During their founder’s and original editor’s life, Trollope wrote for none of Dickens’ magazines. After 1870 All the Year Round was carried on by Charles Dickens the second; his very capable manager G. Holsworth urged him to secure a novel from Trollope. This was written and published; and Mr. Scarborough’s Family[36] was the most deliberately and elaborately satirical of all Trollope’s stories. Mr. Scarborough has conceived and nursed, till it becomes something like a monomania, a detestation of legal restrictions generally and of those imposed by the law of entail in particular. He has therefore, with an ingenuity which highly delights him, contrived his own independence of primogeniture by going through two marriage ceremonies with the mother of his eldest son. One of these rites has been celebrated before that son’s birth, and one after. There are also of course two marriage certificates, each relating to the same nuptials, but each bearing a different date.
According therefore to the document he displays, he can at will prove his eldest son legitimate or illegitimate. This son, Mountjoy, a reckless but amiable spendthrift, has a heartless, calculating and mercenary younger brother, Augustus. Mountjoy, by post-obits and things of that sort, has pledged the paternal property to the Jews. At any cost Scarborough resolves that his fine estate, Tretton Park, shall be kept from the money-lenders. He therefore declares Mountjoy a bastard, and so disqualifies him for inheriting. Thus the younger of the two brothers, Augustus, feels no doubt of soon possessing the acres that, but for the blot on his scutcheon, would have gone to Mountjoy. Meanwhile Mr. Scarborough says nothing, but buys up all Mountjoy’s apparently valueless post-obits. He thus, at comparatively slight expense, gives his alleged natural son a pecuniarily clean slate.
This done he dashes to the ground the hopes of his younger son Augustus by suddenly displaying his first marriage certificate as proof of Mountjoy’s birth in wedlock. Having thus tricked successively all whom it suited his humour to deceive, Mr. Scarborough has no more to do than quietly breathe his last.
The irony and Mephistophelian fun of the story are not confined to the situations now described, but overflow very effectively into the amusingly drawn scenes with the duped and furious money-lenders.
The life at Waltham Cross had been more that of an Essex squire with sporting tastes than of a hard-working author or a busy official. It was an existence whose charm, as years went on, Trollope found himself bent on tasting once more. While casting about for a suitable place, he heard of what seemed as near perfection as possible, in West Sussex. North End, or, as it is to-day known, The Grange, lies in Harting parish, some twelve miles from Chichester and four from Petersfield. At one time two farmhouses, but now joined together, it is among the best and prettiest buildings in the district. Surrounded by an estate of nearly seventy acres, its long line of windows and doors opens on a delightful lawn, with a background of copse, studded with Scotch firs and larches. Under these a long walk, worthy of Windsor or Kensington, starting from the garden gate, leads through fields up to a South Down hill. On the lawn itself might have been seen, even since Trollope’s day, at one end, the greenhouse, whose flowers he used to tend. Nor were his North End days passed less industriously than those in Montagu Square, where he had pitched his tent on his return from Australia. His hours were, nominally, almost the same as in the strenuous days when he first cultivated the habit of very early rising, so as to get through the daily task of authorship before being due either at Post Office inspection or a meet of hounds, as the case may be. A cup of hot coffee and milk carried him on till a solid breakfast at about nine; when he sat down to that meal the day’s literary labours had generally been altogether finished.
Only some time after leaving the Post Office, in 1868, did he extensively use dictation for his novels. Good fortune gave him, while still at Montagu Square, for his amanuensis a niece, Miss Bland. Apropos of her sympathetic co-operation, he once said to me: “However early the hour, however dull and depressing the dawn, we soon warm to our work and get so excited with those we are writing about, that I don’t know whether she or I are most surprised when the time comes to leave off for breakfast.”
Trollope seemed in excellent health on settling at North End, Harting, as well as throughout his stay there. But gradually he left his bed later than formerly, and often reduced the number of words forming the diurnal task. Together with this he increased his local hospitalities, as well as enlarged his active interest in all parish concerns whether of business or pleasure. Penny Readings were in those days still popular. Trollope not only patronised and assisted at them, but delighted his rural neighbours by securing on the platform, or in the body of the room, some of his well-known London visitors, notably Sir Henry James and J. E. Millais; while the picturesque surroundings of his Sussex home inspired another guest, the Poet Laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin, with one among the most charming of his later works, The Garden that I Love. Not once during his stay at Harting did Trollope see the Goodwood or Hambledon foxhounds “throw off”; and he did not spend more time in the saddle on the South Downs than he would have done during his equestrian constitutionals in Hyde Park.
Ireland first had, in 1847, made Anthony Trollope a novelist. His pen was being exercised on an Irish subject when death took it from his fingers. Before, however, beginning The Land Leaguers, he had, in 1879, published a short story, An Eye for an Eye, whose scene is laid in county Clare.
Mrs. O’Hara’s life had been ruined by a marriage with a drunken and cruel husband, from whom she has fled. To avoid him, she lives with her daughter Kate in an obscure corner of the Clare coast. To the barracks at the neighbouring town, Ennis, comes Fred Neville, heir to the Scroope earldom, a handsome, charming, morally weak, but altogether irresistible scamp. His acquaintance with Kate leads to an engagement, the declared prelude of an early marriage. Neville’s English relatives succeed in preventing this, but not before Kate’s personal surrender to her lover. The hateful husband now renews his persecutions of the lady who has the misfortune to be his wife. Mrs. O’Hara, maddened by these fresh troubles and by her daughter’s ruin, contrives with her own hand Neville’s fatal fall over a cliff. After this Kate goes abroad to take care of her father, now a broken invalid. Mrs. O’Hara loses her wits and passes the rest of her days in a mad-house. This unpleasant and painful story has no other interest than that of mere horror. It is as depressing and sombre as The Kellys and the O’Kellys without any of the humorous sidelights which in parts relieve the earlier work.
The other Irish novel was written almost concurrently with a very slight sketch, An Old Man’s Love—his last completed story—a year after The Land Leaguers. The writing of The Land Leaguers had been prepared for by his final stay, during some weeks, on the other side of St. George’s Channel, in the spring of 1882. To that period belongs his decisive separation from Gladstonian Liberalism. His warm friendship with W. E. Forster had made him reluctant to leave the Liberals even after he had begun to distrust their policy; but during his stay on the other side of St. George’s Channel in the spring of 1882, he had penetrated the artificial, purely American, and Anti-British origin of Irish Nationalism. The professional agitation-monger against the British connection, as described in The Land Leaguers, was a Yankee, perhaps with some Hibernian strain in his blood, but, from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear, equally ignorant of and indifferent to the welfare and the wants of the population whether from a national or local point of view. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, he appeared one day as the plausible and patriotic champion of oppressed Erin on the platform; the next, as the promoter of a bogus land company at a Galway market; and then, by a complete change of part, as the insinuating concert or theatrical impresario, who philanthropically puts young ladies with pretty faces, good figures, and voices in the way of making their fortunes and enriching their families. The literary contrasts thus suggested are worked up in The Land Leaguers with pathos and power, as well as old humour.[37]