Framley Parsonage, therefore, from which dates his trade value with the publishers, was the earliest novel that made him a favourite with the hundreds of English households, the great event in whose lives is the arrival of the weekly book-box from Mudie’s. The personal intimacy between Trollope’s readers and his characters at the point now reached began to be quickened and deepened by J. E. Millais, whose tastes, sympathies, and exceptional insight into the life and characters depicted by Trollope qualified him, beyond any other artist of his time, to interpret with his brush the most characteristic creations of the novelist’s pen. Who shall say how much in its mental pictures of Mr. Pickwick and other Dickensian beings the popular imagination was helped by the illustrations of “Phiz”? Would the Rugby boys, for instance, described in Tom Brown, have roared with laughter, as they did, if Hablot K. Browne’s pencil had not breathed a new reality into the novelist’s account of Mr. Winkle’s equestrian difficulties, of Jingle’s boasted performances in the West Indian cricket-field, or into the fat boy’s fiendish interruption of the tender passages between Rachael Wardle and Tracy Tupman. Dickens also derived scarcely less signal service from George Cattermole in The Old Curiosity Shop, and from George Cruikshank in Oliver Twist. With writers of less genius than Dickens, such as Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth, their personages and situations were often saved only from complete failure by the same artist’s help.
More conspicuously than in any of these instances did Trollope’s association with Millais make the artist an active, if not the chief, partner in the creation of the novelist’s characters. In 1861 Trollope had not begun the personal acquaintance, which soon ripened into a lifelong intimacy, with the master of the brush whose personal charm and genial fellowship brought fresh brightness and lasting joy into the novelist’s life, at the same time that his drawings acquainted the Anglo-Saxon world with the manner and meaning of every expression on Lucy Robarts’ face, with her every gesture or movement, with the plaiting of her hair, with the simple little pendant of dull gold on her velvet neckband, with the fringe of her bodice, and with the very folds of her dress.
This fortunate conjunction of pen and pencil resulted to hosts of readers, American as well as English, in a real revelation of country life. These now realised, as they had never done before, the principles underlying the modern village polity with all its personal gradations in the scale of dignity and rank. Trollope’s novels and Millais’ engravings thus completed for multitudes the lessons in provincial existence and character which Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen had begun. The country parish was now shown as the State in miniature, the kingly power being represented, in the present instance, by Lord Lufton and his mother at Framley Court. Between the Court and the Parsonage the relations described reflected the union of the civil and the spiritual authority. With Framley Parsonage, therefore, in the early sixties, begins the period when Trollope’s successive books were events in the publishing year, and the instalments of his work were awaited with scarcely less interest than each coming portion of Dickens’s Great Expectations, then running through All the Year Round, or of Thackeray’s Lovel the Widower and Roundabout Papers, then appearing in the same magazine pages as Trollope’s. Thackeray, indeed, had destined his own Lovel for the chief fiction of The Cornhill. It did not seem to him quite strong enough for that honour. Hence the opening which he gave Trollope. Now, too, began Trollope’s introduction into the literary and general society of the capital in which he had been born, partly bred, and in which he had served his earliest apprenticeship to the Government service that formed the foundation of his fortunes. Of its real life, except from outside, he as yet knew nothing.
Such chance glimpses into society in London as Trollope had secured in his earliest days were due almost or entirely to the good offices of the old Harrow friend, William Gregory, who subsequently, as has been already described, did so much to make his Irish sojourn profitable as well as pleasant. Among the more prominent figures in the great world of their day occasionally visited by Trollope was Lord Clanricarde, who, in London as well as in Ireland, was fond of playing the part of Mæcenas to young men of promise. Together with Gregory, Trollope, a young man under thirty, dined with Clanricarde in Carlton House Terrace. On entering the drawing-room, they found its only occupant a fat elderly parson. He must, the new-comers whisperingly agreed, be the family chaplain. The conjecture had not been murmured in a tone low enough to prevent its being overheard by the divine, who in a moment began to convince them that he was not one of their host’s dependants by, in Trollope’s words, “chaffing them out of their lives” until they descended to the dining-room, and even after that. This incident forms Trollope’s introduction to Sydney Smith, without whom, in the early forties, no fashionable party was complete. The most useful entertainer and friend secured by Gregory to Trollope was, however, Henry Thoby Prinsep, whose acquaintanceship had proved of earlier value to Thackeray. This genial, opulent, and influential Indian official had three sons, the second, Trollope’s particular friend, being the clever and popular artist “Val” Prinsep; while the two others, still living, were respectively in the Indian Civil and Military Service. Prinsep kept open house for Trollope, as for many others, beneath his roof.
