Anthony Trollope; His Work, Associates and Literary Originals

by T. H. S. Escott

Maternal influence in the Barchester novels—Trollope’s first literary success with The Warden—The Barchester cycle begun—Origin of the Barchester Towers plot—The cleric in English fiction—Conservatism of Trollope’s novels—Typical scenes from The Warden—Hiram’s Hospital—Archdeacon Grantly’s soliloquy—Crushing the rebels—Position of the Barchester series in the national literature—Collecting the raw material of later novels—The author’s first meeting with Trollope—The novelist helped by the official—Defence of Mrs. Proudie as a realistic study—The Trollopian method of railway travelling—A daily programme of work and play.

AT each successive stage of Anthony Trollope’s literary advance, what he wrote was, throughout his Post Office days, suggested by no premeditated adventurous effort or mission such as produced the Dotheboys Hall chapter in Nicholas Nickleby, but was coloured and conditioned by the shifting circumstances of his daily routine. His surroundings, whatever for the time they may have been, provided his theme. Out of past reminiscence, when not from present observation, grew his personages. It was not in his nature to live two lives, one that of a Post Office servant, the other that of an author. He made a single life subserve two ends, one official, the other literary. To this must be added the twofold obligation to his mother visibly pervading the works that are now being examined, as the earliest and most stable foundation of his fame. From the clerical preferences shown in The Vicar of Wrexhill he imbibed his dislike of evangelicalism and its representatives. Mrs. Trollope too, by early initiating him into the mysteries of feminine character, imparted to him the skill in feminine analysis displayed throughout each of his stories that won real and lasting popularity. Frances Trollope’s appreciations of national character and of its individual instances invest her book about France with a grace, charm, and literary effect generally wanting to her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her sympathetic insight into French life and thought attracted her son to the same subjects, and go some way towards explaining the choice of a theme for his third novel, La Vendée. That book brought its author the first money he ever made by his pen, £20.

Except perhaps the cultured and gracious High Churchmanship of the character which gives the story its name, nothing of parental inspiration can be seen in the general temper, the subject-matter, the dramatis personæ, or their settings, of the book that, following La Vendée after an interval of five years, first raised its writer to a recognised place among the novelists of his time. This was The Warden. Its glimpses of cathedral close, cloister, and of their dignitaries at duty, or in the private ease of their own homes, owe nothing, whether as regards treatment or feeling, to Mrs. Trollope’s evangelical caricatures. Equally independent are they, on the one hand, of Mrs. Sherwood’s Low Church delineations, or, on the other, of the romances by which Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge rendered lasting service to the Anglican movement in the nineteenth century’s second half. Trollope himself always disclaimed any special first-hand intimacy with clerical life or exclusively clerical society. As a fact, however, something of the sort had been always familiar to him, if not from personal experience, still from family tradition. His ancestor, a London merchant’s son, eventually a dignified and well-known Berkshire vicar, might easily, if studied from his portraits alone, have suggested particular features and whole personages for the Barchester gallery. In connection with the course of its author’s general development, now being traced, The Warden is a real landmark for other reasons than that it formed his earliest introduction to the public as a novelist who had not mistaken his calling and whose works must be read. It was his fourth attempt at fiction, and enabled him to place before his readers some lineaments and traits of his most original and best-liked creations. Its way, however, to popularity was won by slow degrees. While opening the Barchester series, The Warden did not complete its growth into world-wide favour till that series had advanced some way.

Apropos of his real start with this book, Trollope, in 1856, told Lord Houghton that only 750 copies were printed, that they remained over ten years in hand, but that he regarded the book with affection because, after having previously written and published for ten years to no satisfactory purpose, he had made £9, 2s. 6d. by the first year’s sale. “Since then,” he added with quiet satisfaction, “I have improved even upon that.” From the biographical point of view necessarily taken in these pages, The Warden is specially interesting from being the second full revelation of its author’s attitude to life and character at the dawn of his literary success. The pervading temper of The Warden closely resembles that previously shown in La Vendée, and may therefore be described as one of social, moral, and intellectual conservatism. In the English story, the personal contrasts of ecclesiastical life making up most of the book were suggested, after the fashion described by the author, during a summer ramble in Salisbury Close. That, however, was not the way in which he came by the notion, not only of The Warden, but of Barchester Towers as well.

