The youth of nineteen, who after the fashion already described now became a Government servant, with his boyish readiness for rebellion against any constraints on his liberty, of course fretted at times against his occupation. From his mother, however, he had inherited the imaginative faculty which was to do more than make him a novelist. It had indeed already given him some feeling of the national and imperial services that might be rendered by the department to whose staff he belonged. “Why,” he asked himself, “should not that great achievement be sensibly promoted by my individual efforts?” The new ambition, however, did not at once save him from trouble for unpunctuality and for scamping his work. Still, he gradually became conscious of associations with the national life and movement which ennobled even a junior clerk’s daily drudgery. A romantic instinct had already invested the whole system which gave him employment with a poetry of its own. Looking back, he saw the opportunities for letter communication first considered and long remaining an exclusively royal privilege. The lads with whom he was thrown counted for lost every odd half-hour not spent in drinking, smoking, and card-playing. Like them, he saw only his natural enemies in blue-books and official documents of every kind. But one day, when there were no high-jinks with his brother clerks, he lighted upon, and out of curiosity dipped into a heap of musty records, which told him how, throughout the Tudor period, the Master of the Posts was as entirely a Court official as the king’s fool. The maintenance of post-horses out of public taxes only gave loyal subjects the satisfaction of knowing that they effectually contributed to their sovereign lord’s conveniences and comforts. “As I pieced these fragments together into a continuous story, I found myself,” Anthony Trollope would say, “not for the first time, but more unmistakably than I had ever felt before, realising that a Post Office servant’s career might be one of profit to himself as well as of usefulness to his fellow-creatures in all their concerns and interests, whether as citizens or as family breadwinners. From what I saw had been done in the past, I mentally constructed a scheme of possibilities for the future.” Not till the seventeenth century, as Anthony Trollope saw, did the Post Office even attempt to secure, for all the king’s tax-paying subjects, speed and certainty in their communications with each other, both inland and overseas. Every step forward covered a very little distance; without painfully sustained caution and vigilance, there was the risk or rather certainty of relapse. As a fact, after that no inch advanced ever had to be retraced.
For half a dozen years young Trollope had to be at St. Martin’s-le-Grand daily from ten to six. During that time, the irregularities of postal deliveries throughout the United Kingdom steadily diminished, and the Post Office clerk in whom we are interested recognised that there was good and even great work to be done in his branch of the public service. He decided that all the snubs and reprimands with which, justly or unjustly, he might be visited, should not cow him into incapacity for doing his part. Not that the Anthony Trollope of fact, as distinguished from him of fiction, can ever have been in more danger of finding his energies trampled out by autocratic or plain-spoken officialism in London than at an earlier period by schoolmasters or schoolfellows at Harrow. At St. Martin’s-le-Grand, however, during the years which preceded his Irish appointment in 1841, he was unquestionably, by all who were set over him, looked upon as one of the State’s bad bargains. Sir Francis Freeling’s successor in the chief secretaryship was Colonel Maberly. Maberly in due course was followed by Rowland Hill, not in the order of official promotion, but under the urgent pressure of public opinion. Who, from all sides came the question, but the master-mind that had invented penny postage was equal to supervising and directing the official arrangements by which his own great reforms were to be carried out? With both Maberly and Hill, Trollope at different periods was on terms not merely of disaffection, or even of veiled rebellion, but of open war. Between 1834 and 1841, after Freeling’s retirement, he seemed to his new chief, Maberly, an ill-conditioned youth, always in scrapes. From 1854-64 it was one long duel between the outsider, Secretary Hill, and Trollope as champion of the department’s old exclusive officialism.
Throughout the Maberly period, Trollope lacked the two conditions for doing himself justice—a reasonably sympathetic superior, and anything like home comforts. The privations of lodging-house life, and the snubs of those in authority over him at the Post Office, produced in him a chronic, brooding discontent, which left him without wish or power to show what he had it in him to become. Naturally ambitious, and with a nervous longing for the good opinion of his fellow-creatures, he no sooner found himself balked in gratifying these two master passions than, hopeless of any change for the better, he sank into a lethargy of disgust, not more with his position than with himself. As a boy he began to keep a diary in the hope of relieving a constitutional melancholy, almost paralysing his moral and mental power. The daily entries, however, yielded him none of the consolation he had expected. The continual introspection incidental to the task only produced depressing and unwholesome effects. His one real solace was the habit of private study that he never lost through life. The Harrow and Winchester school-books had not been dispersed in the wreck of his home, but were carried about with him wherever he went. His Latin rudiments at least he had learned thoroughly at school or at home. Great was his happiness one day during 1840 in discovering that he could read Horace and Cicero in the original, not as task work, but with pleasure as literature.
