Round this main episode is clustered another series of events, connecting the vicar with his parish. These furnish some of the best scenes in the book as well as serve to introduce the same kind of melodramatic element, first noticeable in Dr. Thorne, afterwards receiving greater prominence in Orley Farm. Thus did Trollope practically acknowledge the influence upon the novel-reading public now firmly exercised by experts in sensational effects like Mrs. Henry Wood, Wilkie Collins, and Miss Braddon. Among the Bullhampton vicar’s parishioners are an unbending old miller, his daughter Carry, who has gone wrong, and his ne’er-do-well son, Sam Brattle, now under suspicion for a murder committed in the village. The Brattles are therefore an undesirable family. So thinks the Marquis of Trowbridge, the landlord of the murdered man. They happen to be tenants of Gilmore, who, meeting one day at the vicarage Lord Trowbridge, is asked point blank to clear his property of them. Here the vicar himself intervenes, turning on the Marquis with sharp words for his uncharitable and inexcusable demand. Lord Trowbridge, a pompous brainless peer, puffed up with the sense of his extreme importance, is for the moment too much overwhelmed by the parson’s audacity to say anything.
Presently, however, his feeling of offended dignity takes practical shape and prepares vengeance in giving a plot of ground, exactly opposite the parsonage gates, as the site for a Primitive Methodist Chapel, to the local minister of that sect, one Puddleham. This territorial donation soon proves to be not Trowbridge property at all. As a part of the glebe land it is at the vicar’s exclusive disposal. The Marquis, therefore, now suffers the further mortification of being compelled to make a full apology to Fenwick for the infringement of his rights, as well as to pull down so much of the chapel as has been already built. All of this conclusively proves, to Trollope’s naïvely undisguised satisfaction, that Providence is on the side of the State Church. The sooner, therefore, Defoe’s The Shortest Way with the Dissenters is literally adopted, the better for the peace, purity, and morals of the community. The same retributive poetical justice that deals so sharply with the Puddlehamites, with all poachers on the establishment’s preserves, and with their patron who wears the Trowbridge title, now befriends the Brattles. Sam turns out to be innocent; poor Carry, if she cannot regain her innocence, displays qualities which at least secure sympathy, and is prevented from falling over the rock of ruin to the lowest depth of degradation. The sturdy, hot-tempered old atheist, her father does not recant his theological heresies, but at least compares favourably with an evangelical Nonconformist.
Q.E.D. The favourable reception in store for the book is to be explained by other circumstances than the skill in the novelist’s technique running through its successive parts and the humour generally redeeming it from dullness. Low Churchmanship was becoming unpopular. Readers of the mid-Victorian epoch saw telling hits and lifelike portraits in what may to-day seem not much removed above the level of caricature. At the time, therefore, Rachel Ray won, not only a popular, but a literary success. The welcome given generally to it by the reviewers formed as great a compliment as Trollope had yet received from the Press. Among the religious papers, indeed, The Guardian and The English Churchman left Rachel Ray and its companion stories severely alone, The Times reviewer, however, recognised in it a new proof of Trollope’s insight into human nature and a fresh justification of the immense favour enjoyed by him with the most intelligent class of novel readers. “A delightful tale,” enthusiastically exclaims this critic, placing its author with Defoe and Richardson. “If,” it was added, “Trollope, like Defoe, has little imagination, what he possesses is so clear that we do not feel the want of suggestion; while his detailed knowledge of conventional custom is unsurpassed by the author of Clarissa.”
“O happy art of fiction,” gushes this enthusiast, “which can thus adjust the balance of fortune, raising the humble and weak to an equality in our hearts with the proud and great!” The eulogistic note thus sounded by the Choragus of the daily Press was at once taken up, prolonged, and swelled in the weekly journals. To The Athenæum, Rachel Ray seemed a book sure to do more than any critical protests to correct existing vices of public taste. The women of the tale were admirable, being treated with skill which must surprise even those to whom the author’s strength is most familiar. To The Spectator, Rachel Ray demonstrated that, as a censor, Trollope had gifts far above sarcasm, and that he had made good his place between Thackeray the satirist and Dickens the caricaturist. The Spectator subsequently hedges by admitting that the author of Rachel Ray leant rather in the direction of Dickens than of Thackeray, and that his powers fitted him less for satire than for caricature. The Saturday Review closed an outburst of panegyric with a declaration that Trollope’s tact, discretion, and gentlemanly taste, combined with his literary power and his faculty of devising imaginary characters, made him eminently successful in describing the inner life of young women.
