Meanwhile the elder Trollope’s death had been preceded by a crisis in the life of his third son. Thirteen years before the date now reached, his parents’ settlement at Harrow had naturally caused him to be sent as a day-boy to the great school, then in the ground-swell left by domestic disturbances which, though they had occurred so long since as almost to be forgotten, projected some demoralising influence upon a generation yet to come. In 1805, Joseph Drury retired from the headmastership. George Butler was elected his successor by Archbishop Manners-Sutton’s casting-vote, against Mark Drury, the local favourite. The poet Byron, then a boy at the school and a monitor, led a rebellion against the new Head. Other disturbances and barrings-out followed. Twelve years before Anthony’s entrance there had happened events not favourable to the position of day-boys at the school. The Harrow parishioners in 1810 petitioned Chancery for the restriction of the school to local residents, chiefly, of course, shopkeepers. The counsel employed by the school bore a name, Fladgate, which, in connection with the Garrick Club, was to be well known by Anthony Trollope in later years. The whole episode, being much talked about at the time, had the effect of familiarising Trollope, while a boy, with the old school of lawyers, figuring so frequently in his novels. Sir William Grant, as Master of the Rolls, thought the boarders so essential to the school’s prestige and prosperity, that he would not sanction any limitation of their number. He risked, however, offending the masters by insisting on fresh guarantees as regards day-boys for the rights of residence. “The controversy,” said Trollope to the present writer, “had the effect of adding a fresh sting to my position as a day-boy. The masters snubbed me more than ever because I was one of the class which had brought about legal interference with their vested interests. The young aristocrats, who lived sumptuously in the masters’ houses, treated me like a pariah.”
At the same time the tenant of Julians Farm supplemented the supervision of the boy’s home-lessons with Spartan severity of physical discipline, at least one box on the ear for every false quantity in a Latin line. Nor was there any gilding of the pill with pocket-money, books, or even proper clothes. Harrow had then a larger percentage of exceedingly rich men’s sons among its boys than either Eton or Winchester. Anthony’s appearance may often have been against him; but the public opinion of the place, if not at first, would in the long run have declared itself against persecuting a boy who was not a fool, who knew the use of his fists, and against whom the worst that could be said was that he came from a poor home. He was, however, as throughout life he remained, morbidly sensitive. “My mother,” he said to me in the year of his death, “was much from home or too busy to be bothered. My father was not exactly the man to invite confidence. I tried to relieve myself by confiding my boyish sorrows to a diary that I have kept since the age of twelve, which I have just destroyed, and which, on referring to it for my autobiography some time since, I found full of a heart-sick, friendless little chap’s exaggerations of his woes.”
In all great schools sets are inevitable, and disappointments, heartburnings, and jealousies at real or imaginary exclusions are rife. Trollope, however, showed himself capable of holding his own, both in the schoolroom and in the playground. Judge Baylis, his contemporary, admits that home boarders were often bullied and pursued with stones, but emphatically testifies that Trollope, being big and powerful, got off easily; he once, it seems, fought a boy named Lewis for nearly an hour, punishing his adversary so heavily that he had to go home. Of course it was, as at every big English school of the time, a rough and occasionally a brutal life, enlivened with such customs as “rolling-in,” “tossing,” and “jack-o’-lantern”; this last was put down by Longley, who followed Butler as headmaster during Trollope’s time. The education was exclusively Latin and Greek, as it was everywhere else. But at home Anthony Trollope received a thorough grounding in modern languages, especially French and Italian, from his accomplished mother, and was noticed by his contemporary Sydney Herbert as a boy full of general knowledge. At a private school kept by one of the Harrow Drurys near Sunbury, some of the time coming between his two Harrow periods was sandwiched in with really good results. Among his Harrow friends other than Herbert were the three Merivales: John, afterwards Registrar in the Court of Chancery, Herman, the permanent Colonial Under-Secretary, and Charles, the Roman historian, who, as Archdeacon of Ely, remained Trollope’s friend through life, and whom I have met at dinner at his house in Montagu Square.
His father’s ambition to get Anthony, like his brothers Thomas and Henry, into Winchester was fulfilled in 1827, when Anthony had for his fellow-Wykehamists, amongst others, Roundell Palmer, Robert Lowe, and Cardwell. The three years of St. Mary Winton were followed in 1830 by another Harrow spell of three or four. After that Anthony Trollope, like the rest of his family, remained a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and homeless until his parents gained a resting-place at Bruges. Disraeli’s Young Englanders in Coningsby, despairing of a career in England, are about to join the Austrian service. Young Anthony Trollope, if not from any Disraelian motive, seriously determined to do the same thing. Subject to an examination in European languages, he contrived to secure the promise of a cavalry commission in the Austrian army. To place himself in the way of picking up the necessary acquaintance with continental tongues, he became for a few weeks an usher in a Belgian school. From that slavery he was delivered by the unexpected opening of the employment that was to make him first a useful member of society, and then a distinguished and a successful man.