Then there were the English writers, a taste for whom his mother had not so much encouraged in her son as created. Of the old Elizabethan classics, Spenser had become his favourite. From Fielding onwards, he spent long evenings in his lodgings over the makers of English prose fiction, making notes while he read as if he had been taking them up for an examination. Jane Austen, however, gave him more pleasure than all her predecessors put together. Very early in his Post Office days, he came to the conclusion that Pride and Prejudice pleased him better than any other fiction he had ever read, was not perhaps so great a work as Ivanhoe, but was immeasurably above Tom Jones. Considered therefore as an intellectual and literary seed-time, quite apart from the business habits they helped to form, Trollope’s early Post Office years were very far from being misspent. Throughout life it was Trollope’s tendency to ponder a petty vexation or trivial crossing of his own will till it became a grievance. Of harsh experiences his youth had a full share. The embittering official relations with Maberly first, with Rowland Hill afterwards, and the hardship of an ill-kept and cheerless Marylebone lodging, were the sequel to a stern preparatory training, whether at school or home. Yet no one more indignantly than Trollope himself would have resented the suggestion of his spirit having been in any way broken by the paternal boxes on the ear over his Latin syntax, by his Winchester flagellations, or afterwards by his daily Post Office reprimands and rows.
Dwelling on the bright rather than the dark places of his early retrospect, he had, at the age of nineteen, entered the Civil Service, not unprepared to do the work expected of him, but also bent upon tasting all those enjoyments which his school friends had found in London life, and to which domestic poverty or severity had so far made him almost a stranger. Some reminiscences of the London Trollope knew in the thirties, though qualified by many modernising touches, may be found in the pictures of City life given in The Three Clerks. The life as a Post Office clerk he was free to lead was never better described than by Aytoun and Martin:
“When I smoked my independent pipe along the quadrant wide,
With the many larks of London flaring up on every side,
Felt the exquisite enjoying, tossing nightly off, oh heavens!
Brandy at the cider cellars, kidneys, smoking hot, at Evans.
Or in the Adelphi sitting, half in rapture, half in tears,
Saw the glorious melodrama conjure up the shades of years.”
The existence which thus had the authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads for its laureates found its prose historian in Albert Smith, who, from the doings of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen in Pickwick, drew the inspiration which produced the Medical Student, the Gent, and various other treatises on the fast life of the shabby-genteel. These were once accepted as manuals of fashion; they still serve to illustrate the difference between then and now. The side streets of the West End were throughout the thirties honeycombed with gambling-houses. The larger thoroughfares were ablaze with “free-and-easys” or dancing saloons. It was the dull, heavy, coarse, debauched London, which had not then at any point given place to the bright and amusing London, that Trollope lived to see. Of this chiefly pre-Victorian, gin-and-bitters-drinking capital, the most characteristic features are sketched from life in The Three Clerks. Touches of it are not wanting to his other stories, and may be seen at one or two points in the passages between John Eames and his landlady’s daughter in The Small House at Allington.
Anthony Trollope, during his early Post Office years, might excuse himself for falling into his own Charlie Tudor’s Bohemian ways on the plea of isolation from the domestic life of his social equals, and the coldness of his own kith and kin. For that solitude no one was to blame but himself. He was shy, proud, rather awkward after the fashion of callow youths, and in his out-of-office hours apt to show an irritable impatience of all conventional restraints. In after years he deplored that as a youth he had avoided the humanising influence of intercourse with refined women. The drawing-rooms and tea-tables of his lady relatives belonging to the Lincolnshire baronet’s branch were open to him; he shunned them all, some for one reason, some for another. Mrs. Clayton Freeling, his earliest benefactress, would have always welcomed him beneath her roof; he seldom or never came. She wrote letters to him of entreaty that, for his brave and clever mother’s sake, he would make the best of the opening she had helped to secure him. Her social circle was agreeable and wide; within its circumference he had only to choose eligible acquaintances. His early Belgian experiences had gained him some lifelong friends; one or two tours with his parents in Germany, as well as the many good wishers, won by his father and mother when Lafayette’s guests at La Grange, might, had he cared for it, have opened for him a wide, varied, and genuinely agreeable visiting-list. As a fact, not till he had reached middle age and fame did he really care for society. Had this taste come earlier, the kinsfolk of his own name were a host in themselves.