Both novels, in Trollope’s own words to the present writer, grew out of The Times correspondence columns during a dull season of the fifties. The letters raised and argued, for several days or weeks together, the controversial issue whether a beneficed clergyman could be justified in systematic absenteeism from the congregation for whose spiritual welfare he was responsible. The ecclesiastic who had supplied the subject for this newspaper discussion was first vehemently attacked by open enemies or candid friends; he then received the best defence possible from zealous partisans; and so, after an empty bout of argument, the matter ended. With Anthony Trollope it had only just begun. The whole question appealed strongly to his natural turn for social casuistry, especially of the more disputatious sort. The disclosures of personal motive, rivalry, and object, as the discussion widened and advanced, were personified by his imagination in a company of concrete forms. The leading journal’s letters came from many different persons, and combined every possible variety of opinion. None of the correspondents were known to the novelist, while his creative touch was secretly endowing them with the nature, the habit, and the form that was to give them something like immortality in his pages. Who, he had asked himself, were these Times letter-writers in private life; what manner of men did they seem to their associates in the Church and the world, to their families at home, to their friends abroad? The mental answers to these questions, elaborated by him during his official progress throughout the country, resulted in the bodying forth of things unknown, clerical or lay.

Thus did strong imagination, as Hippolyta puts it,[9] call for the first time into existence beings who, though now belonging to a past order, for the Victorian age were as full of actuality as Septimus Harding and Archdeacon Grantly, and who will be scarcely less useful to the nineteenth-century historian than, in their pictures of the early Georgian epoch, both Lecky and Macaulay found Congreve’s Parson Barnabas, Fielding’s amiably evangelical Parson Adams, and his antithesis Parson Trulliber. With those personages there are no creations in the Barchester novels that can be compared. And this for the sufficient reason that Fielding, like Congreve, aimed at reproducing with the pen the vigorous effects of George Morland’s brush. Trollope, on the other hand, had no sooner advanced some way with The Warden and the stories which followed it than he had satisfied himself that his most successful and congenial line was that of light-comedy narrative. The social atmosphere breathed, and the men and women brought before us in the Barchester novels are not dominantly, still less exclusively, clerical. Some of the most popular types are introduced chiefly for the purpose of connecting the more or less ecclesiastical fictions that followed The Warden with the panorama of Church dignitaries that formed Trollope’s early speciality. Even in Barchester Towers several of the sketches most conspicuous for inherent vitality are altogether lay. The Stanhopes, and of these the Signora above all, who makes of her sofa a throne before which the Barchester manhood prostrates itself, Mrs. Bold with her genuine or pretended lovers, form the purely secular background against which the Quiverfuls of Puddingdale, the Crawleys of Hogglestock, are thrown out in strong, sometimes painful, but always effective, relief.

As in The Warden Archdeacon Grantly leads the way to Barchester Towers, so in Barchester Towers Mr. Arabin, Fellow of Lazarus, Oxford, links that novel to The Last Chronicle of Barset; while the Thornes of Ullathorne open the way to Doctor Thorne, Squire Thorne’s cousin, the social and medical oracle of Greshamsbury Manor, not far from Gatherum Castle, whose owner, the Duke of Omnium, is to be the central figure in the political novels. As to Doctor Thorne, the heroine, Mary Thorne, if not quite such a masterpiece as Miss Dunstable, combines with the Scatcherd portraits to explain the abiding and even growing popularity of this really great novel. What Trollope’s sympathies were in La Vendée, such they showed themselves, not only in The Warden but in all his subsequent dealing with social and political topics. “Ask for the old paths, where there is the good way, and walk therein, and find rest therein.” The Hebrew prophet’s words[10] might have furnished Trollope with a congenial text for a lay-sermon that would have summed up all his convictions and have reflected, as in a mirror, the essential and deep-rooted conservatism of his mind. At the General Election of 1868, indeed, Trollope was to stand as a Liberal for Beverley. His training in the Civil Service had long since deepened his distrust of innovation and his hearty resistance to whatever savoured of new-fangled ideas. At the Post Office, whether serving under Whig or Tory chiefs, he always stood for the straitest traditions of the department. He showed himself as obstinately conservative in the traditions of its routine as his natural tone of mind, fortified by his mother’s precepts and prejudices, had caused him to be in politics.

