Such were the earlier among the literary labourers in something like his own path of industry who undoubtedly, as no one saw more clearly than he did himself, acted as the pioneers of Trollope’s particular industry. In what relation did he stand to his own contemporaries? More than any other of these George Eliot disciplined and developed personages in themselves often commonplace, by means of abnormal experiences and exceptionally dramatic situations. Trollope, on the other hand, before the season of his personal intercourse with George Eliot during the early sixties and thereafter, found the familiar conjunctures of everyday life abundantly rich in all the opportunities he needed for the evolution of those characters—daughters, mothers, and sweethearts—to whom his readers had no sooner been introduced than they began to share Trollope’s own love for these, the novelist’s own creations. It was during 1862, the year of his first visit to America, that Trollope first acquainted his readers with feminine types whose display and development required another set of surroundings as well as incidents somewhat outside the common routine. The earliest of the fresh ventures belongs to 1862. The monthly parts in which Orley Farm then appeared, as several of Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels had already been issued, were not the only detail wherein Trollope conformed to the great examples of his time. During the early sixties the popularity of the sensational novel, introduced by Mrs. Henry Wood, was confirmed by Wilkie Collins and was still further increased and extended by Miss Braddon. No one, as will be more fully seen on a later page, mirrored more promptly and faithfully than Trollope the literary tendencies of this time. Always quick to take a hint, Trollope therefore introduced the sensational element into the novel Orley Farm, and, by its successful appeal to interests, which it had not yet fallen within his scope to touch, completely justified the new experiment.
The seeds of the plot for the story now to be considered had been long sown in Anthony Trollope’s mind. He himself partly attributed their promise of fruitfulness to conversations on the subject with his brother Thomas Adolphus. When their father removed his household gods from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald he became, it may be remembered, successively the occupant of two houses. The first, a convenient and even handsome building, had been raised by himself under the name of Julians. The second roof that sheltered him and his family was a farmhouse he had found standing on the ground he rented. This formed the original of the structure in which Trollope laid the scene of a novel that had engaged him earlier than his Cornhill stories. Some of the most stirring incidents in Orley Farm grow out of events which took place several years before the opening of the narrative.
The Johnsons were a family that had done well in the hardware business. They had, indeed, almost attained the dignity of county standing. Suddenly they fell upon evil times. As a result, Mr. Johnson’s name appeared in The Gazette. He had, however, one valuable asset in the person of his handsome daughter Mary. This young lady’s calm and dignified beauty eventually attracted, among her father’s north-country acquaintances, old Sir Joseph Mason, a desolate widower of Groby Park, Yorkshire, whose ambition it had always been to become the founder of a territorial line. His three daughters had all married well; each of them, together with their husbands, shared their father’s social aspirations. Such were some of the ready-made relatives by whom Mary Johnson, on giving her hand in marriage to Sir Joseph Mason, was to find herself surrounded. Though Sir Joseph Mason’s chief estate and principal country house lay to the north of the Trent, his favourite residence had long been the modest building in one of the home counties known as Orley Farm situated between twenty and thirty miles from London. At the time of his settlement at Orley Farm, Sir Joseph Mason’s son and heir by his first marriage, Joseph Mason junior, had almost reached the age of forty, when, to his chagrin and his nearest kith and kin’s disgust, his father’s second marriage bore fruit in the birth of a brother, Lucius Mason. The undoubted inheritor of the chief Mason property, Groby Park, Joseph Mason had always counted on possessing, on his father’s death, Orley Farm as well. When, however, old Sir Joseph’s will came to be read, it disclosed a codicil bequeathing Orley Farm to his infant son, Lucius. Another testamentary disposition equally unexpected was that of £2000 to Miriam Usbech, the daughter of that attorney, Jonathan Usbech, employed by Sir Joseph Mason to draft the Will with the codicil, round which the interest of the story centres. The provisions of that document, contested by the eldest son, had formed the subject of an action which he brought against Lady Mason before the novel begins. That had been decided in Lady Mason’s favour. The curtain thus rises on the late Sir Joseph’s eldest son, baffled by his step-mother in the effort legally to assert his ownership of the entire Mason property, and, by this failure, more keenly even than his sisters embittered against her. His half-brother, Lucius, now between twenty and twenty-five, having finished his education in a German university, has brought home with him scientific ideas of farming, and of land improvement generally, which are greatly to increase the value of the Orley Farm, whose master, on attaining his majority, he became. Meanwhile his half-brother, settled at the Yorkshire headquarters of the family, Groby, has held no intercourse with him. Sir Joseph Mason’s two sons have indeed always been strangers to each other.