Anthony Trollope’s personal knowledge of Thackeray began to improve itself into friendship; at Thoby Prinsep’s, also, he heard many amusing stories about a gentleman’s adventures in quest of a parliamentary seat,[15] as well as met habitually the artist Millais, whom he first knew from George Smith, and who, in the manner already described, was so appreciably to promote the novelist’s advance towards a world-wide popularity. As Prinsep’s guest also, Trollope made another artistic friendship, that with the painter Watts, whom, it will be remembered, he had already seen at Florence. Among Prinsep’s other notable visitors were the reigning beauties of the time, Lady Somers, Miss Virginia Pattle, and the highly endowed daughters of a gallant officer in “John Company’s” army, now only recollected as “Old Blazer.” The same company was sometimes adorned by the great artistic and literary patron of that period, Lord Lansdowne, as well as an anecdotical Nestor of the polite world, who nearly saw the nineteenth century out, Alfred Montgomery. This gentleman humorously claimed, by his conversational reminiscences of cathedral towns, to have given Trollope some hints for his Barchester characters. Montgomery’s social services proved, indeed, scarcely less invaluable than Gregory’s, and opened to Trollope many doors on the higher levels.
At the houses now referred to, he heard all the gossip about the celebrities of the forties: how, notwithstanding his starched austerity in the House, Sir Robert Peel’s social playfulness in private life made him really delightful; how Lord Lincoln was quite the pleasantest of all Peel’s followers; how Lord George Bentinck, though private secretary to Canning, was quite uneducated, and only got into parliament by an accident, to become Tory leader by a fluke. He heard too, how, when not at a race, Lord George attended the House of Commons; how, going down to Westminster from White’s after dinner, he slept soundly all the evening on a back bench; and how, though in 1847 he had resigned over Russell’s Jew Bill, he wished all the Jews back in the Holy Land, because the Tories had become a No Popery and No Jew party. Thus Trollope was a looker-on at the game when, on the Tory side, the players were Lord Granby, as Bentinck’s successor, and Herries, who sportingly admitted that, though Bentinck had given the mount, it was Dizzy’s riding which won the race. Some of Anthony Trollope’s later novels take one to a resort called the Beargarden. In their author’s younger days a haunt that might have appropriately borne that name was the Hanover Rooms on one of their smartest gala nights. For about a century, from 1775 to 1875, these premises were used for concerts and balls, till, at the later of the dates just mentioned, they were utilised as the Hanover Square Club. When W. H. Gregory and Anthony Trollope were youths about town, these rooms were not only fashionable, but fast. In one of the vestibules or passages, the two friends witnessed a noticeable but, as it proved, a somewhat risky feat of strength by the Lord Methuen of the day, performed upon a baronet, who, from his immense estates in the principality, was known—like those who were before and after him in his title—as the King of Wales. Sir Watkin William Wynne weighed some fifteen stone. Methuen, to relieve the dullness of a waiting interval, lifted him by the trousers waist-band, and held him out at full length with one hand, only to drop him when the trousers material gave way.