As a clerical portrait-painter Trollope produced his work in advance of George Eliot by four years. Nothing but mutual dissimilarity can be found between the two schools in which they were respectively trained for the work. Nor had George Eliot ever lived in Trollope’s exclusive social environment. Yet Mr. Irwine, in Adam Bede, in his refined vicarage, with his high-bred mother for housekeeper, might be claimed as a distant relation by Archdeacon Grantly, notwithstanding the diametrically opposite associations and experiences of the two novelists. With George Eliot, its Irwines imparted to the Church a grace and sweetness that made itself felt even by Dissenters and infidels. “Imagine,” Anthony Trollope seems to murmur in a series of audible asides, “the curse of a religious establishment that took its tone not from the Grantlys but the Slopes.” The Warden, like the rest of the series it opened, is too universally familiar to need any analysis of its characters or its incidents here. It contains, however, certain passages which strike the social keynote of its author’s personal predilections in matters connected with ecclesiastical polity. The portions of the book now referred to show, in such clear-cut sentences, so unambiguously and picturesquely, their author’s fondness for the old régime, notwithstanding, if not almost because of, its defects, that a few extracts from them will recall more clearly his standpoint in the Barchester books than could be done by pages of description or comment. About Septimus Harding himself nothing need be said. St. Cross Hospital, the original of his Hiram’s Hospital, lies about a mile from Winchester in the Twyford direction. Its chief custodian might naturally therefore be a Wykehamist. Could anything, therefore, so gentle have come from the college of St. Mary Winton? Anthony Trollope would have answered “Yes,” and did indeed once call The Warden an idealised photograph, whose chief features were, by an eclectic process, taken from more than one member of the Sewell family whom, if he had first seen at Winchester, he only came to know well and observe closely when visiting New College, as his brother’s guest.

Equally realistic was the genesis of the principal figures grouped round the Warden. They comprise such old friends as his devoted daughter Eleanor; John Bold, her declared lover, who is denounced by the masterful Archdeacon as an enemy of the Establishment, but whom Mr. Harding is not unwilling to take for his second son-in-law; the inmates of the hospital themselves; the grateful Bunce, the Warden’s favourite and champion; Abel Handy, who leads the rebels and malcontents; Mr. Chadwick, whose family have supplied the Bishops of Barchester with stewards from time immemorial; the local man of business enlisted on behalf of the status quo; and, in the background, the London advisers of the Warden’s friends, Cox and Cummins, who recommend Mr. Harding to seek an interview with that very eminent Queen’s Counsel, a thorough Churchman, a sound Conservative, in every respect the best man to be got, Sir Abraham Haphazard. When in due course that conference has been obtained, Trollope’s portrait of the legal pundit is at one or two points reminiscent of that sound lawyer, notwithstanding his life’s failure, his own father. There is also a paternal touch in the portrait of Mr. Harding himself. The Warden’s sumptuous treatise on church music recalls Thomas Anthony Trollope’s erudite work, the Encyclopædia Ecclesiastica, mentioned to, if not encouraged by, John Murray, but never issuing from Albemarle Street.

Anthony Trollope’s style has been said by twentieth-century critics to lack distinction. But the various pictures of Dr. Grantly’s intervention in the hospital affairs have the strength, the certainty, and the ease of touch which declared in every line the observant humorist. In the pages to which the reader will presently be referred, Trollope shows his constitutional liking for the old, well-to-do, gentlemanlike Erastianism of the Establishment not by any generalities of comment or of moral reflection, but by narrative and descriptive diction as direct, graphic, and significant as any that ever came from his own or from any other contemporary pen. Archdeacon Grantly is on his way to Hiram’s Hospital; noting the signs of picturesque prosperity around him, he thinks with growing bitterness of those whose impiety would venture to disturb the goodly grace of cathedral institutions. The Archdeacon’s complacency has at once been deepened and has developed a new sensitiveness by the mutiny among Hiram’s almsmen, for the purpose of quelling which he is now on his way to the hospital. The ringleaders have not organised the movement without some opposition. The petition to the diocesan authorities setting forth their grievances has only secured signatures with some difficulty. The hundred a year claimed by the almsmen as their right seems to several more likely to be plundered by their children or belongings than to benefit themselves. The Handy and Skulpit faction has, however, now been put on its mettle, and already snaps its fingers at the resistance of the powers that be, “especially old Catgut with Calves to help him”—otherwise Mr. Harding with his violoncello, and his son-in-law, in his ecclesiastical war paint.