 25 per cent of children died before the age of five.8 A large number of the families in the novels have lost children in infancy. In The Prime Minister, of the six Wharton children, two reach adulthood.9 In Rachel Ray, we are told that Mrs Ray had two surviving children, the eldest and the youngest.10 The Crawleys in The Last Chronicle of Barset are said to have had many children and three are still alive.11 Of Bernard Dale’s siblings in The Small House at Allington, we hear that ‘some were dead, some married’.12 The ironic distance implicit in this last example is amplified in Doctor Thorne: As it was, her poor weak darlings were carried about from London to Brighton to some German baths, from the baths back to Torquay, and thence – as regarded the four we have named – to that bourne from whence no further journey could be made under the Lady Arabella’s directions.13

The dichotomy between the Lady Arabella’s desperate attempts to secure her children’s health, and the detachment of the narrative voice from the pain of the subject allows Trollope to continue to mock Lady Arabella and her posturing, while not glossing over the reality of infant mortality and the attendant grief. This grief is regularly confronted head on. The second paragraph of John Caldigate tells us of the death of John’s mother and two sisters: When John was 15, and had been about a year at Harrow, he lost his mother and his two little sisters almost at a blow. The two girls went first, and the poor mother, who had kept herself alive to see them die, followed them almost instantly. Then Daniel Caldigate had been alone.

8 The exact figure is difficult to establish precisely because of the low registration of children who died in the first few days of life, before 1874. Robert Woods and Nichola Shelton, An Atlas of Victorian Mortality (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 48, table 4 (see also Pinchbeck and Hewitt, vol. 2, 349–50). 9 Prime Minister, 21. 10 Rachel, 4. 11 Last Chronicle, 6. 12 Small House, 11. 13 Doctor Thorne, 7.

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Here, the spare telling gives strength to the bleak events. The narrator is struck dumb by the loss, in much the same way that Daniel Caldigate is shown to be, over the ensuing paragraphs. The different ways that father and son cope with their grief and rebuild their lives without them critically shape the manner of their future relationship: ‘When they were taken from him he suffered in silence, as such men do suffer.’14 Today, to lose two children and one’s wife is a major and unusual tragedy. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was commonplace. John Tilley, Trollope’s brother-in-law, lost two wives and four children in the space of two years between 1849 and 1851.15 Trollope makes it clear that while it was common, it was no less a shattering bereavement, with far-reaching repercussions. The Grantlys, who have five children in The Warden and Barchester Towers, raise Charles, Henry and Griselda to adulthood and Mrs Grantly reflects with dignified sadness on the death of Florinda as she ponders on a possible shipwreck in Griselda’s marriage in The Small House at Allington.16 We surmise that the Pallisers coped with the probable loss by death of little Lady Glencora in a similar fashion. The wives who fall pregnant in Trollope’s novels only ever give birth to boys. This statistical improbability is tempered slightly by the numbers of existing families, as the novels open, where there are only daughters – Rachel and Dorothea Ray (Rachel Ray), Gertrude, Linda and Katy Woodward (The Three Clerks), Bell and Lily Dale (The Small House at Allington), Lucy and Ayala Dormer (Ayala’s Angel), the eight Rowley sisters (He Knew He Was Right), Mary Wortle (Dr Wortle’s School), Alice Vavasor (Can You Forgive Her?); there is also a small cohort of families with older daughters and younger sons. Mary Belton in The Belton Estate is older than Will; in Castle Richmond, Clara Desmond has a younger brother Patrick; in The Vicar of Bullhampton, Jane and Frank Fenwick’s eldest child is a daughter; the Burtons have two daughters and a baby son in The Claverings. Trollope is, of course, reflecting the greater importance of primogeniture in the times he wrote in. John and Hester Caldigate curtail their honeymoon trip to be at Folking for the birth of their first-born: ‘Whether an heir, or only an insignificant girl, it would be well that the child should be born amidst the comforts of home.’17 Plantaganet Palliser is fixated on the belief that his first child must be a son and heir: ‘In a few minutes it was to him as though each hand had already rested on the fair head of a little male Palliser’18 and blanches when Glencora taunts him with a preference for a daughter.19 And clearly the plot of Is He Popenjoy? demands a first-born son. But such is the added value of the male child that Alaric and Gertrude Tudor’s first child is a boy (The Three Clerks), Eleanor Bold’s posthumous child is a boy (Barchester Towers), the Belton’s eldest is a boy (The Belton Estate) – and that in a story that sets such store on the iniquities of entails and the disabilities of women

14 15 16 17 18 19

Caldigate, 2. Victoria Glendinning, 187. Small House, 602. Caldigate, 204. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, 340. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, 413.

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to inherit property. Even the child born to Ferdinand Lopez and Emily Wharton in The Prime Minister, who dies soon after birth, is a boy. Trollope’s descriptions of children can vary from the sentimental portrait of Marion Arbuthnot, the Stavely grandchild in Orley Farm, to the sharply satirical picture of the three Grantly boys in The Warden, which lampoons the posturings of three contemporary bishops by translating adult traits into boyish manners and exposes the subtle gap between a parent’s fond estimation and objective observation.20 Both extremes are underpinned with acute observation of the behaviour of children. Trollope has a remarkable eye for the telling detail of child development which sits comfortably with our perceptions today. This is well illustrated by an analysis of his descriptions of Louey Trevelyan, the toddler who becomes a pawn in his parents’ failing marriage in He Knew He Was Right. The Trevelyans part when Louey is about ten months old, and for the next three months he lives with his mother in the country and then in London with her aunt and uncle, until he is abducted by his father and taken to Italy. Six months later a bewildered and withdrawn Louey is returned to his mother’s custody. Trollope shows us, in painful detail, the effect on a small child of so many separations and losses. Trevelyan asks Hugh Stanbury to bring Louey to him from St Diddulph’s. Trollope’s grasp of child development is accurate: ‘The child at this time was more than a year old and could crawl about and use his own legs with the assistance of a finger to his little hand, and could utter a sound which the fond mother interpreted to mean papa.’21 Louey responds to his father by starting to wail. Trollope comments on how normal this is: ‘It was now nearly two months since he had seen his father, and, when age is counted by months only, almost everything may be forgotten in six weeks.’22 Louey is profoundly affected by the changes of care in his life: ‘He was cowed and overcome, not only by the incidents of the moment, but by the terrible melancholy of his whole life.’23 Trollope recognises that a child’s need for consistency and stability is the mirror side of a mother’s relationship with her baby. When Emily Trevelyan is re-united with Louey after his initial abduction, her need to re-establish the physical bonding is primal: It seemed to her that she had not seen her boy till she had had him to herself, in absolute privacy, till she had kissed his limbs, and had her hand upon his smooth back, and seen that he was white and clean and bright as he had ever been.24

Trollope’s recognition of a mother’s need for physical contact with her baby and its importance for the healthy development of closeness between them is strikingly modern and the logic of his insight exposes the false premise of the implementation of the Custody laws of the time.25 20

Warden, 98–101. He Knew He Was Right, 307. 22 He Knew He Was Right, 308. 23 He Knew He Was Right, 741. 24 He Knew He Was Right, 636. 25 Legal custody of children belonged to the husband, and unless declared insane, he could take them from his wife and arrange their care as he thought fit. Largely due to 21

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Mothers who have close physical bonds with their babies, like Emily Trevelyan and Eleanor Bold (Barchester Towers), are endorsed by the text. Conversely, Trollope is scathing about mothers who fall short of the needs of their children. Trollope has particularly strong views about breast-feeding: Of course, Lady Arabella could not suckle the young heir herself. Ladies Arabella never can. They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use.26

It is a tendency made much of in He Knew He Was Right, where Wallachia Petrie taunts Caroline Spalding with the conviction that the children of the aristocracy are brought up by nurses: ‘If you have a baby, they’ll let you go and see it two or three times a day. I don’t suppose you will be allowed to nurse it, because they never do in England.’27 Failure to produce mother’s milk seems, from this, closely linked with membership of an effete aristocracy, whose gene pool is going to be revitalised by the injection of new blood from the robust rising middle classes. This is made explicit in Is He Popenjoy?: When it was decided that the young Marchioness was to nurse her own baby, – a matter which Mary took into her own hands with a very high tone, – the old Marchioness became again a little troublesome. She had her memories about it all in her own time, how she had not been able to do as Mary was doing.28

The import of this, for the generation of active, well-educated and independentlyminded young women who become the mothers of the new generation born into Trollope’s novels, seems to be that good parenting starts from the earliest days. Parents who abandon their children to the charge of nursemaids, like Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds, are scorned and upbraided by the authorial voice in the text. These families with small children do employ nursemaids, but their task is to maintain domestic order in the nursery rather than to parent their charges. Small children in the novels spend their time in the company of their parents and are welcomed by other adults. In Phineas Finn, little Silverbridge accompanies his mother on her morning calls and finds his uncle the Duke at Madame Goesler’s. He sits ‘on his grand-uncle’s knee’.29 This is presented as a comfortable and familiar thing to do. There is no suggestion that it was unusual for Lady Glencora to pay her morning calls with her son. It was far more an issue of comment to leave him at home: ‘Lady Glencora went to Park Lane early on Tuesday morning, but she did not take her boy with her.’30 This is followed by, ‘Why did you not bring him, Lady Glencora?’ In The Claverings, the portrayal of Cissy and Sophie Burton at play in the drawing room with their mother reinforces this: the lobbying of Caroline Norton, an abused wife who was denied access to her three small children, an Infant Custody Act, passed in 1839, entitled a mother to apply for custody or contact with her children after separation, but not if she had been proven adulterous. 26 Doctor Thorne, 30. 27 He Knew He Was Right, 758. 28 Is He Popenjoy?, vol. 2, 299. 29 Phineas Finn, 453. 30 Phineas Finn, 470.

From Birth to Man’s Estate

Figure 5.1

The Infant Silverbridge Sits on his Great-uncle’s (Millais’ Illustration for the 1st Edition of Phineas Finn)

107

Knee

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‘Close beside her, on a low chair, sat a fair-haired girl, about seven years old, who was going through some pretence at needlework; and kneeling on a higher chair, while she sprawled over the drawing room table was another girl, some three years younger, who was engaged with a puzzle-box’.31

The children’s relaxed comportment suggests that this is where they are every day. This passage demonstrates Trollope’s ear for the conversation of a seven year old, and the extra licence given to a four year old, and occupation appropriate to their ages. Later on Theodore Burton shows a sensible firm parental line on bed-times when the children stay in the parlour with him while his wife talks to Harry Clavering about his duplicity.32 Theodore and Cecilia Burton’s views on bringing up children are much in line with Dr Thorne’s: ‘He delighted to talk to children, and to play with them. He had a great theory as to the happiness of children; ... he argued that the principle duty which a parent owed to a child was to make him happy.’33 This is a consistent theme whenever children enter the plot. In Marion Fay Lord Hampstead’s pleasure is to play rough and tumble with his three little half-brothers: ‘They were made to gallop on ponies on which they had only walked before; they were bathed in the river, and taken to the top of the castle, and shut up in the dungeon after a fashion which was within the reach of no-one but Hampstead.’34 Healthy little boys are desired and expected to be energetic, be up to mischief, get into scrapes. In Is He Popenjoy?, Popenjoy, at five, is a ‘very healthy and rather mischievous little boy, who tyrannised over his two little sisters’35 and, in The Bertrams, George Bertram as a lad ‘gave Mrs Wilkinson the usual amount of trouble as regarded his jackets and pantaloons’.36 It is clear that in Trollope’s book, parents should both be actively involved with their children, and that this involvement should include playing games and having fun, and that this leads to children growing into well-balanced young people who get on well with their parents. To have healthy energetic children is considered the ultimate blessing on a happy marriage; in The Bertrams Trollope reflects poignantly that ‘no baby lies in Caroline’s arms, no noisy boy climbs on the arm of George Bertram’s chair’.37 The proximity of parents continues to be of primary importance as children progress through their education. Most studies of childhood agree that the rise of formal systems of education in the sixteenth century paralleled changes in the way that children were perceived in relation to their parents, though there is wide disagreement about the nature of the relationship. As formal education became more commonplace, there was a corresponding growth in the publication of writings about theories of education, like John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, first

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Claverings, 78. Claverings, 295. Doctor Thorne, 41–2. Marion Fay, 122–3. Is He Popenjoy?, vol. 2, 307. Bertrams, 6. Bertrams, 487.

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published in 1693, which advocates a leniency towards the growing child. Education theorists split (and perhaps still do split) into two camps, those who see childhood as a state of innocence tainted by contact with the corrupt adult world and those who perceive children as being in a state of sin, needing discipline to teach them better ways. Rousseau’s theories polarised the debate. Emile,39 first published in 1762, was widely read and influenced many, entrenching the opposition of those who disagreed with him. John Wesley described it as ‘the most empty, silly, injudicious thing that a self-conceited infidel ever wrote’,40 yet, by the end of the century, over two hundred books and pamphlets, influenced by Emile, had been published in England.41 Rousseau’s principle that each boy’s education should be steered by an individual tutor, ideally his father, points to domestic rather than institutional education. It is ironic that Rousseau’s thinking has been taken up by institutions who have sought to apply his child-centred principles to the education they advocate. His view that children should learn through cause and effect, and that if they break a window they should sleep in its draught, – and that this was a more potent method than the overt moral indoctrination and discipline elsewhere advocated – influenced many experiments in the education of children, and Rousseau has probably been quoted, misquoted, interpreted and misinterpreted to justify some of the most bizarre systems of education for the past 200 years. It is certainly possible to discern Rousseau’s influence in an analysis of the educational experience of boys and young men in Trollope’s novels. If we examine Table 5.1, we can see that an overwhelming proportion of boys go to public school. Their age when they are sent there varies. John Caldigate is 14 when he goes to Harrow, George Bertram and Arthur Wilkinson 13 when they go to Winchester. However, from the nature of the exchange of responses of Sammy Grantly in The Warden, we might guess him to be about eight or nine. While there is no overt commentary that says that children who are sent away to school at an early age grow into colder and shallower human beings, it is certainly true that some of the men who grow into the warmest and most loving husbands spend longer in an environment where they receive a great deal of individual attention from father figures. One might then inversely hypothesise that the young men who are superficial in their adult relationships and at loggerheads with their fathers, like Porlock (Lord de Courcy’s son) who appears in Dr Thorne, The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, Dolly Longestaffe (The Way We Live Now) and Lord Grex’s son (The Duke’s Children), had been sent to public school at a very young age. When Plantaganet Palliser’s administration falls, he takes his whole family on an extended tour of the continent, including Gerald, who was due to go up to Cambridge, ‘but his father had thought it well to give him a 12 month’s run on the continent,

38

John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1st published 1693; reprinted 19 times by 1761 (Grylls, 20). 39 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. William Kenrick (London: Everyman, 1992; 1st English publication London: R. Griffiths, T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1762). 40 Grylls, 34. 41 Grylls, 34.

Table 5.1

Education

Name

School

University

Outcome

Occupation

Charles Amedroz

Harrow (expelled)

Cambridge

sent down

none

Francis Arabin

Winchester

Balliol, Oxford (commoner)

did not get a 1st

professor of poetry, clergyman

Winchester

Trinity, Oxford

double 1st

writer

Harrow at 14

Trinity, Cambridge

degree

gold prospector

Oswald Chiltern

Christchurch, Oxford

sent down

MFH

Harry Clavering

Cambridge

double 1st

schoolmaster, civil engineer, private fortune

George Bertram

Early education

private pupil with clergyman

John Caldigate

Adolphus Crosbie

civil servant

Frank Fenwick

St. John’s, Oxford

a fellowship

clergyman

Irish schools

Trinity, Dublin

degree

lawyer; politician

George Germain

Eton

Oxford

degree

private fortune

Henry Grantly

Public School

Phineas Finn

Frank Gresham

army, land-owner Cambridge

degree

private fortune

honours degree

scholar, politician

John Grey

educated by father (a clergyman)

Cambridge

Ferdinand Lopez

educated in England

German University

Lord Lufton

private pupil with clergyman

Walter Marrable

Harrow

Oxford

stockbroker pass degree

Public School

private fortune army

Lucius Mason

German University

Paul Montague

Oxford

farm management sent down

investment income

Name

Early education

School

University

Outcome

Occupation

John Morton

Eton

Reginald Morton

Public School

German University (no money to go to Oxford)

Harry Norman

Public School

Oxford

left because of lack of funds

civil servant

Gerald Palliser

Eton plus 12 months with father

Trinity, Cambridge

sent down

private fortune

scholar, private fortune (eventually)

Harrow

Oxford

pass degree

clergyman

Louis Scatcherd

Eton at 15 (expelled)

Cambridge

sent down - then had tutor who resigned

private fortune

Lord Silverbridge

Eton

Christchurch, Oxford

sent down

private fortune, politician

pass degree

lawyer, journalist

Mark Robarts

private pupil with clergyman

diplomatic service

Obadiah Slope

Cambridge (sizar) Oxford

clergyman

Hugh Stanbury

Harrow

Jonathan Stubbs

Public School

Frank Tregear

Eton

Christchurch, Oxford

2nd class honours

politician

Louis Trevelyan

Public School

Oxford/Cambridge

brilliant scholar

private fortune, scholar

Alaric Tudor

Private School

position as tutor at German University

army

civil servant

George Vavasor

clerk, wine merchant, stockbroker

Everett Wharton Arthur Wilkinson

at home with father (a clergyman)

Winchester

Oxford

left without a degree

banking, stockbroker, private fortune

Balliol, Oxford

2nd class honours

clergyman

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112 42

under his own inspection’. John Grey, in Can You Forgive Her?, is educated entirely at his father’s hand until he goes to Cambridge. His father is a clergyman. Mark Robart’s life-long friendship with Lord Lufton in Framley Parsonage begins when they are tutored together as little boys in the house of a clergyman. In The Bertrams, Arthur Wilkinson’s father, also a clergyman, takes charge of his son’s education until he is considered old enough for public school and takes in George Bertram to teach alongside his son, to help with the family finances. Arthur himself ekes out what is left of his income after his mother’s depredations, by taking in pupils two at a time, who share their home, and he prides himself that he has never had one who failed. Indeed, this is exactly how Dr Wortle came to establish his school, when his system of combining good teaching skills with first-rate physical and emotional care becomes so successful that he builds a schoolhouse where he can take thirty pupils at a time. It is worth pausing to examine the structure of Dr Wortle’s school and compare it with what was standard in the public schools at the time. In principle, it is a preparatory school; it prepares boys for Eton, where Dr Wortle had previously taught, though some boys stay longer and Lord Carstairs, of course, returns at 18 when he is expelled from Eton. We hear that the young Lord has just spent a year with a private tutor on the continent, and that when he returns to Bowick he lives in the Parsonage and eats his meals with the Doctor and his family ‘in some sort as a private pupil’.43 The Doctor believes in good wholesome food, plenty of it, and a regime which does not exploit the vulnerability of smaller children; the sports facilities are excellent – cricket, tennis, rackets and swimming. The staff group (for 30 boys) consists of a French Master, a German Master, a Maths and Science Master and Mr Peacock, nominally the assistant Classics Master, but taking much of the weight of the running of the school from Dr Wortle’s shoulders. The average age for starting is not asserted, but Lady de Lawle is persuaded that at 11, it is time for her son to broaden his horizons. Leaving one’s mother is clearly a characterbuilding experience; her continued presence ‘would deprive his education of all the real salt’.44 Not that mothers have no role in the everyday life of little boys of 11: ‘this poor desolate boy’ became the ‘happiest of the young pickles whom it was Mrs Wortle’s special province to spoil whenever she could get hold of them.’45 In short, Dr Wortle’s establishment is exactly what was sought by ‘those parents who love to think that their boys shall be made happy at school’.46 Dr Wortle charges his parents £200 per year for his care of his charges. As we can see from Trollope’s article ‘Public Schools’ (and all the information in this paragraph is drawn from this article),47 this is about double the cost of Harrow at the time. This extraordinary contrast draws attention to an even more striking disparity. The staff: 42

Dukes Children, 1. Dr Wortle, 41. 44 Dr Wortle, 15. 45 Dr Wortle, 15. 46 Dr Wortle, 9. 47 ‘Public Schools’, The Fortnightly Review, 1st October, 1865, reprinted Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews (New York: Arno Press, 1981). 43

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pupil ratio at Eton was 1:25, at Harrow and Shrewsbury 1:22, Winchester 1:20 and at Dr Wortle’s 1:6. Dr Wortle has a French Master and German Master for his 30 pupils; for the 806 boys at Eton there was one teacher of foreign languages. At St. Andrew’s College, Bradfield, where Trollope sent his own sons, the ratio was 1:13 or 14 and they did profess to teach boys for their £130 per annum. The public school system, where masters ‘heard’ their pupils recite lessons learnt from the older boys, left many boys with only the vaguest notions of what they were supposed to know. ‘Tuition’ was an optional extra. Dr Wortle does not say what he pays his teachers for taking the task of teaching boys seriously; Harry Clavering earns £300 a year as a schoolmaster.48 The average income of assistant masters at Eton was £1,845. Little wonder that Trollope felt there was room for reform in the great institutions, though his wishes fall short of radical change. Public schools justified their existence by establishing a ground where the sons of gentlemen could grow up together. That Trollope is keen to preserve some vestige of class distinction is clear from his comments in Doctor Thorne about Louis Scatcherd’s career at Eton. ‘He had been sent to Eton when he was 15, his father being under the impression that this was the most ready and best-recognised method of making him a gentleman.’ Alas, ‘Boys ... are at least as exclusive as men, and understand the difference between an inner and outer circle’.49 All Louis Scatcherd learns at Eton, and subsequently at Cambridge, is a taste for liquor, and how to buy the companionship of other disreputables. Does Dr Wortle resort to corporal punishment? Dr Thorne in advancing his view that a parent’s principal duty is to make a child happy strongly argues against corporal punishment: ‘Why struggle after future advantage at the expense of present pain, seeing that the results were so very doubtful?’50 It should not be necessary, he goes on, to beat a boy to make him do his lessons. Surely it would be more constructive to make the lessons pleasant. When he is challenged on the need for control and correction for children, he counters that he also needs control and correction – but manages not to steal his neighbour’s peaches, or make love to his neighbour’s wife without recourse to the rod. It is clear that young boys were expected to be up to mischief. That little de Lawle becomes a ‘young pickle’ is a sign of the success of the school’s regime. That four of the schoolmasters play cricket with the older boys of a Saturday afternoon suggests a school with relaxed relationships between pupil and master and a school that prizes fair play – since it is cricket that they are playing.51 The only reference to corporal punishment is in the scurrilous accusation of Everybody’s Business: ‘He passes all the morning in the school whipping the boys himself because he has sent Mr Peacock away, and then amuses himself in the evening by making love to Mr Peacock’s wife.’52 The accusation that stings, and which he leaps to deny, is the impropriety with Mrs Peacock. That he might beat the boys, or normally employ Mr Peacock to do it passes without comment. 48 49 50 51 52

Claverings, 9. Doctor Thorne, 138. Doctor Thorne, 42. Dr Wortle, 28. Dr Wortle, 114–15.

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Trollope famously describes himself as the most flogged child ever to attend Winchester and Harrow: ‘I feel convinced in my mind that I have been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all’53 and the novels seem to suggest that, however futile it might be as a way of disciplining boys, there is a sad inevitability about it. In Framley Parsonage, Dr Robarts, discussing the relative merits of Eton and Harrow with Lady Lufton, wonders ‘whether the Eton floggings were not more efficacious than those at Harrow’.54 The ironic distance of this suggests that the floggings of neither were at all beneficial, and also that floggings were an unavoidable part of the public school experience. If the only certainties of the public school system are floggings and haphazard tuition, we can see from Figure 5.1 that there are even fewer certainties to be gained from a degree. While it is clearly the done thing to progress to Oxford or Cambridge, what one might gain beyond further useful friendships is hard to perceive. There is clearly no shame in not being able to afford to go to University. Reginald Morton in The American Senator, and Harry Norman in The Three Clerks, both have to give up their ambition to take a degree, but still make their mark on the world and win the girl. Two of them work their way through University as servitors (like the Halliburton boys), but since they are Slope and Arabin (Barchester Towers), one would be hardput to see what point might be being made. Seven are sent down. Being sent down in itself is no particular indicator of disgrace. In The Duke’s Children, when Silverbridge paints the Dean’s house red, the text implies this is youthful exuberance and high spirits. Peregrine Orme, in Orley Farm, is sent down: ‘the frolics of which he had been guilty had been essentially young in their nature’.55 Paul Montague’s ‘rows’ at Balliol, in The Way We Live Now56 while clearly markers of Paul’s character, are not perceived as great faults, in contrast to Charles Amedroz, whose ‘vagaries’, it is hinted, cause real damage in The Belton Estate.57 In Phineas Finn, Lord Chiltern’s position is interestingly ambiguous. He is sent down when he near-strangles a college servant while drunk. Certainly Oswald’s wildnesses far exceed those of Silverbridge or Peregrine Orme; having nearly killed a man at Oxford, he really does kill a man at Newmarket. In the past he has drunk heavily and he has gambled away both his fortune and his sister’s. It is important to notice that in spite of these transgressions Oswald is not presented as morally corrupt. This explains why he still gets to marry Violet Effingham, the virgin with ‘the dearest dimple that ever acted as a lodestar to man’s eyes’.58 As the tale of Phineas Finn unfolds, he turns away from hard drinking and gambling, though not from impetuous violence, since he still insists on a duel with Phineas and says he would have killed him if he could.59 By the time

53

An Autobiography, 18. Framley, 149. See A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, 2002 (London: Arrow Books, 2003) 291–2, for Eton’s reputation for harsh flogging. 55 Orley Farm, vol. 1, 31. 56 Way We Live Now, 55. 57 Belton Estate, 3. 58 Phineas Finn, 84. 59 Phineas Finn, 367. 54

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Phineas Redux is played out, with Violet’s love and support, he has turned away completely from his earlier life and sublimates his violent tendencies in his fearless riding to hounds. It is as though Oswald’s openness about his over-strong feelings is to be interpreted as honesty, a chivalric quality, which thus exonerates him. Indeed ‘honest’ and ‘chivalric’ are regularly applied to Oswald.60 If being sent down does not automatically debar a man from a successful future, neither do academic honours necessarily imply that a man’s course will run smoothly. Only Louis Trevelyan (He Knew He Was Right) and George Bertram (The Bertrams) are declared to have done brilliantly. While it is implied that Harry Clavering also has a double first, it is perceived as a positive liability in civil engineering circles: It is a knowledge that requires no experience and very little real thought … At four and twenty a young fellow has achieved some wonderful success, and calls himself by some outlandish and conceited name – a ‘double first’, or something of the kind. Then he thinks he has completed everything, and is too vain to learn anything afterwards. All that competition makes false and imperfect growth.61

Everett Wharton, the perpetual butterfly-brain, flits out of university and out of a succession of professions, but seems on target to make a success of being heir to a title by the end of The Prime Minister. The men whose accounts of their university careers seem to demand respect are either those who also do well as sporting men, like John Caldigate and Frank Fenwick, or those who do modestly well, like Frank Tregear and Arthur Wilkinson. Of Francis Arabin, we read: He was not a double first, nor even a first class man; but he revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double firsts out of fashion for the year, and laughing down a species of pedantry which at the age of 23 leaves no room in a man’s mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.62

A double first then, may be a poisoned chalice when Trollope awards it to a young man. Jonathan Stubbs (Ayala’s Angel), Henry Grantly (Last Chronicle of Barset) and Walter Marrable (The Vicar of Bullhampton) set out on their very creditable military careers straight from public school. This is explicit in the case of the young Henry Grantly who attends his aunt Eleanor’s wedding, ‘resplendent in a new uniform’.63 John Morton (The American Senator), joins the diplomatic service after Eton, and while their stars later sink below the horizon, Alaric Tudor (The Three Clerks) and Adolphus Crosbie (The Small House at Allington) make meteoric rises through the Civil Service from their early starts. As these young men with degrees step out into adulthood, their career choices are narrow – politics, the Church, or managing an inherited estate. Few of them (probably only Felix Graham in Orley Farm) make a success of attempts at Law and those who embark on a legal career tend to side-step into writing or journalism or politics, like Hugh Stanbury in He Knew He Was Right, George Bertram and Phineas 60 61 62 63

Phineas Finn, 299. Claverings, 85. Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 188. Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 267.

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Finn. However, the novels say that men, no matter how adequate their income, ought to have a worthwhile occupation. In Phineas Finn, Lord Chiltern becomes a Master of Foxhounds in response to Violet Effingham’s insistence that he should find a purpose in life. In The Duke’s Children, Plantaganet Palliser wants his son to have a career, rather than passing his days in hunting, shooting and learning to drive a four-in-hand. And in the same book, Frank Tregear’s demonstration that he means to spend his time wisely when he wins his seat in the House helps put an end to the opposition to his desire to marry Lady Mary. The whole business of earning one’s living and maintaining one’s gentility is full of ambivalence and paradox in the novels. In He Knew He Was Right, is Hugh Stanbury demeaned by working for a newspaper? Do we think less, or more of Luke Rowan because he is determined to make his own fortune, rather than living on the proceeds of his father’s fortune, in Rachel Ray? Could Harry Clavering earn his spurs as a man more worthily by making his way as a civil engineer than by inheriting wealth? In Doctor Thorne does our estimation of Frank Gresham increase because he determines to make his way as a farmer in order to marry the woman he loves? If these men’s standing is enhanced by the dignity of labour, what then is the implication of the plot resolutions that make Harry and Frank rich and remove from them the necessity of earning their bread? The Claverings is one of the subtlest explorations of these issues. Theodore Burton, so scorned because he dusts his shoes with his handkerchief, nonetheless has the trappings of the social group Harry aspires to belong to – a pretty, intelligent wife, a comfortably-appointed home, three well-spaced children, entertaining dinner guests from the new industrial-age society. Burton is the New Man of his generation, who gets up in a morning and goes to work to decide which bit of London to pull down next, in the name of progress and the railways – ever-potent symbol of the industrial revolution. His position is very different from Sir Roger Scatcherd, who also rises by the development of the railways, but who never transcends his origins as a labouring stonemason. Burton’s origins, though humble, are in a family who work with their brains, not their hands. Burton is the signifier of a new world order, a meritocracy, where men achieve power and respect (and some wealth) because of what they know and do, displacing a worn-out, self-regarding aristocracy represented by Lord Ongar and Sir Hugh Clavering. The walls Burton knocks down are the old class barriers, the thoroughfares he chooses to build are the new routes to control and influence. In this context, Harry’s installation in the family seat is putting him back in his place, confining him to the class where he was born, denying him the opportunity to prove himself in this new world order, the opportunity he so desires to make his mark with Locke, Stephenson and Brassey: ‘Providence was making a great mistake when she expected him to earn his bread’,64 says Burton as the novel ends. In giving the last word to him, Trollope confirms a reading that Harry, in spite of his double first, has been denied the goals of manhood that are worth striving for.

