Anthony Trollope; His Work, Associates and Literary Originals

by T. H. S. Escott

On returning to his hotel, Trollope heard that his Excellency Nubar Bey had called, and was waiting to see him. That able and urbane Armenian statesman many years later became the Khedive Tewfik’s Prime Minister. Received by him at Cairo in the eighties, I found he had not forgotten his interviews with Trollope in 1858. Very pleasant, very conversational, but somewhat peremptory had he found the author of the Barchester novels. “It was, however,” continued Nubar, “some time before Mr. Trollope found me, I fear, quite satisfactory; even then his manner of negotiating had about it less of the diplomatist than of the author who might have meditated scolding his publisher if he did not come round to his terms, and of carrying his literary wares elsewhere.” The one difference between Nubar and his visitor was the rate of speed at which the mails should be carried between Alexandria and Suez. In pressing for a longer time than Trollope thought necessary, the Egyptian official was suspected by the envoy from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, as he himself said, and perhaps quite wrongly,[13] of wishing to oblige the Peninsular and Oriental Company rather than the British Government. The matter was soon adjusted in accordance with the English view.

While these diplomatic conversations were in progress, Trollope contrived, of course, not to neglect his writing. The fortnight he remained in Cairo sufficed for completing the novel already on hand, Doctor Thorne, and commencing a new story that came out a year later, The Bertrams. For that work, the rest of Trollope’s oriental wanderings (1858-59) provided useful and entertaining material. The Palestine scenes in that novel reflected the author’s experiences of a visit to Jerusalem and its neighbourhood. Then came the return journey home through Spain. In John Bull, one of the stories in Tales of All Countries (1861-1870), he recorded what happened to himself during an excursion on the Guadalquivir. In Spain there were no postal treaties to be engineered, and no English Post Offices to inspect. His adventure on the Spanish river, that of mistaking a Castilian Duke for a bull-fighter, had occurred just after a little spell of work, en route for England once more. The postal arrangements of Malta and Gibraltar were overhauled, with the result that private residents and business houses on “the Rock” received their letters more regularly, if not earlier, than they did before.

The period of Trollope’s excursions now described was historically memorable as that which witnessed the beginning of the Suez Canal. In the record of Trollope’s own life, his prodigious powers of writing against time, rivalled only by Mr. Gladstone’s feats, on his oratorical pilgrimages, of speaking against it, reached their culminating point. Six years before Trollope’s birth, the pedestrian record had been broken by Captain Barclay’s walk of a thousand miles in a thousand hours. At the age of forty-three Trollope was habitually performing analogous feats of endurance with his pen, and could have backed himself to cover more pages of two hundred and fifty words each in a working year than any writer of his time. The pace at which he passed from one piece of task-work to another, or rather combined several at the same time, caused the most brilliant of Trollope’s Post Office contemporaries, F. I. Scudamore, to say that nothing could give an idea of the man’s all-embracing versatility but Ducrow at Astley’s simultaneously riding half a dozen horses round the ring. Test the truth of this simile by the work of the twelve months that opened with the Egyptian mission. Of course, too, that record further reminds one that only a man endowed with very exceptional strength of brain and body could have prolonged his course to the threshold of old age without wearing himself out before.

The material for the serious love-making and flirtation pictures amid Syrian ruins, palm-trees, and deserts had been collected, but not entirely worked up, before that expedition closed. The finishing strokes were to be given during a hurried stay at Glasgow, whither he had been sent on Post Office business. So far, few men of Trollope’s social taste and literary notoriety could have made fewer personal acquaintances among the rank and file of his craft. About newspaper writers, and editors in particular, personally he knew absolutely nothing. His journey beyond the Tweed introduced him in Edinburgh to the most distinguished Scotch journalist of the day, Alexander Russel, who had made for himself on The Scotsman a position at least equal to that belonging in London to J. T. Delane of The Times. On the Conservative side James Hannay had not then been installed at The Edinburgh Courant. As, however, on comparing notes in London many years after the two men found out, Hannay and Trollope had just met each other beneath Professor Blackie’s roof.

The eventfulness to Trollope of the year 1858 did not end with the incidents already recorded. He had acquitted himself so well in his Egyptian treaty-making, not less than in the tour of inspection which went with it, that on his return from Scotland he had scarcely unpacked in London before receiving orders to prepare for a voyage across the Atlantic. In He Knew He was Right, Mrs. Trevelyan’s father stands for a favourable specimen of a West Indian governor. The postmasters and other officials of that sort provided for our transatlantic dependencies were often not up to Sir Marmaduke Rowley’s mark. As a consequence, the British postal service in this part of the world had become disorganised, discredited, and even somewhat discreditable, besides being, at its best, irregular and ineffective. Trollope had already given repeated proof that the public service possessed no man more competent than himself for investigating abuses, for detecting failures or weak spots in a system, and for effectively reprimanding the local officials who were responsible. These congenial tasks were now once more filled to perfection. Of course, before leaving England he had held the inevitable interview with the publisher he had selected for the book that the tour was to produce. This volume, for it did not run to more, was most of it written on board ship. He had begun his work while steaming out of Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, and had still some thousands of miles to traverse. He continued it uninterruptedly amid all the other duties of his absence.

The entire copy, ready for the printer to the last comma, was in his dressing-case when the cab from Waterloo deposited the traveller at his London door. This was in the autumn of 1858. Since leaving home he had explored the chief points in the West Indies, visited British Guiana and Columbia, as well as crossed and recrossed Central America. In the course of his homeward route, for the first time he touched New York; this and the political metropolis of the States, Washington, he was, as will be shown in due order, several times to revisit. Meanwhile, his earliest experiences of the New World were recorded in a style whose spirit, ease and picturesqueness impressed publishers and readers alike with a feeling of the vigour and variety always apparently at his command. Entirely unlike anything he had yet attempted, his descriptions of South American scenery, manners, character, and of its negro population, displayed the same swiftness and sureness of realistic touch as had hitherto made the places and personages familiar to the public from his first successes pulsate with the breath and movement of life.