The whole Trollope clan, with their innumerable outlying connections—Gresleys, Hellicars, and Meetkerkes—had all in 1809 welcomed the Trollope-Milton marriage, to which he owed his existence. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s wife had no sooner achieved success with her pen than her countless kinsfolk rallied round her, while John Forster’s and Sir Henry Taylor’s ever helpful interest survived the long series of her husband’s reverses.[2] Before the settlement of Anthony Trollope’s parents in Keppel Street, Sir John and Lady Trollope had been at great pains to find out a suitable and really useful present for the occasion. They were only consoled for their absence from the wedding by an early prospect of making their new cousin’s (the bride’s) acquaintance, and in seeing a very great deal of them both, perhaps in due time of others, in town. Afterwards, when the tide had turned against him, even in the darkest hour of his misfortunes, his relatives of the titled branch had stood by Anthony Trollope’s father. The family seat in Lincolnshire, Casewick, was still open to him during his worst troubles, and his wife describes their visits there as the bright spots in their lives. Many others of the Trollope family were scattered through the Midlands. The laymen of the family had in some cases risen to consideration during the Middle Ages, and contracted alliances with countless stocks at least as good as themselves. Amongst those connections were some Dutch immigrants named Meetkerke. A Miss Penelope Meetkerke, by her marriage with the Rector of Cottery St. Mary, Herts, had become Anthony Trollope’s grandmother, and had left posterity which, if soon becoming extinct, in Anthony Trollope’s youth flourished sufficiently to provide him with a welcome beneath many comfortable roofs.
But all this time Anthony Trollope’s mother was not only, as she had always been, his wisest counsellor and best friend, but the one influence that, continuing to form and furnish his mind, necessarily shaped his career. Returning to England after her husband’s death at Bruges in 1835, she had created a new mode of industry for herself and domestic centre for those she loved at Hadley, near Barnet. Anthony Trollope had the satisfaction of seeing a favourite sister, Cecilia, become the wife of a Civil Service official, afterwards Sir John Tilley, and comfortably settled in Cumberland, whence she lavished invitations on her brother. Frances Trollope, too, at her various settlements, abroad even more than at home, had it within her reach to bring many little pleasures into his existence. At Hadley he passed some nights every week in the bedroom always kept in readiness for him, and on several occasions there were for him excursions to Paris, where his mother long pitched her tent. In the home surroundings, Anthony’s intellectual promise had shown itself neither so brightly nor so soon as had been the case with his eldest brother Tom, or his sister Cecilia. His mother, however, at no time doubted in her heart that he would eventually become the household’s bright particular star. She had noticed the daily entries in his childish journal, regularly kept but carefully guarded because at Winchester some of its records had brought down upon the writer the furious application of a cricket-stump by Tom. Again, almost so soon as he could hold a pen, Anthony took to describing imaginary situations in which he placed himself, explaining and justifying his conduct in those fictitious circumstances. Frances Trollope not only thought this good practice for an infant novelist; she gradually led on her boy to discuss the details he depicted in their effect upon characters other than his own. This, if the most useful and instructive, formed the least stimulating part of her son’s training for that literary walk she had made her own. In the Harrow days The Magpie formed the manuscript exhibition of the family talent, supplemented by a few outsiders, Drurys and Grants. Here Anthony at first had seemed to lag behind the other contributors. He soon picked up, and had the satisfaction of finding his little contributions in prose and verse generally given a place. It was not, however, these boyish essays, but the regular appearance at short intervals of his mother’s publications, which sealed young Anthony’s resolution to make authorship the chief business of his life.