64

Claverings, 514.

Chapter 6

Sex and the Single Man The last chapter traced Trollope’s construction of manhood from the birth of a boy to his arrival in the world of men. This chapter similarly constructs the narrative of a young man’s growing awareness of his sexual identity and his transition from boyhood to adult sexuality. It examines the novels to decipher Trollope’s codes to describe behaviour that is beyond the pale and discovers him granting considerable leeway to some young men in their interaction with young women. Contrasting the lives of those young men to whom he gives licence and those to whom it is denied reveals unusual subtleties in his construction of the masculinity that young men should aspire to. Young men in the normal course of things may feel the first stirrings of sexual passion, interpreted as love, at 17 or 18, as Lord Carstairs is when he proposes to Mary Wortle while still a schoolboy, in Dr Wortle’s School.1 These early passions can come upon a young man before he has put his laddish pursuits behind him. Peregrine Orme (Orley Farm) conceives his unrequited passion for Madeline Stavely while still indulging in juvenile pranks. ‘He had assisted in driving a farmer’s sow into the man’s best parlour, or had daubed the top of the tutor’s cap with white paint, or had perhaps given liberty to a bag full of rats in the college hall at dinner time.’2 The narrator hints at the end of Dr Wortle that Lord Carstairs’ amorous ambitions may fade before fruition, and Peregrine Orme’s green passion is presented as a rite of passage, a necessary part of the process of growing up: ‘There are men who are old at one and twenty, – are quite fit for Parliament, the magistrates’ bench, the care of a wife ... but there are others who at that age are still boys.’3 ‘Fruit that grows ripe the quickest is not the sweetest; nor when housed and garnered will it keep the longest’,4 is the authorial commentary on Peregrine’s developmental delay, a metaphor that regularly occurs when young men lack the maturity and the skill to make a success of their love-making. For while Lord Carstairs has no problem in finding the words to woo Mary, nor the confidence to take her in his arms and kiss her, in spite of her parents as audience, Peregrine’s biggest problem is his lack of experience with young women: ‘When he was alone, he carried on with her all manner of imaginary conversations, though when he was in her company he hardly had a word to say to her.’5 Arthur Fletcher is in his teens when he first declares his love for Emily in The Prime Minister.6 Johnny Eames (The Small House at Allington) loves Lily Dale from 1 2 3 4 5 6

Dr Wortle, 128. Orley Farm, vol. 1, 31. Orley Farm, vol. 1, 31. Orley Farm, vol. 1, 31. Orley Farm, vol. 1, 221. Prime Minister, vol. 1, 134.

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his earliest youth. Young love, puppy love, is regarded as normal and healthy, and it is expected that these early passions will burn themselves out, and leave the heroes free to make a mature and long-lasting match in the future: ‘Most young men have to go through that disappointment, and are enabled to bear it without much injury to their prospects or happiness.’7 This belief, expressed in authorial intervention and, in the views of parents, is regularly belied by the plots. Johnny Eames never gets over his love for Lily; it is not clear whether Peregrine Orme’s intrepid career as big game hunter assuages his broken heart, nor whether Owen Fitzgerald ever learns to love again and Arthur Fletcher finally does marry Emily after her disastrous first marriage. Young love, and perhaps a heart believed to be broken, is the norm then for a young man. Certainly, to miss out that stage in one’s development is to be open to a degree of mockery: Since he [Plantagenet Palliser] had been told that Lady Dumbello smiled upon him, he had certainly thought more about her smiles than had been good for his statistics. It seemed as though a new vein in his body had been brought into use, and that blood was running where blood had never run before.8

Plantagenet Palliser gets through his adolescence without a ripple in his moral rectitude, and here he is, at 25, having to deal with an inconvenient erection. The implication seems to be that young men need to learn the mastery of situations like this when they are young enough to make light of it. There is no suggestion anywhere that a young man might make use of any devices such as these illustrated here (Figure 6.1) to inhibit sexual arousal. Some young men clearly learn how to comport themselves in the company of young women from their sisters. One might guess that such was the experience of Phineas Finn, Harry Clavering, Hugh Stanbury, Luke Rowan; however, how young men might decently learn how to engage with the opposite sex is a challenge regularly addressed in the novels. Charlie Tudor (The Three Clerks) learns how to appreciate feminine delicacy when he is taken by his cousin to meet Mrs Woodhouse and her daughters, who then make him part of their family Sundays. Johnny Eames (The Small House at Allington) fares less well and has only Amelia Roper for his apprenticeship. His lack of experience with women, and the part that plays in his failure to win Lily, is tackled forthrightly: If I were a mother sending lads out into the world, the matter most in my mind would be this, – to what houses full of nicest girls could I get them admission, that they might do their flirting in good company.9

This is a remarkable observation in several ways. It is notable that Trollope sees a young man’s early sexual encounters as the ambit of his mother, rather than his father, or the unspecific parent. Part of it, of course, acknowledges that women rather than men tend to organise domestic social events, but it also contains an assertion 7 8 9

Small House, 147. Small House, 474. Small House, 555.

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Figure 6.1

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Devices to Inhibit Masturbation and Nocturnal Arousal (Taken from Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience, facing 183)

that mothers have a primary concern in counselling their sons about their early encounters with women. ‘Houses full of nicest girls’, implies that there are nuances about courtship that a young gentleman can only learn from young women of his own class. Johnny’s experience in making love to Amelia Roper will not help him a whit with Lily. Indeed Lily’s discovery of his dalliance with Madelina Desmolines in The Last Chronicle of Barset puts an end to what chance he had of winning her hand. That mothers should wish young men to be given the opportunities to flirt with these ‘nicest girls’ exposes the double standard, for while it is seen as desirable that

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men should have experience of courtship, a young woman’s first encounter with sexual passion should come with the first embrace of betrothal. Young women who are kissed before the exchange of lovers’ vows – such as Clara in The Belton Estate, and Clarissa in Ralph the Heir, are offended and angry with their admirers (though an authorial voice adds that they are pleased, at heart). In contrast, young men need experience to help them in their stratagems. In Doctor Thorne, Frank Gresham is courting Mary Thorne: ‘Had Frank known more about a woman’s mind – had he, that is, been 42 instead of 22 – he would at once have been sure of his game’,10 this in spite of earlier demonstrating some skill at flirting where his heart was not engaged. On this occasion, Frank manages to get hold of Mary’s hand and kiss it – after he has established that Mary returns his love. The next time they meet, he takes her in his arms: ‘Mary! my own, own love! my own one! sweetest! dearest! best! Mary! ... There he held her close bound to his breast.’11 Their meeting lasts two hours and it would seem that Frank presses for more physical demonstration of love than Mary is prepared to give: ‘Had she not borne thy caresses? Had there been one touch of anger when she warded off thy threatened kisses?’12 There seems a clear thread that a young man fit to be a hero should woo with ardour, and with skill. But how should he develop that skill? Is it permissible for a young man to acquire sexual experience without offending the prevailing mores? In He Knew He Was Right, Hugh Stanbury’s initial declaration of love to Nora has him imposing his physical attentions on her against her better judgement, if not exactly against her will. He takes her hand and will not let go. He manages to get his arm round her waist. ‘“Let me go”, she said, struggling through her tears and covering her face with her hands.’ He goes away ‘[smoking] the pipe of triumph rather than the pipe of contemplation.’13 His confidence is vindicated – they engage themselves by letter. The next time they meet at the hotel where she is staying with her parents, she again wards of his sallies: ‘That will do, Hugh, you can talk without taking hold of me.’14 They finally fall into a passionate embrace as he sets off to bring the dying Trevelyan home: ‘[he] kissed her hair and her forehead, and held her close to his bosom.’ And lest anyone fear that Nora’s fielding of his persistent hands suggests frigidity, ‘she rushed into his arms’.15 His lover’s privilege of an arm round a waist is taken with some expertise. One of Aunt Stanbury’s reasons for disowning him is that ‘she was almost certain that he had once kissed one of the maids’.16 This information, alongside other examples of independence of action and thought, confirm a view of Hugh as a healthy, well-balanced, red-blooded male. It is a throw-away remark, without the deeper examination of the circumstances which led Trollope to comment, in The Small at Allington, that Johnny Eames had been forced to do his flirting in very bad company, 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Doctor Thorne, 395–6. Doctor Thorne, 474. Doctor Thorne, 475. He Knew He Was Right, 372. He Knew He Was Right, 846. He Knew He Was Right, 862. He Knew He Was Right, 74.

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but it does beg the question of whether and where other heroes had practised their love-making technique. In The Claverings, Harry Clavering is also very adept at getting his hand where he wants it when he sits in the dimly-lit back parlour with Florence, where they sit on a sofa holding hands, until ‘he pressed her close to his bosom, and kissed her lips, and her forehead, and her glossy hair’.17 Harry constantly pleads for an early day for their wedding; his requests are countered, with equal constancy, with counsels of prudence. When the death of his cousins makes him heir to the Clavering estate, and removes the necessity for prudence, Harry’s urgings become more insistent. His mother advises Florence: ‘You see, Harry is a young man of that sort, – so impetuous I mean, you know, and so eager, – and so – you know what I mean, – that the sooner he is married the better. You can’t but take it as a compliment, Florence, that he is so eager.’18

It seems to me that the repeats of ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’ are indicators of a mother’s oblique references to her son’s desire for sexual consummation. Harry’s mother recognises the urgency of his passion, and views it as a positive affirmation of manhood to be received with enthusiasm by Florence. That she takes it on herself to speak in this way to Florence (and it was Mrs Clavering who understood what had happened with Julia Brabazon and urged Harry to be true to Florence) suggests that Harry learnt about sex from his mother, and that like the mothers from the earlier quotation, it was Mrs Clavering who made sure that he had the ‘nicest girls’ to practice his flirting on. Exactly what young men know about sex is harder to determine. In The Bertrams, George Bertram says: ‘I believe that the seed of man is carried in a woman, and then brought forth to light, a living being.’19 This suggests a belief that a man’s ejaculate contains ‘homunculi’ which grow into babies in the inert vessel of a woman’s uterus, a belief which dates back to Classical times. The process of ovulation and fertilisation was unravelled in the 1830s, but scientific fact came a poor second to masculinist belief for decades afterwards.20 Some beliefs about ovulation and its part in conception were contradictory, but this was held no impediment. It was believed that ovulation occurred on orgasm, that as a man released his sperm in intercourse, so a woman released the ovum. Inherent in this was the belief that a woman had to achieve orgasm to conceive. Contrary to our popular stereotype, Victorian husbands set great store in knowing how to arouse their wives. A pamphlet on contraception, The Fruits of Philosophy, by Charles Knowlton, and in circulation from 1832 onwards, has an extensive section on the physiology of sex and explicitly and accurately describes the position and function of the clitoris. At odds with this theory of ovulation, but believed at one and the same time, was the view that ovulation occurred around 17

Claverings, 35. Claverings, 496. 19 Bertrams, 280. 20 The way in which knowledge of ovulation was suppressed is the subject of Chapter four, ‘Carnal Knowledge’, in Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 18

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the time of menstruation. It was regularly advocated that the safest time to have sex without fear of pregnancy was mid-way in a woman’s cycle. There was even more confusion about how egg and sperm might meet up. Knowlton dismisses the idea that this might happen via the cervix and believes in ‘a set of absorbent vessels leading directly from the inner surfaces of the labia external to the ovaries’. He goes on: ‘I do not know that these vessels have yet been fully discovered … .’21 A discreet curtain is drawn over the exact manifestations of Harry’s impetuosity and eagerness, though this is not always the case. Trollope makes it perfectly clear that Fred Neville’s love-making to Kate O’Hara in An Eye for an Eye, conducted well away from any chaperoning eye, extends to sexual intercourse: ‘She gave him her all, and her pricelessness in his eyes was gone for ever.’22 Fred pays for his incontinence with his life. The price was perhaps high. Most of Trollope’s men who engage in sexual intercourse outside marriage are more usually met with sneering dismissal by the text and by the plot. Sir Lionel Bertram, George Bertram’s cavalier father in The Bertrams, is a vain man who ‘thought that in the matter of nose he was quite equal to the Duke in aristocratic firmness, and superior to Sir Charles Napier in expression and general design’.23 This mocking sarcastic tone pervades the commentary on his behaviour, and hints of his sexual loucheness are a constant thread. Sir Lionel ‘felt his son’s presence of some impediment – perhaps in the way of his pleasures’;24 ‘Sir Lionel and the old gentleman were at variance. We allude to the old gentleman at Hadley: with the other old gentleman of whom we wot, it may be presumed that Sir Lionel was on tolerably favourable terms.’25 At other times, that he keeps a mistress is more explicit: ‘ ‘But speaking for myself, I have not many wants now’ – nor had he, pleasant old man that he was; only three or four comfortable rooms for himself and his servant; a phaeton and a pair of horses; and another smaller establishment in a secluded quiet street.’26 Such peccadilloes form a seam of ironic disparagement through the novel. In Phineas Redux, the hallmark of Maurice Maule, a similar vain man in late middle age (Sir Lionel is said to be 60, Mr Maule 55), is rather his seediness, an empty vapidness in a pointless life: ‘He had married, let us say for love; – probably very much by chance. He had ill-used his wife, and had continued a long-continued liaison with a complaisant friend.’ The complaisant friend, though part of his life for 20 years, was but one of a series: ‘Then he would call on some lady whose acquaintance at the moment might be of service to him.’27 The disparaging tone persists. Doomed for ever to pursue the unobtainable, he ends the novel in pursuit of the latest widow to enter the London season with

21

For an interesting account of the contemporary understanding of the reproductive process, see Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy. An Essay on the Population Question, 1832 (London: R. Forder, 28 Stonecutter Street, 1898). See also Margaret Markwick, ‘Devices and Desires’ (Trollopiana, 57, May 2002, 4–10). 22 An Eye for an Eye, 109. 23 Bertrams, 70. 24 Bertrams, 123. 25 Bertrams, 343. 26 Bertrams, 220. 27 Both from Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 185.

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£3,000 a year: ‘Selfish and civil, pleasant and penniless, and I should think utterly without a principle’28 is Madame Max’s summing-up. For a young man to keep a mistress is an indicator of a more serious flaw. Trollope’s authorial tone loses its ironic detachment and becomes more overtly hostile. An examination of the text of The Small House at Allington demonstrates a careful building up of hints about Adolphus Crosbie’s shortcomings, to the coded insinuation that he keeps a mistress, the ultimate of the early warnings that he is not the worthy recipient of Lily’s heart. Crosbie has certainly learnt the art of love-making: ‘“Dearest Lily”, and his unchecked arm stole round her waist’;29 ‘He pressed her closer to his side’;30 ‘And then he stooped over her and pressed her closely, while she put her lips to his, standing on tip-toe that she might reach his face’;31 ‘He remembered at the moment a certain scene which took place on the little bridge at Allington, and his Lily’s voice, and Lily’s words, and Lily’s passion as he caressed her: Oh my love, my love, my love’;32 – and his skills, his caresses, arouse Lily’s sexual responses. But this unfolds against an insistent niggling authorial voice, pointing out his shorter comings: ‘Nor in becoming a swell had he become altogether a bad fellow.’33 This is rapidly followed by an early hint about his domestic arrangements: ‘But – We will not however, at the present moment enquire more curiously into the private life and circumstances of our new friend Adolphus Crosbie.’34 Crosbie reflects that Lily comes empty-handed: ‘Which consideration somewhat cooled the ardour of his happiness.’35 While Lily’s passion and love is regularly noted as fathomless, what we are told of Crosbie is, ‘He was very fond of Lily ... but was the sacrifice worth his while?’36 The picture of Adolphus as a self-seeking man of shallow feeling builds. He fails to respond spontaneously to Lily’s greeting at the Small House party: ‘I’m not sure that Crosbie liked it as much as he should have done.’37 The authorial voice becomes a little more strident: ‘My reader will say that in all this he was ungenerous. Well; he was ungenerous. I do not know that I have ever said that much generosity was to be expected from him.’38 We are now ready to understand the implication of the coded comment on the following page: ‘Then he spoke of entanglements, meaning, as he did so, to explain more fully what were their nature, – but not daring to do so when he found that Lily was altogether in the dark as to what he meant.’39 That he would seem to have had a mistress gives poignant weight to the possibility

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 271. Small House, 96. Small House, 97. Small House, 98. Small House, 446. Small House, 14. Small House, 15. Small House, 60. Small House, 67. Small House, 92. Small House, 154. Small House, 155.

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that Lily and he had consummated their passion.40 If he had a mistress, he is perhaps less likely to be constrained from pressing for a sexual expression of their love. It is clear from the manner of the voice in the text that Lily’s fervent response to her lover’s kisses is everything that is normal and healthy in a young woman. The voice that is critical of Crosbie may be implying that, while Harry Clavering’s ardour is a compliment to Florence, young men should exercise restraint. This is more clearly expressed in the passages in Can You Forgive Her? about George Vavasor’s love-making. We hear on page 16 that Alice Vavasor’s cousin is not well-regarded, on page 18 that Alice and he had discussed marriage and that she had terminated their understanding. On page 25 we hear why. ‘He had been selfish, coldly selfish, weighing the value of his low lusts against that of her holy love.’ This seems to imply that George had pressed her to gratify his sexual demands, his low lusts, against her better judgement, – that he wanted sexual gratification from the relationship, while she wanted a higher union. The text passes a moral judgement on his appetites: ‘He had lived in open defiance of decency.’41 A little later, using the signifiers he used for Mr Maule and Sir Lionel, Trollope tells us that he kept a mistress: ‘There was a third [establishment] too, very closely hidden from the world’s eyes, which shall be nameless.’42 These enigmas are made flesh towards the end of the novel, where George’s discarded mistress appears in person. In spite of her poverty, her appearance still bears witness to her former beauty, though ‘all the softness which still remained was that softness which sorrow and continual melancholy give to suffering women’.43 She is penniless and only George Vavasor’s charity lies between her and prostitution. It is significant that she is presented as an exploited victim. This is not unusual in Trollope. Earlier in Can You Forgive Her?, Burgo Fitzgerald, ironically having just left George Vavasor, takes pity on a young prostitute: a poor wretched girl ... He looked round at her and saw that she was very young, – 16, perhaps, at the most, and that she had once, – nay, very lately been exquisitely pretty. There still lingered about her eyes some remains of that look of perfect innocency and pure faith which had been hers not more than 12 months since.44

In exonerating young women, Trollope makes men the exploiters and women the victims of sexual promiscuity. This is demonstrated with more deliberation and at greater length in The Vicar of Bullhampton, where Carrie Brattle, described as ‘a castaway’, is rehabilitated into the bosom of her family. As explored in chapter 4, men who more overtly transgress the sexual mores are correspondingly more castigated, and the ultimate visitation for flagrancy is syphilis. The Duke’s Children is a particularly interesting text, tracing, as it does, the progress of two young men from late adolescence into the fullness of man’s estate. 40 41 42 43

Markwick, Trollope and Women (London: Hambledon, 1997) 84–5. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 37. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, 121. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, 321. For a full analysis of this episode, see Morse,

36–8. 44

Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 308–9.

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The scrapes of Silverbridge with the turf, and Gerald’s encounter with card-sharps, are seen as pardonable rites of passage, in a way that drink and fast women never are. Young men who behave like Gerald and Silverbridge (and young Peregrine Orme with his rat-catching) will turn out well, while the plot will visit sexual peccadilloes with disappointment and failure. Trollope is very clear about the boundaries for the sexual conduct of young men. They may flirt in their green years, and when they fall in love their ardour will be reflected in their pressing desire for physical closeness with the object of their passion. However, the desired sexual union should be gratified by an early date for the marriage. Men who press for consummation of passion outside holy matrimony are everywhere frowned on. It leads to the loss of respect for the woman, and of self-respect for the man, as the affair between Fred Neville and Kate O’Hara in An Eye for an Eye so bitterly shows. Such men as these are pursuing lust, not love. In writing about men in love, Trollope distinguishes between mature love and the testosterone-driven puppy love of Peregrine Orme, in Orley Farm, and the young Thomas Tringle, in Ayala’s Angel. Both young men are consumed with a passion for a young lady, but neither has yet reached those years of discretion where they could reasonably expect to be taken seriously. Such young men are sent off round the world to burn off their excess energies, with the expectation that they will return wiser and calmer, and may even have achieved something notable in their adventures. In Trollope’s world, men never forget these passions and meeting up with the inamorata of one’s youth in one’s slippered years causes forgotten stirrings. For Trollope, ‘What is this thing called love?’ is a question with far more depth and dimension when applied to the man who has reached years of discretion. In this Trollope is no ageist. Sir Peregrine Orme’s love for Lady Mason is as green in the leaf as his grandson’s for Madeline Stavely. ‘His vacant arm passed itself round her waist ... as he pressed her [he] kissed her lips.’45 The authorial voice glosses: He may not twitter of sentiment as thou doest ... But that old man’s heart is as soft as thine if thou couldst but read it. The body dries up and withers away, and the bones grow old; the brain too becomes decrepit, as do the sight, the hearing, and the soul. But the heart that is tender once remains tender to the last.46

An Old Man’s Love similarly gives a narrative to the capacity of a man in his 50s to nourish desire and admiration for a woman. In Miss Mackenzie John Ball, baldheaded, stout,47 with nine children, the eldest over 21, makes love as passionately as a man half his age. He kisses Margaret Mackenzie in the shrubbery in evening gloom and John Ball is as insistent as any of Trollope’s younger bloods: ‘They say that lovers who demand are ever the most successful. I make my demand.’48 All Trollope’s novels after The Macdermots of Ballycloran contain an account of at least one pair of lovers whose long-term happiness is assured by the outcome of the plot. They most usually feature portraits of men of conventionally marriageable 45 46 47 48

Orley Farm, vol. 1, 267. Orley Farm, vol. 1, 265. Miss Mackenzie, 74. Miss Mackenzie, 270.

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age falling in love, where the plot interest lies in an exploration of their varying degrees of obstacle and success. We can further explore the subtleties of Trollope’s constructions of masculinity by examining and comparing the experience of falling in love of men who contend with varying degrees of success and failure in their courting. John Grey (Can You Forgive Her?) and Harry Gilmour (The Vicar of Bullhampton) are both intelligent, clean-living young men. John Grey is perhaps 29, for it is seven years since he graduated49 and Harry Gilmour is 33.50 Both men have been bowled over by their love. Of Harry Gilmour we are told: Mary is a lady, and Harry Gilmour thinks her the sweetest woman on whom his eyes ever rested ... He is so absolutely in love that nothing in the world is, to him, at present worth thinking about except Mary Lowther. I do not doubt that he would vote for a conservative candidate if Mary Lowther so ordered him; or consent to go and live in New York if Mary Lowther would accept him on no other condition. All Bullhampton parish is nothing to him at the present moment, except as far as it is connected with Mary Lowther. Hampton Privets is dear to him only as far as it can be made to look attractive in the eyes of Mary Lowther. The mill is to be repaired, though he knows he will never get any interest on the outlay, because Mary Lowther has said that Bullhampton water-meads would be destroyed if the mill were to tumble down. He has drawn for himself mental pictures of Mary Lowther till he has invested her with every charm and grace and virtue that can adorn a woman. In very truth he believes her to be perfect. He is actually and absolutely in love.51

While of John Grey it is declared: He was not by nature an impatient man, but now he became impatient, longing for the fruition of his new idea of happiness, – longing to have that as his own which he certainly loved beyond all else in the world, and which, perhaps, was all he had ever loved with the perfect love of equality.52

For both men their love is immediate and insistent, all-consuming; Gilmour’s fixation borders on obsession. John Grey is no less possessed by his passion, but there is a different note in his love – ‘equality’. This suggests a relationship with his love where her feelings are weighed with his. Harry Gilmour may be prepared to go to the ends of the earth for Mary, but her feelings for him have not yet entered his computation. Both men have close male friends who support them and counsel them as they face disappointment in their suits. Frank Fenwick’s role in The Vicar of Bullhampton is the more overt, since he also plays a major part in the action of the book (and carries responsibility for introducing Mary to Harry in the first place); both Frank Fenwick and John Grey’s friend Frank Seward became intimate with their friends at university and both these ‘frank’ young men are clergymen. Though the episode where John Grey turns to his friend as a staff to lean on is short,53 it shows a great 49 50 51 52 53

Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 102. Bullhampton, 96. Bullhampton, 5. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 103. Can You Forgive her?, vol. 1, 372–6.

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deal of John Grey’s inner man. The blow that Alice has engaged herself to her cousin comes while the two friends are at breakfast at John Grey’s house. Seward has also received a letter from the woman he loves and does not immediately notice his friend’s distress. He has already been told that there are impediments to John Grey’s happiness, though he is not privy to the detail: … he was the only man to whom Grey had told anything of his love for Alice, and of his disappointment. Even to Seward he had not told the whole story.... Mr Grey told none of the particulars, though he owned to his friend that a heavy blow had struck him. His intimacy with Seward was of that thorough kind which is engendered only out of such young and lasting friendship as had existed between them ...54

The gap left by reticence is filled with empathy, compassion and good will. Seward comprehends his friend’s pain without being told of the fine detail: ‘There are things which a man cannot tell’, says Grey, ‘Indeed there are’, says his friend, as he agrees to stay at Grey’s house while Grey goes to London to see if he can rescue his betrothal, and remain till he returns: ‘Why not stay here?’ said Grey ... ‘I wish you would, old fellow, I do, indeed.’ There was a tone of special affection in his voice which struck Seward at once … ‘… it will be a comfort to me to know that I shall find you here.’55

This dialogue is interesting on several counts. Both men agree that Grey’s economy with words is part of manly behaviour, but this does not impede the recognition and communication of deep feeling, there in their voices, though tersely expressed in words. Grey knows that he can rely on Seward’s hearing the unspoken dialogue and continues: ‘If I fail in what I am going to attempt, it is probable that you will never hear Alice Vavasor’s name mentioned by me again; but I want you always to bear this in mind; – that at no moment has my opinion of her ever been changed, nor must you in such case imagine from my silence that it has changed.’56

John Grey is not always the complete master of his feelings. He agrees with Alice’s father that George Vavasor probably wants her fortune and that, if they give it to him, he will then abandon her. When he suggests that he would then re-press his suit his emotion has visible signs: ‘there was a fragment of a tear in his eye, and the hint of a quiver in his voice’.57 These are significant indicators of the man who feels deeply and knows his heart. Frank Fenwick is similarly prepared to go to considerable lengths to support his friend: He loved his friend dearly. Between these two there had grown up now during a period of many years that undemonstrative, unexpressed, almost unconscious affection which, with men, will often make the greatest charm of their lives ... They were rough to each 54 55 56 57

Can You Forgive her?, vol. 1, 372. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 375–6. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 376. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 377.

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other, caustic, and almost ill-mannered. But they thoroughly trusted each other; and the happiness, prosperity, and above all, the honour of the one, were, to the other, matters of keenest moment.58

This is taken from a lengthy passage describing and analysing the nature of homosocial bonds between men. It feels like a fleshing-out of the kind of relationship that existed between John Grey and Frank Seward. Frank Fenwick stands by his friend through his woes, breaking the news that Mary has finally refused him, spending time with him, even tracking him down in London when he suddenly decamps. But the contrast between Harry’s conduct in disappointment and John Grey’s could not be more different. Whereas John Grey acknowledges his loss, but determines to maintain a brave face to the world, Harry’s bitter disappointment is openly expressed. Of John Grey we read: ‘The bruise would have remained on his heart, indelible, not to be healed but by death. He would have submitted, and no man would have seen that he had been injured.’59 In contrast, Harry Gilmour ‘got up and shook himself, and knew that he was a crippled man, with every function out of order, disabled in every limb ... He threw himself on the sofa and cried like a woman’.60 And while Fenwick treats his friend with great patience, ultimately he is driven to declare, ‘“Have you no feeling that though it may be hard with you here” – and the vicar as he spoke struck his breast – “you should so carry your outer self that the eyes of those around you should see nothing of the sorrow within. That is my idea of manliness”.’61 It is important to be clear that Grey and Fenwick are not advocating a denial of feeling. They are both honest and clear about the emotional hurt. They are rather making a point about the comportment of men. Both Grey and Gilmour are moved to tears by the pain of their feelings, but whereas Gilmour is overwhelmed by his emotions to the extent that it affects his ability to be a rational employer (telling the workmen to down-tools in the middle of their jobs on the house62), Grey sees it as important for his self-respect that he will continue as usual in his worldly activities. Walter Marrable, Harry Gilmour’s rival for Mary’s hand, is similarly able to live with an outward appearance of a normal life. When their romance seems doomed, ‘He hunted; but did so after a lugubrious fashion, as became a man with a broken heart, ... But still, when there came anything good, in the way of a run ... he enjoyed the fun and forgot his troubles for a while.’63 Perhaps the most revealing element of the comparison, an example of similarity which also marks the two men out as different, is the changes they both make to their homes to prepare to receive a woman into the household. Both men remodel their gardens according to the wishes of their future brides: ‘Your commands have been obeyed in all things’,64 says John Grey, enjoying telling Alice about his gardener implementing her every wish. His view of home comforts changes diametrically: 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Bullhampton, 440. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 107. Bullhampton, 158. Bullhampton, 490. Bullhampton, 441. Bullhampton, 259. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 22.

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Hitherto at Nethercoats his little smoking room, his books, and his plants had been everything to him. Now he began to surround himself with an infinity of feminine belongings, and to promise himself an infinity of feminine blessings, wondering much that he should have been content to pass so long a proportion of his life in the dull seclusion which he had endured.65

In a similar manner, Harry Gilmour seeks to adapt his house to suit Mary: And he had already, – already, though no allusion to the day for the marriage had yet been made, – begun to press on for those changes in his house for which she would not ask, but which he was determined to effect for her comfort. There had been another visit to the house and gardens, and he had told her that this should be done ... and that other change should be made.66

What both these men demonstrate, and what Trollope articulates specifically, is the recognition that the feminisation of the world of their bachelor spaces will increase their happiness; both know that long-term emotional fulfilment demands that they must change their domestic arrangements. The ‘infinity of feminine belongings’, their accompanying ‘infinity of feminine blessings’ contrast with the ‘dull seclusion that he [John Grey] had endured’. It is like passing from darkness to light; in order to be whole, maleness must encompass the female; in knowing what these things are that they must put into their homes, both men own knowledge of the feminine sides of their natures. The outcomes for the two men are starkly different. John Grey finally wins Alice after supporting her loyally when she misguidedly engages herself to a blackguard. Harry Gilmour fails to win Mary after begging her to marry him even though he knows she loves another. Equally, their responses to their set-backs are crucially different. When Alice engages herself to George Vavasor, John Grey’s next meeting with her is full of respect for her independence and honest dignity in his affirmation of his unchanged love. He gently seeks to establish the state of her heart. She has no plans to marry in the near future – for at least a year. Her evasive reply, when he cautiously and discreetly asks why she has accepted George, suggests to him that she is not driven by love. As he leaves her he tells her: ‘I love you now as well as ever, and should things change with you, I cannot tell you with how much joy and eagerness I should take you back to my bosom. My heart is yours now as it has been since I knew you.’67 Harry’s interview with Mary when she is finally able to follow her heart and marry Walter is very different. He is petulant and vindictive. He demands to see her.68 He ‘expressed more than his anger. He had dared to shower his scorn upon her’.69 With his final insult, that were she his sister, he would blush for shame at her inconstancy, she declares she will never speak to him again.70 As he prepares to leave the country to escape his memories, he refuses to forgive her: ‘I can’t say that I forgive her. How is a man to forgive such treatment?’71 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 103. Bullhampton, 386. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 381. Bullhampton, 443. Bullhampton, 457. Bullhampton, 458. Bullhampton, 505.

