At Beverley Trollope had no person of commanding authority to speak for him at all; unlike Thackeray, he was not a member of the Reform. The managers at the Liberal headquarters gave him his first introduction to the place, where he found himself at least as well received as he could have expected. Some ten or fifteen years later the thought and reading involved in the preparation of his political stories and his Lord Palmerston (1882) had more or less familiarised him with the temper, the issues, and the personages of public controversy. It was without any of even that preparation that he began to canvass the Minster town of the East Riding. Can You Forgive Her? indeed (1864), like Rachel Ray of the same period, had contained passages casually mentioning rather than attempting to describe the war of parties at Westminster, or the appeals of the rival chiefs to the country. At the General Election, therefore, that made Gladstone for the first time Prime Minister, and brought our novelist as his supporter, Trollope knew little more of politics than average newspaper readers and a good deal less than the newspaper writers.
By his failure at Oxford in 1857, Thackeray, according to Trollope, was saved from a situation in which he could not have shone. Probably the same thing might have been said eleven years later of Trollope himself after the Beverley misadventure of 1868. As parliamentary candidates both men, indeed, belonged to the same description. Proud of being English gentlemen first and popular writers afterwards, they looked, in Trollope’s own words, upon a place at St. Stephen’s as the birthright of a well-born, well-bred, and well-to-do Briton.[25] Like others of the social order with which they identified themselves, their Westminster ambitions implied no more idea of being useful than does entrance into any first-class club. The real and serious difference between the two candidatures was this. At Oxford Charles Neate had long been watching for a vacancy which might suit Thackeray; the single reason that took Trollope to Beverley was its allotment to him in return for a contribution to the Liberal election fund. Beverley then possessed two members. The Conservative candidates were stronger than any likely to be found on the other side. Sir Henry Edwards had not only held the borough for the Conservatives before coming into the baronetcy, but afterwards had contributed to its institutions of all kinds so munificently as almost to have made its representation his own and his friends’ appanage. He had now chosen for his colleague Captain Kennard, who had already secured a good start of Trollope, and had spared neither labour nor money in locally ingratiating himself. On the other hand, Trollope soon made many friends who, in some cases, already knew his writings and were gratified to find in their author a gentleman with every mark of good breeding, as well as a shrewd, genial, and often delightful companion.
Trollope’s comrade in the fight, then Marmaduke Maxwell of Everingham, became subsequently Lord Herries and the Duke of Norfolk’s father-in-law; for him Trollope had all the personal charm which he had long found in his writings. The two representatives of Liberalism were thus well assorted, and each in his own way did yeoman service to the other. From his father, however, Trollope inherited an irritable intolerance of fools and bores; he found several of both among his Beverley friends. The business of electioneering degenerated into drudgery before it was half done. The hunting season was in full swing; Trollope felt that he should go out of his mind in disgust if he missed a few days off with the hounds. The recreation was not indeed enjoyed at the cost of the seat, because the Conservative success could never have been for a moment in doubt. It did, however, make the novelist play a worse second to Maxwell and so leave him even further behind the two Tory victors than might otherwise have been the case. Though Trollope fell short of success at Beverley, the invitation of his local friends to try again and the pressure of official Liberalism not to withdraw his name from the candidates’ list are enough to show that his failure had its redeeming points. His Post Office experience and his power, improved by the practice, of getting up and expressing himself on any subject would have helped him to make at least a respectable figure had he ever been returned. As a speaker, he not only exemplified his own counsel, already quoted, to those ambitious of addressing parliament, but he delighted without exception, and on both sides, his Beverley audiences by the sonorous delivery of virile periods, clothing in clear and terse phrase thoughts that were the condensed essence of practical wisdom and shrewd insight.
A few years after the election I happened to be visiting, at Brantingham Thorp, Mr. Christopher Sykes. He had himself between 1865 and 1868 filled the seat contested by Trollope in the latter year. Beverley lay within an easy drive. In my host’s old constituency there still flourished the local gentlemen who had vigorously worked with head, heart, and hand for Trollope. They included Mr. Charles Langdale, Mr. Alfred Crosskill, Mr. Daniel Bayes, Mr. Hawkshaw, the famous civil engineer—a connection by marriage of the great Josiah Wedgwood—Mr. Charles Elwell, and Mr. F. Hall of The Yorkshire Post, the oldest member of that newspaper’s staff, which indeed, before the journal actually started, he did much to get together. Both these last-named gentlemen, still, I am happy to know, alive and well, have themselves supplied me with some details and put me in the way of getting others. These authorities have made me independent of my own memory and even Trollope’s own reminiscences in the matter.
The county families of course threw their influence into the scale of Trollope’s Conservative opponent. The balance of speaking talent was undoubtedly on Trollope’s side; on the platform he derived his chief assistance from Mr. James Stewart, of Hull, from Colonel Hodgson, a very large employer of Beverley labour, and especially from Mr. William Carey Upton, a Baptist minister. During the struggle, the Conservatives paid our novelist a compliment he much appreciated by undertaking on their side to withdraw Kennard, if their opponents would scratch Trollope. This would have meant Sir Henry Edward’s and Mr. Marmaduke Maxwell’s uncontested return. The official Liberals might have accepted the suggestion, but the working men, deeply impressed by Trollope’s unconventional treatment of familiar subjects and the sense of intellectual power of all he said, would not for a moment hear of it, and this though Trollope almost ostentatiously failed to do himself and his supporters justice.