In A Publisher and His Friends, the second John Murray, at Mrs. Trollope’s request, is said to have obtained for her third son the Post Office clerkship which took him back in 1834 from Bruges to London. Other influences, however, co-operated in the same direction as those of Albemarle Street. Among Mrs. Trollope’s wide, varied, and influential acquaintance was Mrs. Clayton Freeling, daughter-in-law of the then chief secretary at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Sir Francis Freeling. That lady overflowed with admiration of the splendid struggle made by her friend to keep her home together and secure a future for her boys. Sir Henry Holland, the great physician of the time, a man whose word on any subject went for much in official and political circles, had already helped the future Sir Henry Taylor to a career in the Colonial Office; he had also, as one gathers from his autobiography, been looking out for a chance of doing the Trollopes a good turn. Any one of these agencies would have been enough in young Anthony Trollope’s case. Their combination in his favour gave him the additional advantage of reminding the heads of the department he entered that he possessed powerful friends in high places. His family connections stood him also in good stead. So, said Mrs. Freeling, they ought to do, especially with the Postmaster-General; for had not young Anthony’s kinsman, Admiral Sir Henry Trollope, Sir Thomas Trollope’s grand-nephew, not only rendered his country heroic service at sea in the French wars, but also won special fame and promotion as a sort of amateur postman by carrying despatches from the chief commander of the fleet abroad to the Government in London—particularly in 1781, during the whole episode of Gibraltar’s release by Admiral Rodney. Sixteen years later he secured fresh distinction in suppressing the mutiny at the Nore. For reward a peerage and the capital to support it would not have been excessive. As it was, he only received such a pension as enabled him to lead a country gentleman’s life in Herefordshire. The utmost therefore, urged Mrs. Freeling, that the Whigs then in power could do for her friend’s boy would be only an instalment towards paying the arrears of the public debt due for Admiral Trollope’s tact, presence of mind, and naval eminence. Finally, protested this indefatigable lady, the Whigs owed some reparation for their breach of faith towards her protégé’s father.
Thomas Anthony Trollope had indeed been actually promised a London police-magistrateship by Lord Melbourne, who wriggled out of his engagement under some backstairs pressure. Their reverses therefore had not robbed the Trollope family of “friends at Court.” Young Anthony, in fact, belonged by birth and connection to the governing classes. He might well have aspired to a higher branch in the Civil Service. During the Victorian era another man of letters, more brilliant perhaps but less famous afterwards than Trollope became, Grenville Murray, was given a position in the Foreign Office without satisfying any severer test of fitness than was done by Trollope when he began work at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. From one point of view what he had picked up at Harrow and Winchester formed the least remunerative part of his equipment. As a public school boy he had learned to look after himself, let people see he was a gentleman, intended to be treated as one, and to adapt himself to circumstances. As much classics as either school gave him he might have acquired in his father’s study, if the teacher and the scholar had not come to open war before the course was over. As it was, Thomas Anthony Trollope, almost as soon as his son could hold a pen, taught him the points to be aimed at in letter-writing—clearness, conciseness, abstinence from the repetition of words or ideas, and the non-introduction of any unnecessary or irrelevant matter. At the same time he instructed him by example in the theory and practice of précis writing. This formed the morning’s educational routine in the Harrow home. After tea came the mother’s turn. Mrs. Trollope was a far more cultivated woman than might be supposed from her books. Proud, as well as fond, of all her boys, she taught them of an evening enough French, German, and Italian to speak and write these languages correctly, as well as understand them when spoken, without difficulty, and converse in them with ease.
“As for my father,” once said Trollope, “while the soul of honour and unselfishness, after he gave up the Bar he showed a want of ballast, a fickleness, and an inability to make both ends meet, really reminding one of Micawber in David Copperfield.” Trollope’s own apprenticeship to work for his livelihood came some years later than it had done to Dickens. Years after the establishment of his literary fame, Trollope adopted the habit of interspersing his stories with touches as really autobiographical as anything in David Copperfield. He had not long exchanged the Harrow home for continental wandering, when his efforts to support himself began. These took an educational direction. His eldest brother eventually became, under Dr. Jeune, a master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. To that height Anthony did not aspire, and was satisfied, till some other employment came, if he could cease to be a burden to his mother, by giving English lessons to small boys in a Belgian school.
CHAPTER II
THE NOVELIST AND THE OFFICIAL IN THE MAKING
Activity at the Post Office during the thirties—The romance of letter-carrying—One of the State’s bad bargains—Trollope’s unhappy life, in the office and out of it—The novelist in the making—London at the beginning of the Victorian era—Lost opportunities—Mrs. Trollope’s influence on her son’s works—Her religious opinions as portrayed in The Vicar of Wrexhill—Anthony’s first leanings to authorship—Literary labours of others of his name—With his mother among famous contemporaries at home and abroad—The trials of a youthful London clerk—Trollope’s remarkable friends of school and social life.
WITH his junior clerkship at the Post Office in 1834, Anthony Trollope’s working life begins; now also commences his conscious preparation for the literary labours that, seriously entered on a few years later, were only to cease when death took the pen from his hand. The atmosphere of the department which he was to serve for thirty years had in it much calculated to stimulate the energies and even excite the imagination of the new-comer. Till 1829 the postal headquarters had been, amongst other places, at a house once belonging to Sir Robert Vyner in Lombard Street. The St. Martin’s-le-Grand building had therefore been occupied just five years when Anthony Trollope entered upon his Post Office experiences. The early thirties were a season of great activity, of novel and awakening enterprise at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Sir Francis Freeling, supported, as chief secretary, by the Postmaster-General, the Duke of Richmond, aimed at nothing less than reorganising the entire service. Within a short time there were introduced thirty-nine specific reforms. These dealt with the conveyance of letters by sea as well as land. The whole system of mail-packets, when thus entirely recast, gradually made deliveries from foreign parts as safe as those within the United Kingdom. The steam-locomotive had just opened a rivalry with the horse-drawn car which few people believed would at an early day achieve complete success. As a fact, it was not till 1854 that Anthony Trollope saw the Mail-Coach Office department become obsolete in the vocabulary of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.