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While there is much similarity in the manifestations of their two loves, it seems they are very different in the significance of that love to their inner selves and we can detect that overtly in the manner of their love-making. John Grey is physically demonstrative in his love, openly desiring of Alice, eager to show his love in his physical embraces: ‘My dearest, he said, advancing across the room, and before she knew how to stop herself or him, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her.’72 In the scene where he finally persuades her to marry him, we read: ‘his hand, like his character and his words, was full of power. It would not be impeded ... “In winning you I have won everything”. Then he put his face over her and pressed his lips to hers.’ His words are as passionately erotic as his actions. ‘“Will you come and be my one beautiful thing, my treasure, my joy, my comfort, my counsellor? ... Come to me for I want you sorely”.’73 Alice is in no doubt that she is desired, and the implication is that her passion equals his in her desire to be desired. In comparison, Harry Gilmour’s one kiss with Mary is casual and banal: ‘It seemed as though the thing itself were a matter but of little joy.’74 Harry’s disappointment in his kiss seems to hint that in some sense, Harry expects the gratification of his needs to come from Mary. He has not recognised the mutuality of sexual pleasure, that in giving pleasure, he will himself find the pleasure he seeks. Harry Gilmour, the text says, would do anything to win Mary’s love. However, he seems fixated on his own needs. He does not know what John Grey knows, that being able to convey sexual commitment and sexual passion will win lovers’ hearts and pledges. After all, Mary Lowther engages herself to Walter Marrable after a short acquaintance because the sexual chemistry is right.75 John Grey knows what he wants, and gets it. Are there any suggestions in the text that Gilmour will not, or should not, win Mary? Very early on there is a hint that there may be that in his character which points to possessiveness rather than giving: ‘He is a man with a good heart, and a pure mind, generous, desirous of being just, somewhat sparing of that which is his own, never desirous of that which is another’s.’76 That ‘somewhat sparing of that which is his own’ hints at a heart that is self-centred; he wants to own Mary for his own sake, not love her to make her happy. As the novel ends, this is referred to as ‘his desire to call her his own’.77 In his disappointments he is only able to think of his own despair, and is never able to consider Mary’s feelings, whereas John Grey is ever mindful, not only of how his life will be enriched by winning Alice, but how much Alice will be giving up to marry him. He thinks hard about what Alice wants. Harry Gilmour is set solid in what he wants. John Grey, then, wins Alice because he is generous, and can put Alice’s happiness above his own, with no rankling bitterness held against her if he fails in his quest for her hand. This is more important than the facade of reserve that he preserves for the outside world. Though Harry Gilmour’s love is as passionate as 72 73 74 75 76 77

Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 114. Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 2, 352–6. Bullhampton, 361. Bullhampton, 128, 129 and 208. Bullhampton, 4. Bullhampton, 452.

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John Grey’s, it is a self-centred love, and this is why he fails to win Mary. That John’s composure is declared ‘manly’, while Harry’s lack of it is ‘unmanly’ is important, but Trollope’s construction of the masculinity of a man in love transcends this. It is John Grey’s ability to think himself into Alice’s world, her feminine space, that shows him to be the greater man, the man worthy of a woman’s love. There is still more to be said about the men who will be rewarded with the choicest virgin-heroines. Some men with what might seem major character flaws nonetheless end up winning the girl. How this subversive resolution can be a satisfactory conclusion to a tale which does not disrupt the conventions of romantic comedy is revealingly exposed in an examination of Phineas Finn through Phineas Finn and its sequel Phineas Redux. The history of Phineas’ love life is worth recounting quite carefully. Born the son of an Irish catholic country doctor, brought up and educated in Ireland, he goes to London to train for the bar and mixes with a lively and radical group of politicians and their families. He returns home for a furlough before beginning the next stage of his legal training. Before he leaves Ireland again he has extracted from Mary Flood Jones, his childhood sweetheart, a kiss and a lock of hair, favours that should betoken betrothal. Back in London, he wonders if he is in love with Mary, while telling himself he is certainly not in love with Lady Laura Standish, daughter of a Whig politician. Within a week he is walking round London Zoo convincing himself he is in love with Lady Laura. By the time he decides he will propose, she has already engaged herself to Robert Kennedy, a wealthy politician. In spite of this, he rather petulantly tells her of his love for her and takes a kiss from her, ‘that I may think of it and treasure it in my memory’.78 As with Mary, he takes his token before she has a chance to refuse. He then returns to Ireland and continues to philander with Mary’s affections: ‘If you knew, Mary, how often I think about you’79 he tells her, with just a hint of irony. In London once again, with Lady Laura now a married woman, his affections transfer with remarkable alacrity to Violet Effingham, his passions fanned by the information that she has a suitor in Lady Laura’s brother, Lord Oswald Chiltern, though he seeks to deny this to himself. He fights a duel with Oswald to defend his right to press his suit with Violet, declares his passion for her – and returns to Ireland to dream again of marrying Mary Flood Jones. On his return to London he enlists the support of Lady Laura to plead his cause with Violet. Meanwhile he meets Madame Max Goesler. Notwithstanding his protestations of love for Violet, and his unsuccessful application for her hand, when he sees that the Duke of Omnium admires Madame Max, his first reaction is to wish to cut him out. He returns to Ireland again, where he longs to make passionate love to Mary – while acknowledging that he does not love her. On his return to London, he hears that Violet has accepted Oswald and tells himself that his heart is broken, and indeed makes a fair impression of behaving in that way. He pours out the story of his crossed love life to Madame Max, returns to Ireland and proposes to Mary. He tells no-one of his engagement when he returns to London; he ponders on the impact on his career of his marriage to Mary and weighs 78 79

Phineas Finn, 124. Phineas Finn, 127.

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up the possibility of ditching Mary for Madame Max. A deep and intimate exchange with Madame Max leads to her proposal of marriage to him, before he finally resigns his political position and returns to Ireland to marry Mary, not because he loves her more than the other women, but because she loves him more than they ever would. Phineas Redux opens two years later with Phineas now a widower, having lost Mary in her first pregnancy, returning to London and his old political haunts, where the objects of his former passions flock to welcome him back. He goes to stay with Violet and Oswald, now man and wife and parents of a baby boy. He visits Lady Laura, now separated from Kennedy and they exchange a passionate embrace. Though he tells himself he would not marry her were she free, he still stands with his arm round her waist as they discuss her problems. When Kennedy conveniently dies, the world assumes that Phineas will marry Lady Laura. Bonteen’s murder and Phineas’ arrest and trial intervene. Lady Laura visits him in prison and throws herself into his arms, proclaiming her passion for him. Madame Max’s demonstration of devotion is more practical. She sets about finding the evidence to prove him innocent. On his acquittal, he tells Lady Laura that he intends to propose to Madame Max; when he proposes to her she falls into his arms and declares her passionate and sexually-fired love for him. It is just possible that Phineas is an incurable romantic, constantly in love with the idea of being in love. A cynic could equally well read the two tales as a philanderer’s charter, the story of the love life of a young man led entirely by his libido. He believes himself to be in love with whichever young woman he is nearest to at the moment. This is explicitly perceived by Lady Laura and Violet towards the end of Phineas Finn: ‘One can hardly forgive a man for such speedy changes,’ said Violet. ‘Was I not to forgive him: I, who had turned myself away from him with a fixed purpose the moment that I found that he had made a mark upon my heart? I could not wipe off the mark, and yet I married. Was he not to try to wipe off his mark?’ ‘It seems that he wiped it off very quickly; and since that he has wiped off another mark. One doesn’t know how many marks he has wiped off. They are like the inn-keeper’s score which he makes in chalk. A damp cloth brings them all away, and leaves nothing behind.’80

Lady Laura has been equally critical of his plastic heart in the past. When he requests her intercession in his suit for Violet’s hand she says, ‘Do you speak of loving a woman as if it were an affair of fate, over which you have no control?’81 and after Violet has announced her engagement to Oswald, ‘Talk of love! I tell you, sir, that your heart is one in which love can have no durable hold. Violet Effingham! There may be a dozen Violets after her and you will be none the worse’.82 These women’s critical views of Phineas are no impediment to their affection and indeed their love for him. ‘He is the only man whom I ever loved’,83 says Lady Laura, as she acknowledges that he marked her heart and pardons him for erasing what mark there may have been on his heart. The authorial voice works hard to exonerate Phineas: 80 81 82 83

Phineas Finn, 539. Phineas Finn, 303. Phineas Finn, 425. Phineas Finn, 538.

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Jove smiles at lovers’ perjuries; and it is well that he should do so, as such perjuries can hardly be avoided altogether in the difficult circumstances of a successful gentleman’s life. Phineas was a traitor, of course, but he was almost forced to be a traitor, by the simple fact that Lady Laura Standish was in London, and Mary Flood Jones in Killaloe.84

Or, as Phineas puts it a little later: He felt that he had two identities – that he was, as it were, two separate persons – and that he could, without any real faithlessness be very much in love with Violet Effingham in his position of man of fashion and member of Parliament in England, and also warmly attached to dear little Mary Flood Jones as an Irishman of Killaloe.85

There is deliberate irony in the ‘successful gentleman’s life’ which mocks the behaviour of men who fail the stringent chivalric test. Morally this seems an untenable position, though Phineas Finn shrugs it off: ‘Is there inconsistency in ceasing to love when one is not loved? Is there inconsistency in changing one’s love and in loving again?’86 This preamble to a proposal to Mary Flood Jones who has nursed her love for five years, while seemingly expecting a confirmatory response, carries an implicit invitation to disagree with the tenet. Neither the authorial voice nor Phineas’ interiority offer up a convincing defence of his behaviour; the best that they appear to say is ‘that’s the way life is’. Even more casuistical is the excuse that it is not Phineas’ fault anyway; he cannot help being handsome and god-like in his appearance. Women certainly find him physically attractive. He is said to be ‘six feet high, and very handsome with bright blue eyes, and brown wavy hair, and light silken beard’;87 ‘Mrs Low had told her husband more than once that he was much too handsome to do any good’.88 Mrs Bunce, his landlady, had similarly noticed her lodger: ‘She had a woman’s instinctive partiality for comeliness in a man, and was very fond of Phineas Finn because he was handsome.’89 Even Mrs Bonteen thinks he is handsome – though her husband fails to see what the attraction is for ‘a coal-heaving sort of fellow like that’.90 Lady Glencora, newly elevated to be Duchess of Omnium, describes him as ‘the handsome Irishman’.91 His troubles, as he stands arraigned for the murder of Mr Bonteen, enhance his sexual attractions; he was ‘thin and pale ... but handsomer than ever’.92 By the time he is acquitted, ‘All the women in London were ... more or less in love with the man who had been accused of murder’,93 and the romance of his story is augmented by his good looks: ‘The name of the lady who had travelled all the way to Bohemia on behalf of their handsome young member was on the tongue

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

Phineas Finn, 128. Phineas Finn, 271. Phineas Finn, 504. Phineas Finn, 58. Phineas Finn, 58. Phineas Finn, 67. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 45. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 277. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 188. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 264.

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of every woman in Tankerville.’94 Views like this that are near to saying that it is the women’s fault that Phineas had such sexual success are elsewhere mitigated by the defence of Oswald’s legendary ugliness: ‘Women are not actuated in the same way, and are accustomed to look deeper into men at the first sight than other men will trouble themselves to do.’95 It is regularly stressed that Phineas is unaware of the sexual draw of his appearance. When Mrs Low has remarked that Phineas was ‘too handsome to do any good’, Mr Low replies ‘that young Finn had never shown himself to be conscious of his own personal advantages’.96 He may make the women of his acquaintance weak at the knees, but the major reason for his success, says the text, is his amiable personality: ‘It was simply his nature to be pleasant.’97 There is a subtle difference between the Phineases of the two books. In the first he is full of the confidence of youth, eager to take risks with his financial security to achieve his ambition. He turns his back on the sober route to the legal profession for the opportunity to chance all on political success. Ultimately he realises that he values personal integrity above political success. This is to a certain degree mirrored by the progress of his love-life, where, having made love to the eligible young women on the London political circuit, he finally chooses, not the woman he loves most, but the woman who loves him most. This is made explicit in the text: A thousand times he had told himself that she had not the spirit of Lady Laura, or the bright wit of Violet Effingham, or the beauty of Madame Goesler. But Mary had charms of her own that were more valuable than them all. Was there one among the three who had trusted him as she trusted him – or loved him with the same satisfied devotion?98

There is some tension before he arrives at this point of self-discovery. He engages himself to Mary at the end of chapter 66, and returns to London to test his commitment to Mary for eight chapters in the fire of the temptation to propose to Marie Goesler, as Lady Laura urges, or to accept Marie’s offer to him of her hand and fortune, before he turns his back on political power and sets to ‘with manly strength’99 to make a new life as a man without great political influence, but with a life that will be emotionally deep and satisfying. This domestication of male ambition and aspiration, the recognition that the quality of emotional intimacy holds more promise of happiness than success in the world of men, is played out again in Phineas Redux, but from a different starting point. The Phineas of Phineas Redux is more cynical and cautious. He has had perhaps a year of marriage to Mary, a year of domestic happiness and fulfilment. But the Phineas of this book has hankered after the excitement of political life ever since he gave it up: ‘Since the day on which he had accepted peace and returned from London, his very soul had sighed for the lost glories of Westminster and Downing

94 95 96 97 98 99

Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 271. Phineas Finn, 90. Phineas Finn, 58. Phineas Finn, 106. Phineas Finn, 556. Phineas Finn, 571.

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Street.’ That his thirst for parliamentary excitement is directly linked to the loss of his domestic fulfilment is clear: ‘Had she been spared to him he would never have longed for more than fate had given him. He would never have sighed again for the glories of Westminster had his Mary not gone from him’,101 though as he gets back into harness, he reflects that life in Dublin had been ‘vapid and flavourless’.102 The way back into political favour is not an easy ride and Phineas finds his past catching up with him. He is remembered as one who put his independent view before that of his party; and memories of his past friendship with Lady Laura have an edge of scandal to them now that she is a separated wife. Political preferment eludes him and he finds himself increasingly disenchanted with the butterfly he is chasing. His trial for murder entrenches this view; he resigns his seat. That he is still an MP at the end of the story has more to do with the wishes of his supporters and electorate than with his personal volition. In his love-life, Phineas Redux is an account of relationships revisited, with this difference, that this time round, conversely, the women declare their love for him. He finally marries the woman who offers him a purposeful life beyond politics, though she makes it clear that her reason for accepting his proposal is that she is fired by a sexual passion lacking in her previous relationships: ‘You are the only man I ever loved. My husband was very good to me, – and I was, I think, good to him. But he was many years my senior, and I cannot say I loved him, – as I do you.’103 She offers him virgin passion, if not her virginity. In this lionisation there is some similarity between Mary and Marie’s yearning desire for this man. Once again, he turns away from the world of men to find a deeper satisfaction in a close bond with a woman and with Marie he will have an occupation in business that involves them both. This story of a man’s love entanglements with so many women, the man who finds himself embracing women before he can stop himself, the man who unwittingly is the cause of women involuntarily falling in love with him and who is yet a hero has a strong subversive thread. Phineas is seemingly the antithesis of John Grey’s very focused passion for Alice as the one great love of his life. Moreover, he is not the only central male protagonist in a Trollope novel to challenge our preconceptions of hero. In The Eustace Diamonds, Frank Greystock embraces Lizzie Eustace while engaged to Lucy Morris and Harry Clavering (The Claverings) asks a second woman to marry him while engaged to a first, without tarnishing their standing as heroes. The eponymous John Caldigate lives with a woman as his wife in Australia before returning home to marry the fairest virgin. With Frank Greystock the matter is dealt with quite prosaically. Lizzie Eustace seduces him from the straight and narrow path and as a healthy redblooded male, no blame can attach to Frank. The text says this quite explicitly: ‘It is almost impossible for a man, – a man under 40 and unmarried, and who is not a philosopher, – to have familiar and affectionate intercourse with a beautiful young woman and carry it on as he might do with a friend of the other sex.’104

100 101 102 103 104

Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 6. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 10. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 54. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 355. Eustace, vol. 2, 230.

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For Harry Clavering, John Caldigate and Phineas, the issues are of greater moment to the plot. For Harry, there is serious questioning whether he has not compromised his integrity. Harry tries to exonerate himself by blaming Julia: ‘Yes, indeed, she had injured him! She had robbed him of his high character, of his unclouded brow, of that self-pride which had so often told him that he was living a life without reproach among men.’105 However, this does nothing to mitigate the criticism that flies at him from all other quarters, from the Burton family, his Clavering cousins, his mother. We need to examine the text elsewhere to find his vindication as a hero. Our dilemma with John Caldigate is similar. How can a man who, in Australia, lives openly with his mistress, addresses her as his wife and who, on his return, to England prevaricates about the nature of his relationship with her until confronted with the truth, be entitled to be rewarded with a virgin such as Hester Bolton? This was a problem for his early critics who found no resolution in their reading of the text. As The Saturday Review said, ‘Those who visit John Caldigate’s conduct with their hearty disapproval are under the cloud of the author’s dislike or contempt; those who stand by him through thick and thin are the good fellows of the piece’.106 How can Trollope give us these virile young men, and present them as feasible role models for the impressionable young, when they so disrupt convention and how does the text contrive to vindicate them when they are condemned by their action in the plot? Examining Phineas Finn’s masculinity sheds light on alternative constructions of manhood and reveals details of the make-up of his psyche which seem revolutionary for Trollope’s time. In Phineas Redux, Phineas receives a letter from his old friend and confidante, Lady Laura, as he kicks his heels in London waiting for the outcome of his petition for the scrutiny of the votes in the election at Tankerville. As he waited for the electioneering to start in earnest, he had been to stay with her brother Oswald and his wife, the former Violet Effingham. Lady Laura, now in exile in Dresden to escape her husband’s legal action for the restitution of his conjugal rights, is keen to gain an inside view of the life of her brother and sister-in-law and their new baby. This is what she writes to Phineas: Violet does write, but tells me little or nothing of themselves ... they are never family letters ... Of her inside life, of her baby, or of her husband as a husband, she never says a word. You will have seen it all, and have enough of the feminine side of a man’s character to be able to tell me how they are living.107

This seems a remarkable conceptualisation. Lady Laura is asking Phineas for close observation of the female milieu, the feminine spaces; she wants to know the fine detail of Oswald and Violet’s inner life. She wants close observation of how they are as man and wife, what sort of parents they are turning out to be and she asks this of a man. She is confident that Phineas has the insight to make these judgements because she recognises that men do have a ‘feminine side’ to their nature and that Phineas is in touch with his. It is this side of himself that she perceives him as knowing well, that gives him a feeling for, an interest in, an empathy with, that level of functioning in personal 105 106 107

Claverings, 267. Smalley, 456 (Saturday Review, 16 August 1879). Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 57.

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relationships that is more usually perceived as women’s territory. In overtly recognising this as one of Phineas’ qualities, she extends the parameters of his manliness; he makes his way in a man’s world not only by negotiating with conventional ambition and drive. His success is the more penetrating because he has more highly honed social skills and aptitudes that are rarely acknowledged and analysed. This is what is implicit in the conjectures about his social success in Phineas Finn: It soon came to be admitted by all who knew Phineas Finn that he had a peculiar power of making himself agreeable which no-one knew how to analyse or define. ‘I think it is because he listens so well,’ said one man. ‘But the women wouldn’t like him for that,’ said another. ‘He has studied when to listen and when to talk,’ said a third.108

Here are men envious of his social success (particularly his success with women) and unable to see what is so special about him from the confines of their narrow masculinity. His secret eludes them. There is, it is important to add, no suggestion of a conscious strategy on Phineas’ part; the narrative voice says, ‘It was simply his nature to be pleasant’. There is good evidence in the text that there is an entirely conscious and deliberate strategy on Trollope’s part to incorporate aspects of a woman’s nature into the manliness of his hero. From very early on in the two novels, we see Phineas in touch with the domestic and nurturing side of his nature. When it is first suggested that he might stand for parliament, his response is that ‘it would be a thing to talk of to his children in 20 years time, or to his grandchildren in 50’.109 Though this does have some atavistic threads to it, it is significant as an indicator that the family and relationships within the family are regularly his reference points. Lady Laura wants Phineas to tell her what sort of a father Oswald is making; Phineas has asked the same question when he wrote accepting Violet’s invitation to stay with them: ‘Remember me very kindly to him [Oswald]. Does he make a good nurse with the baby?’110 Phineas may be being ironic here. The Oswald of Phineas Finn was noticeably lacking in finesse in negotiating his relationships and may put as little effort into his bonding with his son as he put into his relationship with his own father. Such is not Phineas. While he was their guest ‘he rode Lord Chiltern’s horses, and took an interest in the hounds, and nursed the baby’.111 Indeed, Phineas is as comfortable and at ease in a domestic, family, child-centred setting as Harry Clavering is when he visits the Burtons and kisses the children in their cots.112 Much is made of Harry’s propensity for the discourse of the hearth, that he gets on better with Cecilia than Theodore: ‘He is one of those men who get on best with women.’113 When he needs to talk about the predicament he has got into, it is to Cecilia that he can open his heart. Theodore’s invitation to him when his quandary over Julia is making him ill is to ‘come once more to Onslow Crescent, and kiss the bairns, and 108 109 110 111 112 113

Phineas Finn, 106. Phineas Finn, 53. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 18. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 26. Claverings, 449. Claverings, 84.

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kiss Cecilia too, and sit with us at our table, and talk as you used to’.114 It is significant that here again we have a hero, flawed, but who is in touch with the nurturing side of his nature. Similarly, John Caldigate, when he has done with his wild oats, enjoys the practicalities of child care when his baby is born: ‘Then he took the child very gently, and deposited him, fast asleep, among the blankets. He had already assumed for himself the character of being a good male nurse.’115 The implication of ‘good male nurse’ would seem to be that John Caldigate knows how to change a nappy. These men who are comfortable in feminine spheres can flout other conventions of behaviour which for other young men disqualify them from winning the girl. This is patently true of Ralph Newton, the heir in Ralph the Heir, where Ralph’s cavalier dalliance with Clarissa is ultimately punished by marrying him off to a shallow frigid doll. A sexually charged description of Ralph when he comes to steal his kiss from Clarissa tells us of his impetuosity, abandon, indulgence, but not his constancy: ‘He lay on the green sward, hot with linen trousers and a coloured flannel shirt, with a small straw hat stuck on the edge of his head, with nothing round his throat, and his jacket over his shoulder.’116 His kiss and his declaration of love are as impulsive and unconstrained as his dress. He is served with his just deserts in his pairing, not with Clarissa whose dimples promise nuptial bliss, but with Augusta Eardham, located, as is Ralph, by the signifier of dress: He was a little annoyed, perhaps, when he found that the beauty of her morning dress did not admit of her sitting upon the grass or leaning against gates, and once expressed the opinion that she need not be so particular about her gloves in this hour of their billing and cooing. Augusta altogether declined to remove her gloves in a place swarming, as she said, with midges, or to undergo any kind of embrace while adorned with that sweetest of hats.117

Phineas Finn, John Caldigate and Harry Clavering have this in common: they openly acknowledge the pleasure and satisfaction of close involvement in the nurturing of babies and children, and in their stories this is the common signifier of their sterling qualities that cancels out their shortcomings when judged by a more conventional code. When one starts looking more widely for textual indicators of character based on how men behave with children, the pointers are everywhere. Henry Grantly takes his baby girl out in her pram.118 Lady Albury, pleading Jonathan Stubbs’ cause with Ayala, says ‘See him with children!’119 Burgo Fitzgerald, the rake and wastrel, but who has redeeming features is described as ‘soft and gracious with children’.120 Conversely, criticising Sir Hugh Clavering, his uncle the Reverend Henry Clavering says ‘He is a hard man; the

114

Claverings, 276. Caldigate, 232. 116 Ralph, 31. 117 Ralph, 332. This is also, of course, the punishment meted out to Adolphus Crosbie, in his doomed marriage to Lady Alexandrina de Courcy. 118 Last Chronicle, 68. 119 Ayala, 505. 120 Can You Forgive Her?, vol. 1, 365. 115

Sex and the Single Man

139 121

hardest man I ever knew. Who ever saw him playing with his own child?’ These are significant comments on these men’s masculinity. The men who take pleasure in the physical care of children, and understand children, are the men who can be trusted to make good husbands; they can be relied on to be gentle and considerate; they will be good providers, with their pleasures focused on their hearths. Phineas Finn’s tale is of a young man who goes out to win the laurels of a man’s world and who chooses integrity over political success. A wiser man, with perhaps more insight into the constitution of human happiness after his first marriage, he tries to find consolation for his losses in politics, but is soon disillusioned. At the end of Phineas Redux, Phineas has confronted the chimera which is the male political world, with its illusory and transitory rewards and pleasures. He has also learned to value his ‘feminine’ side. When he finds himself bursting into uncontrollable tears, he is charged with being ‘unmanly’. With the support of Marie Goesler he finds a modus operandi that enables him to move slowly back into society, in control of his feelings, while not denying his pain: ‘A few days ago he had thought that these allusions would kill him. The prospect of them had kept him prisoner in his lodgings; but now he smiled and chatted, and was quiet and at ease.’122 In recognising his nurturing side, he comes to own it. This in its turn requires that he puts a lesser value on the masculine world of politics. In marrying Marie Goesler, he accedes to a life of meaningful occupation (managing the property business in Vienna), where his integrity may not be compromised, and still maintains a position in politics, while keeping it in its proper perspective. Phineas has grown from serial philanderer to an integrated manhood which recognises that true manliness incorporates both sides of the gender divide.123

121 122 123

Claverings, 203. Phineas Redux, vol. 2, 309. For a further exploration of the gender issues in this marriage, see Morse, 81–3.

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Chapter 7

Husbands, Fathers, Sons Frederic Harrison, a near-contemporary of Trollope, writing in 1894–1895 about the Victorians who had shaped the literature of his age writes: ‘This is the age of sociology.’ He goes on: Our literature is now absorbed in the urgent social problem and is become but an instrument in the vast field of sociology, – the science of society ... This predominance of sociology, the restless rapidity of modern life, the omnipotence of material activity, fully account for the special character of modern literature. Literature is no longer ‘bookish’, – but practical, social, propagandist.1

In this, Harrison is reflecting those trends identified in chapter 1, the rise of new sciences, such as demography and statistics, and the increasing importance placed on the accurate and comprehensive collection of data through the censuses. And while Trollope did not consciously write social history tracts, his novels do reflect his age’s preoccupation with what Harrison calls ‘the science of society’. Indeed, so precise is Trollope about the make-up of his (admittedly mono-class) fictional communities, it is possible to conduct our own census of them to discover a society broadly similar to that exposed by mid-Victorian censuses, but with some telling differences. From studies of the nineteenth-century censuses, we know that throughout Trollope’s lifetime, life expectancy at birth was improving. In 1801, it was 39; in 1851, 41; and in 1876, 46.2 The great childhood killers were the infectious diseases – measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever and whooping cough. Dysentery, typhoid and bronchial disease also cut a broad swathe. However, if one survived the first five years, the prognosis improved considerably, until phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) started to pose a significant threat after the age of ten, creeping up from around five deaths per 1000, to 20 per 1000 at the age of 20 and not significantly receding until the age of 55. The other significant cause of death of people who lived to adulthood was typhoid and, for men, violent death – accidents, which took more lives than typhoid. A child in any one year was slightly more likely to lose a father in an accident than a mother in childbirth.3 Maternal death rates for women of childbearing age have been comprehensively researched and analysed.4 In the population as a whole, the 1

Frederic Harrison, 9 and 26. Robert Woods, The Population of Britain in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1992) 23. 3 Robert Woods and Nicola Shelton, 23. 4 Particularly helpful are: Irvine Loudon, ‘Maternal Mortality 1880–1950. Some Regional and International Comparisons’. Social History of Medicine. Vol. 1. No. 2. August 2

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maternal death rate, covering puerperal sepsis, haemorrhage and toxaemia troughed and peaked through the century. For instance, in 1850–1855, the maternal mortality rate stood at about 4.9 per thousand births, but in the mid 1870s it had risen to 6.8 per thousand births.5 Most commentators are eager to set this in context. A young woman was far more likely to die of tuberculosis than to die in childbirth – 96 per cent of births resulted in a live mother and baby. Only because childbirth was such a common event did maternal death seem such a common occurrence.6 The implications for parenthood and family life were far-reaching. All h censuses from 1841 onwards sought to establish the civil condition of the population. Thus the 1861 census7 shows that while there were around 3,500,000 married couples, there were a little over 1,100,000 widows or widowers. This 1,100,000 is made up of 756,717 widows and 359,955 widowers. If we exclude everyone over 65, we are left with about 3,200,000 married couples, 212,000 widowers and 471,000 widows, 683,000 single-parent families in total, or about 1 in 5.5 of all families.8 In Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, Lawrence Stone has pointed out the similarity with the social structure of modern times, where divorce plays the role so arbitrarily taken by death in the nineteenth century.9 That there were twice as many widows as widowers is another convincing challenge to our assumption that childbirth was exceptionally hazardous. As already mentioned, accidents took as many fathers as childbirth took mothers and death from infectious diseases is relatively even across the sexes. The disparity between the numbers of widows and widowers is partly accounted for by re-marriage and the tendency for widowers to re-marry more frequently than widows. Wrigley and Schofield extrapolate that 11.27 per cent of all marriages in 1851 were re-marriages, mostly widowers re-marrying, for a variety of cultural and economic reasons.10 M. Drake, in his essay ‘The Remarriage Market in Mid nineteenth century Britain’, analyses exceptional information gathered by the Registrar General in Scotland in 1855. For that year, and that year only, over and above the usual information, the marriage schedule contained questions about place of residence, the marital status of the parties to the marriage, the number of the marriage (if remarrying) and the number of children by any former marriage. The collection and analysis of this information and the similar detail in the births and deaths registration proved too much for the system and was dropped from 1856 1988. Oxford University Press; Woods; and Bonfield, Smith and Wrightson (eds), The World We Have Gained (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 5 Loudon, 183. 6 Roger Schofield, ‘Did the mothers really die?’, Bonfield, Smith and Wrightson, 260. 7 Figures taken from Census of England for the Year 1861, vol. 2 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1863) xx. Table V, ‘Civil or Conjugal Condition of the People’. 8 9 per cent of these units were childless. The proportion, 1 in 5.5 will stay constant. 9 Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990) 410. ‘Statistically speaking, marriage has today reverted to a pattern which existed before the sharp decline in adult mortality in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The difference is that whereas in the early nineteenth century the driving force was a high adult mortality rate, today it is a high divorce rate.’ 10 E.A. Wrigley and P.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: a reconstruction; with contributions from Ronald Lee and Jim Oeppen (London: Edward Arnold, 1991) 259.