By this time also, Miriam Usbech, a beneficiary, as has been already mentioned, under Sir Joseph’s Will to the extent of £2000, has become the wife of a local solicitor, Dockwrath, whose practice lies near Orley Farm. This man had received from Lady Mason, during the minority of her son Lucius, a grant of land on the understanding that it should remain in his hands until it might be wanted by her son, as possessor of the farm. Lucius has no sooner arrived at his majority than the contingency thus forecast is realised. The ground in question has become, he finds, essential for the improvement he is bent on introducing into the estate. Dockwrath, therefore, has, in the earlier chapters of the book, conceived a grudge against Lucius Mason, as well as a strong suspicion of his mother. A search among the papers of his father-in-law, Jonathan Usbech, discloses the fact that the alleged witnesses to old Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of a codicil devising Orley Farm to Lucius must, on the same day, have witnessed also the execution of another legal instrument. That strikes Dockwrath as, to say the least of it, odd; he therefore hunts up these witnesses and puts to them the question: Did they, on the date of certifying Sir Joseph Mason’s signature of the codicil, certify also in a like capacity his signature of the other paper? So far from thinking she did anything of the sort, the interrogated witness felt quite certain that she had only seen Sir Joseph writing his name once.
The results of this inquiry are communicated by Dockwrath to the master of Groby Park, who forthwith commences a second suit against his step-mother on the charge of perjury committed at the first trial. At this point begins the real action of the novel under conditions so sombre, and in an atmosphere loaded so depressingly with a sense of coming evil, that considerations of art and nature imperatively demand some relief. This lighter element is supplied by expedients resembling those which, for a similar purpose, were adopted so skilfully in Trollope’s first book, The Macdermots. The humorous passages, now following in brisk and varied succession, without actually advancing the movement of the story are no mere excrescences upon it. They give life and reality to the figures in the central episode, and in their place are perfectly natural as being Dockwrath’s experiences on his momentous journey to Groby Park. Their drollery relaxes the nerve tension at a painful point, but deepens, by the force of contrast, the dark presentiment of the tragic catastrophe to which the freakish fun of the commercial-room visited by Dockwrath forms a comic prelude. Humorous criticism or witty dialogue, seasoned with incisive repartee, was not Trollope’s strongest point. He is, however, seen at his best in these laughter-moving descriptions of bagmen’s buffoonery or in the sketches of platitude-mongering vulgarity, which his fresh and vigorous seizure of slight personal distinctions redeems from commonplace.
Samuel Dockwrath was a little man with sandy hair, a pale face, and stone-blue eyes. Those who knew Anthony Trollope in the flesh saw in him one who, at his prime, had stood some six feet in his socks, with the other parts of his person on a corresponding scale. It was not, however, his goodly proportions of body that so much impressed the judicious observer as the penetrating fire of the quick blue eyes. This was intensified rather than concealed by the large, heavy spectacles which so entirely remedied any natural infirmity of vision that, after he had taken to wearing them, his eyes never missed a single characteristic feature of his fellow-creatures, or failed accurately and at once to stamp the impression they received on the retentive brain. Those were the eyes that had themselves seen on his Post Office doors—for the most part those in England—each one of Dockwrath’s companions in the commercial-room of the Bull Inn at Leeds. Dickens himself, unsurpassed in sketching the humours of the road as well as the outer and inner life of its travellers’ houses of call, paid Trollope a special compliment on the rapid successions of life-like touches with which he draws a contrast between the arrival at an inn of regular habitués and strangers—the former loud, jocular, assured, or, in case of deficient accommodation, loud, angry, and full of threats; the strangers shy, diffident, doubtful, anxious to propitiate the chambermaid by great courtesy. To the latter belonged Dockwrath. To the former belonged another arrival by the same train, called Moulder, whose salutation to the girl at the bar, “Well, Mary, my dear, what’s the time of day with you?” is met with the reply, “Time to look alive and keep moving.” This has been introduced by a living picture of Dockwrath’s effort to make himself as much at home as the freest and easiest frequenters of the place by calling for a pair of public slippers, while solacing himself with a glass of mahogany-coloured brandy and water and a cigar. Here end the comic preliminaries.