The West Indies and the Spanish Main also had the effect of raising his reputation, not only with the public, but with the fellow-craftsmen of his own art. Thomas Carlyle in 1861 recognised its graphic power, and in characteristic terms endorsed its estimates of the black man’s place in creation. Carlyle’s compliment seemed the more welcome and unexpected because some years earlier, in 1851, the Chelsea sage had been the subject of remark anything but eulogistic by Trollope. “Surely,” he writes to his mother and brother, “eight shillings for Carlyle’s Latterday Pamphlets cannot be considered anything but a very bad bargain, because the grain of sense belonging to the book is smothered in such a sack of the sheerest nonsense as to be useless.” During the earlier years of the Victorian era, the social patronage of the rich and great was still considered almost, if not quite, essential for a successful advance towards literary fame. Sir Henry Taylor, of whose relations with Trollope special mention will afterwards be made, had first introduced Carlyle both to Holland and to Lansdowne House. The Blessington-D’Orsay ménage in London had ended before Carlyle had become a lion or Trollope’s great drawing-room experiences had begun. It is therefore pure fiction to speak, as some have done, of the men who wrote Sartor Resartus and The Warden respectively ever meeting each other or seeing Benjamin Disraeli and Louis Napoleon at Gore House.

The end of the fifties and the earlier sixties were to effect a transformation-scene in Trollope’s mature position and prospects, at once fortunate and complete. This was his connection with Thackeray, with the house of Smith and Elder, as with certain other of the members of its artistic or literary staff, above all J. E. Millais. In the October of 1860 Trollope, then officially resettled on the other side of St. George’s Channel, was dividing his time between Post Office inspection, in the northern parts of Ireland, and the composition of his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond. Trollope, it has been already seen, in his Examiner letters for John Forster, 1848, had defended the steps taken by the English Government for the relief of Irish distress, not as adequate in themselves, but as being the best practicable under the circumstances. That opinion, twelve years later, he now illustrated with forcible and picturesque description in Castle Richmond. But at this point a few words must be given to the relations in which this story exhibits its author with other experts in his art then living. He had found, we already know, his earliest model in Jane Austen. During the sixties and afterwards Thackeray became his declared master. In the first place the novel shows its author going, like his greatest contemporaries, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and even Dickens himself, to Blue books for scenery, incident, and even germs of character. Trollope did not, however, as was done by Reade in Put Yourself in His Place, lift the contents of a State paper into any description of an existing evil, such as the excesses of trade unionism. Still less did he appropriate official or other printed matter, after the fashion of Collins, who, in Man and Wife, illustrated the anomalies of the Anglo-Scotch marriage laws by reproducing in extenso the reports of famous trials, and supported his attack upon the malignant effects of inordinate athleticism by citing from The Lancet the testimony of doctors who had given evidence that suited his arguments.

Trollope, in Castle Richmond, while as realistic as Collins or Reade, had assimilated his facts more artistically than either, subordinating them at every turn to the development of his characters, or rather of that development making them a perfectly natural part. Every neighbourhood, like every form of suffering and want, he describes, he had not only himself seen, but minutely studied and worked out, in his own words, as he would a sum, its true lessons. His impressions remained the more vivid because he trusted to no notes taken at the time to preserve them. For instances aptly illustrative of the exact impression he wished to convey, or of the moral he desired to point, Post Office experience and severe habits of private cultivation had made his memory serviceable enough to dispense with pocket-book and pencil. As an account at once clear, picturesque, and powerful, of the crowning calamities that came upon Ireland after the potato famine in the first half of the nineteenth century, Castle Richmond will almost bear comparison with the classical records of national visitations in other ages and in other lands, whether penned by eye-witnesses, or by men whose genius enabled them to describe that of which they had only heard, with the verisimilitude of actual experience. In the first of these classes Trollope might thus nearly claim a place with Thucydides or Boccaccio, in the second with Daniel Defoe, who lived, indeed, during the great plague of 1665, but only as a child of seven years old; while to Defoe’s earlier or later rivals must be added Pliny as chronicler of the plague at Rome in the second century B.C., and, in our own day, Father Thomas Gasquet, whose pen-and-ink picture, published 1894, of the mediæval “Black Deaths,” left on the mind an impression scarcely less powerful than that produced by the author of Robinson Crusoe himself.

In addition to the merits of Castle Richmond as an historical novel, Trollope’s impending connection with The Cornhill Magazine, under Thackeray’s editorship, invests with special interest an undesigned coincidence of idea between a central feature in the plot of Castle Richmond and in that of Esmond, published eight years before Trollope’s third Irish novel came out. Both stories show the girl’s lover as the subject of an unsought attachment conceived for him by the lady in whom he himself hopes to find only a mother-in-law. In Castle Richmond, the part of Thackeray’s Esmond falls to Trollope’s Owen Fitzgerald. Here, however, the resemblance ends. In Esmond the mother is as completely without strength of character as without fever or force of passion, and calmly bestows her affection on the young man by way of consoling him for her daughter’s cruel indifference. In Castle Richmond feminine insipidity is the daughter’s attribute, while the mother, strong to repulsiveness, deliberately tries to supplant the girl in her lover’s affections. There is this further difference too: Harry Esmond, robbed of Beatrix, finds peace and happiness in her parent, while Owen Fitzgerald, discovering Lady Clara Desmond is bent on having the heir to Castle Richmond, his own cousin Herbert, never marries at all.