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143

onwards. Drake establishes that while 90 per cent of widows re-marrying were under 45 years of age, 28 per cent of the widowers were over 45. Of widows 80 per cent had two or fewer children alive at the time of re-marriage and 17 per cent had no children. Of the widowers 45 per cent had three or more children. Of Widowers 64.7 per cent married spinsters, while only 34.7 per cent of widows married bachelors. Thus widows competed in the same marriage market as spinsters, and while their children were an impediment to re-marriage, widowers experienced no such hindrance. Drake also points out that the terms of some life insurance policies would deter some widows from re-marriage.11 Step-parenthood, then, was commonplace, though there were more stepmothers than stepfathers. Trollope regularly exhorts his heroines to have two children and live happily ever after. Few Victorian families heeded his exhortation, as we can see from Figure 7.1, which shows the distribution of family size in 1860.12 The overall picture of family life then, is that while two-parent families were the norm, one fifth of all families had lost a parent and while re-marrying was common, single parents regularly raised large families on their own and a significant proportion of these single parents, one in three, were men.


     

  























 Figure 7.1

Distribution of Births in 1860

11 M. Drake, ‘The Remarriage Market in Mid Nineteenth Century Britain’, Marriage and Remarriage in Populations of the Past, edited by Dupâquier, Hélin, Livi-Bacci and Sogner (London: Academic Press, 1981) 287–96. 12 Royal Commission on Population Report (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, June 1949) 26.

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Table 7.1 considers the structure of families in England and Wales concerned in the main actions of Trollope’s plots, where their operation as a family has a significant bearing on the story as it unfolds. Using this yardstick there are 52 two-parent families, including eight re-marriages. Of these, seven are widowers with children re-marrying, and only one is a widow with a child, Eleanor Bold, marrying Francis Arabin. Olivia Proudie (Framley Parsonage) and Julia Babbington (John Caldigate) both marry middle-aged men with teenage children. Georgiana Longstaffe’s aborted engagement to Ezekiel Breghert in The Way We Live Now reflects the same cultural phenomenon. The only widows who re-marry in the novels are Eleanor Bold, at the end of Barchester Towers (though she features as a ‘step-marriage’ in The Last Chronicle of Barset) and Lady Carbury, at the end of The Way We Live Now; both marriages are the resolution, rather than the action, of the plot. There are 29 women on their own and 25 men on their own. The numbers includes two aunts, one uncle and one unmarried man who brings up his illegitimate son alone. These 54 singleparent families more than equal the number of two-parent households, compared with the reality of 1 in 5 in life. There are nearly as many men on their own as women on their own, compared with 1 in 3 in the country at large. This suggests that Trollope had a significant interest or preoccupation with men as single parents. Of the 52 two-parent families, 18, including five of the eight re-marriages, could be described as dysfunctional. Where family relationships are poor between husband and wife, and where this increases the vulnerability of their children, equally where a single parent has problems with the family relationships, I have defined such families as ‘dysfunctional’, while allowing some leeway. For instance the Gresham family is not described as dysfunctional, because Frank Gresham senior, in his parenting skills, seems to have outweighed the materialistic influences of his wife; their son Frank is a credit to them, Trichy seems a pleasant, good-natured young woman, who makes a happy marriage to her clergyman and the younger girls too seem to have avoided Augusta’s shallowness. Mr and Mrs Masters (The American Senator) also escape censure, since although Mrs Masters, the step-mother, increases much of Mary Masters’ unhappiness, there is plenty of evidence that her heart is good and that she is trying to be even-handed with Mary and her own two daughters. Of all of Trollope’s families 36.8 per cent (39 out of 106) can, by these criteria, be described as dysfunctional and his single-parent families are only slightly more dysfunctional than his two-parent families (38 per cent compared with 34.6 per cent). If we take out the step-parent cohort, where 62.5 per cent are dysfunctional, the percentage of two-parent families with major problems drops to 29.5 per cent. This suggests that Trollope perceived a step-family as the most precarious style of parenting and that single-parenthood, while it presented its own raft of problems, was only 9.3 per cent more hazardous than bringing up children with one’s spouse. When we look at the single-parent families, ten of the 29 widows (34.5 per cent) have significant problems as parents, compared with 11 of his 25 single fathers (44 per cent), a significant incongruity. Six of his dysfunctional fathers have problems parenting their daughters, and three single mothers have problems with their sons. (This may seem a little arbitrary. If Mrs Roper is dysfunctional because of her problems with Amelia, should not Mrs Eames be similarly categorised because of Johnny Eames’ dalliance with Amelia?) Only one widow, Lady Carbury,

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145

has problems in her relationship with both her son and her daughter, whereas four widowers struggle with their children of both sexes. This all seems to suggest that Trollope perceives widowers to be more precarious in their parenting than women similarly bereft. That fathers bringing up children on their own find the pressures more of a problem than the women is reinforced by the number of casual references to men with families seeking to re-marry, like the Reverend Smirkie, who marries John Caldigate’s cousin Julia, with five children, the eldest 16, and the widowed clergyman who marries Olivia Proudie. Men on their own are particularly prone to render their daughters more vulnerable. Emily Wharton (The Prime Minister) needs a mother’s advice and guidance, as does Alice Vavasor (Can You Forgive Her?), though Mr Wharton makes a better fist of it than does Mr Vavasor. One significant factor here may be that Alice’s mother dies soon after she is born, whereas Mrs Wharton dies only two years before the start of the novel. Perhaps Mr Wharton’s additional years of matrimonial experience have taught him some skills in negotiating the feminine spaces in the domestic sphere. Mr Amedroz fails Clara (The Belton Estate) and Admiral Blackstock fails his daughter Lizzie Eustace (The Eustace Diamonds); these are counterbalanced by Septimus Harding’s warm, loving, tolerant, supportive relationship with Eleanor in The Barchester Chronicles and Dr Thorne’s tender relationship with his niece Mary in Doctor Thorne. Squire Newton also incorporates these feminised skills into the model of manliness that shapes the parenting of his illegitimate son in Ralph the Heir. In general, women on their own fare better, whether they bring up sons or daughters or both. Mrs Woodward brings up three strong-minded and independent daughters in The Three Clerks; Lady Lufton raises a son to self-determined manhood when her husband dies in Ludovic’s infancy in Framley Parsonage. While Lord Lufton loves his mother, his clear conviction that he is his own man is intrinsic to the plot. Mrs Ray, in spite of her own need for support, brings up Rachel and Mrs Prime to be clear-headed, strong-minded young women in Rachel Ray. Mrs Dale fills her daughters with precepts of sound common sense through her long widowhood in The Small House at Allington. On the down side, Lady Mason makes such a god out of her son Lucius that he grows into a priggish bore in Orley Farm; in Lady Anna, Lady Anna’s mother is ready to force her daughter to repeat her own mistake in marrying a man without love; Lady Carbury ducks out of ever setting boundaries and brings up an unprincipled rake in The Way We Live Now. Where the primary story line follows the life of a single parent, their vulnerability, and that of their children, is a primary focus. Dr Thorne is quite exceptional, in following the story of a single man successfully parenting his niece.

Table 7.1

Family Structure Supportive relations

Parentless

16 s/d

Gresham

6 s/d

de Courcy

Yes

Scatcherd

Yes

Dr Thorne (uncle)

1 niece

7 s/d 1s

Robarts

2s

Grantley (rpt)

5 s/d

Proudie (rpt)

7 or 8

Lady Lufton

soon after son’s birth

2 s/d

Mrs Dale

15 yrs

2d

5 s/d Yes

7 s/d

Mrs Eames Mrs Roper

The Last Chronicle of Barsetshire

1s

3 s/d

Quiverful

de Courcy (rpt)

2d

7 or 8 Yes

Crawley The Small House at Allington

12 yrs

Sons and daughters

Framley Parsonage

2 yrs

Cause of partner’s death

Dr Thorne

Eleanor Bold

How long alone

Stanhope

Mr Harding

Dysfunctional?

Proudie

Widowers

5 s/d

Sons and daughters

Grantley (rpt)

Cause of partner’s death

Barchester Towers

How long alone

5 s/d

Dysfunctional?

Grantley

Widows

Sons and daughters

Dysfunctional?

2 parent families

Title The Warden

Grantley (rpt)

5 s/d

Mrs Dale (rpt)

Proudie (rpt)

7 or 8

Mrs Demolines

Adolphus Crosbie

2 s/d Yes

2 s/d 15 yrs

Yes

Henry Grantley 1d

2 yrs

in childbirth

1d

No

Palliser (rpt)

1s

The Prime Minister

Palliser (rpt)

1s

Phineas Redux

Chiltern

1 baby

Mrs Flood Jones

Yes

2 s/d

Lord Standish

Yes

1s

Admiral Greystock

Yes

Lady Fawn

8 s/d

Mr Wharton

Mrs Fletcher

2s

Lizzie Eustace

Yes

Supportive relations

4 s/d

Parentless

1s

Dean Greystock

Sons and daughters

Palliser

Cause of partner’s death

6 s/d

How long alone

The Eustace Diamonds

Mr Vavasor

Finn

Dysfunctional?

1d

Can You Forgive Her?

Phineas Finn

Widowers

Yes

Sons and daughters

12 s/d

Cause of partner’s death

3 s/d

Toogood

How long alone

Arabin st/p

Mrs Van Seiver

Dysfunctional?

5 s/d

Widows

Sons and daughters

Dysfunctional?

2 parent families

Title

Crawley (rpt)

before son’s birth

TB

Phineas Finn

25 yrs

in childbirth

1d

John Grey

Yes

George Vavasor

No

Kate Vavasor

No

Glencora Palliser

Yes

Plantagenet Palliser

Yes

Ferdinand Lopez

No

2 s/d

wife died in Lizzie’s teens

1d

2 yrs

1 s/d

in childbirth

1 died at birth

Supportive relations

Parentless

Sons and daughters

Cause of partner’s death

How long alone

Dysfunctional?

Widowers

Sons and daughters

Cause of partner’s death

How long alone

Dysfunctional?

Widows

1s

Mr Maule

Yes

Boncassen

1d

Plantagenet Palliser

Yes

Tregear (st/p)

2s

Earl Grex

Yes

Masters (st/p)

3d

Reginald Morton

Yes

Yes

1d

John Morton

Yes

Yes

3 s/d

Ayala & Lucy Dormer

Yes

Frank Houston

Yes

Imogene Docimer

Yes

Will Belton

Yes

Trefoil Mistletoe Ayala’s Angel

Sons and daughters

Dysfunctional?

The American Senator

2 parent families

Title The Duke’s Children

Palliser (rpt)

Tringle

as book opens

pneumonia? 3 s/d 2 s/d

1s

The Belton Estate

Aylmer

The Bertrams

Wilkinson sen.

5 s/d

The Claverings

Sir Henry Clavering

3 s/d

Sir Hugh Clavering

1s

Yes

Yes

3 s/d

1s

Theo Burton

3 s/d

Burton sen.

9 s/d

Miss Baker (aunt)

1 niece

Mr Amedroz

Yes

20 yrs

2 s/d

Lionel Bertram

Yes

since George was 9

1s

J. Caldigate

Brotherton

Bolton (st/p)

Yes

several s/d

1s

1s

15 yrs

Mrs French

Yes

Dowager

Yes

3 s/d 2d

7 yrs

‘very suddenly’

Shand

10 s/d

Babbington

6 s/d

Marion Fay

Marquis of Kingsbury (st/p)

Yes

3 s/d + 1 nephew

Countess Lovel

5 s/d

Mrs Roden (separated)

Miss Mackenzie Annesley

7 yrs

Daniel Caldigate

Yes (but 7 yrs mellows)

1d

epidemic

1s

6 s/d

Rev Sparkie

5 s/d

1d

Mr Thwaite

1s

1d

Lady Grant Lovel

Dean Lovelace

Marchioness

Mrs Holt

Lady Anna

6 s/d

5 s/d

Kept in the Dark

Mr Scarborough’s Family

Mrs Stanbury

1s Yes

Supportive relations

John Caldigate

Yes

Parentless

Marquis of

Sons and daughters

Trevelyan Is He Popenjoy?

Cause of partner’s death

8d

How long alone

Rowley

Dysfunctional?

He Knew He Was Right

Widowers

1s

Sons and daughters

1d

Bracey

Cause of partner’s death

Dr Wortle

How long alone

Dr Wortle’s School

Yes

Dysfunctional?

Broderick (st/p)

Widows

Sons and daughters

Dysfunctional?

2 parent families

Title Cousin Henry

‘children’ Yes

Mrs Mackenzie

Yes

Mrs Mountjoy

Yes

25+ yrs

left her husband

1s

Mr Fay

widowed in course of plot

cancer

6 or 7 s/d

John Ball

1d

Mr Scarborough

about 10 TB yrs

1d

9 s/d

Yes

20 + yrs

2s

Jack de Baron

No

1s

Dockwrath

Yes

16 s/d

Edith Orme

20 yrs

hunting accident

1s

Furnival

Yes

18 yrs

3 s/d

Tappits

3d

Mrs Ray

Cornbury

5 s/d

Mrs Rowan

Neefit

1d

The Vicar of Bullhampton

The Way We Live Now

Yes

No

Ralph Newton

No

Alaric Tudor

No

2d 2 s/d Mr Underwood

2d

Gregory Newton (single man) Valentine Scott (st/p)

Felix Graham

1d

Stavely

The Three Clerks

Supportive relations

old age

Parentless

19 yrs

Sons and daughters

Lady Mason

Cause of partner’s death

5 s/d

How long alone

Yes

Dysfunctional?

Joseph Mason

Widowers

Sons and daughters

Cause of partner’s death

How long alone

Dysfunctional?

Widows

Sons and daughters

Ralph the Heir

Dysfunctional?

Rachel Ray

2 parent families

Title Orley Farm

1d

Mrs Woodward

Fenwick

4 s/d

Miss Marrable

Brattle

3 s/d

(aunt)

Longstaffe

Yes

3 s/d

Lady Carbury

Melmotte (st/p)

Yes

1d

Mrs Pipkin

13 yrs

Colonel Marrable Captain Marrable

3 yrs

1s

3d 1 niece

Yes

Since Ralph was a baby

2 s/d several children

Mr Breghert

1s Yes

1s 5 or 6 s/d

Husbands, Fathers, Sons

151

Examining Trollope’s recording of causes of death shows that most deceased parents died unremarked and perhaps unremarkable deaths – two cases of tuberculosis, one bronchial infection, one hunting accident, one cancer, one contagious disease and three deaths in childbirth. It is a small sample, but does tend to reflect the findings in the world at large, that tuberculosis and infectious diseases were the primary scourges, that fatal accidents feature largely in the mortality of young men, and that while 96 per cent of births resulted in a live mother and baby, death in childbirth appears common because childbirth is a common occurrence. But the group whose lives are most blighted by parental death are those who set out in adult life without either parent and with no support from relatives. Alaric Tudor, Adolphus Crosbie, Ferdinand Lopez and George Vavasor are all shown by the plot to be irresponsible and lacking in integrity. Facing the world alone from an early age has skewed their sense of values. The only exception to the rule is Felix Graham and he starts out in Orley Farm with some bizarre notions of marriage, which only love for Madeline Staveley, who comes from the warmest, most stable family, dispels. John Grey is parentless, but he has only comparatively recently lost his father who educated his son himself, suggesting a close, protective bond between father and son. Plantagenet Palliser and Glencora M’Cluskie appear parentless, though they are both shored up by their wider families. There is no indication in the text as to when the double tragedy hit their lives, though in The Duke’s Children, Plantagenet tells Lady Mabel Grex that he remembers her mother when he was young, since his mother and her mother’s mother were first cousins and dear friends,13 perhaps suggesting that he was old enough to know his mother as a person in her own right by the time she died. The support of relations, who actively concern themselves with their welfare, is perhaps the factor of greatest significance when we look at this group as a whole. Parentless young people discarded by their relations – like Alaric Tudor, whose sister’s husband found it irksome to share his life with the adolescent Alaric – lack moral fibre in their lives as adults. Perhaps there is no cause for surprise that Trollope’s stories contain a concentration of those families most prone to produce problems and that his characters, both as marriage partners and as parents, face more difficulties than the world at large, for this census shows us Trollope’s specific interest in men as parents. His statistically skewed relish for relationships under stress yields up some surprising patterns when we examine his plots for the extra vulnerability of men in their closest relationships. While a major theme of many of the novels is the courtship of a hero and heroine, with their marriage as a final resolution of the plot, there is a significant group of novels which is different, where the marriage occurs at the beginning of the story and where the major story line is the examination of what happens in the marriage – novels like He Knew He Was Right, Kept in the Dark, John Caldigate, Is He Popenjoy?, Dr Wortle’s School and The Prime Minister. Throughout all the novels Trollope regularly expresses a pragmatic, unsentimental view of marriage when the first passion has subsided into a workaday relationship. In Ayala’s Angel, as Jonathan Stubbs pledges himself to be as much a lover as ever after he has married his bride, Trollope comments: 13

Duke’s Children, 227.

New Men in Trollope’s Novels

152

Alas, no! There he had promised more than it is given man to perform. Faith, honesty, steadfastness of purpose, joined to the warmest love and the truest heart will not enable a husband to maintain the sweetness of that aroma which has filled with delight the senses of the girl who has leaned upon his arm as her permitted lover.14

This is more robustly expressed in Framley Parsonage: When a man walks back from the altar he has already swallowed the choicest dainties of his banquet. The beef and the pudding are then in store for him, – or perhaps only the bread and cheese. Let him take care lest hardly a crust remain, – or perhaps not even a crust.15

There is something foreboding in this view, that the milk and honey all too soon run out, and what is left may bear little relation to what was hoped for, or aspired to. This is rather more specifically spelt out in The Belton Estate: The theory of man and wife – that special theory in accordance with which the wife is to bend herself in loving submission before her husband – is very beautiful, and would be good altogether if it could only be arranged that the husband should be the stronger and greater of the two. The theory is based upon that hypothesis, – and the hypothesis sometimes fails of confirmation. In ordinary marriage, the vessel rights itself, and the stronger and greater takes the lead, whether clothed in petticoats, or in coat, waistcoat and trousers; but there sometimes comes a terrible shipwreck, when the woman before marriage has filled herself full with ideas of submission, and then finds that the goldenheaded god has got an iron body and feet of clay.16

Trollope appreciates the strength of marriages where the vessel rights itself and the stronger and greater takes the lead. An analysis of his marriages shows that, for Trollope, masculinity in the marriage relationship embraces a wide range of models. The Tappitts, for instance, in Rachel Ray, have a common enough arrangement, where the outward show for the world is that it is the man who is master, while within the domestic circle, it is clear that the female holds sway. Trollope shows us a marriage where two people have evolved a comfortable way of living together for 30 years. It is a portrait of how two ordinary people who are committed to each other sort out who does what and who decides what, without any deep introspection into the issues and implications on their parts. Both Mr and Mrs Tappitt can fairly be described as having thought through what the other likes and getting pleasure from doing it. Mr Tappitt always buys his wife an extravagant wedding anniversary present and when Mrs Tappitt wants to secure his approval for the party, she makes him a beef-steak pie ‘with her own hands’. The sub-text of the strategy is wellrecognised: ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I wonder how much that pie is to cost me?’17 As if to underline that this is a marriage that he is exposing, and that marriages are about intimacy, much of the action between Mr and Mrs Tappitt is set in their bedroom. This is not unusual for Trollope. The most revealing episodes of family 14 15 16 17

Ayala, 630. Framley, 559. Belton, 132. Rachel, 69.

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dynamics take place in the Grantly bedroom. In The Warden, he observes that only when the archdeacon has got his trousers off can he converse like anyone else: It’s only when he has exchanged that ever-new shovel hat for a tasselled night-cap, and those shining black habiliments for his accustomed robe-de-nuit that Dr Grantly talks, looks and thinks like an ordinary man.18

And ordinary men concede domestic power to their wives. With his astute eye for the minutiae of behaviour, the conversation finishes when Mrs Grantly rolls over: And the lady turned herself round under the bed-clothes, in a manner to which the doctor was well accustomed, and which told him, as plainly as words, that as far as she was concerned, the subject was over for that night.19

Twenty years later, in The Last Chronicle of Barset, the Grantly bedroom is still where the action is, and Dr Grantly has again taken his trousers off for us. The discussion is again a conjectured romance, this time between their son Henry and Grace Crawley. The archdeacon takes his clothes off in his dressing room and stands in the doorway to their bedroom, ‘all unaccoutred’,20 to express his dismay at the suggestion. ‘All unaccoutred’, as well as telling us of his nakedness, has extra layers of meaning: without his accoutrements, without his protective trappings of office, in a vulnerable state – and his wife, yet again, has the last word in the argument.21 The Tappitt bedroom is equally revealing. Besting a tipsy husband, preferably with his trousers down, is the bedrock of farce and Trollope knows that old jokes are the best. There are two major scenes set in the Tappitt bedroom, and on both occasions Mr Tappitt is the worse for drink. In both of them we see Mrs Tappitt finetuning her strategy to make the most of her opportunity. She has a nice appreciation of her husband’s character, and knows when to stop. Her purpose is to get her own way, not to humiliate him. Customarily she allows him the last word22 and this is the ploy she has developed these last 30 years. In a scene of great comic effect, she deflects his responses so that his replies are retorts to the detail rather than the body of the argument and ‘when she put out the candle, [Mrs Tappitt] felt she had done a good evening’s work’.23 To win the retirement war, she delivers the coup de grace when his digestion is suffering as well, in a passage of high comedy when Mr Tappitt ‘recognised he would have to yield before he was allowed to put his clothes on’.24 Sadly, for Emily Trevelyan in He Knew He Was Right, the vessel has not righted itself in the manner of the Grantly and Tappitt marriages. She finds that her god has an iron body and feet of clay. Trollope again stalks the marital bed-chamber to expose the catastrophic marriage between an obsessional and jealous husband and an intransigent wife. The exploration of the marriage and its shipwreck is perhaps 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Warden, 18. Warden, 20. Last Chronicle, 19. Last Chronicle, 20. Rachel, 290. Rachel, 291. Rachel, 356.

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most interesting for the insight provided into the judicial position of married women in strife with their husbands at the time. Certainly, in the telling of the tale, Emily becomes the victim, both of her husband’s idée fixe, which pitches him into madness, and of her legal position and as the victim she draws all the compassion of the text. ‘I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story’, says Trollope in An Autobiography. ‘It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man, who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgement to the opinion of others.’25 Kept in the Dark was written 12 years later, and is often regarded as Trollope’s second attempt to construct a humane character with Louis Trevelyan’s failings, but who would generate sympathy, not dismay. Kept in the Dark opens with a widow who has brought up her daughter to be independent-minded and to make her own decisions. The daughter, Celia, misguidedly engages herself to a wastrel, but pulls back before the brink. She subsequently meets a man who is worthy of her hand; she hesitates to tell him of her earlier engagement; after their marriage he discovers the story and suspects some malign and sinister reason for his wife’s reticence. He leaves her and a large part of the novel explores his inability to resolve in his own mind, and to his own satisfaction, the implications of his wife’s history and the unsubstantiated accusations he levels at the woman he loves. Some of us might feel that Trollope manages no better at his self-appointed task the second time round. Just as He Knew He Was Right supports Emily’s side of the story, so the narrative voice of this text tells the story from Celia’s point of view rather than from George Western’s, which does inevitably colour the reader’s response. But as Trollope slips from implicit narrator to explicit interpreter, he comments: ... how ignorant she had been of the difficulty under which a man may labour to express his own feelings! That which we may call reticence is more frequently an inability than an unwillingness to express itself. The man is silent, not because he would not have the words spoken, but because he does not know the fitting words with which to speak. His dignity and so-called manliness are always near him, and are guarded, so that he should not melt into open ruth.26

This quotation is a remarkable analysis of George Western’s problems. Trollope is suggesting that men often fail to develop the capacity for putting their own feelings into words, shunning such facility for fear of seeming womanish. Thus not talking about how they feel mistakenly becomes a signifier of manliness. Resisting ‘melt[ing] into open ruth’, they fail to learn to locate their feelings accurately, which leads them to pursue false trails, with no insight into how they damage that which they most love, nor how to repair it. It is a fine description of that emotional illiteracy so heralded as the root of men’s problems at the end of the twentieth century, articulated 120 years earlier. It is particularly fruitful to examine another shipwreck and its salvage, the Germain marriage in Is He Popenjoy?, in the light of the quotation from Kept in the Dark. Is He Popenjoy? is a subtle tale, and one that does not give up its secrets easily. On the surface it explores a question of legitimacy, perhaps inspired by the case of 25 26

Autobiography, 321–2. Kept in the Dark, 158–9.

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27

the Tichborne claimant. A debauched marquis returns home to his family seat from Italy, where he has lived for many years, with a woman he claims is his wife and a rickety child of two, who may or may not be the legitimate heir. The dilemmas faced by his wider family are resolved by his child’s death and subsequently his own. Underneath this is played out the story of his younger brother George’s marriage to a young and beautiful heiress and his jealousy of the attention that her beauty and lively manner attract. Their problems are resolved when George inherits his brother’s title and wealth and his wife produces a legitimate heir. However, if we pry more deeply into the text, a third, much bleaker, but more satisfying tale emerges. As we examine the exchanges of the protagonists, and the expressions of their interiority, a picture emerges of George as a man whose whole life is one of emotional repression, whose marriage is unconsummated for many months, who has few resources to help him comprehend his feelings. The real story is of the skewed emotions that his impotence to consummate the marriage causes. And yet again, like Kept in the Dark and He Knew He Was Right, Is He Popenjoy? is told through a narrative voice that empathises with the wronged and ill-served wife, Mary, and is critical of George, whose poor self-knowledge is the root of so much unhappiness. The thread of this plot follows George, the younger son and youngest child of six children born to the Marquis and Marchioness of Brotherton. The old Marquis has died some five or so years previously and the older son has opted to continue living in Italy, where he has already lived for several years. George has applied little thought or initiative to his own manner of life. He has been to Eton and thence to Oxford, where he has gained his degree. There is a family living, but he declines to go into the Church and, having no constructive alternative, returns to live at home. When his father dies, in the absence of his brother he takes on the management of the estate, taking on the responsibilities of head of the family, but with no status or rank to support him and only the interest on £4,000 – perhaps £180 a year – for income. It is said by everyone that George must marry money, but at 30 he becomes infatuated with his equally ill-endowed cousin, Adelaide de Baron, viewed by his family as fast and vulgar. She declines to join his poverty to hers and shortly afterwards marries a rich old man. George is cut to the quick and shuts himself away for months on end. Trollope comments, ‘There are men to whom such disappointment as this carries enduring physical pain’.28 Two years later he is attracted by Mary Lovelace, the very beautiful, very chaste and very wealthy 19 year old daughter of the local Dean. He asks her father’s permission to address her; the young lady meets him on

27 ‘In 1854 Roger, the young heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates had been drowned (as it was thought) at sea. Sir Roger’s mother, a weak-minded lady, clung to the belief that her son was still alive. Her advertisements for information about her son were answered in 1865 by an apparent impostor, Arthur Orton, alias Thomas Castro. The family (except for the besotted mother) saw through Castro at once. He was brought to court first to eject him from his usurped title, then on charges of perjury.’ John Sutherland, Is Heathcliffe a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 173–4. 28 Popenjoy, vol. 1, 8.

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her own once; a month later she accepts his proposal and then sets about ‘to fall in love with him’.29 It is unclear how deeply George actually feels for his beautiful young wife, for, though when she accepts him ‘he brushed a real tear from his eyes’30 and though he presses her for ‘an early day’,31 within four months of his marriage he is reflecting that ‘he was very fond of his wife; but it had never yet occurred to him that the daughter of Dean Lovelace could be as important to him as all the ladies of the house of Germain’.32 Whatever it is he feels for Mary, it seems it is hardly the consuming passion he felt for Adelaide, nor does his devotion set her interests above those of his mother and sisters. The reflection is prompted by the announcement that his brother is returning home, with an Italian wife and an Italian-born son, and wants the family seat vacated. George’s responses are mixed and confused. When his fatherin-law offers to help him out of the financial difficulties posed by the need to move his mother into the dower house, his reaction is to feel angry.33 His anger is perhaps more a projection of his feelings of impotence to influence events and circumstances. He seems unable to step back to consider with any veracity what is prompting the discomfort in his heart. It is this lack of a language with which to explore feeling that characterises his relationship with Adelaide and determines his censorious response to his wife. The seeds are sown when Adelaide is recovering at Manor Cross from a fall from her horse while hunting in the neighbourhood. George and Mary have been married about three months. George spends time with Adelaide alone while Mary is confined with his sisters at their Good Works. He experiences an uncomfortable mix of guilt, ‘doing something in which he would not wish to be detected’34 and pleasure at ‘the flattery of such intrigues’.35 Three months later Adelaide pushes home her advantage when George and Mary have taken up residence in their London house. She traps George into saying that he still loves her – though ‘trap’ perhaps too generously frees George from his share of responsibility. As Trollope says: ‘These are the words which a man cannot resist from a woman, even though he knows them to be false.’36 He goes on to say that George had ‘none of that experience which strengthens a man against female cajolery’.37 He is blind to her gambits. She invites him to imagine their life if they had married. ‘But, if I had, the joint home of us all must have been in Mr Price’s farmhouse.’38 Obtusely, George replies: ‘It isn’t a farmhouse.’ In sidestepping to the trivial detail, he walks blindly into the heavy broadside that is upon

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Popenjoy, vol. 1, 17. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 17. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 16. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 58. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 60. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 86. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 87. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 177. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 179. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 176.