The Saturday alone, in the Press, weekly as well as daily, noticed the attacks on evangelicalism as follows: “Mr. Prong is not an unfair representation of the lower clerical order in provincial towns; but the accuracy of the portrait does not make it a pleasant study, the foolish language, the pert fanaticism and the petty tricks of the worst evangelical class are not agreeable reading. Whatever of comic there is in them is soon exhausted unless the author glaringly exaggerates every symptom to spice his description.” The compliments forthcoming by the famous weekly then under Douglas Cook’s absolute editorial control, but owned by Beresford Hope and generally reflecting its proprietor’s antipathies to all forms and expression of faith not distinctly Anglo-Catholic, admit of another explanation than its natural benediction on the religious portraits drawn by a writer who was then so much in its own way of thinking as Trollope. In 1864 Anthony Trollope’s North America had received such sharp treatment in The Saturday Review that his friends, G. H. Lewes and the famous lady bearing his name, were concerned to find some way of counteracting what they called the nasty notice. Eventually, some time later, Lewes himself did justice to Trollope’s transatlantic experiences in The Fortnightly Review.
Before that he had succeeded in influencing an important section of the political Press in Trollope’s favour. Trollope’s next experiment in fiction, as well as certain events in his life connected with it, will form the subject of the next chapter.
CHAPTER XIII
PEN AND PLATFORM POLITICS
Failures of literary men in the political world at the beginning of the nineteenth century—Trollope increases the number by going under at Beverley—“Not in, but in at the death”—Ralph the Heir—Its plots and politics—Trollope as editor of The St. Paul’s Magazine—Phineas Finn—Some remarks on Trollope’s Palmerston—In the heart of political society—The hero’s flirtations and fights in London—His final return to the old home and friends—Phineas Redux—Again in London—Charged with murder—Madame Goesler’s double triumph—Some probable caricatures—Trollope renews acquaintance with Planty Pal and his wife in The Prime Minister—The close of the political series comes with The Duke’s Children.
“ANTHONY’S ambition to become a candidate for Beverley is inscrutable to me. Still, it is the ambition of many men, and the honester the man who entertains it, the better for us, I suppose.” So wrote Charles Dickens to Thomas Adolphus Trollope in the December of 1868. Exactly twenty-seven years before that date, the literary pre-eminence of Dickens, together with his championship, with pen and on platform, of social and administrative reform had, in 1841, brought the author of Oliver Twist the offer of a seat for Reading. During the pre-Victorian age the future Lord Beaconsfield’s adventures in search of a constituency had begun in 1832, some five years after the completion of Vivian Grey. Disraeli’s contemporary in letters, and so a novelist older in point of years and fame than Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton came before the electors of St. Ives as the writer of Pelham, not to mention a novel and the prose or poetical miscellanies which had preceded it. Sixteen years after Dickens declined standing for the Berkshire capital, Thackeray (1857) unsuccessfully contested the city of Oxford. The political tradition had therefore been sufficiently confirmed and adorned by the leading fellow-craftsmen in his art by 1868. This was the year in which, at the General Election, Trollope tried his chance at Beverley. The illustrious precedents thus followed by him, though numerous, were not altogether encouraging. Benjamin Disraeli himself, in 1837, had owed his success at Maidstone not to his brilliant romance, or even to his effective Runnymede Letters and telling pamphlets, but to his adoption by the sitting member, Wyndham Lewis, who held the place in his pocket.
At that date the popular tide had begun decidedly to turn against the Whigs. Even the famous and eloquent man of letters, then worth many votes to the Whigs on a division, T. B. Macaulay, had owed the opportunity of his memorable displays in defence of the Grey Reform Bill to his having been brought into the House by Lord Lansdowne for the family borough of Calne. Macaulay’s partner in the primacy of English letters, W. M. Thackeray, did not, in 1857, make much of a fight against Cardwell at Oxford. Yet in that contest Thackeray had enjoyed advantages entirely denied Trollope at Beverley. In the first place, Thackeray, as a member, of whom naturally it was proud, had the influence of the Reform Club at his back. Further, he had originally presented himself to the Oxford electors at the suggestion of a universally as well as an altogether exceptionally popular resident, Charles Neate, a Fellow of Oriel; with him Thackeray had long lived in affectionate intimacy. Under Neate’s personal guidance, and with him for prompter as well as introducer, the novelist canvassed the place and spoke from the hustings. Neate too, though unseated on petition, had carried the seat against Cardwell during the previous March. His own reputation was therefore concerned in seeing that his recently vanquished rival did not retrieve his discomfiture. Nevertheless, on the declaration of the poll, July 21 (1857), the author of Vanity Fair was shown not only to have lost the day, but to have failed in favourably impressing any large body of the electors. “It is,” was Thackeray’s comment, “what I expected, and I take it as the British schoolboy takes his floggings, sullenly and in silence.” He had indeed scarcely reached his constituency before writing to Dickens. “Not more than 4 per cent of the people here, I have found out, have ever heard of my writings. Perhaps as many as 6 per cent know yours, so it will be a great help to me if you will come and speak for me.”