In the sixties, indeed, few were left who had been fashionable figures in Trollope’s boyhood. Besides Gregory, however, when Trollope took up his eastern counties’ surveyorship, the most notable survivor, in addition to Alfred Montgomery, was Sir Henry Taylor, who had been at the Colonial Office before Trollope went to Ireland as a surveyor’s clerk. He was there still in the year that Trollope re-established himself in an English home at Waltham House. During the early sixties, Sir Henry Taylor’s literary fame and social influence, still at their height, had opened the best houses in England, both to himself and to any person of promise he might take up. No man was ever at any time less on the look out for a patron or an introduction to patrons than Anthony Trollope. Taylor himself owed his official career, as well as much of his commanding place in society, to the great physician of the time, Sir Henry Holland. That medical magnate, having in earlier years befriended Mrs. Trollope, now joined Taylor in advancing the interests of her son. The two had even hoped to secure Trollope’s election to the Athenæum by the committee, some years before that event actually took place—in 1864. Meanwhile, as Milnes’s guest at the Sterling Club, Trollope made intellectual acquaintances as distinguished as any whom he met afterwards at the Athenæum, and heard specimens of the conversation at a meal, which had been the speciality of some famous London sets, but then in the process of dying out. This was the dinner- or breakfast-table talk which, seldom or never becoming general, chiefly assumed the form of a monologue by a single brilliantly gifted performer. S. T. Coleridge in remote times had founded the school, with Sidney Smith for his successor, Macaulay and Carlyle for his subsequent followers. “It was, no doubt,” said Trollope to me, “a good discipline for an impatient and irritable listener, but it never seemed to teach one anything.” It was three years before his Athenæum membership that Thackeray’s good offices introduced Trollope to the Garrick Club, April 5, 1861, and so gave him a recognised place among the professional literary workers of his time.
His connection with this club was fraught with consequences of no small interest in themselves, as well as in their influence upon Trollope’s personal relations with some of his best-known contemporaries. The Athenæum, which some years later was to bear Trollope’s name on its books, had been founded in 1824, and stood upon the Pall Mall site once occupied by Carlton House. Its early, and indeed immediate success, was largely due to the personal efforts of John Wilson Croker, the Rigby of Disraeli’s novels, and the distinguished patronage secured by Croker for the enterprise. The name it now bears did not finally supersede the appellation first suggested, the “Society,” till 1830, when the present building, designed by Decimus Burton, opened to receive the members. The Mæcenas of his age, the great Lord Lansdowne, had deigned to become an original member. He attracted to the place not only some half-dozen of his political contemporaries or juniors in the front rank of politics, such as Sir James Mackintosh, Romilly, Macaulay and Brougham, but also the brightest lights in the firmament of literature or science at Bowood and Lansdowne House, Thomas Moore and Theodore Hook, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday.
Trollope’s earliest club, the Garrick, was the Athenæum’s junior by some seven years. It originated in an idea thrown out at a meeting in Drury Lane Theatre, August 7, 1831. The proposal had no sooner taken definite shape than measures for translating it into existence were pushed promptly forward. By October 15, 1831, several members had been elected, the rules had been drawn up and approved, as well as the general committee appointed. The Duke of Sussex, the foremost, in all intellectual movements, of George III’s sons, had actively associated himself with the project from the first. He figured in the earliest members’ list as patron, and presided over the opening dinner, February 13, 1832, at Probat’s Hotel, 35 King’s Street, Covent Garden. Here the club was housed till, a full generation later, its establishment beneath its present roof in Garrick Street. The Garrick, therefore, known to Trollope during his earlier years in London, was not that at which, rather than at his home in Montagu Square, he found it sometimes convenient, in his later days, to entertain his friends, but the genuine and original “little G,” as Thackeray affectionately used to call it, and as Thackeray’s most devoted disciple, Trollope himself, got into the way of denominating it too.
Before describing his early Garrick associates, let it be recalled what these saw in Trollope himself. At this time, his forty-fifth year, Trollope was passing into a remarkably vigorous middle age. As for the bodily signs of advancing years, which visibly multiplied on him after having completed his first half-century, not a trace was to be found in 1862. Upright and elastic in figure, he showed to special advantage, and seemed some years younger than his age, in the saddle, from which men at the club window occasionally saw him descending, while a groom was in waiting to take his horse home. His voice, sharp, authoritative, inclining to severe always, sometimes peremptory and gruff, had in it the ring of perfect vigour and health, as of body, so of mind and nerve. The official manner, contracted, as has been seen, during the period of his Irish surveyorship, had become a part of the man himself, though it veiled a more than feminine self-consciousness. Trollope’s “abrupt bow-wow” way, as it came to be called, was not merely the personal peculiarity of a well-bred man of the world, but, by all who knew him and his antecedents, was recognised as a note of the social school in which he had been trained quite as much as an attribute of the individual. The good old High Churchmen of the pre-ritualistic period, whether at Winchester, Oxford, in the rectory, or the manor house, distrusted and discouraged the suaviter in modo, because they thought it likely to enervate the fortiter in re.