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him. ‘Do you love me?’, she says; ‘You may love me without anything wrong.’ He takes her in his arms and kisses her, then leaves the house. He wanders round central London in a spin. As he hurries away from Adelaide he is almost overcome by the excitement of the occasion: ‘There was a luxury in it which almost intoxicated him, and a horror in it which almost quelled him.’ As he reflects on what has just taken place, ‘the wickedness of the thing was more wicked than the charm of it was charming’.40 But what troubles him most is the possible shame of his wife’s hearing of it: ‘That he should lord it over her as a real husband was necessary to his happiness and how can a man be a real lord over a woman when he has had to confess his fault to her and to beg her to forgive him.’41 Nothing in his life has foundations. His assumption of authority in marriage is as spurious as the sphere in life that he has adopted, discharging the responsibility of the peerage unsupported by title and trappings. As he walks in Kensington Gardens towards the Albert Memorial, he suddenly meets Mary and Jack de Baron, Adelaide’s young and impoverished cousin, who pursues a life of pleasure and entertainment: ‘He had been unhappy before because he was conscious that he was ill-treating his wife, but now he was almost more disturbed because it seemed to him to be possible that his wife was ill-treating him.’42 His own guilt is displaced by anger: ‘The idea was so strong as altogether to expel from his mind for the moment all remembrance of Mrs Houghton.’43 And yet it is glaringly obvious, made clear at his second glance and confirmed by Adelaide, that his wife is out walking with her father and has merely met Jack de Baron taking a stroll with Adelaide. She fans the flame most effectively: ‘Say that you love me ... What is it that ails you? You are unhappy because she is here with my cousin Jack?’44 There is, as the authorial voice points out, nothing rational about George’s anger: In thinking over all this, his mind wasn’t very logical, but he did feel he was justified in exacting particularly strict conduct from her, because he was going to make Mrs Houghton understand that they two, though they loved each other, must part.45

Both his guilt and his dysfunctional marriage make him peculiarly vulnerable to jealous suspicion. The evidence that the marriage is unconsummated is coded, and sometimes circumstantial, but strong. People around them have suspicions. Adelaide Houghton says: ‘Think of Mary. Think of Mary’s child – if she should have one.’ Trollope goes on: ‘As she said this she looked rather anxiously into his face, being desirous of receiving an answer to a question which she did not quite dare ask.’46 The question she does not dare ask seems to be about the possibility of conception, about whether George and Mary have a sexual relationship. At the end of the novel, 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Popenjoy, vol. 1, 178. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 179. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 179–80. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 181. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 181. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 183. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 184. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 174.

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Mr Price, the tenant farmer of Cross Hall, jokes with the Manor Cross housekeeper about the length of time it took George and Mary to produce a baby: But Mr Price, with his bride did come down and see the baby, on which occasion, the gallant husband bade his wife remember that although they had been married more than 12 months after Lord George, their baby would be only three months younger. Whereupon Mrs Price boxed her husband’s ears, – to the great delight of Mrs Toff, who was dispensing sherry and cherry brandy in her own sitting room.47

The Dean too has an inkling: ‘I have no child’, said Lord George. ‘But you will have.’ The Dean, as he said this, could not keep himself from looking closely into his son-inlaw’s face.48

On the following page, he puts the question more directly to his daughter: Then for the first time, he asked her what immediate hope there was that Lord George might have an heir. She tried to laugh, then blushed, then wept a tear or two, and muttered something which he failed to hear. ‘There is time enough for all that, Mary’ he said, with his pleasantest smile.49

The blush, the tear, the muffled words, the attempt to laugh, suggest an embarrassing problem and the Dean’s response implies he has understood what she cannot quite say. ‘There is time enough for all that’, he says, with his ‘pleasantest’ smile. The Dean is reassuring, supporting Mary’s morale. Without being specific, he conveys to Mary that he knows what she means; he knows, perhaps from his position as a priest, or perhaps from his down-to-earth origins, that many marriages can take a considerable length of time to achieve sexual harmony and adjustment. It is certainly a problem that has perplexed Mary over many months: ‘Say that you’ll like being alone with me’, she pleads to George on the train as they set off to live in their London house. ‘She, as they spoke, leaned against him, inviting him to caress her.’50 When they are finally alone ‘she hovered around him touching him every now and then with her light fingers, moving a lock of his hair, and then stooping over him and kissing his brow’.51 Mary’s attempts to arouse George fall flat and he goes to sleep reading his paper. The passage continues: It might still be that she would be able to galvanise him into that lover’s vitality, of which she had dreamed. He never rebuffed her; he did not scorn her kisses, or fail to smile when his hair was moved; ... But through it all, she was quite aware that she had not galvanised him as yet.52

47 48 49 50 51 52

Popenjoy, vol. 2, 296. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 280. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 281. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 106. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 107. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 107.

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In using ‘galvanised’ twice in five lines, Trollope intends us to notice it as a significant observation. ‘Galvanise – to stimulate with electricity, especially figuratively, to galvanise something into life.’53 Trollope is seeking a code to express the absence of sexual activity in the marriage, in spite of Mary’s best efforts. George has few role-models in his life to help him in his marriage. His models of womanly behaviour are drawn from his mother – an hysterical and foolish woman given to the vapours, the butt of some of the most brilliant comic scenes – and his older sisters, three celibate and one recently married to an elderly clergyman. His father is dead; his brother, ten years older than he, is a dissipated rake, who may well be dying of syphilis. There is little here to teach him how to take pleasure in his young wife’s company and her body, a wife still in her teens when he married her, who had lived a very chaste and sheltered life. And what about that honeymoon? When Rachel Ray comes back from her honeymoon with Luke Rowan, she has no recollection of what the weather was like, but assumes the sun shone.54 George and Mary go to Ireland and George quizzes the peasants about their economy. When he and Mary return he sets out a course of reading for her, – ‘so much for the two hours after breakfast, so much for the hour before dressing – so much for the evening; and also a table of results to be acquired in three months – in six months – and so much by the close of the first year; and even laid down the sum total of achievements to be produced by a dozen years of such work’.55 It is made to sound like cold showers and bromide in the tea, as though he recognises her potential for passion and is trying to dampen it. He seems ashamed of his attraction to Adelaide’s overt sexuality, while at the same time, Mary’s virgin modesty inhibits his arousal. Perhaps his first experience of intense sexual attraction caused such pain that his marriage to Mary was driven by a need to avoid repeating such a hurt. In these circumstances, her attempts to stimulate his ardour, reinforced by her attractiveness to other men, would subliminally confirm that he was likely to be hurt again. In such a situation, he would experience Mary’s clear pleasure and exhilaration in dancing and dancing with Jack de Baron as confirmation that she purposely set out to hurt him when she danced the Kappakappa, the incident which finally led to their estrangement. Trollope gives Mary a dimple, confirmation that she has the capacity for sexual appetite and fulfilment.56 It is worth noting that it is Jack de Baron who notices her dimple, not George. George, a man with so little insight into his failings, is played out alongside Jack de Baron, a young man with many faults – and superficiality is certainly one of them – who nevertheless can examine his heart and put names to the feelings in there. In the chapter ‘Real Love’, he says, ‘If I could have any hope that he [George] would die, I would put myself into some reformatory to fit myself to be the second husband’. He continues:

53 54 55 56

Oxford English Dictionary: 1b. fig, 1st cited 1853. Rachel, 391. Popenjoy, vol. 1, 23–4. Popenjoy, vol. 2, 111 and Markwick, 90–92.

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‘The dimples on her cheeks are so alluring that I would give my commission to touch them once with my finger. When I first knew her, I thought that the time would come when I might touch them. Now I feel that I would not commit such an outrage to save myself from being cashiered.’57

Ironically, while he is saying this to Adelaide Houghton, Mary and George are living apart, separated by George’s obsession that Mary’s vivacity is a slur on his manhood. In these post-Freudian days we are comfortable with analysing behaviour such as this. The emotionally-defended George, shielding a weakly-construed projection of masculinity, displaces his distress at his impotence into anger and jealousy directed at his wife. Trollope, without the language of psychoanalysis, draws us a fully worked portrait of George’s emotional incoherence. There is some growth towards the end of the book. A month after they have parted, Mary realises she is pregnant. With the Marquis’s Italian child dead, the baby she is carrying may be the new Popenjoy. This helps build a bridge between her and her husband. When the Marquis dies, and George inherits the title and the estate, he now has a man’s occupation that is rightly his. He no longer has to justify his position in life. He takes his duties as a peer and as a landlord very seriously. When the book ends, the Germain nursery has three babies in it, an heir and two little girls. However, beneath the confident asserting that all good things have come to the Germains, runs an undertow that suggests it is Mary who has changed and not George. ‘Since the dancing of the Kappa-kappa she had never danced ... Dancing has been a peril to her, and she avoids it all together.’58 Of George we read: The Marquis has become a model member of the House of Lords. He is present at all their sittings, and is indefatigably patient on committees – but very rarely speaks ... He is also a pattern landlord, listening to all complaints, and endeavouring in everything to do justice between himself and those who are dependent on him. He is also a pattern father expecting great things from Popenjoy, and resolving that the child shall be subjected to proper discipline as soon as he is transferred from feminine to virile teaching.59

Popenjoy, who has been christened Frederic Augustus after his uncle, George’s dissipated brother, is said to tyrannise over his two little sisters.60 It seems probable that, just as George’s perception of his contribution to government is to be everpresent, but ineffective, so his perception of parenthood is similarly skewed. Few boundaries are being set in the nursery, and it appears that George anticipates that boarding school – ‘virile teaching’ – will have to beat some discipline into him. George’s problems are not resolved, they are merely avoided, and shelved for the next generation. Trollope’s ironic, laconic tone charts George’s move from a domestic sphere, where he holds no power, to the potential arena that offers power, but where he exercises none. Ultimately we realise how little George understands of human 57

Popenjoy, vol. 2, 111. Popenjoy, vol. 2, 309. 59 Popenjoy, vol. 2, 308. 60 Popenjoy, vol. 2, 307. Frederic and Augustus are, of course, names belonging to the eighteenth century Hanoverian royal family, suggesting decadence, not solid English stock. 58

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relationships. He is stuck in a model which proposes male supremacy and female subservience, which is at odds with Trollope’s recognition of the need for mutual respect. ‘In marriage’, Trollope says, ‘equality is necessary for comfortable love.’61 The Germain marriage survives because Mary understands what she has to do to preserve her self-respect, not because George acquires any insight into the crippling and limiting notion of masculinity rife in his family.62 A misalliance in marriage does not necessarily lead to poor parenting. Frank Gresham senior, a man perhaps guilty of poor stewardship, who in his green years (he marries at 22 and his son Frank is born when he is 2363) has more than a due share of immature pride and vanity, cares more than he should for appearances and marries a woman even weaker in that direction. But he has integrity in his heart, which grows stronger with maturity, in spite of his marriage to a shallow and histrionic wife: ‘Lady Isabella had her faults, and they were such as were extremely detrimental to her husband’s happiness and her own.’64 The relationship between father and son, though it is hallmarked with openly expressed frank love, is tinged with Frank Gresham senior’s guilt at embarrassing the estate to meet the demands of his wife. Both father and son are free with physical demonstrations of their affection for each other and neither will brook criticism of the other from any quarter. We are told that Mr Gresham loves his son ‘with the tenderest love’,65 while Frank ‘loved his father truly, purely, and thoroughly, liked to be with him, and would be proud to be his confidant’.66 Mr Gresham expresses his love physically: ‘He put his hand on his son’s shoulder, and half caressed him.’67 That this is commonly how he demonstrated his feeling for his son is reflected in Frank’s readiness in his turn to reassure his father of his love for him with physical touch: ‘Frank drew near to his father, and pressed his hand against the squire’s arm, by way of giving him, in some sort, a filial embrace for his kindness’,68 and: ‘Frank, jumping up from his chair, threw his arms round his father’s neck.’69 This second quotation comes in a passage quite remarkable for what it reveals about the discourse between the two men. Frank has been declaring that his love for Mary transcends anything that he could learn about her birth and both men have been undissimulating in acknowledging the world’s skewed values in allowing money to outweigh the disadvantages of lowly birth, when blood and birth are at issue. Frank hotly defends Mary’s suitability as a bride for him, saying he does not give a straw for the world’s opinion. His father reads more deeply into his son’s heart: ‘What you 61

Popenjoy, vol. 1, 315. This is at odds with the conclusion I reached when exploring the Germain marriage in Trollope and Women, 144–56, where I concluded that the marriage ultimately achieves a modus vivendi when George recognises Mary’s generous heart. My re-examination, focusing on issues surrounding George’s masculinity urges me to adopt a much bleaker interpretation of the plot. 63 Doctor Thorne, 7. 64 Doctor Thorne, 6. 65 Doctor Thorne, 400. 66 Doctor Thorne, 55. 67 Doctor Thorne, 79. 68 Doctor Thorne, 601. 69 Doctor Thorne, 515. 62

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mean is that ... you value your love more than the world’s opinion.’70 He recognises the integrity of his son’s protestations. This is not without its own particular pain for him. He knows, and acknowledges, that money is only an issue because of his own poor stewardship. Frank sets out his plans for earning his own living. His father reflects on the import of his son, his heir, seeking a profession. The two men, in trust and respect, offer their hearts for inspection: ‘Frank, ... I wonder what you think of me? ... Yes, what you think of me for having thus ruined you. I wonder whether you hate me?’71 The invitation to give voice to unspoken angry feelings is immediately rebuffed: ‘Frank, jumping up from his chair, threw his arms round his father’s neck. “Hate you, sir! How can you speak so cruelly. You know that I love you … But father, never say, never think that I do not love you!”.’72 This is the dialogue of two men who know their hearts and value their faculty for the expression and exchange of feeling. Frank has grown up secure in his father’s love for him, – ‘his father, whose face was always lighted up with pleasure when the boy came near him’.73 Their love is set in sharp relief against the relationship of the de Courcy sons with their father: ‘The young man [John, the third son] sighed as he reflected what small hope there was that all those who were nearest and dearest to him should die out of his way, and leave him to the sweet enjoyment of an earl’s coronet and fortune.’74 John de Courcy’s emotional detachment is reflected in his diction, as the words he uses for death convey superficiality, indifference: ‘Were the governor to walk’; ‘his father kicked the bucket’; Frank’s father’s death would be a ‘stroke of luck.’ The dialogue bats between the two young men, the one callow, the other, while not wishing to sound like a prig, unwilling to belie his heart. ‘I shouldn’t think it a stroke of luck, John, I should think it the greatest misfortune in the world.’75 Trollope recognises the difficulty his hero is in: ‘It is so difficult for a young man to enumerate sententiously a principle of morality, or even an expression of ordinary good feeling, without giving himself something of a ridiculous air ... .’76 As the scene ends, Frank goes away chuckling over a joke about death his cousin has told him. Trollope absolves him of any affectation. John de Courcy’s attempt to pass on his materialistic values continue. He attempts to provoke Frank to express dissatisfaction with his stable backfire when Frank exposes his cousin’s physical timidity on the hunting field. John de Courcy’s jibes are not lost on Mr Gresham and the scene again confirms Frank senior and junior as two men knowing how they feel, and saying it, without appearing mawkish: ‘The squire had understood it all; had understood the meaning of his nephew’s attack, had thoroughly understood also the meaning of his son’s defence, and the feeling which had actuated it.’77

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Doctor Thorne, 514. Doctor Thorne, 515. Doctor Thorne, 515–16. Doctor Thorne, 54. Doctor Thorne, 52. Doctor Thorne, 55. Doctor Thorne, 55. Doctor Thorne, 81.

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There are other such father and son relationships in the novels where the warm loving feeling which flows freely between two men is regularly expressed in an embrace. In Ralph the Heir, Squire Newton and his illegitimate son Ralph, against all cultural odds, have just such a relationship. For the Squire, ‘His boy was as dear to him as though the mother had been his honest wife’.78 ‘There had never been a more devoted father, one more intensely anxious for his son’s welfare,’79 while of Ralph we read, ‘He could only take his father’s arm, and whisper a soft feminine word or two. He would be as happy as the day is long if only he could see his father happy.’80 The ironic antithesis of this in George Bertram’s relationship with his father in The Bertrams emphasises the point. Lionel Bertram, notable by his absence on any plane from his son’s childhood, agrees to meet George, now a young man, in Jerusalem. George, whose relationship with his father is perhaps based on a fantasy untempered by reality, endows his father with all the parenting qualities he so patently lacks and responds to him as though they were tied by bonds as firm as those between the Greshams: ‘... the son was half holding, half caressing his father’s arm. Sir Lionel, to tell the truth, did not much care for such caresses, but under the peculiar circumstances of this present interview, he permitted it.’81 The idealised father/son relationship that George aspires to, and perhaps observed between Arthur Wilkinson and his father when he was growing up, is warm and physical. His own father’s heart is cold, calculating and manipulative. Just as the good rapport between Arthur Wilkinson and his father is implicit in the text, so one might make similar assumptions about the father/son relationships of other young men who show a marked aptitude for tenderness in parenthood. Mark Robarts, Jonathan Stubbs, Theodore Burton, Harry Clavering, Phineas Finn, perhaps all learn to find pleasure in children’s company by being cherished by their fathers. These relationships are presented in relief against a backdrop of families where father and son are at war: ‘“How odd it is”, said Madame Max Goestler, “how often you English fathers quarrel with your sons!”.’82 It is a sharply observed fact of life in the aristocracy. ‘The earl [de Courcy] and Lord Porlock indeed hated each other as only such fathers and such sons can hate’;83 ‘Lord Grex had been very badly treated by his son, whom he hated worse than anyone else in the world.’84 Mr Longstaffe and his son ‘never did come together without quarrelling’.85 All these feuds are fuelled by the tensions of primogeniture, with young men brought up in affluence and idleness, dependent on their fathers for their income until they can enjoy the full fruits of their position on their fathers’ deaths. Both parties are hampered by the competing demands of their diametrically opposed positions in this particularly British institution and Trollope can regularly be detected admiring estates that are

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Ralph, vol. 1, 128. Ralph, vol. 2, 38. Ralph, vol. 1, 273. Bertrams, 71. Phineas Finn, 402. Small House, 173. Duke’s Children, 154. Way We Live Now, 115.

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checked by no entail. The Gresham estate is one; squire Dale’s estate in The Small House at Allington is another. The plot of Cousin Henry hangs on an old man’s scruples about passing his unentailed estate to another Indefer Jones. Archdeacon Grantly has inherited and acquired great wealth and property. He prides himself on how well he has provided for his family, that he can make ‘first sons’ out of both Charles and Henry. His hubris is to believe that his money entitles him to exercise power over his sons’ lives and one of the sub-plots of The Last Chronicle of Barset explores the repercussions and resolutions of that self-delusion. It is significant that the impetus to disinherit Henry, to cut off his allowance, comes from the Archdeacon’s daughter Griselda, who has married into the aristocracy and has perhaps appropriated such behaviour from her new sphere. One fears for the emotional well-being of the little Lord Dumbello, for surely Griselda never learnt it at home. As we have already examined, the Grantly ménage operates on a dual principle, where the archdeacon wields the power in public, but his wife rules from inside the bed curtains. Because of the exposition of this dynamic, we know before Archdeacon Grantly does that he will be unable to enforce his threat and that the manner of his change of heart is what will give the twist of the tale its interest. This space also allows Trollope to explore Henry Grantly’s conduct as a son, a man, a father and a lover, and to reveal some enlightening aspects of his masculinity. It is important to acknowledge that Henry Grantly, unlike Porlock and Percival Grex, grows up expecting to earn his own living. When he leaves school he goes into the army and carves a brilliant career in India, being decorated with the Victoria Cross. On his marriage at the age of about 26, and with the encouragement and financial support of his father, he leaves the army and settles himself in Barsetshire. Sadly, a year later, his wife dies in childbirth and for the past two years he has brought up their child Edith alone (though with the full panoply of Victorian uppermiddle-class nursemaids). However, the text makes it clear that he is physically and emotionally very involved in her care. When he spends Christmas with his parents at Plumstead, special arrangements are to be made for father and baby: ‘Anything that he wanted for Edith was to be done.’86 Thus not only does Henry stay in charge of his daughter, the Plumstead Rectory household also expects him to be in charge and offers him every support. We see him taking Edith for a walk in her pram87 and when, on a day of male bonding with his friends, he becomes downhearted at their pessimistic reflections on the Crawley family plight, he goes home to be there for Edith’s bed-time, rather than stay and dine with his companions.88 When he falls in love with Grace Crawley, whom he meets at Lady Lufton’s at Framley, the establishment of her suitability to be a mother to his child is paramount. He is primarily concerned about the quality of love and affection he recognises his little daughter needs. Before he declares his love, he has made opportunity both for him to observe Grace with his daughter and for her to examine her feelings about Edith. He has allowed her to stay overnight in her charge.89 When he asks Grace to marry 86 87 88 89

Last Chronicle, 218. Last Chronicle, 68. Last Chronicle, 135. Last Chronicle, 49.

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him, it is a dual proposal. ‘I have come here, dearest Grace, to ask you to be my wife, and to be a mother to Edith.’90 His grandfather, Mr Harding, himself a single parent, is equally child-centred and fills his pockets with toys when he knows he will meet his great grandchild.91 Another child, his granddaughter Posy, is the favourite companion of his final days.92 Mr Harding is instrumental in showing Henry the way to mend the rift that has opened between him and his father over his plans to marry Grace, so there is perhaps evidence of a close relationship which shapes his view of the parameters of manliness. Each time Henry examines his feelings about Grace, his feelings about Edith guide his thoughts. When he discusses with Miss Prettyman how he should proceed in pressing his suit, he says he has been ‘wondering whether I was too old for her, and whether she would mind having Edith to take care of’.93 He pours out his heart to Mrs Thorne, the former Martha Dunstable, and tells her of the warnings men have given him about Edith’s interests.94 While he reveals less of the vulnerability of his heart when talking to his mother of his love for Grace and his determination to marry her, Edith is central to his argument.95 The words that Henry uses in these dialogues reflect his emotional literacy: ‘I know what my feelings are. I do love her with all my heart’,96 he says to Miss Prettyman. Henry’s open and honest articulation of love for his daughter and love for Grace sit well with his determination to be his own man in the face of his father’s threat to stop his allowance and disinherit him: ‘I claim the privilege of a man of my age to do as I please in the matter of marriage ... I had not yet made up my mind to make an offer to Miss Crawley, but I shall now do so in the morning.’97 His love is driven by powerful desire: ‘Then he took her in his arms before she could escape from him, and kissed her forehead and her lips ...’98 – a red-blooded, honest, manly response. His mother thinks that both father and son are as ‘cross-grained’ as each other: ‘They’re as like each other as two peas’,99 she says, as she tries to negotiate a truce between a son determined to be his own man and a father known to be all bark and no bite. But she is unable to broker a peace. In the end it is Mr Harding whose words go home to Henry: ‘Be gentle with him – and submit yourself.’100 Being gentle with people, and submitting oneself are qualities most often perceived as feminine; indeed, in Barchester Towers, Mr Harding is said to have ‘that nice appreciation of the feelings of others which belongs of right exclusively to women’.101 Trollope, then, recognises that the quality that make his Warden so exceptional a man is his integration of the 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Last Chronicle, 298. Last Chronicle, 216. Last Chronicle, 859. Last Chronicle, 64. Last Chronicle, 139. Last Chronicle, 222. Last Chronicle, 64. Last Chronicle, 26. Last Chronicle, 302. Last Chronicle, 627. Last Chronicle, 629. Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 265.

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feminine into his masculinity. His advice to Henry is given as a dying man’s bequest to his heirs. This is what he has to leave behind him when he goes, the principles by which he has lived his life. As Henry reflects on this, he realises that ‘it might be becoming in him to forgive some fault in his father’.102 Not that Henry is made out to be at all priggish or a paragon. There is a healthy seam of peevish resentment that the truth about the allegations against Mr Crawley emerges before he can marry Grace in spite of his father’s opposition – his mother is so right about his similarity to his father. Henry knows that, through taking on his grandfather’s precepts, he is a bigger man than his father. Two men who have had to be mother and father to their children, and who have risen to the challenge, show that masculinity has to encompass nurturing qualities to become truly strong and worth striving for. Plantagenet Palliser’s journey to recognise this truth is a much rougher ride. When we set out to examine him as a single parent, we are particularly fortunate in knowing so much of his private life and emotional development from his early adult years. We can construct little of his childhood. The only fact we can deduce is that he was old enough to remember his mother when she died. Of the death of his father we know nothing. Our detailed knowledge of him starts in his mid 20s, when we meet him at Courcy Castle in The Small House at Allington.103 We hear him to be a hardworking young man, showing determination to do well in his chosen sphere of politics, with blood which has only now pulsed with desire for a young woman.104 He toys with the idea of a ‘platonic, innocent, but nevertheless very intimate’ flirtation with a married woman, but prefers to bestow his newly discovered capacity for passion on the heiress Lady Glencora M’Cluskie, in her first season out in the world. He asks for her hand after two dances105 and the first book of the Palliser novels, Can You Forgive Her?, explores the problems of establishing a modus vivendi in a marriage with such inauspicious antecedents. Lady Glencora has not sought to hide her existing passion for a handsome rake, but ultimately she bows to family pressure, and gives her hand to a man whose great distinguishing feature is his capacity to keep his feelings in check. The dynamics of this inequality add relish to the whole series; the marriage hits its lowest point in Can You Forgive Her?, where Glencora is on the verge of eloping with her handsome rake, and Plantagenet forgoes the opportunity to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in order to take her on holiday, telling her that his love for her, and keeping her love for him, is more important to him than any political accolade. The mutual commitment and loyalty engendered by this episode form the bedrock to a relationship between opposites which shapes much of the subsequent action. Glencora’s ungoverned impetuosity reaches its apogee in The Prime Minister, where her conspicuous consumption surpasses all bounds of vulgarity, as she tries to pander to the disparate ambitions of the factions in his coalition.

102 103 104 105

Last Chronicle, 687. Small House, 250. Small House, 474. Small House, 614.

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That Trollope intended us to recognise the bedrock in their marriage is clear from the resolution of The Prime Minister. Plantagenet reflects ruefully that his coalition will fall; he and Glencora both acknowledge the sadness they feel: Then she came up to him and put both her hands on his breast. ‘But yet, Othello, I shall not be all unhappy.’ ‘Where will be your contentment?’ ‘In you. It was making you ill. Rough people whom the tenderness of your nature could not well endure, trod upon you, and worried you with their teeth, and wounded you everywhere... Now you will be saved from them, and so I shall not be discontented.’ ... ‘Then I will be contented too’, he said, as he kissed her.106

In The Duke’s Children, the two lads, home from ‘Eton and some minor Eton’ in The Prime Minister,107 are now turned 21 and 20; the two little girls (the older of whom was the ‘little Lady Glencora’108), are reduced to one, Lady Mary, now 19.109 In The Prime Minister, Plantagenet has often yearned for time with his family: ‘I am always dreaming of some day when we may go away together with the children, and rest in some pretty spot, and live as other people live’,110 and ‘I am a private gentleman who will now be able to devote more of his time to his wife and children than has hitherto been possible with him’,111 – sentiments so regularly endorsed by politicians today. In Phineas Finn, Silverbridge, as a very little boy on his great uncle the Duke’s knee, says: ‘Papa is very well, but he almost never comes home.’112 We know that Plantagenet has done what he can within the constraints of his public position to remedy this; in The Prime Minister he is keen to go for a walk with his children when they arrive at Gatherum, but the two little girls are tired from their journey, and the two lads have already gone off on their own adventures.113 When a father is usually absent, he does not easily find a place in his children’s activities when he is there. The Duke’s Children opens with the family newly returned from a year on the continent, plunged into grief by the sudden death of Glencora, the Duchess of Omnium. The Duke, Plantagenet Palliser, finds himself a widower, grief-stricken, suddenly responsible for three young people whom he loves dearly, but whom he hardly knows. Plantagenet is bereft: ‘It was as though a man should suddenly be 106

Prime Minister, vol. 2, 309. Prime Minister, vol. 1, 171. 108 Prime Minister, vol. 2, 267. 109 Duke’s Children, 7. It is, of course, the novelist’s prerogative to set his own almanac. The Prime Minister, begun on April 2nd, 1874, and published in eight monthly parts from November 1875, came out in book form in 1876, and Trollope started to write The Duke’s Children on May 2nd, 1876. Two fictional years pass between the end of one novel and the beginning of the second. Only a pedant would point out that in these two years, between the fall of the Duke’s administration and the death of his wife, his children age about 8 years, and that it was little wonder he failed to understand his children as young adults, since he clearly missed their entire adolescences. 110 Prime Minister, vol. 2, 104. 111 Prime Minister, vol. 2, 365. 112 Phineas Finn, 453. 113 Prime Minister, vol. 1, 171. 107

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called upon to live without hands or even arms.’114 While he loves his children, his expression of his love is hindered by his misconceptions of his role as parent; instead of promoting and sharing their welfare he becomes a block to their happiness. His epiphany from misguided and pessimistic attempts to exercise control to the articulation of pleasure in the choices his children make in their partners and way of life is the discourse of this novel; the road he has to travel is rough, and his shoes often rub, but he can finally look honestly into his heart and find words to express the feelings he acknowledges are there. This facility for articulation is remarkably absent as the book opens. Thus, while his heart needs his daughter near him to assuage his grief (and hers) in the early weeks after Glencora’s death, he is on the verge of sending Mary to stay with Lady Cantrip, whom she hardly knows, because he thinks she must need the support and guidance of an older woman. His view of his task as the parent of a 19 year-old young woman is restrictive and fettering: ‘How was he to decide whom she should or whom she should not marry? How was he to guide her through the shoals and rocks which lay in the path of such a girl before she can achieve matrimony?’115 His rhetorical questions form an ominous indicator of things to come, as he mistakes the place of duty and obedience in his task of encouraging his children to be confident and make independent choices about their future. His problems with Mary start almost immediately when he discovers that she has pledged herself to a young man, a commoner without means. Frank Tregear is indeed something of a paragon. He worked hard at school and at university, graduating with honours. He has well-thought-out political opinions, sincerely held; he is on good terms with his parents, and is handsome to boot. He doesn’t gamble, or drink, or fall into bad company. His only failing is that, having sufficient income for the life he leads, he has no clear plan for a profession that will give him an income on which he could marry, and certainly not on which to marry a duke’s daughter. Plantagenet entirely fails to recognise his sterling qualities and only sees an arrogant adventurer after his daughter’s money. In trying to browbeat his daughter he merely succeeds in denying himself the comfort of her love and embrace at his own time of greatest need. Lady Mary has been entirely open about her love with her mother before her death and Glencora has approved of her daughter’s choice, though she has not discussed the matter with her husband. His greatest problem is that he is haunted by the history of his wife’s first love, and the ghost of Burgo Fitzgerald stalks every encounter with his daughter. The duchess has herself made something of a comparison between the two men116 and the duke is obsessed with the notion that Mary must be made to give up Tregear in much the same way that his wife was forced to give up Burgo: ‘His own Duchess ... – had not she in the same way loved a Tregear, or worse than a Tregear, in her early days? ... And now this girl of his ... was doing exactly as her mother had done.’117 When Mary insists she will never give up Frank, or forget him, ‘he reflected whether his own wife, this girl’s mother, had ever forgotten her early love for that Burgo Fitzgerald, whom 114 115 116 117

Duke’s Children, 2. Duke’s Children, 4. Duke’s Children, 20. Duke’s Children, 54–5.