The tragic realities that have brought Dockwrath from London to Yorkshire are opened by the solicitor’s call on Joseph Mason at Groby Park. The £2000, it must be remembered, which old Sir Joseph had left to Dockwrath’s wife were devised to her in the codicil that it is the real object of Dockwrath’s interview with Lady Mason’s stepson to upset. Ostensibly, therefore, as Dockwrath reminds the squire of Groby, the solicitor’s own interest lies in maintaining, not invalidating the supplementary bequests. Duty, however, has first claim upon the man of law, who begins his conversation by hinting that Joseph Mason’s representatives, Round and Crook, have been slack in guarding their clients’ interest. Will not Mr. Dockwrath, Mr. Mason suggests, see Round and Crook themselves, and so save time and trouble by imparting to them his tale of misgivings and suspicions? No, Dockwrath will do nothing of the sort. His message is for Joseph Mason alone. Then comes the decisive conversation in which Dockwrath’s shrewdness tells him that his cue is only to begin with piquing Mason’s curiosity and emphasising by a significant reserve the imputations against his stepmother. At last, he sees reason to fear he may be irritating and offending rather than interesting the squire of Groby by his prolix exordium. He therefore concentrates all his damning suggestions into the one word, forgery. Even this only elicits from Joseph Mason the remark: “I always felt sure my father never intended to sign such a codicil as that.” The question about the line of action to be now taken is the more difficult because the children of Sir Joseph Mason’s first marriage have already disputed the will with the result that a Court of Justice has given its award in Lady Mason’s favour. Before deciding on further litigation, Joseph Mason must consult his men of business in London. Meanwhile, what is likely to be said by the undoubted witnesses to the will and the alleged witnesses to the codicil—did they or did they not upon the same day attest the signatures to separate documents?
When the conference arranged between Mason and Dockwrath takes place, Bridget Bolster, who is known to have been a witness to the Will, and alleged to have witnessed also a codicil, in an interview with Messrs. Round and Crook has most positively declared her certainty that she never attested more than one document on the same day. Still, Messrs. Round and Crook are against prosecuting Lady Mason. Joseph Mason’s emphatic rejoinder, “I will never drop the prosecution,” encourages for a moment Dockwrath’s hope of getting the business. On that point Mason is as obstinate as on the other. The case, therefore, goes forward under the London attorney’s management. Trollope justly prided himself on the accuracy with which, thanks to the experts he consulted, are presented the legal details in the trial and in all the business connected with it. The entire episode is, like the characters that figure in it, a piece of skilfully contrived realism. The Old Bailey barrister, Chaffanbrass, who rises to his work so meekly, smiling gently while he fidgets about with his papers as though he were not at first quite master of the situation; Sir Richard Leatherham, the Solicitor-General and the leading counsel for the prosecution, are none of them full-length sketches from life. Each is a composite of many originals. Nor is there a single member of the group who does not recall, by some trick of manner, of voice, or by some other distinctive peculiarity, the qualities of advocates well known in the era during which Cairns, Coleridge, and Ballantine were in the full flush of their forensic fame.
Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, notoriously found his model for Darnay’s counsel, Stryver, in Edwin James. Of James I can recall Trollope’s remark: “I had scarcely ever seen him, out of court or in it, but I have been told he had Chaffanbrass’s habit of constantly arranging and re-arranging his wig, and of sometimes, for effect, dropping his voice so low that it could scarcely be heard.” The other court scenes form a little series of artistically disposed photographs. More skilful even than these clever descriptions is the manner in which a few simple and well-chosen words, remarkable for their power, less of expression than suggestion, bring Lady Mason’s anguish and agony home to the reader as vividly as could be done by any minute and harrowing details of her countenance and carriage. Even so, the suspense caused by these Acts in the drama called for mitigation by Trollope’s favourite device of entertaining interlude. The by-play of the under-plot now introduced shows throughout the true mastery of his art here reached by Trollope.
Lady Mason’s good looks, noble bearing, and painful position, have deeply interested her leading counsel, Furnival, her acquaintance in society long before he became her advocate in Court. Hence, the one deviation from exact verisimilitude in this part of the book. The commencement of the proceedings finds Lady Mason without a solicitor of her own, and anxious above all things to dispense with one. After the service of the writ upon her, she consults her admiring neighbour, the chivalrous Sir Peregrine Orme, who naturally pronounces the solicitor a necessary evil. To that, her objection still remains. Assured that she has a warm friend in Furnival, a barrister of high repute, she visits him at his chambers, Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. On his advice she places her affairs in the hands of a solicitor he recommends, Solomon Aram, as the cleverest criminal solicitor known to Furnival. Meanwhile, the presence at her husband’s business rooms of so attractive a client excites Mrs. Furnival’s suspicions in such a degree that a series of domestic scenes is only closed by the lady leaving the family roof in Harley Street. The immediate sequel is given with Trollope’s happiest humour. The housekeeper predicts misery for the barrister if his wife remains inexorable, but is at once told by the butler that their master would live twice as jolly without her, and that it would only be “the first rumpus of the thing.” Is it not, reflectively asks the novelist, the fear of the “first rumpus” which keeps together many a couple. Even the special and manifest pains taken with them do not, as Trollope himself felt, entirely redeem the trial chapter from the charge of anti-climax.