His sportsmanship formed a real point in his favour, for the Beverley electors, like other Yorkshiremen, love a horse, and are instinctively attracted to a bold rider to hounds. Trollope therefore did himself no harm by letting the householders see him in his top boots and pink riding through the streets on the way to a famous meet. His mistake was the selection for sport of a time at which his committee were working for him night and day, and his own presence could ill be dispensed with at public meetings or private conclaves. Liberalism’s association with Home Rule placed Trollope, in his later years, among the Conservatives. Had they enlisted his distinction, ability, and energy on their side at the first dissolution after the Derby-Disraeli Household Franchise Bill, he would undoubtedly have been found Sir Henry Edward’s colleague on the declaration of the poll. But in 1868 the Conservative educators, by their discovery of the Conservative working man, rode on a wave of popularity, rising in many places to enthusiasm. As for the “another attempt” mentioned by Trollope to his Beverley friends, that was never to be made, because, before the next general election, Beverley had lost its independent political existence, less, however, in consequence of its political corruption than by reason of certain municipal irregularities. As the judges who disfranchised the place themselves said, it was the “double event” which secured the political extinction of the place. “I did not,” was Trollope’s characteristic comment on the whole affair, “get in, yet I was in at the death; for the effort of my defeat involved Beverley’s own parliamentary demise, under circumstances less tantalising than those of our friend Kinglake’s parliamentary extinction; for, unlike me, he got in only to be kicked out, while I at least had the satisfaction of seeing those who had walked over me faring worse than myself, inasmuch as they not only lost their seats but their money too.”[26]
Every incident, personage, or issue connected with Trollope’s electioneering errand to Yorkshire was, after his usual fashion, turned into “copy.” The novel thus inspired did not appear till 1871. It forms a well-written record of its author’s personal partialities or prejudices during the adventure already described. More than any of his books belonging to this period, it recalls, by the loaded colour of its lampoons and the unwonted bitterness of its satire, his mother’s way of dealing with the persons and things she had found disagreeable. For the rest, the humorous notes, whether in the way of local description or personal caricature, have, more frequently than is found in any other novel, a Dickensian ring. If occasionally laboured, as well as, for the most part, not below the average in writing, it is as regards plot almost as complicated and confusing as those parts of the Scriptural narrative dealing with the kings of Israel and Judah called by the same name. Not less baffling than to the Biblical student the rival Jehorams and Ahaziahs, are, in Ralph the Heir, the two prominent personages named Ralph Newton. The story unfolds itself on these lines: Old Squire Newton of Newton Priory, a rich country gentleman, has only one child, Ralph, an illegitimate son, on whom all his love and hopes are fixed. His estates, however, are entailed on his nephew, another Ralph Newton, distinguished from his namesake as Ralph the Heir. This young man, a spendthrift, equally weak and handsome, is universally admitted to be the best fellow in the world. His only enemy is the uncle whom the law compels to leave him the estate. His chief friend, formerly his guardian, is Sir Thomas Underwood—a former Solicitor-General—a widower living at Popham Villa, Fulham, with his two daughters. To this household is presently added a niece, Mary Bonner, from abroad. Ralph the Heir, now more than usually in debt, has his heaviest creditor in Neefit the tailor, whose hunting breeches—his speciality—are of world-wide fame.
Some critics have scented in Trollope’s Neefit a likeness to the Mr. Bond Sharp of Disraeli’s Henrietta Temple. The resemblance, however, is but imaginary, because Mr. Bond Sharp, though professionally a maker of clothes, is the idealised usurer of Disraeli and romance, while Neefit has nothing to do with professional money-lending, and only supplies Ralph with cash in the character of his future son-in-law, the husband-elect of his daughter and heiress, Polly. Hence his indignation when Ralph backs out of the match, although the would-be father-in-law gets his money back with interest, for the tailor’s daughter is not the only matrimonial string to his bow. Reflection and delay increase Ralph the Heir’s objection to entire pecuniary dependence on the tailor’s daughter and heiress as his wife. He has hit upon what may prove a more excellent way. True, his uncle, the present owner and occupant of Newton Priory, is strong and well enough to have many years of life before him. Still, some day, in the course of nature, the place must be Ralph’s. It’s money worth could never be such an object to him as now, when he knows not where to turn for funds. Why not, therefore, exhaust every possible means for converting his reversionary interest into ready cash. Rather than sell himself to father-in-law Neefit, with Polly for his bride, why not sell outright to his uncle for a good round sum, say £50,000, his Newton rights? Horace’s Ulysses, rent by the Circean and Penelopeian rivalries, and Captain MacHeath, divided betwixt Polly and Lucy, personify the failing of indecision as familiarly as Buridan’s ass itself. Both are almost outdone by the average Trollopian youth or maiden’s perplexity in the final selection of a lover from three or four candidates for the place. Most pre-eminently is Ralph the Heir, Ralph the wobbler. Having loved or talked about loving Polly Neefit, and ridden away, he goes through the farcical process of giving what he is pleased to call his heart first to Clarissa Underwood, next to Mary Bonner, and then to Clarissa again. At this point, however, that young lady has something to say, with the result of finding that not Ralph the Heir, but his younger brother, the Rev. Gregory Newton, is the right man for her husband. At the same time Mary Bonner similarly gives his congé to Ralph the Heir, and her hand to Ralph who is not the Heir.
“He that will not when he may,
When he will he shall have nay.”
So it had befallen one of Trollope’s Three Clerks who loved the barmaid. So it was now to befall Ralph the Heir.