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in her girlhood she had wished to marry’. He is as convinced that in his actions he is rescuing his daughter, as his wife’s family were in parting her from her lover: ‘His Cora and all her money had been saved from a worthless spendthrift.’119 In his musings, though, a thread of insecurity and self-doubt creeps: ‘Had she been allowed to have her own way when she was a child, what would have been her fate? Ah what! Then he had to think of it all. Might she not have been alive now, and perhaps happier than she had been with him?’120 Close female friends counsel him that Mary and Frank Tregear’s love is different: ‘Nor was Lady Cantrip blind to the difference between a poor man with a bad character, such as Burgo had been, and a poor man with a good character, such as was Tregear.’121 Mrs Finn’s advice runs on similar lines, but is expressed at greater length and intensity; but through his conversation with her, ‘his mind was intent on Burgo Fitzgerald’.122 The discussion with Mrs Finn while they are on holiday in Austria marks the beginning of Plantagenet’s change of heart, though it is a slow and painful process, still dogged by the spectre of Burgo Fitzgerald. He knows he must finally concede when he recognises that his future happiness hangs on a warm, tender and physically affectionate relationship with his daughter and when he realises that his stance has been a barrier to this: He put his arm round her and kissed her, – as he would have had so much delight in doing, as he would have done so often before, had there not been this ground of discord ... It was sweet to him to have something to caress. Now in the solitude of his life, as years were coming on him, he felt how necessary it was that he should have someone who would love him. Since his wife had left him, he had been debarred from these caresses by the necessity of showing his antagonism to her dearest wishes. It had been his duty to be stern.123

The shift in his relationship with his sons, particularly with his heir, Silverbridge, is a similar journey of revelation for him. It has ever been a source of sadness that Plantagenet’s political life has forced him into the role of absent parent. However, it is as much the nature of the man as his career in life that keeps them apart: ‘He was a man so reticent and undemonstrative in his manner that he had never known how to make confidential friends of his children.’124 He has precious little assistance from memories of his own adolescence to help him negotiate the minefield. Plantagenet Palliser, it was, in The Small House at Allington who went into his own young adulthood untrammelled by sexual ardour and was, perhaps, so shocked by his first experience of arousal at 25 that he willingly accepted the advice of his family and married a young woman of their choosing. His conduct had been impeccable; he had kicked over no traces, sown no wild oats nor squandered any inheritance. He was heir to his uncle’s vast wealth and 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

Duke’s Children, 92. Duke’s Children, 189. Duke’s Children, 175. Duke’s Children, 272. Duke’s Children, 330. Duke’s Children, 528. Duke’s Children, 44.

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estate, an uncle who was a noted libertine in his youth. With an ironic foresight that is the novelist’s privilege, anticipating Silverbridge’s youthful excesses, Trollope says, ‘If he [Planagenet] would have bought race-horses, and expended thousands on the turf, he would have gratified his uncle in doing so.’125 Fortunately for the well-being of his children, they had warm, close and supportive relationships with their mother: In all their joys and in all their troubles, in all their desires and in all their disappointments they had ever gone to their mother. She had been conversant with everything about them, from the boys’ bills and the girl’s gloves to the innermost turn in the heart and disposition of each.126

Had he been a closer parent to his children, he might have shared her generosity of spirit and together they might have agreed upon some clear boundaries; instead, his perception of his parenting role is a sermon on duty and obedience untempered by any warmth. ‘If he could only so operate on the mind of this son, – so operate on the minds of both his sons, as to make them see the foolishness of folly, the ugliness of what is mean, the squalor and dirt of ignoble pursuits, then he could easily pardon past faults.’127 Plantagenet’s tragedy is that he has to learn, not only how to be a father to his sons, but also how to be a mother to them, to maintain in them the enjoyment of a close rapport with a parent, from a heart that has feelings, but no capacity to express emotions. Thus his quarrel with Mrs Finn festers because he cannot talk through the situation beyond his anger: ‘As he thought of it he became hot, and was conscious of a quivering feeling round his heart.’128 The crux of the telling of his story is how he learns to name his feelings, and then act on them. This process with Silverbridge puts Plantagenet through something like a refiner’s fire, where each time he seems to learn to take pleasure and pride in his son’s demonstration that he is his own man, the temperature rises and he has to face the challenge of an even tougher ordeal, until he finally emerges to enjoy unalloyed pleasure in his children. Plantagenet’s bewilderment in his grief, his rawness in mourning his wife, denies him any code by which he might talk about her to those who are also devastated by her death: ‘Her name was so holy to him that it had never once passed his lips since her death, except in low whispers to himself, – low whispers made in the perfect double-guarded seclusion of his own chamber, “Cora, Cora” he had murmured, so that the sense of the sound, and not the sound itself had come to him from his own lips.’129

Silverbridge explicitly understands his father’s lack of adjustment. When they discuss Tregear’s proposal he notices the effect that saying, ‘My dear mother, sir, thought well of him’, has on his father and is unable to go on to say that he would have spoken of it himself, when the sharpness of his father’s grief had subsided.130 125 126 127 128 129 130

Small House, 251. Duke’s Children, 3. Duke’s Children, 518. Duke’s Children, 119. Duke’s Children, 118. Duke’s Children, 60.

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Silverbridge’s strategies are regularly tempered by similar consideration for his father, where it does not involve stepping down from his youthful principles. Thus, while he resolutely defends his own views, he offers to stand down from the election if standing causes his father such pain. When he realises how much his high spirits in persuading Gerald to join him to watch the Derby, and thereby be rusticated by his college, have hurt his father, he ‘crept out of the room, and going to his own part of the house shut himself up alone for nearly an hour. What had he better do to give his father some comfort?’ he asks himself.131 When father and sons are living under one roof in London during the summer session, he puts great effort into helping his father into situations where he cannot but enjoy his sons’ company. He was ‘simply desirous of making himself pleasant to the dear old governor’:132 ‘It was a genuine trouble to him that his father should be so unhappy.’133 Silverbridge, in spite of his youthful follies, has an expertise beyond his years in showing his father how to identify and name other feelings in his heart than the pain and grief which so often blot out the pleasures still left to him. Plantagenet’s first conflict with Silverbridge is over his son’s insistence on holding his own and dissenting opinion over politics. ‘The Pallisers have always been Liberal. It will be a blow to me, indeed, if Silverbridge deserts his colours’,134 is his starting point. Face to face with his son, he delivers a political lecture on Benthamite135 principles over breakfast: ‘I trust you will consider it, ... that you will not find yourself obliged to desert the school of politics in which your father has not been an inactive supporter, and to which your family has belonged for many generations.’136 An exchange about philosophical positions becomes personalised: ‘Then you refuse to do what I ask?.’137 Silverbridge never rises to the bait, to retort in anger. His reductio ad absurdum: ‘In comparison with a great many men, I know that I am a fool. Perhaps it is because I know that, that I am a Conservative. The Radicals are always saying that a Conservative must be a fool. Then a fool ought to be a Conservative.’138 pushes his father into petulance. ‘He was tempted again and again to burst out in wrath and threaten the lad, – to threaten him as to money, as to his amusements, as to the general tenure of his life. The pity was so great that the lad should be so stubborn and so foolish.’139 The repetition of ‘lad’ emphasises that Plantagenet undervalues his son’s 22 year old maturity. He denies him man’s estate, as he contemplates denying him his financial independence. When Silverbridge is 131

Duke’s Children, 145. Duke’s Children, 196. 133 Duke’s Children, 237. 134 Duke’s Children, 37. 135 ‘Then the Duke gave his son a somewhat lengthy political lecture which was intended to teach him that the greatest benefit of the greatest number was the object to which political studies should tend.’ – a paraphrase of Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarian creed, ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’ (Works, x. 142) comprehensively glossed by Hermione Lee, World Classics edition, 641. 136 Duke’s Children, 57. 137 Duke’s Children, 57. 138 Duke’s Children, 58. 139 Duke’s Children, 58. 132

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returned to Parliament, he writes a letter to ‘My Dear Father’,140 which is open, honest and true. This facilitates Plantagenet’s reply: ‘I am able to congratulate you as a father should a son, and to wish you long life and success as a legislator.’141 As his son settles into the harness of parliamentary life (though not as assiduously as his father might wish142), Plantagenet experiences a common ground between them, which fosters the growth of respect: ‘Upon the whole the Duke was pleased with what he heard from his son. The young man’s ideas about politics were boyish, but they were the ideas of a clear-headed boy.’143 And he does now credit Silverbridge with being a ‘young man’. After listening to a debate together, Silverbridge invites his father to dine with him at his club, ‘anxious to make things pleasant for his father’.144 Plantagenet ‘liked the feeling that he was dining with his son’.145 The combined effect of the efforts of the son and the increasing confidence of the father to believe that his gesture will be well received brings about a watershed in Plantagenet’s growth to be an effective parent to his son: ‘He put out his hand, and gently stroked the young man’s hair. It was almost a caress, – as though he would have said to himself, “Were he my daughter, I would kiss him”.’146 Physical embrace marks the resolution of his next ordeal with Silverbridge, who is swindled out of a fortune in a shady horse racing deal: ‘Then the father came up to the son and put his arms around the young man’s shoulders and embraced him. “Of course, it makes me unhappy ... But if you are cured of this evil, the money is nothing”.’147 When Plantagenet goes into the fire a third and final time, when Silverbridge insists he will marry the woman he loves, a commoner and an American, he needs the wisdom of all the experience he has accumulated over recent months. One of life’s paradoxes is man’s propensity to harbour diametrically opposed views at the same time: ‘I could never bring myself to dictate to a son in regard to his choice of wife’, Plantagenet says.148 When he hears that his son’s choice is Isabel Boncassen, he cries, ‘Is there to be no duty in such matters, no restraint, no feeling of what is due to your own name, and to others who bear it?’149 Isabel is the loved and cherished daughter of parents who are loved and respected in their turn, but he wishes his son to marry Lady Mabel Grex, the daughter of a man he knows to be ‘a wretched unprincipled old man, bad all round ... But the blue blood and rank were there’.150 He hankers after the glory of the match, and disregards the pitfalls of a dysfunctional family, while his son, with better-honed articulacy in emotional matters, follows his heart in choosing a young woman sincere, honest and open in her love, with no guile, who will love him and their children in the same fashion. 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150

Duke’s Children, 114. Duke’s Children, 121. Duke’s Children, 193. Duke’s Children, 203. Duke’s Children, 205. Duke’s Children, 205. Duke’s Children, 208. Duke’s Children, 364. Duke’s Children, 367. Duke’s Children, 485. Duke’s Children, 391.

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But while Plantagenet’s immediate reaction seems to be as entrenched as his earlier responses to Silverbridge’s espousal of the rival cause, his passion for horseracing, and his daughter’s commitment to her love, the shifting of his position now seems to cause him less anguish than he felt at the outset of this chronicle. All the plot lines converge for a final resolution. Gerald dissipates a younger son’s portion; his manly repentance must be recognised, and himself forgiven.151 Tregear must be accepted into the family fold; Silverbridge’s political career must be acknowledged as a source of pride (ironically, no sooner is the father fully reconciled to his son’s Conservative politics than Silverbridge switches allegiances) and, finally, he must accept Isabel Boncassen as ‘bone of his bone’. This he does with grace, affection, honesty and deep feeling, when he gives her a diamond ring, the first present he ever gave to Glencora. ‘You shall be my child’, he says, ‘And if you will love me, you shall be very dear to me ... I must either love [my son’s] wife very dearly, or else I must be an unhappy man.’152 As Plantagenet settles into his new-found land, his demeanour changes in other ways, equally radical for him. He makes a joke of his son’s change of political heart: ‘“I suppose it is your republican bride-elect that has done that”, said the Duke, laughing.’153 And at his daughter’s marriage, ‘perhaps the matter the most remarkable ... was the hilarity of the Duke’.154 It is clear from the closing paragraphs that while the memory of his suffering stays with him, there is a confidence there that he is now better equipped to face his new world. It is Silverbridge’s assimilation of nurturing qualities from his close relationship with his mother that enables him to parry his father’s poorer personal skills with warmth and humanity. In learning to value such qualities, and to incorporate them into his own behaviour, Plantagenet learns the fulfilment of knowing his feminine side. From the cold, harsh, distant, judgmental, patriarchal stand, Plantagenet moves to a parental position that allows him to take pleasure in his children’s pleasure and to express that physically. Denied by death the warm comforts of his wife, in learning how to be father and mother to his children, he also begins to heal the wound of Glencora’s loss. In this exposition of masculinity in such an old friend as Plantagenet Palliser, Trollope is making a point about fathers and a new world order, which encompasses the emotional, the political and the economic. When The Duke’s Children was written in 1876, Britain was still marvelling at the marriage of Randolph Churchill, heir to the Blenheim title and estates, to the American beauty, Jenny Jerome, in 1874;155 The Duke’s Children is perhaps Trollope’s fictionalised musings on the 151

Duke’s Children, chap. 65. Duke’s Children, 510. 153 Duke’s Children, 623. 154 Duke’s Children, 632–3. 155 Robert Rhodes James, in Lord Randolph Churchill (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959) charts the statesman’s growth through boyhood and adolescence to a very early marriage. His prowess at school was as unprepossessing as Silverbridge’s (though he did get his degree). He fell in love with Jeanette Jerome when he first met her at a ball during Cowes week, and proposed three days later. Both families protested, but ultimately conceded, when Randolph argued that marriage to Jenny would steady him to purposeful activity. 152

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ramifications of the match. Duty and obedience, harshly imposed, have no place in his modern families. In its place we recognise children who are loyal to their parents, who love and respect them and are entitled to love and respect in their turn. This is the untold history of Victorian fathers, where men, so many of whom were forced by circumstance into lone parenthood, learn that close involvement with the minutiae of children’s lives offers life-long satisfactions.

Chapter 8

Smoking Rooms: Bawdy Jokes ‘I despise them as much as I do a f—t.’ Which last word he [Squire Western] accompanied and graced with the very action which, of all others, was the most proper to it.1

While Trollope expressed the utmost admiration for Fielding’s works, and Tom Jones2 in particular, to the best of my knowledge, no-one breaks wind in a Trollope novel. Before going any further into an exploration of how Trollope might manage to indulge his taste for scatology beneath a veneer of respectability which successfully hoodwinks even Mrs Grundy, we could remind ourselves why this is so. The shifts in the novel, from the robust humour of Fielding, Sterne and Smollett in the eighteenth century to the Victorian novel, politely packaged for a new reading public, have been well chronicled, interpreted and reinterpreted for the last 50 years. The early commentators, Queenie Leavis,3 Kathleen Tillotson4 and Richard Altick5 all trace a democratisation of an undifferentiated reading public, as the industrial revolution inexorably brought in its train wider access to education for men and for women and the creation of an expanded middle class with disposable incomes and leisure time to fill. Altick, whose ‘common reader’ though ungendered is presumed to be predominantly male, explores the advance of literacy through the availability of reading material other than fiction, and comments interestingly on the market for second-hand printed texts,6 which needs to sit alongside Frank Kermode’s observation that the first editions of Tom Jones cost 18 shillings, the weekly income of a craftsman and more than double the wage of the ordinary working man.7 But by and large the majority of eighteenth-century people who could read, and had access to books, did belong to the wealthy elite. With the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s, the assumptions of earlier commentators about the gender of literacy were re-assessed; the new generation of commentators constructed the female reader and writer and gave them their appropriate space. Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own and Sally Mitchell’s The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s

1

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, 1749, afterword, Frank Kermode (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1963) Book VII, chapter 3, 283. 2 Autobiography, 319, ‘... Tom Jones, which is one of the greatest novels in the English language’, and 126, ‘The plots of Tom Jones and Ivanhoe are almost perfect.’ 3 Q.R. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932). 4 Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). 5 Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader. A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 6 Altick, English Common Reader, 59. 7 Fielding, The History of Tom Jones. afterword 855.

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Reading, 1835–1880 opened up the debate and paved the way for Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and, more recently, Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader: 1837–1914.9 These commentators unite with their precursors in seeing the trend as democratic, though when one reflects on the pressures imposing a culture of politeness on the middle classes newly liberated from their workingclass exclaves, it might be more accurate to describe it as the bourgeoisification of a reading public that had entered the nineteenth century increasingly looking over its shoulder to see what the neighbours thought of it. Scatological imagery did not entirely disappear in popular fiction after Tristram Shandy,10 doomed not to surface again till Leopold Bloom’s defecation in Ulysses in 1922.11 In Our Mutual Friend,12 Podsnap’s attempt to engage a Frenchman in an exploration of the British Constitution ends the paragraph with horse droppings on the London streets. Names like Murdstone and Merdle13 have a resonance of ‘merde’. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Pirates of Penzance, first performed in 1879, has a chorus of pirates singing ‘A rollicking band of pirates we, who tired of tossing on the sea ...’14 Puns and double entendres of a more refined nature were the bedrock of Victorian wit, and Punch, founded in 1841, is the epitome of such word play. Indeed the success of the humorous weekly, Punch, is a paradigm for the rich diversity of Victorian humour. The century’s greatest cartoonists, Leech, Keene, Tenniel and Doyle, made their reputations there. The Grossmiths added ‘Pooterish’15 to our language. Bret Harte wrote his Condensed Novels16 for it and Thomas Hood’s poems, also regularly featured in Punch, confirmed the Victorian age as the age of the pun. ‘For a generation or two [the pun] was par excellence the English form of wit’, says Stephen Leacock in Humour, its Theory and Technique.17 Punch was a respectable magazine, seen as suitable for young ladies’ consumption. Flint recounts how Winnie Seebohm, resting after a breakdown while at Newnham College, was allowed to read only Punch and The London Illustrated News and how The Graphic, Punch and The London Illustrated 8

Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835–1880 (Ohio: Bowling Green, 1981). 9 Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 10 Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1781. Introduction. George Saintsbury (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1912, reprinted 1964). 11 James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922 (London: Penguin Books, 1986) 56. 12 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 1864–1865 (London: Macmillan, 1908) 125–6. 13 Dickens’ ironic nomenclature for David Copperfield’s step-father and Mr and Mrs Merdle in Little Dorrit. 14 W.S. Gilbert and A. Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance; or The Slave of Duty. Vocal Score (London: Chappell and Co. nd.) 145. Toss: Oxford English Dictionary 13d, ‘to masturbate, (partic. toss off ) mid eighteenth century onwards’; see also Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Cassells Dictionary of Slang. 15 George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody, 1892 (London: Book Society, 1946). 16 Bret Harte, Condensed Novels: The Two Series Complete (London: Chatto and Windus, 1903). 17 Stephen Leacock, Humour: Its Theory and Technique with Examples and Samples. A Book of Discovery (London: Bodley Head, 1935) 16.

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News were seen as suitable reading material to be provided for governesses. But the age’s taste for double entendres as evinced by the Gilbert and Sullivan joke was often less discriminating. The Worm in the Bud, by Ronald Pearsall, contains an excellent trawl of cheapskate journals, such as Town, and uncovers a genre devoted to exploiting the lubricious possibilities of Victoria’s marriage to Albert: So Albert goes with the Queen to Windsor after the ceremony. He’ll go further before morning. How so? Why, he’ll go in at Bushey, pass Virginia Water, on through Maidenhead, and leave Staines behind.19

That Trollope liberally peppered his texts with similarly vulgar jokes is a poorlyacknowledged and under-researched area of study. To the best of my knowledge, the only other person to have written about Trollope’s aberrant taste in jokes is Philip Collins, who notices, ‘There’s nothing like a good screw’, in his 1982 article ‘Business and Bosoms: some Trollopian concerns’: ... when, reading the episode in which Ned Spooner is having a man to man chat with Phineas Finn about his intention of proposing to Adelaide Palliser, my eye lit upon Spooner’s remark that, ‘There’s nothing like a good screw ...’ Trollope didn’t intend a double-entendre, maybe, though two considerations give me pause. First, Ned Spooner does find it difficult to distinguish between fillies and his intended Adelaide. ‘She’s such a well built creature’, he exclaims. ‘There’s a look of blood about her I don’t see in any of ‘em. That sort of breeding is what one wants to get through the mud with.’ Secondly, my suspicions are roused by his calling a country character Mr Glascock, and the more so because he had that grievous habit of belittling his minor characters by giving them indicatively comic names, and because Trollope was, after all, a worldly-wise man. ‘Screw’ had been sexual slang since the late eighteenth century, ‘cock’ since the early seventeenth century, and Trollope must have learnt something by attending not one but two Public Schools.20

That in the 20 odd years since Collins kicked the ball into touch, no-one has picked it up and run with it, suggests an unsuspected purity of thought in the academe of this generation. Collins points to Trollope’s public school education as the seed bed of Trollope’s ear for a vulgar joke; it is also very probable that his reading in his formative years included Fielding, Smollett and Sterne.21 Dickens, only three years older than Trollope, read his father’s copies of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe as a child. His own personal experience is transposed to David Copperfield, who consoles himself, aged about seven, with his father’s copies of 18

Flint, 60 and 105. Pearsall, 29. 20 Philip Collins, ‘Business and Bosoms: some Trollopian concerns’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 37, December 1982, 302–3. 21 The catalogue of his own library, printed for him in 1874 by James Virtue, shows that he had a 1784 edition of the complete works of Fielding, a set of Smollett’s work from 1797 and Sterne’s from 1793. (See The Letters of Anthony Trollope, edited N. John Hall [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983] Vol. 2, 877 footnote.) 19

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these novels when the Murdstones arrive to blight his life. He says they ‘did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some of them, was not there for me’.22 John Forster, in his Life of Charles Dickens, says: ‘It is one of the many passages of Copperfield which are literally true, and its proper place is here.’23 In view of all this, it is easy to believe that Trollope was being entirely conscious as he wrote ‘There’s nothing like a good screw’24 and that he expected a significant portion of his readership to notice it. For Trollope enjoyed stretching language to the limits of respectability. The apogee is perhaps reached in The Small House at Allington, where he describes Plantaganet Palliser incommoded by an inconvenient erection: Since he had been told that Lady Dumbello smiled upon him, he had certainly thought more about her smiles than had been good for his statistics. It seemed as though a new vein in his body had been brought into use, and that blood was running where blood had never run before.25

Today our powers of discrimination are so dulled by explicit sex assaulting our senses visually and aurally, whichever way we turn, that the vulgarity of Trollope’s joke is lost in the elegance of the wit in which he wraps it. Indeed, when this passage was read aloud to the great Trollope scholar R.C. Terry, he remarked that it felt like he was hearing a piece of Trollope that he had never read before. He has missed out on a rich vein of Trollope jokes, since careful planning and judicious attention to language enable Trollope to construct passages which are inoffensive and yet at the same time contain extremely suggestive lines and even allow him to get away with the f-word. That men will tend to make vulgar jokes amongst themselves when free from the civilising influence of women was as true in Trollope’s time as it is now. There are any number of men behaving badly in the novels. Even so, when I first noticed ‘It’ll cost you something to mount Lady Tewett’, in The Eustace Diamonds,26 it seemed most likely that this was a momentary, though heart-warming, aberration of taste. Yet what could be more likely to arise in a conversation between men cleaning up after a day in the hunting field? Finding the same joke in The American Senator persuaded me that this was a fruitful area of study. Arabella Trefoil’s father says to Lord Rufford: ‘You mounted her – and you gave her a horse.’ 27 Doubling up on the double entendre makes the play on words more explicit. It became clear that there is a whole raft of vulgar jokes to notice and enjoy. Lady Glencora having ‘become intimate with “her member”28 as she would sometimes call him in joke’, teases Arthur Fletcher about his

22

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1849–1850 (London: Chapman and Hall. N.D.) 76. John Forster, Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman and Hall, 1893) vol. 1, 7. 24 Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 164. Screw: Oxford English Dictionary 12, ‘a prostitute, a woman considered in sexual terms, mid eighteenth century onwards’; see also Partridge and Cassells. 25 Small House, 474. 26 Eustace, vol. 2, 20. 27 American Senator, 388. 28 Member: the penis, particularly as a political pun, ‘the member for Cockshire’, from the eighteenth century onwards; Partridge and Cassells. 23

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Figure 8.1

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Plantagenet Palliser perhaps Disguising – or Discovering – ‘A New Vein in his Body’ (Illustration by Millais from The Small House at Allington)

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matrimonial prospects in The Prime Minister.29 Three of the suitors for the hand of the eponymous Miss Mackenzie are called Handcock, Rubb and Ball.30 All Trollope’s vulgar jokes depend on a suggestive ambiguity that would do credit to Frankie Howerd – indeed, it may help if you have watched some Carry On films recently – and one can identify some broad types. Some are the expression of vulgar ideas wrapped in elegant language. Plantagenet’s erection is such a one. In Barchester Towers,31 the tracing of Mr Slope’s ancestry back to Dr Slop, the doctor in attendance at the birth of Tristram Shandy, depends additionally on a degree of erudite familiarity with the works of Lawrence Sterne, a familiarity probably more commonplace in Trollope’s times than now: ‘In early years, he added an “e” to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.’ Thus, Trollope laughs at the trollop/Trollope joke. Slope’s obstetric ancestry explains the cold clammy perspiration that forever clings to him: ‘I could never endure to shake hands with Mr Slope’, says Trollope.32 Other jokes rely on the repetition of words that are commonly understood to have a double meaning. Quintus Slide in Phineas Finn says: ‘There’s nothing like having a horgan to back you’ and ‘Come to us and we’ll be your horgan’; ‘he continued to assure him [Phineas] that a horgan was indispensable to him’.33 Many of his jokes have horse-riding and horse-trading associations: the vocabulary of that fraternity is full of vulgar possibilities. In The Claverings Juliet Brabazon’s mercenary marriage to Lord Ongar exposes her to a mixed circle of aspirants to her hand and wealth when she tries to re-establish her credentials in her widowhood. The treating of the wooing of Juliet Brabazon as an exercise in horse-breaking, by Archie Clavering, under Captain Doodle’s tutelage, becomes the running joke through the book.34 In similar vein no-one who prided himself as a judge of horse-flesh would wish to be saddled with a screw, a slang term for an unreliable horse, so there is a clear slippage in meaning when, in Phineas Redux, Mr Spooner says, ‘There’s nothing like a good screw’, particularly when it is followed by, ‘A man’ll often go with 250 guineas between his legs.’ The inherent misogyny which tinges such wordplay is not uncommon. Towards the end of Phineas Finn, Laura Standish and Violet Effingham, in one of their exchanges of great intimacy, discuss their feelings and attachments for Phineas. Laura confesses that he is the only man she has ever loved. Violet says that his ability to transfer his feelings from one woman to another prevented her affection for him growing into love: ‘There should be a little notch on the stick – to remember by’ – said Violet. ‘Not that I complain, you know. I cannot complain, as I was not notched myself.’ ‘You are silly, Violet.’

29

Prime Minister, vol. 2, 381. Miss Mackenzie, 5, 37 and 71. 31 Barchester Towers, vol. 1, 25–9. 32 I am entirely in John Sutherland’s debt for this elucidation (John Sutherland, ‘In the Smoking Room’). 33 Phineas Finn, 203, 218 and 230. 34 See, for instance Claverings, 177–80. 30

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‘In not having allowed myself to be notched by this great champion?’

