One more famous friend of a very different kind from Forster had been brought by family accident within Anthony Trollope’s reach. This was Lord Ashley, afterwards to become Lord Shaftesbury. Recognising Frances Trollope’s cleverness, and anxious to enlist it on the side of his own philanthropies, he had encouraged her to interest the public in the miseries of industrial life in the Black Country. The representative of the “poor man’s peer” with Mrs. Trollope in this matter had been his secretary, a dweller in Camberwell, the father of no less a son than Benjamin Jowett. The story embodying Mrs. Trollope’s fulfilment of the Shaftesbury suggestion, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, was published in 1840, when, greatly to her disgust, it found more friends among the Chartists than in any other class. Ashley did not succeed to the family title till 1851. By that time Anthony Trollope had left St. Martin’s-le-Grand for ten years. But some time before then the future Lord Shaftesbury’s concern for Irish distress made him open communications with Anthony Trollope, as one who had inherited his mother’s faculty of keen observation, and whose opinion, based on local knowledge of Irish difficulties and wants, promised to be, as it proved, of real value to practical and philanthropic statesmanship. This however, like the various events connected with it, will more fittingly find a place in a new chapter.
CHAPTER III
THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW
A fresh start—Off to Ireland—The dawn of better things—Ireland in the forties and after—The Whigs and Tories in turn make vain efforts to remove the nation’s chief grievances—The most deep-seated evils social rather than political—Trollope’s bond of union with the “distressful country”—Sowing the seed of authorship on Bianconi’s cars and in the hunting-field—“It’s dogged as does it”—Ireland’s hearty welcome to the Post Office official—Trollope and his contemporaries on the Irishman in his true light—The future novelist at Sir William Gregory’s home—The legislation of 1849—The history and race characteristics of the Irish and the Jews compared—Irish novelists of Trollope’s day—Marriage with Miss Heseltine in 1844—His social standing and hunting reputation in Ireland—Interesting notabilities at Coole Park—Triumphant success of Trollope’s Post Office plot—Scoring off the advocate.
IN his periodical murmurings at the dispensations of fate, Anthony Trollope spared himself at least as little as he did others. In the retrospective censures upon Colonel Maberly and any others in authority over him during his initiation into the Government service, he magnified rather than extenuated his own shortcomings. Private letters about him to his own relatives from those of the Freeling family, who long remained in more or less close touch with the Post Office, show the low esteem in which he complains of having been held by his official masters to have been for the most part imaginary. The impression, even in its most unfavourable aspects, left behind him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand on his transfer to Ireland in 1841 was not so much one of incapacity for work as of indisposition to it. If he showed himself to be unpunctual, spiritless, and untidy, that was generally put down to want, not of power, but of proper training for his duties. According to the habit of the time, all subjects not classical had been “extras” at Anthony Trollope’s schools. Thanks to his home lessons, from the beginnings of his official course he could express himself clearly and tersely; he had inherited and retained throughout life his mother’s clear, flowing calligraphy. Of arithmetic, however, he knew little or nothing. Here, as in other respects, he improved as he went on. A spruce and finished official in his youth he never indeed became; but, on landing at Dublin in the September of 1841, he had outgrown the unpunctuality, the want of method, and the gaucheries which so often opened against him the vials of Colonel Maberly’s wrath. Thrown on his own resources in dealing with all sorts of people, from departmental overseers in St. Martin’s-le-Grand to lodging-house landladies in Marylebone, he had picked up enough worldly wisdom and insight into character to compensate for any failing of personal or official equipment.
Once in Ireland, he had no sooner looked round him than he fancied he could see a resemblance between the condition of the country and his own state and prospects. This inspired him with a kind of sympathetic affection for the Irish people. In the June before Trollope landed at Dublin, Queen Victoria’s first Parliament had come to an end, with the result that, of the long-promised Whig reforms for Ireland, the only instalments actually carried into effect were an unpopular Poor Law of doubtful efficacy, and certain measures, largely dictated by the Conservative opposition, for dealing with the inveterate evils of tithe collection as well as with municipal corporations. It was the Irish tithe abuses which had caused a literary admirer of Anthony Trollope’s mother, Sydney Smith, to say: “There is no cruelty like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in all discovered parts of Africa, and in all that we have ever heard of Timbuctoo.” For centuries Ireland had been not only the object of English misrule and neglect, but the victim of the English party system. The exigencies of that party system secured periodical surrenders to Irish agitators, which were called concessions, and spasmodic outbursts of eleemosynary lavishness, which were in reality merely part payments of long overdue debts. Three years before the Victorian era began, the Tories, led by Peel, had made way for the Whigs under Melbourne. Whoever was out or whoever was in, O’Connell remained master of the position. Without truckling to that dictator, neither Whig nor Tory minister thought of moving a step. The habit of English surrender to Irish importunity, when sufficiently persevering and acute, had, when Anthony Trollope crossed St. George’s Channel, produced the feeling that agitation and outrage were the two infallible instruments for wresting the demands of the moment. Neither of the two great political connections had shown more statesmanship than its rival in its Irish policy. But for the three months nominal tenure of office by Peel in 1835, the Whigs had enjoyed unbroken control of affairs during more than a decade.