Here the repetition of ‘notch’, slang for female pudenda from the late eighteenth century onwards,36 flags the possibility of the joke. In Trollope and the Magazines, Mark Turner explores those Trollope short stories published in St Paul’s while he was himself editor, and detects Trollope exploiting the conventions of soft pornography to construct tales with an explicit appeal to men, which excludes women. He includes an excellent analysis of the misogynist humour in ‘Mary Gresley’, but bypasses any exploration of women noticing and enjoying the ambiguities of the soft-porn innuendoes.37 The dialogue between Laura and Violet may be read as two women of impeccable standing talking in all innocence, with the ribald possibilities only accessible to the salaciously minded. On the other hand, Laura’s ‘You are silly, Violet’ may have a joshing tone to it, suggesting that they are both enjoying the double entendre.38 Trollope regularly prepares for a joke for several chapters, sometimes for a whole book. The American Senator tells the story of Arabella Trefoil, the husband-hunter whose strategies to catch a man become increasingly desperate with the passing seasons. She attempts to entrap Lord Rufford in his chaise on his way home from a hunt, though afterwards he stoutly maintains that all he did was lend her a horse. Calling the horse that he lends her ‘Jack’39 and not Dapple, or Puck, or Dandy, eventually gives Arabella the opportunity to say, ‘But a young man’s Jack is quite another thing’.40 John Caldigate has a similarly worked joke. ‘Folking’ is a cleverlycontrived invention for the name of the Caldigate family seat. It has an authentic fencountry ring to it; indeed, there is a village of Folkingham to the north of Cambridge. It is his choice of Folking and not some variant on Grantchester or Trumpington which opens up the possibilities. The eponymous John Caldigate has squandered his patrimony on the turf while at University. His father is bitter and adamant. If he raises the money to pay off his son’s debts, he will disinherit him: he will never inherit Folking. John fumes about his financial embarrassments. ‘Folking’ is spat out three times in four lines, as he gets ever angrier with his predicament. Its nature changes from innocence to expletive. Fifteen lines down the page, when he lets fly with ‘the Folking property’, our ear may hear something slightly different.41 Trollope invites us to make a similar association when he calls the third object of Phineas Finn’s desires Violet Effingham. Trollope indulges in word-play on her name when

35

Phineas Finn, 539. Notch: the female pudenda, late eighteenth century onwards; Partridge and Cassells. 37 Turner, chap 5, ‘The Editor as Predator in St Paul’s’, 183–230. 38 Jill Heydt-Stevenson (‘Slipping into the HaHa: Bawdy Humour and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels.’ Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 55, No. 3, 309–39) has posed similar questions about Jane Austen whose bawdy humour ‘asks us to question any easy assumption that during her era women would be less likely to experience such bawdy talk as both an enjoyable and ordinary way of communicating with men or with each other’ (313). 39 Jack: both a penis and an erection, from the nineteenth century onwards; Partridge and Cassells. 40 American Senator, 211. 41 Caldigate, 13. 36

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he says that ‘though Lady Glencora was still talking Radicalism, Violet was still smiling ineffably’.42 Reading the current best-seller aloud in company was popular evening entertainment in Trollope’s day. Indeed, Trollope suffered his fatal stroke whilst listening to, and laughing excessively at, F. Anstey’s Vice-Versa.43 The audience round a hearth could encompass a wide range of ages, and it was important that the spoken word should offend no-one. All Trollope’s jokes for grown-ups can safely be read aloud, with perfect composure, to the impressionable young. The gloss on the ‘mounting’ joke in The Eustace Diamonds, in the World’s Classics edition, is that he means to buy her a horse.44 Of course he does. It is particularly important that there could be this entirely innocent reading. As long as syphilis is not mentioned directly, there can be any number of references to a man called Siph, who is a great favourite with the ladies.45 When paterfamilias allows a snigger to escape, and his 15 year old daughter asks him what he is laughing about, the answer is clearly, ‘nothing at all’. As Trollope stoutly maintains in his Autobiography, ‘I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading of my pages less modest than she was before’.46 Trollope’s contemporaries spotted his jokes. Henry James, who never passed up an opportunity to disparage him, said that Trollope was ‘by no means destitute of a saving grace of coarseness’.47 The phrase ‘saving grace of coarseness’ may seem oxymoronic in the context of James’ pursuit of high art and his denigration of Trollope for turning his back on its pursuit. It could also imply that James was enigmatically recognising a strength in his writing. Frederic Harrison, writing at the end of the century about the great names of his younger days, said: ‘good old Anthony had a coarse vein: it was in the family’.48 So Trollope got it from his mother, whose books, to her pecuniary profit, were regularly disparaged for their vulgarity and licentiousness.49 The mystery is not that a novelist like Trollope peppered his tales with risqué jokes, but why we readers stopped noticing them – or even studiously denied that they are there. In 1929, J.B. Priestley, in English Humour says, ‘On the whole, his weighty realism, his unfailing sobriety, his even touch, all of which made him the fine novelist he is, stand in the way of his humour. In actual life, he could bellow with laughter, but in his fiction he keeps a close grip on himself.’50 Lord David Cecil, five years later, says that Trollope’s humour ‘is infinitely vital, 42

Phineas Finn, 292. N. John Hall, Biography, 514. 44 Eustace, 401. 45 Last Chronicle, 561. See also chapter 4, 00. 46 Autobiography, 146. 47 James, 175, ‘Anthony Trollope’, Century Magazine, July 1883. reprinted in The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. 48 Frederic Harrison, 189. 49 ‘Mrs Trollope makes great pretensions to superior delicacy and refinement, but the texture of her mind is essentially gross. There are stories in her book which offend modesty, and in her spite against prudery, she indulges in something far less to be endured.’ The New Monthly Magazine, November 1831. Quoted by Teresa Ransome in Fanny Trollope: a Remarkable Life (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995). 50 J.B. Priestley, English Humour (London: Longman’s, Green and Co., 1929) 108. 43

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and vigorous, and easy, and it has a sort of genial leisurely masculinity about it that makes it one of the pleasantest things in English Literature’.51 ‘Masculinity’ could imply that he might have noticed a young man’s Jack, but his subsequent examples show that he is identifying comic interludes, like the Proudies’ reception for the local clergy and dignitaries in Barchester Towers, and the Thornes’ fête champêtre, rather than the bawdy jokes that lurk under the surface of his polite language. To understand how Trollope embeds his bawdy humour unobtrusively into his text to entertain the grown-ups without offending juvenile modesty, we need to return to the concepts of narratology and Bakhtin’s theories of ‘heteroglossia’ explored in chapter 3. In that chapter we traced the growth and development of Trollope’s craftsmanship, from his tyro work The Macdermots of Ballycloran to the consummate control of his material in Rachel Ray, written at the height of his powers. The Trollope we uncovered there, seamlessly conducting a sophisticated dialogue between the many voices in his text, can be found utilising the same subterfuges to disguise his vulgar jokes. As we noticed in chapter 3, Trollope’s taste for slapstick manifests itself very early on in his writing career. Mary Brady and Denis McGovery’s wedding, in The Macdermots of Ballycloran, is a fine example of this, where the bride ducks from a kiss from the best man and the groom and best man crash heads together.52 Chapter 26 describes a duel, where the better marksman shoots to cut his opponent’s buttocks. The greenhorn Trollope attempts similar waggery in the cross-examination of a witness at Thady’s trial for murder. Brady, the double agent, working for Thady and spying for Keegan, is appearing for the prosecution. He is asked if he has ever heard Captain Ussher threatened with murder. He replies: ‘I’ve heard the boys say that he would be under the sod that day six months.’53 This turn of phrase, ‘under the sod’, is repeated frequently in Brady’s evidence – ‘… the boys swore to put the Captain under the sod’;54 ‘… the Captain should be under the sod’;55 ‘… had sworn to put Captain Ussher under the sod’.56 However, when Mr O’Malley for the defence starts his cross-questioning, the phrase changes: ‘… they talked of sodding Captain Ussher’.57 While to put someone under the sod may well have been regular Irish vernacular for to kill, ‘sodding Ussher’ has other slangy connotations. This play on words, in a most emotionally charged passage, feels gratuitous, an ill-timed joke in poor taste. It sticks out. It is not a mistake Trollope makes in his later works. For just as in Rachel Ray we noticed his seamless interplay of several voices in dialogue with one another, his later jokes, embedded in respectability, can be similarly deconstructed. If we examine again the passage where Plantagenet Palliser struggles with his inconvenient erection, we can detect several voices in dialogue with one another. 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Lord David Cecil, 274. Macdermots, 197. Macdermots, 543. Macdermots, 544. Macdermots, 545. Macdermots, 551. Macdermots, 558.

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There is a socially-literate voice, describing the house parties of the upper classes in mid-Victorian Britain. There is a discreet, slightly understated voice whispering the drawing room gossip (does Lady Dumbello smile on him?), a whispering which mirrors Grizelda Dumbello’s silent attractions. And there is a witty, urbane, male voice laughing at Plantagenet’s discomfiture. To understand the joke, the reader must be aware of the mechanics of sex, but the passage is still entertaining even if the new vein in his body with blood running where blood had not run before merely suggests a blush on his cheek. ‘There’s nothing like a good screw’ is slipped into a similarly multi-layered passage. Mr Spooner has opted not to hunt a fourth time that week at Harrington Hall, and has come down to a late breakfast wearing ‘a dark-blue frock-coat, with a coloured silk handkerchief round his neck’ and with his hair slicked down. The ladies are quite put out: ‘Lady Baldock said something afterwards, very ill-natured, about a hog in armour, and old Mrs Burnaby spoke the truth when she said that all the comfort of her tea and toast was sacrificed to Mr Spooner’s frock-coat.’58 Mr Spooner walks over to the stables with Phineas Finn and opens his heart. But as Collins points out, in his vocabulary he constantly confuses his lady-love with the horses around him. He flits from ‘As for Miss Palliser, I don’t know that a man could do better’, to ‘A clean little mare isn’t she’ (referring, Trollope insists, to a horse standing in the stables).59 So rapidly does Spooner switch from Adelaide to horse-flesh, and back to Adelaide, the boundaries of each become blurred, in Spooner’s mind as well as the reader’s and the episode ends with his request to Phineas: ‘Couldn’t you get Lady C to trot her out into the garden?’60 So it is no wonder that when he says: ‘There’s nothing like a good screw’, sufficient fog has been created to obscure who or what Mr Spooner is referring to. It is a passage that bounces with the fun of the joke that Trollope is playing with his readers, as an authorial voice almost dares us to read the passage salaciously: ‘A man’ll often go with 250 guineas between his legs.’ The heteroglossia of the dialogue between the interior voice of Phineas reflecting on his own attempts to manoeuvre the opportunity to make love to young women, the voice that is shocked at a man of Spooner’s coarseness setting his cap at a young lady of Adelaide’s refinement, and a playful male narrator making the most of the ribald opportunity, enable Trollope, in two pages, to destroy Spooner’s stratagems, expose the preciousness of life in country house parties, make wry observations about Phineas Finn’s career with women and produce double entendres of remarkable indelicacy. What audience was this male voice, the voice of the smoking-room, the tack room, the men’s club, addressing? When women were the major consumers of fiction, when there was a clearly defined genre of ‘men’s fiction’, what evidence is there that Trollope’s male voice reached a male audience, and was that actually the prime target of that voice?

58 59 60

Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 163. Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 164. Phineas Redux, vol 1, 165.

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There are several paradoxes in the history of the reading of fiction. While there was a popular contemporary view that it was women61 who mostly read the 50,000 items of fiction that were published between 1837 and 1901,62 there is good evidence of a general belief that women’s, and particularly young women’s, reading should be strictly censored, and censored by men.63 Equally paradoxical is the assumption of the reader as male by the early twentieth century commentators like Leavis and Altick set against the thorough research of Showalter and Flint supporting the existence of an extensive female readership, unmatched as it is by a similar body of evidence constructing the male reader. I have found no parallel study of the contribution of man’s gender to the form of his writing and the nature of his reading, and I find myself scouring the primary texts for hard evidence that men read the novels they were buying, but which were said to be read by women. In a review of a new abridged edition of Richardson’s Clarissa by E.S. Dallas, Trollope says: In these days, everybody reads novels. Now and again we hear the voice of a thoughtful or earnest man raised against this popular recreation. Mr Carlyle or the Archbishop of York may endeavour to prove to us that we are dissipating our minds, wasting our time, and encouraging laxity and diffuseness in our intellectual powers; but the preaching of the preachers is of no avail ... we all read novels; – lawyers, divines, merchants, soldiers, sailors, courtiers, politicians, – and what not. There is hardly a man or a woman who can read who does not require that some amount of novel reading shall be printed for the delight of his or her leisure hours.64

Such passages make it clear that Trollope recognised a widely-spread male readership for novels. The persistence of views like those of Carlyle and the Archbishop of York is confirmed by Henry James, who, in ‘The Art of Criticism’, speaks of ‘the old superstition about fiction being “wicked”’.65 Trollope expresses a similar anxiety: There still exists among us Englishmen a prejudice in respect to novels which might, perhaps, have been lessened by such a work. This prejudice is not against the reading of novels, as is proven by their general acceptance among us. But it exists strongly in reference to the appreciation in which they are professed to be held.66

The defensiveness of both men suggests a suspicion that the prejudice persists, though we can notice that Trollope speaks on behalf of his own gender – ‘us Englishmen’; 61

‘The great bulk of novel readers are females; ... they have more time as well as more inclination to indulge in reveries of fiction.’ ‘Moral and Political Tendency of the Modern Novels’, Church of England Quarterly Review 12 (1842) 287–8. Quoted in full by Kate Flint, 12. 62 John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction. Writers, Publishers, Readers, 151. 63 see Kate Flint, chapter 8, ‘Reading, Prohibition and Transgression.’ 209–18, and also Smalley, 339, a review in The Times of Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, which suggests this novella should be marked as French novels used to be ‘La mère en défendra la lecture à sa fille’. 64 Writings for St. Paul’s Magazine, intro. John Sutherland (New York: Arno Press, 1981) 164. 65 James, 187. 66 Autobiography, 216–17.

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there is implicit in all these passages a sense that it was becoming less outré for a man openly to admit to reading novels, though some feeling that it was infra dig persisted. The history of this belief is examined by Altick in his chapter on the public libraries,67 where he quotes from correspondence in the London Evening Standard in 1891: Many are the crimes brought about by the disordered imagination of a reader of sensational, and often immoral, rubbish, whilst many a home is neglected and uncared for owing to the all-absorbed novel-reading wife.68

He recalls a librarian telling a meeting in 1879 that: Schoolboys or students who took to novel reading to any great extent never made much progress in after life. They neglected real practical life for a sensually imaginative one, and suffered accordingly from the enervating influence.69

There was a long debate, drawn out over many years, about whether the public libraries should be offering the masses cheap and open access to fiction and libraries were constantly challenged about what they decided to offer their users; there was a tide of Gradgrindian view that only that which was demonstrably utilitarian should be offered free, set against the contrary approach which saw no benefit in offering what no-one was going to accept. Altick’s researches into who the subscribers were who took advantage of the new public libraries show that the membership came largely from the new middle classes just beginning to pull themselves clear of the labouring population. However, the most telling detail of his charts is how few members were women. What one can abstract is that it was largely men who were borrowing the books. Such detail might be borne in mind when examining his evidence of the reading material available in smallscale library enterprises operating as sidelines in barbers, confectioners, stationers and tobacconists. Thirty-eight such libraries in three Westminster parishes were surveyed by The London Statistical Society in 1838. As Altick points out, it is most remarkable for what it demonstrates of the investigators’ literary criteria, but it also clearly demonstrates that these entrepreneurs offered their customers light fiction in spades – 1,845 novels, including over 1,000 of ‘novels of the lowest character’, compared with 337 more instructional or improving works, and ten ‘decidedly bad’.70 A substantial body of evidence of men reading novels can be amassed from anecdotal sources. A review of Orley Farm refers to a cabinet minister apologising for his late arrival at a Government meeting because he had been unable to put down Jane Eyre.71 Georgina Battiscombe records that William Morris was bowled over by Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Radcliffe and urged his fellow pre-Raphaelites to

67

Altick, English Common Reader, 213–39. Altick comments, ‘one feels that the date line could just as well be “1791”, or “1831”’. 68 Altick, English Common Reader, 232. 69 Altick, English Common Reader, 233. 70 Altick, English Common Reader, 217–18. 71 Smalley, 153, London Review. 18 October 1862, v, 344–5.

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model themselves on Guy Morville, and emulate his ‘almost deliquescent piety’.72 Charles Kingsley wrote to a friend: ‘I have just read for a first time Heartsease [Charlotte Yonge] and I cannot lose a day before telling you that I think it the most delightful and wholesome novel I ever read.’73 Mr Austin Leigh, to Sir William Heathcote: ‘I have just been reading The Daisy Chain, I am not sure whether for the second or third time ...’74 Battiscombe’s hagiography of Yonge also reports Tennyson taking The Daisy Chain with him on a walking holiday with Francis Palgrave.75 Smalley quotes three letters from Edward Fitzgerald from 1860, 1865 and 1873, where he is engrossed in Barchester Towers, Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right76 and Cardinal Newman took great pleasure in Barchester Towers.77 In An Autobiography, Trollope says he killed Mrs Proudie off having overheard two clergymen at the Athenaeum Club speaking disparagingly of his creation,78 though N.J. Hall, in his biography of Trollope, identifies three other versions of the same story told by different people, all published before An Autobiography. It must have been one of Trollope’s favourite anecdotes.79 While Can You Forgive Her? was coming out in instalments, he corresponded with a ‘distinguished dignitary of our church’ about the seemliness of a book published for general consumption featuring a young married woman considering adultery.80 And Thackeray, reading it at home, called out for the immediate production of Volume II of The Three Clerks, having so enjoyed Volume I.81 Remarks in reviews of Trollope’s work imply a male reader: ‘The Cornhill counts its readers by millions, and it is to [Trollope’s] contributions, in 99 cases out of a 100, that the reader first betakes himself (my italics).’82 Framley Parsonage is described as ‘fitting food for men’.83 Within the novels, men are outed as closet novel readers, perhaps echoing that persisting ‘prejudice in respect to novels’. Archdeacon Grantly reads Rabelais in the sanctum of his study,84 and Ferdinand Lopez catches Abel Wharton hurriedly concealing the yellow cover of a circulating library book

72

Georgina Battiscombe, Charlotte Mary Yonge. The Story of an Uneventful Life, intro. E.M. Delderfield (London: Constable, 1943) 76. ‘his almost deliquescent piety’ is a quotation from Mackail, Life of William Morris (London Longmans, Green and Co, 1920) vol. 1, 40–41. 73 Battiscombe, 87. 74 Battiscombe, 93. 75 Battiscombe, 118. 76 Smalley, 377. 77 See chapter 1, endnote 81. 78 Autobiography, 275. 79 Hall, 298. 80 Autobiography, 182; Letters of Anthony Trollope, vol. 1, 316. 81 Smalley, 65, and Autobiography, 137–8. 82 Smalley, 167, National Review. January 1863, xvi, 27–40 ‘Trollope as the voice of the English middle class’; Turner (11–12) points out that though many articles published were specifically aimed at men and written within a male discourse, the Cornhill prided itself on its appeal to a female audience. 83 Smalley, 126, London Review, 11 May 1861, ii, 544–5. 84 Warden, 105.

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in a drawer in his chambers.85 Frank Fenwick, the Vicar of Bullhampton, is quite brazen about it: ‘Nor has the vicarage house been confided to me for the reading of novels, but that is what goes on there’86 and Bishop Proudie reads Little Dorrit.87 John Caldigate openly shows himself to be an avid consumer of transitory fiction in the voyage out to Australia; he offers to lend Euphemia Smith The Heartbroken One, by Spratt ‘very absurd, but full of life from beginning to end’, Michael Banfold, ‘hard work, but very thoughtful if you can digest that sort of thing’, Ridden to a Standstill by Miss Bouverie ‘a little loud perhaps, but very interesting’, from his collection of light fiction.88 The Victorian publishing industry was an extremely sophisticated machine, tuned to targeting very specific audiences. The periodicals catered for every nuance of class and credo; the Evangelicals had their Good Words,89 Leisure Hour,90 Gospel91 and General Baptist.92 The Tories had Fraser’s Magazine93 and Saturday Review.94 The Temperance movement had Working Man’s Friend,95 Cottage Gardener,96 Family Friend97 and Family Tutor98 appealed to lower orders with an eye to self-improvement, while Reynolds’ Miscellany99 indulged its audience’s taste for sensation. In 1873, there were 630 magazines circulating in England and the largest group, as Altick shows, were those of a religious bent. There was even a magazine specialising in the dissemination of the sensation religious novel, The Christian World.100 Novelists evolved, flexible and prolific, to cater for every nuance of taste. There are 254 novels by Evelyn Everett-Green deposited with the British Library, many written for the Religious Tract Society,101 but with a strong line in Historical Romance and Domestic Fiction and including a series on the Queens of England that could have been Lady Carbury’s model for her Criminal Queens. Charlotte Yonge regularly wrote three books at once, a novel perhaps, an historical fiction and a religious tract,

85

Prime Minister, 23. Bullhampton, 402. 87 Barchester Towers, vol. 2, 174. 88 Caldigate 52–3. The real-life identity of these novels and novelists was explored in a lively correspondence in the T.L.S. between 19th October 1940 and 3rd January 1942. This is comprehensively glossed in John Caldigate. ed. N. John Hall (Oxford University Press, 1993) 617. Ridden to a Standstill can be read as another equestrian bawdy joke. (See also Heydt-Stevenson, 314.) 89 Good Words, 1st published London: A. Strahan, 1860. 90 Leisure Hour, 1st published London: W. Stephens, Jan 1852. 91 Gospel, 1st published London: J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1766. 92 General Baptist, 1st published London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1822. 93 Fraser’s Magazine, 1st published London: J. Fraser, Feb 1830. 94 The Saturday Review, 1st published London: The Chawton Publishing Co, Nov 1855. 95 Working Man’s Friend, 1st published London: Cassel, Jan 1850. 96 Cottage Gardener, 1st published London: G.W. Johnson, Oct 1848. 97 Family Friend, 1st published London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1849. 98 Family Tutor, 1st published London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1851. 99 Reynolds’ Miscellany, 1st published London: J. Dicks, 1847. 100 The Christian World, 1st published London, sine nomine, 1857. (All these periodicals cited, Altick, English Common Reader, chapter 15, ‘Periodicals and Newspapers 1851–1900’.) 101 Sutherland, Writers, Publishers, Readers, 157. 86

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writing a page of each in turn as she waited for the ink to dry. And certainly one of the niches in the market was for ‘men’s fiction’. Sutherland comments on how many sea captains turned to writing novels in the 1830s and 1840s, when peace time drove them ashore on half pay.103 Charles Lever wrote racy novels about Army life, R.S. Surtees wrote for the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ brigade. Nat Gould wrote about this sporting life. These novels certainly were extremely popular (and Flint describes how some young women enjoyed the stronger meat of their brothers’ books104). Such ‘men’s’ books offer a view of masculinity that is narrow, shallow and limiting, a diet with little variety. However, large numbers of men clearly also read gender-neutral and domestic novels, particularly those that were published under the auspices of the quality periodicals like The Cornhill, The Saturday Review, The Fortnightly, Blackwood’s Magazine and All The Year Round. Periodicals such as these appealed to a broad range of interests. A quick survey of early Cornhill issues shows articles on economics, scientific discovery, travel and philosophy, interspersed with poetry, alongside the requisite novel and the cultural status of fiction was enhanced by being published in journals alongside heavyweight material.105 In picking up the journal to read an article on palaeontology, the gentleman of the house could slip seamlessly into reading George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, or even Trollope, relaxing in the domestic spaces of novels that explored the manner and nature of relationships between men and women. Such is certainly the primary dimension of Trollope’s novels. However, woven into his construction of men finding their greater happiness round the hearth are the reassuring threads of familiar and stereotypical constructions of masculinity. Many of his novels have major passages of action on the hunting field; his political story lines focus on male discourse which largely precludes women. Classical quotation and allusion promote an ethos of shared culture and values between an educated male audience and male writer. And then there are his jokes. Sutherland, in his unlayering of the Slop/Slope joke, suggests that it was an exclusively male audience that would have been familiar with Tristram Shandy; Thackeray too can construct a joke round reference to similar robust fiction. In Vanity Fair, when Becky Sharp is interrupted giving a lesson to Sir Pitt Crawley’s daughters, she belies their light-hearted comportment by claiming they are studying history,106 later qualified as drawn from the robustly entertaining Expeditions of Humphrey Clinker, by Smollett, a conscious joke that Thackeray expected would be recognised and understood by his readers. The implications of this in the light of Sutherland’s assertion are twofold; either that men formed a substantial part of his readership, and the joke is there for them, or that women too read books such as Humphrey Clinker 102

Battiscombe, 116. Sutherland, Writers, Publishers, Readers, 157. 104 Flint, 202. 105 The first numbers of The Cornhill ran five articles on ‘Studies in animal life’, a series of illustrated papers on the microscopic examination of living organisms. These were followed by a series of illustrated articles titled ‘Physiological Riddles’, which explored the development of cells into living forms. There was an early series on exploring China, an article on ballistic theory, and an article on ‘Electricity and the Electric Telegraph’. Articles on Art and Art History were a regular feature. 106 W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 1847 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 106. 103

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and will laugh at the reference. Trollope, on the other hand, openly suggests that there is possibly a contentious female readership, since Miss Marrable, the staunchly respectable epitome of polite breeding in The Vicar of Bullhampton, has Wycherly and Smollett on her book shelves, even if they are upstairs.107 Mrs Dale, dear Lily’s mother in The Small House at Allington says, five pages after the erection joke: ‘the quick understanding of the meaning must depend on the reader’,108 suggesting that she considers herself well able to spot a jeu d’esprit when she hears one and I find no hint that Mrs Dale ever did anything unseemly. Glencora Palliser is certainly conscious of the jest in the matrimonial prospects of her member. And as we have seen earlier,109 both Lily Dale and Martha Dunstable are familiar with ‘siph’ as an abbreviation for syphilis. However, when Arabella Trefoil makes the crack about the young man’s Jack, we can either assume that she has made the remark in all innocence, and it is there for a man’s mind to notice, or that its coarseness is further evidence of Arabella’s low standing in the marriage market. Altick reports, with some degree of surprise, that Mr and Mrs Ruskin senior read Humphrey Clinker with considerable enjoyment and Mrs Ruskin’s credentials as a proper-thinking evangelical are otherwise impeccable.110 Any claim that the audience for jokes would be exclusively male may not, after all, be quite so clear-cut. As Flint says: Evidence of what individual women were actually reading throughout the period, and the ways in which they incorporated references to their reading activities into autobiographical letters and journals considerably complicate our view of the Victorian woman reader, challenging many of the generalisations advanced by contemporary commentators.111

However, as referred to earlier, she does submit extensive evidence of women, particularly young women, having their access to fiction severely curtailed. In spite of his admiration for Charlotte Yonge’s work, Charles Kingsley forbade his daughter to read even her novels till she was 20 and in turn Edward Pusey considered Kingsley’s Hypatia ‘a work not fit to be read by our wives and our sisters’.112 The reality probably lies somewhere mid-way between the two poles, where a significant proportion of girls had their reading quite strictly supervised (along with quite a lot of boys, I suspect. I am not entirely convinced that all lads shared Dickens’ easy access to the eighteenth-century classics). These eighteenth-century classics do not feature in the library lists of frequently-borrowed books assembled by Altick – and Tom Brown is looking forward to reading Captain Marryat’s tales of sea-faring adventures, not Fielding, in the study he hopes to share with East.113 While some women, as they grew older, preferred, by choice, genteel and sentimental novels, a good number of mature women probably liked their fiction ‘rather strong’ like Miss Marrable, though it is not clear whether their pleasure in sharing texts from the male sanctum attracted opprobrium 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Bullhampton, 62. Small House, 484. See chapter 4, 00. Altick, English Common Reader, 116. Flint, 187. Flint, 209–18. Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 181.

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from their stricter sisters. It is, however, certainly true that even if the jokes are not exclusively men-only, the masculine mind in particular would perceive the discontinuity between genteel young ladies studying history and Humphrey Clinker’s story. Trollope and Thackeray’s friendship, and their pleasure in the company of men, is well documented and Trollope particularly delighted in the masculine ethos of his clubs. In An Autobiography he speaks of his pleasure in being elected to the Garrick Club: In 1861 I became a member of the Garrick Club, with which institution I have been much identified ... I enjoyed infinitely at first the gaiety of the Garrick. It was a festival to me to dine there ... The Garrick Club was the first assemblage of men at which I felt myself to be popular.114

He was proposed by Robert Bell, and seconded by Thackeray. Other supporting signatures included J.E. Millais, Shirley Brooks, Frederic Chapman, Tom Taylor, Henry O’Neil, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade. Earlier he had been elected to the Cosmopolitan Club where he rubbed shoulders with Richard Monckton Milne, Browning, Tennyson, Thomas Hughes and Thackeray, along with a powerful collection of Liberal politicians, such as Lord Ripon, Lord Stanley, William Forster, George Bentinck and Vernon Harcourt. George Lewes, William Powell Frith and Charles Lever were also his close friends and regular companions – persuasive evidence of Trollope’s success as ‘a man’s man’.115 Several of these – Shirley Brooks, Richard Monckton Milne116 and Thackeray – were closely involved with the editing of Punch, and Punch editorial lunches were famous, if off the record, for their unbuttoned humour. Sutherland, again in his Times Literary Supplement article, tells of how difficult it is to recover hard evidence of such discourse, but cites one source in Henry Silver, who stayed sober enough to keep a diary account of the goings-on at Punch lunches between 1858 and 1870. Thackeray is recorded joking about his impaired urinary tract function, being tempted on meeting a lady called Miss Peawell, to joke: ‘Oh Miss Peawell! I wish I could’ and looking for a rhyme for ‘snugger’. Trollope’s friendship with men who make jokes like these expose the paradox of Trollope’s novels, so long perceived as polite accounts of the loves and lives of the minor rungs of the aristocracy and the landed gentry. His early reviewers fostered the image of the novelist who was so accurate with women’s dialogue, which encouraged the fantasy that he was himself a polite inhabitant of Framley or Allington.117 Lady Rose Fane, who met him at a house party, famously said: ‘I wish I had never met Mr Trollope. I think he is 114

Autobiography 157–9. Hall points out (Biography 244) that Trollope mistakenly recalls that he was elected in 1861. He was elected on 5 April 1862. 115 Hall speaks extensively of Trollope’s friendships with the leading literary figures of his day throughout his biography of Trollope. 116 Said by Pearsall (421) to have a ‘collection of erotica so famous that his country seat at Fryston Hall was known as Aphrodisiopolis. 117 ‘It is in the portraiture of the fair sex that Mr Trollope’s great glory consists, and his success in this walk has made him the pet of our drawing rooms. The women adore him. Nobody understands these gentle dames and damsels of modern life half as much as this modern Anthony.’ Smalley, 190. The Times, 25 November 1863, 4, reviewing Rachel Ray.

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detestable – vulgar, noisy and domineering – as unlike his books as possible.’118 And yet the vulgarity of the man who so enjoyed Club conversation is there in his books for all to see. Lady Rose Fane clearly had never noticed a young man’s Jack and supports the view that women’s education would shelter them from recognising the references to the coarser fiction of that earlier age, though I think the evidence of Mrs Dale, Glencora Palliser and Miss Marrable suggests that Trollope had a penchant for mature women who could share a salacious joke within their intimate circle. Trollope’s use of classical quotations, regularly identified as masculinist plants to entertain a male audience who shared a common culture with male authors, also needs some careful examination. For while it is clear that they make a direct appeal to a body of men who share Trollope’s classical education, Trollope’s use of classical allusion is more subtle than it first seems. A multi-layered classical joke in The Last Chronicle of Barset, demonstrates how subtlety can divide even his male audience into scholars and those with now only a passing acquaintance of Latin and Greek. Mr Toogood, Mrs Crawley’s genial lawyer cousin tells Crawley how blessed he feels in having a wife and 12 children who are all fit and healthy. He slightly misquotes from Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’: The lovely Thaïs sits beside you. Take the goods the gods provide you.119

He has quoted the lines so frequently that his children now call their mother ‘Thaïs’. Crawley reflects to himself: ‘What was [he] to say to a man who has taught his own children to call their mother Thaïs? Of Thaïs Mr Crawley did know something, and he forgot to remember that perhaps Mr Toogood knew less.’120 (We should also remember that Crawley gave his daughters a classical education and Grace was said to be a fine scholar of Hebrew and Greek.) The allusion operates on several levels. The initial quotation from Dryden is from one of his most popular pieces; a large proportion of Trollope’s audience, both men and women, would be familiar with ‘Alexander’s Feast’. A much smaller proportion and only those who had studied (and remembered) Greek history, would recall that Thaïs was the Athenian courtesan who, according to tradition, accompanied Alexander on his Asian conquest trail. The recognition of the allusion is denied to a man like Toogood whose years living in the world have dimmed the memories of his classical education and exiled him, along with many women and a good proportion of men, from the scholarly territory occupied by Crawley. There is a nice inversion in a joke which can only be understood by those like Crawley with a life arcane and narrow enough to remember such detail. It is, though, an allusion that Trollope is familiar with; there is a playful, teasing shift of readerly allegiance as we measure which camp we prefer to identify with – warm, big-hearted Toogood, who calls his wife after a Greek courtesan, or mad, scatterbrained Crawley, lost in the real world but at home in the classics.

118 119 120

N.J. Hall, Biography, 507. John Dryden, ‘Alexander’s Feast’, Canto V, lines 105–6. Last Chronicle, 319.

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There is a classical allusion with similar scurrilous overtones in Dr Wortle’s School: ‘After a hot morning with τυπτϖ121 in the school, there will be amo in the cool of the evening’,122 pairing the Greek verb τυπτϖ, pronounced ‘tupto’, with the first Latin verb to be found in every schoolboy’s primer. The interpretation, that after beating the boys in the school himself in the morning (because he has sent his assistant away) he makes love to his assistant’s ‘wife’ in the evening, is made by a woman, Mrs Stantiloup, ‘having herself studied the passage so as to fully appreciate the virus it contained’.123 The thread in this seems to be that while beating little boys is a thoroughly English perversion and a fact of life understood by all men, regardless of what class of school they attended and, while classical knowledge enriches a man’s understanding of the world, there is something in the joke that confirms Mrs Stantiloup’s improbity in her determination to understand Latin and Greek. There is little primary evidence that any sections of Trollope’s audience felt excluded by their unfamiliarity with Greek and Latin. No contemporary critic accused him of elitism, and one might hypothesise that, while the Grace Crawleys understood it all, readers like Lady Rose Fane would identify with the sentiment that Mrs Stantiloup was betraying her sex in pursuing the inherent obscenity of τυπτϖ and amo, rather than feeling marginalised by their lack of Greek. In this passage from Dr Wortle’s School, we can thus detect a variety of authorial voices that simultaneously appeal to a classically-literate audience, an audience entertained by the intrinsic impropriety of τυπτϖ and amo and an audience that is glad to spurn knowledge of such indelicacy. In doing this, Trollope seemingly manages the impossible. He writes an explicitly masculinist discourse that manages not to exclude women, and in writing this masculinist discourse, he engages a wider audience for his impenitently didactic sub-text. While Trollope did take a great pride in his skill at writing novels, he wanted, first and foremost, to write novels that were read and to achieve this he had to set out to write books that would maximise his audience. This meant that he had to write books that were suitable to be read aloud, to an audience of mixed age and sex and to produce plots that would appeal to them all. He also needed to secure a male audience for the new masculinity he sought to advance. Classical allusions will not, in themselves, keep the male reader’s attention engaged. Harold Greenwald, in an address to the Welsh Branch of the British Psychological Society said: ‘you see, whenever I see an audience getting a little restless, I introduce sex, to get their interest back’.124 It seems to me highly probable that Trollope, the Trollope that gloried in his men’s clubs and men’s conversation and the connotations of that discourse, used sexual innuendo to do just that, to keep his male readers engaged and turning the page. This needs to be set in the context of Trollope’s self-avowed evangelism in his novel writing. He says in An Autobiography:

τυπτϖ, first person singular of the verb to beat. Dr Wortle, 114. 123 Dr Wortle, 115. 124 Harold Greenwald ‘Humour in Psychotherapy’, Anthony Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds), It’s a Funny Thing, Humour. International Conference on Humour and Laughter, Cardiff 1976 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1977) 163. 121 122

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But the novelist, if he has a conscience must preach his sermons with the same purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics.125

and: A vast proportion of the teaching of the day, – greater probably than many of us as yet have acknowledged to ourselves –, comes from these books, which are in the hands of all readers.126

and: Thinking of all this as a novelist must surely do – as I have certainly done through my whole career – it becomes to him a matter of deep conscience how he shall handle these characters by whose words and doings he hopes to interest his readers. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit that fault, he can do neither harm nor good.127

Trollope’s didactic purpose is thus explicit. He wishes to expose his audience to his world view and he understands what every propagandist should know, that you must work to keep your audience captive while they hear the message. His code of ethics has many threads: always marry for love, never for money; it is important to hold broadly Christian beliefs, but extremism, in whatever direction, is as pernicious as ungodliness; the married state should be the aspiration of both sexes. His thesis of masculinity forms an important part of this fabric. He constructs a masculinity that on the surface appears simply to endorse the convention of the chivalric code, with some timely caveats about the challenge to one’s integrity when engaging in the market place, but when we examine the behaviour of his men more closely, we uncover him advancing a model of behaviour that transcends the convention to embrace a wider range of behaviours which address the nurturing side of a man’s nature, taking him out of the market place, off the field of battle, away from his field sports and into domestic and feminised spaces. Trollope’s message in his text is that this way offers a richer fulfilment to the lives of men. He knows he must sugar his pill if he is to keep the attention of his audience: ‘The novelist may not be dull’. His elegantly constructed vulgarities and his carefully concealed puns and double entendres are the sugar on his pill. In scattering his novels with the jokes of men’s clubs and smoking rooms, he seeks to retain a wider male audience for his view. The wonder is that we have been so blind to them for the past 100 years. Some schools of criticism must take particular responsibility for this. Henry James’ elitist tendencies, so enthusiastically embraced by the Bloomsbury Group, were distorted into a cult of dilettantism, as a backlash to which F.R. Leavis led a crusade to confine suitable study to exploration of the high purpose of the great and the good. These all conspired to eliminate populist readings from serious study. It has been our great loss and has fostered a skewed construct of who the Victorians were. We have been blinkered to their great sense of humour, and their delight in the comic, in spite of the glaring evidence of Punch magazine, in its heyday through all Victoria’s reign. It was always fashionable

125 126 127

Autobiography, 222. Autobiography, 220. Autobiography, 221.

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amongst the Jonahs and Jeremiahs to declare that Punch was not as funny as it used to be. That’s as maybe. But Trollope is certainly funnier than you think. * In conclusion: while Trollope presents his men in masculinist dialogue with other men, where their behaviour complies with convention, his heroes are given an additional layer of functioning, where they are comfortable in feminised domestic spaces and where they find deeper satisfactions in their roles as warm, considerate husbands and involved parents. It is clear from key quotations that Trollope explicitly understood the importance for a man to be in touch with his feminine side128 and that failure in this area would lead to emotional illiteracy.129 Trollope uses a variety of strategies to promote his self-avowed didactic purpose in writing novels and to keep the text of his self-styled ‘sermon’ firmly before his audience.130 His use of vulgar jokes for this end has been allowed to sink further out of sight than his other techniques. Other commentators have undertaken similar studies and arrived at different conclusions. In The Gentleman in Trollope, Shirley Letwin reaches back to the civic humanism of the eighteenth century to find the origins of her moral Trollope.131 Jane Nardin’s study, Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy, while not specifically targeting manliness, draws on similar ideologies.132 Mark Turner, in Trollope and the Magazines, examines Phineas Finn to discover Trollope deliberately constructing a man’s man.133 These are all important aspects of the subtle composite which, for me, contributes to Trollope’s concept of a model for masculine behaviour. What I have set out to show is that there are other strands which have previously been unexplored and which add a new dimension to this area of study. In this respect, this work is one more piece of the jig-saw. This close focus on Trollope’s masculinities and the cultural ideologies that shape his perceptions, exposes the absence of comparative studies of his contemporaries. What are the ideologies that one can detect shaping Dickens’ masculinities, or Thackeray’s? What models of manliness do Emily and Charlotte Brontë advance and do they share common ideologies with other women writers? Such lines of enquiry might further confirm the gap between who Victorian men really were and the stereotypes of Victorian patterns of manhood that the twentieth century so enthusiastically embraced. In the twenty-first century we need to address why we have been so ready to believe in the Victorian man as a universal patriarchal despot, denying autonomy to women, reinforcing at home the subjection of women embodied in statute.

128

Phineas Redux, vol. 1, 57. Kept in the Dark, 158–9. 130 Autobiography, 146. 131 Shirley Robin Letwin, The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (London: Macmillan 1982). 132 Jane Nardin, Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996). 133 Turner, particularly chapter IV, 145–82. 129

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Feminist cultural analysis such as, for instance, Martha Vicinus’ Suffer and Be Still,134 has foregrounded texts that confirm Victorian men as oppressors. Primary texts such as Mrs Stickney Ellis’ etiquette books135 and Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies,136 which give powerful support to their theses, perhaps exercise more influence today than they did in their own time. Such parameters are indeed difficult to assess at a distance; our generation might, for instance, be uncomfortable if we were defined, in a 150 years time, by Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus137 and The Rules,138 two books that analyse behaviour between the sexes in the 1990s, that seek to offer advice to men and to women on the conduct of their relationships with each other and that stayed in the best-sellers lists for several years. Trollope himself, in his review of Sesame and Lilies, was scathing about Ruskin’s narrow definition of men and women’s differing spheres, and wrote that Ruskin ought to confine himself to art and art history, where he might be considered to have some expertise.139 It is also time for Victorian man as a reader, and in particular, novel-reader, to be constructed explicitly. Kate Flint’s exhaustive study of what Victorian women read seemingly has no parallel in masculinity studies. While this chapter makes some tentative suggestions about the possible breadth of men’s fiction-reading that would extend their library beyond the masculinist Lever and Gould into the feminised spaces of Yonge and Gaskell, there is a clear need for a definitive study of what men were reading, what proportion of it was fiction and what was the nature of that fiction. It will also be important to consider the class structure of male readership, since Altick’s research suggests that there may be considerable class differentials in what men read.140 Matthew Arnold lying on his couch weeping at the latest Mrs Gaskell, and proud of his tears, might not be an accurate reflection of the broad spread of male readers.141 We need to know the answer to these sorts of question.

134 Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still (Indiana University Press 1972; London: Methuen 1980). 135 Between 1839 and 1845 Sarah Stickney Ellis published her very successful series Women of England, Daughters of England, Wives of England and Mothers of England. See Donald Crow, The Victorian Woman (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971) and Vicinus, x. 136 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London: Smith and Elder, 1865). 137 John Gray, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What you Want from Your Relationships, New York, 1992 (London: Thorsons, 1993). 138 Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Winning the Heart of Mr Right (London: Thorsons, 1995). 139 Fortnightly Review, July 1865, printed in Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews (New York: Arno Press, 1981). 140 Altick, 81–5. 141 ‘Matt is stretched at full length on one sofa, reading a Christian tale of Mrs Gaskell’s which moves him to tears, and the tears to complacent admiration of his own sensibility’, taken from a letter from one of his sisters, quoted P. Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981) 168; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987) 111 and Segal, 106.

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Only then will we be able to place Trollope in the spectrum of what men read and begin to assess the impact of his thesis of manliness on the reading public. In his book On Men: Masculinity in Crisis, published in 2000, the psychiatrist Anthony Clare writes: What I want as a man, and what I want for men, is that we become more capable of expressing the vulnerability and the tenderness and the affection we feel, that we place a greater value on love, family, and personal relationships, and less on power, possessions and achievement.142

This articulates precisely that additional aspect of masculinity that Trollope sought to incorporate in the model of manhood advanced in his novels. The New Man, proposed by so many late-twentieth century, and now early-twenty-first century commentators, has been with us for a very long time.

142

Anthony Clare, 221.

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Trollope Editions used in this Book The Macdermots of Ballycloran. 1847. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 (World’s Classics). The Kellys and the O’Kellys. 1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (World’s Classics). La Vendée; an Historical Romance. 1850. London: The Trollope Society, 1999. The Warden. 1855. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (World’s Classics). Barchester Towers. 1857. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 (World’s Classics). The Three Clerks. 1857. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984. Doctor Thorne. 1858. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (World’s Classics). The Bertrams. 1859. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Castle Richmond. 1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 (World’s Classics). Framley Parsonage. 1861. London: Penguin Books, 1986. Orley Farm. 1862. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 (World’s Classics). The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. 1862. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (World’s Classics). The Small House at Allington. 1864. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (World’s Classics). Can You Forgive Her? 1864. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (World’s Classics). Hunting Sketches. 1865. London: The Trollope Society, 1996. Miss Mackenzie. 1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 (World’s Classics). The Belton Estate. 1866. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (World’s Classics). Clergymen of the Church of England. 1866. London: The Trollope Society, nd. Nina Balatka and Linda Tressel. 1867 and 1868. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (World’s Classics). The Claverings. 1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (World’s Classics). The Last Chronicle of Barset. 1867. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (World’s Classics). Phineas Finn. 1869. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1996. He Knew He Was Right. 1869. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 (World’s Classics). The Vicar of Bullhampton. 1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 (World’s Classics). Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. 1870. London: The Trollope Society, 1992. Ralph the Heir. 1871. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 (World’s Classics). The Golden Lion of Granpère. 1872. London: The Trollope Society, 1997. The Eustace Diamonds. 1873. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (World’s Classics).

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Phineas Redux. 1873. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (World’s Classics). Lady Anna. 1874. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1985. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. 1874. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (World’s Classics). The Way We Live Now. 1875. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (World’s Classics). The Prime Minister. 1876. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 (World’s Classics). The American Senator. 1877. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (World’s Classics). Is He Popenjoy? 1878. London: Penguin Books, 1993. An Eye for an Eye. 1879. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (World’s Classics). Thackeray. 1879. London: The Trollope Society, 1997. John Caldigate. 1879. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 (World’s Classics). Cousin Henry. 1879. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 (World’s Classics). The Duke’s Children. 1880. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (World’s Classics). Dr. Wortle’s School. 1881. London: The Trollope Society, 1989. Ayala’s Angel. 1881. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986 (World’s Classics). The Fixed Period. 1882. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Marion Fay. 1882. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Lord Palmerston. 1882. London: Isbister, 1883. Kept in the Dark. 1882. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (World’s Classics). Mr. Scarborough’s Family. 1883. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (World’s Classics). The Landleaguers. 1883. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 (World’s Classics). An Autobiography. 1883. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (World’s Classics). An Old Man’s Love. 1884. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 (World’s Classics). The New Zealander. 1972. London: The Trollope Society, 1995. The Complete Short Stories. 5 vols. London: W. Pickering, 1990-94. Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews. New York: Arno Press, 1981. Writings for Saint Paul’s Magazine. New York: Arno Press, 1981. Four Lectures. Edited by Morris Parrish. London: Constable & Co, 1938.

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Mitchell, Sally. The Fallen Angel: Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835–1880. Ohio: Bowling Green, 1981. Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960. Moncrieff, Ascott Robert Hope. Hero and Heroine: The Story of a First Year at School. London: A. and C. Black, 1898. Morse, Deborah Denenholz. Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels. Ann Arbor, Mich: UMI Research Press, 1987. Mulkay, Michael. On Humour: Its Nature and its Place in Modern Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Nardin, Jane. He Knew She Was Right: The Independent Woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. ——— , Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996. Nash, Walter. The Language of Humour: Style and technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman, 1985. Nelson, Claudia. Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals 1850–1910. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. ——— , Boys will be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857– 1917. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Newsome, David. Godliness and Good Learning. London: Murray, 1961. Onega, Susana and José Angel Garcia Landa eds Narratology; An Introduction. London: Longman, 1996. Osborne, Hugh. ‘Selected Myths of Anthony Trollope’. Diss. University of Wales, 1997. Overton, Bill. The Unofficial Trollope. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982. Parsons, Tony. Man and Boy. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Pearsall, Ronald. The Worm in the Bud. The World of Victorian Sexuality, 1969. Stroud: Sutton, 2003. Petersen, William. Malthus. Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979. Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Pinchbeck, Ivy and Margaret Hewitt. Children in English Society. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Polhemus, Robert M. ‘Being in love in Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux: Desire, Devotion, Consolation’. Nineteenth Century Fiction vol. 37, no. 3. 383–395. ——— , The Changing World of Anthony Trollope. Berkley and London: University of California Press, 1978. Pollock, Linda A. Forgotten Children; Parent–Child Relations from 1500–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Porter, Roy and Leslie Hall. The Facts of Life. The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Praz, Mario. The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction. Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. Priestley, J.B. English Humour. London: Longman’s Green and Co, 1929. Quétel, Claude. History of Syphilis. Trans. Judith Bradock and Brian Pike. 1990. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

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Index

Altick, Richard D 79n, 175, 185–6, 188, 190, 196 Anstey, F 39, 182 apRoberts, Ruth 8–9 Ariès, Phillippe 101 Arkwright, Sir Richard 27 Arnold, Matthew 196 and n Arnold, Dr Thomas 3, 29, 30–33, 38–9, 41, 43 Bagehot, Walter 21 Bailey, Philip James Spasmodic poets, founder of 56 Bakhtin, Mikhail 64, 74, 183 Battiscombe, Georgina 186–7, 189n Belloc, Hilaire 47n Benkert, Karoly Maria 97 Benson, Edward, Archbishop of Canterbury 15, 17, 19 Benson family 17 Bentham, Jeremy 3, 21, 78, 171 Biddulph, Steve 11 Bloomsbury Group 194 Bly, John 2 Bonfield, Smith and Wrightson 142 Booth, Bradford 8 Booth, Wayne 8, 67n, 70n theories of narratology 65–70, 73 Bradlaugh, Charles and Anne Besant 22n The British Quarterly Review 6 Brownmiller, Susan 1n Burgess, Adrienne 11 Burton, Sir Richard 98 Butler, Bishop Joseph 29 Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell 78n Byron, Lord George 76 Calvino, Italo 61, 63, 65 capitalism morality of 27 theories of 20–21, 27, 78 Carlyle, Thomas 3, 17, 27–9, 30, 41, 50, 52, 56, 77, 78, 185

Carpenter, S.C. 32 Cecil, Lord David 7, 8, 182 Chadwick, Edwin 54 Chadwick, O 32 Chapman, Edward and Frederick friends and publishers 21 and Hall, publishers 71 Charbit, Yves 22n Chartism 33–4 childhood, histories of 101–11 child development 105–8 Chitty, Susan 34, 53n chivalry 18–19, 42, 46, 50, 57, 59, 70, 83, 99, 115 Christianity Anglo-catholic 36, 55 apostolic succession 30 baptismal regeneration 32 broad church 29 Calvinism 32–3, 35, 51 Christian manliness 17–18, 20, 30, 35, 43 Christian socialism 33–5, 40, 52 eternal damnation, belief in 36 eternal hope, belief in 43, 57 Greek, theology in 32 Muscular 3, 11, 15, 30, 34, 36, 53, 55, 72–3 Church, the Victorian church attendance 26 Church of England 29 evangelicalism 25, 30, 32, 34–5, 53, 72 old “high and dry” 35, 59 Sabbatarianism 33, 35 Tractarianism 25, 29, 34 non-conformist 27, 29 Churchill, Randolph 173 Clare, Anthony 2, 197 Clarke, Norma 17, 28 Cobbett, William 17 Cockshut, A.O.J. 8, 10

212

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 28–9, 34, 52, 54 Collins, Philip 177 Cornhill magazine 3, 20, 189n courtship and marriage 125–139 choosing to marry 134 falling in love 125–31 Craik, Dinah 18 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland 3, 185 Day, Thomas 102 demography census of religious attendance 24–5 censuses 24, 141–3 childhood mortality rates 103 civil status 142–3 life expectancy 141, 143 Dickens, Charles 19, 23, 61, 176n, 177, 195 Digby, Kenelm 18–19, 50, 83 Donovan, Robert 72n Dostoevsky, Feodor 66 Dowden, Edward 65 Drake, M 142–3 Dryden, John 192 Dupâquier, J., Fauve-Chamonix, A. and Grebenik, E. 22n, 23 Dupâquier, J., Hélin, E., Livi-Bacci, M. and Sogner, S. 143n Eagleton, Terry 4 education 108–14 bullying 42, 45–6, 49 classical 192–3 Plato, study of 97 Socrates, study of 97 corporal punishment 41, 45–6, 113–14, 193 curriculum 39, 112–13 homosexual abuse 42 Rousseau’s theories of 109 sex education 46, 47 University 114–16 see also schools and schooling Eglinton tournament 18 Eliot, George 65 Escott, T.H.S. 7 Farrar, Frederick W., 37–8, 43–8, 51, 102 belief in ‘Eternal Hope’ 43 Farrar, Reginald 37, 44, 49n

femininism 1, 38, 175 feminist critiques 2, 196 fiction children’s 38, 44, 102 evidence of men reading 186–8 improving 37, 39, 44, 53 men’s 184–91 prejudice against 185–6 Fielding, Henry 175, 177 Flint, Kate 176, 185, 189–90 Fogel, Gerald 2 Ford, Ford Madox 64 Forrester, Mark 97 Forster, John 178 The Fortnightly (later The Fortnightly Review) 21, 112, 196n Frith, William Powell 9 Froude, Richard Hurrell 29 Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan 2, 176 Gilbert, W.S. and Sullivan, A. 176 Gilmour, David 2 Girouard, Mark 18, 47n Glendinning, Victoria 92n, 93n, 104n Good Words 72 Gorham, George Cornelius 32 Gould, Nat 189, 196 see also fiction men’s Grand, Sarah 92 Gray, John 196n Grossmith, George and Weedon 176 Grylls, David 102, 109 Hall, Donald 11, 15 Hall, N. John 4, 30, 66, 72n, 78, 177n, 182, 187, 191, 192n Hallam, Arthur 20 Harrison, Frederic 7, 21, 141, 182 Harrison, J.F.C. 33n heteroglossia 64, 74, 183, 184 polyphony 64 Heydt-Stevenson, Jill 181n Hood, Thomas 176 Hornby, Nick 12–13 Hughes, Thomas 15, 29, 32–4, 37–44, 46–7, 49, 51, 102 attitudes to women 42 Tom Brown’s Schooldays, analysis of 38–44 Hughes, Winifred 48 Hutton, R.H. 6, 9

Index Ireland absentee landlords in 69 social problems of 23, 24, 68, 71 interiority 70, 79 Irving, David 17, 28 James, Henry 6, 8, 61–6, 67n, 73, 182, 185, 194 James, Robert Rhodes 173n jokes men’s jokes 189 scatology 175, 176–84 women enjoying 180–81, 190 Joyce, James 71 Keble, John 29, 30, 59 Ker, W.P. 7 Kermode, Frank 175 Kincaid, James 4, 7n, 9, 10 Kingsley, Charles 3, 15, 19, 29, 30, 33, 34–5, 37, 38, 187, 190 attitudes to women 58 theology 53 Two Years Ago, analysis of 52–9 Kipling, Rudyard 37 Knowlton, Charles 22n, 121–2 Labouchère, Henry 96 Law, the custody of children 105–6 and n on homosexuality 95–6 on married women 154 Lawton, Richard 24, 25n Leacock, Stephen 176 Leavis, F.R. 4, 8, 185, 194 Leavis, Q.R. 175 Lee, Hermione 171n Letwin, Shirley 195 Lever, Charles 189, 196 see also fiction, men’s Lewes, George 21 Lister, T.H. 24 literacy 175 Locke, John 108 Lodge, David 64n Longmans (publishers) 78 Loudon, Irvine 141n Lubbock, Percy 8, 63–4, 69 Ludlow, J.M. 33, 35

213

Macleod, Norman 72 McMaster, Juliet 9–10 Malthus, Thomas 3, 22–4 malthusianism 22–3 Mangan, J.A. and James Walvin 11, 15, 17 Mann, Horace 25 Markwick, Margaret 5n, 122n, 124n, 159n, 161n Martineau, Harriet 20 masculinity emotional literacy/illiteracy 15, 81 men in touch with their feminine side 80, 129 new men 12–13, 197 theories of 1–2, 11 masculinity, Victorian 3, 11, 15, 17, 19, 25, 28–9, 38, 40, 45, 59, 77, 79, 195 children, affection for 59 effeminacy 57 Mason, Michael 95, 121n Masterman, N.C. 35n Maurice, Frederick Denison 3, 20, 29–30, 32–5 God’s love, belief in 36, 43 Mause, Lloyd de 101 Mechanics’ Institutes 33 metafiction 63 Mill, John Stuart 77 Miller, Hillis 8 Millet, Kate 1, 9 Mitchell, Sally 175 modernism 61 Morris, William 186 Morse, Deborah Denenholz 10–11 Mudie’s library 4, 7 Nardin, Jane, 10–11, 195 narratology, theories of 8, 61–6 narrators assumed 66 dramatised 65–71, 73–82 Nation 61 Neale, E.V. 33, 35 Newby, Thomas Cautley, publisher 71 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 30, 187 Newsome, David 11, 15, 17 Nineteenth Century Fiction (now Nineteenth Century Literature) 8 see also The Trollopian

214

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Oriel College, Oxford 29, 33 Overton, Bill 4n Parsons, Tony 12 Pater, Walter 97 Paul, Herbert 7 Pearsall, Ronald 99n, 177, 191n Petersen, William 22n, 23 Phillpotts, Bishop Henry 32 phrenology 87 physiognomy 87, 88 Pinchbeck, Ivy, and Margaret Hewitt 101n, 102, 103n Place, Francis 22n political economy, theories of 77, 171 Pollock, Linda 101 Poor Law, the 23, 35 Praz, Mario 8, 10 Priestley, J.B. 182 Pritchett, V.S. 4 Punch 16 (illust.), 176, 191, 195 suitable for young ladies 177 Pusey, Edward Bouverie 29, 30, 43 Quétel, Claude 92 Radicalism 80 Ransome, Teresa 182n Reade, Brian 95 realism 6, 9, 62 Ricardo, David 3, 20 Rickman, John 24 Riffaterre, Michael 9, 73 Robb, Graham 96n Roper, Michael 11 Rosen, David 2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 109 Ruskin, John 196 parents of 190 Sadleir, Michael 4, 7–8, 10 Said, Edward 98 Saintsbury, George 7 Sanders, T.C. Muscular Christianity, coiner of 53 Schlovsky, Victor Russian formalists, leader of 64 Schofield, Roger 142 schools and schooling 39, 45

bullying 41–2, 45, 49 Classics, study of 39 curriculum 49 homosexuality in 42 punishment and flogging 41 sex education 47, 121 see also education Scott, Sir Walter 18, 50 Segal, Lynne 2 Sex condoms, as a protection against infection 92 see also Charles Knowlton homosexuality 39, 42, 95–100 codes for 97 Sotadic zones 98 masturbation 46–7 outside marriage 122–4 codes for 123–4 sex education 47, 121 sexual arousal 118, 121, 132 sexual attraction 125, 133 sexual depravity, codes for 95 sexual knowledge 121 sexual slang 177, 178n, 180–4 sexuality 38, 58 of schoolboys 99 Showalter, Elaine 2, 175, 185 Skilton, David 5–7, 22n Smiles, Samuel 3, 19n, 27–8 Smith, Adam 3, 20 Smollett, Tobias George 92, 175, 177, 189 social structure aristocracy 19 gentility 50 primogeniture 104, 163 rising middle class 106 Spender, Dale 1n Spender, Stephen 4 Spock, Benjamin 15 Stapleton, B 23n Stead, William 96 Stephen, Leslie 7, 66 Sterne, Laurence 175–7, 180 Stone, Donald D. 4n Stone, Lawrence 142 Strachey, Lytton 15, 30 structuralism 9 Surtees, R.S. 189 see also Fiction, men’s

Index Sutherland, John 6n, 71, 93, 155n, 180n, 185, 188, 189 syphilis 159 appearance 91 in fiction 92–5, 124 incidence of 91–2, and 92n slang terms for 93 symptoms of 91, 94 similarity with alcoholism 94 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 19–20, 50, 187 Terry, R.C. 4, 7, 9, 10, 72n, 178 Thackeray, William Makepeace 187, 189–90, 195 Thompson, David M. 25 Tichborne claimant 155 Tillotson, Kathleen 65n, 175 Tingay, Lance 5 Tosh, John 2, 11, 16–17 Tracy, Robert 67, 72n Trollope, Anthony 59 attitudes to religion 25, 75 Carlyle, opinion of 78n critical opinions of 3, 4, 5–11 demography of novels 143–51 lone fathers 145, 151 morbidity 151 single-parent families 143 didactic purpose 194 education of his sons 113 family structure in works 104, 144–53 fatal stroke in 1882 39, 182 his friends 9, 21, 191 homosexuality in works 95–100 his library 177n masculinity, models of in works 83–4, 194 appearance 87–94 careers for men 115–16 church attendance 26 emotional literacy/illiteracy 154–74, 195 fathers and fatherhood 137–9 with babies 137–9 as single parents 144–5, 164–74 homosocial bonds 128 in marriage 152–61 men in touch with feminine side 129, 135–9, 164–74, 195 sexual impotence 157

215 tears in men 84 methods of composition 64, 66, 187 parenting practices in works 106, 160–74 private life of 66, 98, 104, 191 publishing history 5, 37, 66, 71–3, 78, 167 Ruskin, opinion of 196 his schooling 114 style of writing 73 ventures 21 works The American Senator 24, 26, 70, 78, 114, 144, 178, 181 An Autobiography 21n, 37, 64, 66, 71–2, 98, 154, 175, 185, 191, 193 Ayala’s Angel 88, 104, 125, 151–2 ‘The Banks of the Jordan’ 97 Barchester Towers 18, 30, 32–3, 35, 63, 87, 98, 104, 106, 114, 144, 165, 180, 183 The Belton Estate 21, 62, 95, 104, 114, 120, 145, 152 The Bertrams 78, 95, 98, 112, 121, 122, 163 Can You Forgive Her? 22n, 62, 88, 96, 104, 112, 124, 126–31, 145, 166 Castle Richmond 24, 91, 98–100, 104 The Claverings 91, 94, 104, 116, 121, 135–9, 180 Clergymen of the Church of England 25 Cousin Henry 164 Doctor Thorne 10, 22, 29, 36, 87, 94, 103, 106, 109, 113, 120, 145, 161–2 Dr Wortle’s School 8, 104, 112–14, 117, 151 The Duke’s Children 21–2, 27, 86, 95, 103, 109, 114, 124, 151, 163n, 167–74 The Eustace Diamonds 95, 96, 106, 135–9, 145, 178, 182 An Eye for an Eye 8, 38, 122, 125 The Fixed Period 5, 24 Framley Parsonage 3, 10, 22n, 25, 33, 78, 112, 144–5, 152, 187 He Knew He Was Right 104, 105, 106, 120, 151, 153–4, 155 Is He Popenjoy? 27, 93–4, 104, 106, 108, 151, 154–61

216

New Men in Trollope’s Novels John Caldigate 36, 87, 103, 135–9, 144, 151, 181 Kept in the Dark 8, 151, 154, 155 Lady Anna 19, 78, 145 The Landleaguers 102 The Last Chronicle of Barset 19, 33, 83, 93, 103, 109, 119, 144, 153, 164–6, 192 The Letters of Anthony Trollope 78–9n, 177n The Macdermots of Ballycloran 5, 61, 66–72, 81, 183 Marion Fay 19, 108 Miss Mackenzie 36, 62, 125 Mr Scarborough’s Family 8, 26 The New Zealander 78 An Old Man’s Love 125 Orley Farm 105, 114, 117, 125, 145, 151, 186 Phineas Finn 27, 96, 100, 106, 114–15, 131–9, 163n, 167, 180, 195 Phineas Redux 83, 122, 131–9, 180, 184 The Prime Minister 10, 78, 91, 101, 105, 117, 145, 151, 167 Rachel Ray 5, 25, 26, 36, 61, 71–82, 88, 103, 104, 145, 152–3, 183, 191n Ralph the Heir 91, 120, 138, 145, 163 The Small House at Allington 10, 21, 26, 37, 73, 79, 91, 103, 104, 109, 117, 118, 120, 123, 145, 163n, 178, 183–4, 190 The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson 78 The Three Clerks 78–9, 104, 114, 118, 145, 187

‘The Turkish Bath’ 97 The Vicar of Bullhampton 25, 36, 88, 92, 96, 104, 124, 126–31, 190 The Warden 3, 8, 28, 32, 37, 66, 78, 104, 109, 153 The Way We Live Now 5, 40, 78, 91, 109, 114, 144, 145, 163n Trollope, Fanny 182 Trollope Society 5 The Trollopian 7 see also Nineteenth Century Fiction Turner, Mark W. 13, 97, 181, 195 Vance, Norman 3n, 11, 15, 28–30, 33–4, 44, 54n, 56 Vicinus, Martha 196 Victorian publishing industry 5n, 71n, 188–9 Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) 92 Walpole, Hugh 84 Walton, Priscilla 10–11 Weeks, Jeffrey 97n Westminster Review 20 Wilde, Oscar 95 Wilson, A.N. 114n Wood, Mrs Henry 19, 37–8, 102 Mrs Halliburton’s Troubles, analysis of 48–52 theology 50–51 women’s issues, attitudes to 48 Woods, Robert and Nichola Shelton 103, 141n Woolf, Virginia 9 Workers’ Educational Association 33 Working Men’s College 33, 35 Wrigley, E.A. and Schofield, P.S. 142 Yonge, Charlotte 186–8, 196