Now, in the month of Anthony Trollope’s first crossing the Irish Channel, a change had come, and the Tories were to have their turn. When therefore Trollope passed his first night in Dublin, the Castle was enjoying the novel experience of a Conservative Viceroy, Lord de Grey. His official term coincided with some attempt at improving the state of the country from which much was hoped. The most important and promising project recommended by his predecessors Peel, however, had shelved. Five years before Trollope’s departure from St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the Whig ministers had contemplated introducing railways into Ireland. Peel’s opposition to that proposal precluded him from himself adopting it, notwithstanding his private conviction of its usefulness. Instead he took the earliest step towards that Roman Catholic endowment at which, when out of office, he had so often shied. In the early future, he let it be understood, he would increase the education grant and qualify the Roman Catholics for receiving gifts and holding property for charitable and religious uses. At the same time, he promised an extension of the county franchise, and votes in boroughs to all who paid poor rates. The great feature in the Conservative surrender to popular Irish feeling was the abandonment of Protestant ascendency as an administrative principle. There was now appointed for dealing with charitable bequests a new Commission, half of whose members were Irish Papists, and whose secretary belonged to the same denomination. The new policy secured a permanent endowment for paying Roman Catholic priests and building Roman Catholic chapels.
But these measures of Irish relief, however well received, attracted less attention than the personality of the man who, as Trollope settled down to his Post Office work, had just been installed at the viceregal lodge. The magnificent presence, the great wealth, the fine temper, and the impartial sympathies of Lord de Grey had not yet, and indeed never did, endear him to the Irish heart; but they had really impressed the Irish imagination. The personnel of Peel’s whole administration was marked by two characteristics: first, its deference to the principle of aristocratic connection; secondly, its recognition of past official services. The chief Irish secretary under Lord de Grey, Lord Eliot, was, like Grey himself, the subject of Orange criticism. Such censure in the circumstances of the time was looked upon as a recommendation, while as for Lord de Grey, the only doubt felt about him was whether he might not prove somewhat too much of the beau sabreur to labour only for peace. Never since the introduction of constitutional government could Ireland have been more under the control of an individual ruler than when Trollope made his acquaintance with the country. Neither his Tory supporters nor the most influential of his personal adherents, Stanley and Graham, had been consulted in the appointments made. If further proof were needed of the Prime Minister’s determination to dominate the administration, it would be found in the fact that, to make sure of crossing swords himself with Palmerston in the Commons over imperial policy, he dispensed with a Foreign Under Secretary in the Lower House. To the Irish people therefore, as Trollope discovered directly he began to know something of the country, Peel was not only the head of the new Government, but concentrated in himself its most decisive authority and its highest prerogatives.
The educational reforms and the Roman Catholic educational subsidies to which Peel had early given the Conservative sanction were not to be carried out in Grey’s time, and did not come within Trollope’s observation. “Property has its duties as well as its rights.” So in 1838 had said Thomas Drummond, the engineer officer who filled for five years the chief secretaryship. The words dwelt in the Irish mind long after their echoes had died away from the Irish ear. In his new quarters, Anthony Trollope had no sooner time to look round than he descried everywhere detailed proof of Drummond’s remark having lost none of its force since it was first made. Excessive population and deficient production were the two great evils, each social rather than political, of the land from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clear. In England there was at this time an average of one agricultural labourer to every thirty-four cultivated acres. In Ireland the average was one to every fourteen. One-third of the entire population depended for food on the little plots round their cabins on the barren hillside or on the uncertain moor. The great monument of English enterprise for relieving Irish need was the large workhouse in each new Poor Law district, execrated by the masses, and only acquiesced in by those who were better off. Within two years of Trollope’s arrival in Dublin, there had set in a steady increase of crime, and an addition, visible on all sides, to the chronic distress. Nor did the lot of those who owned the soil display to Trollope much that raised them greatly above its industrial occupants. His boyish acquaintance with his father’s agricultural failures in Harrow Weald seemed to repeat themselves, as he observed the struggles of the Irish squireens, in the dilapidated tenements that they still called their country houses, to postpone indefinitely the evil day of being sold up by the attorney and the usurer. The urban neighbourhoods were no better off than the rural. Most of the towns within Trollope’s district had once been the seats of some small industries. Many if not most of these had now declined into a languor which had often caused them to be entirely abandoned, and had sometimes withdrawn the bulk of the population they had formerly supported from their homes.
On all sides, therefore, melancholy and desolation were in the foreground on which Trollope daily gazed. In the desponding moods of which he had naturally many after first realising his loneliness in a strange country, Trollope’s fancy could not but detect a certain congeniality between his own lot, present or future, and the dismal destinies, the depressing sights and sounds surrounding him. The distressful country thus found, in its newest comer, one who at heart was as distressful as itself. The social and political atmosphere of the country, even before Trollope came, had begun to be stirred by the note of Celtic preparation for throwing off the Saxon yoke. Trollope’s apprenticeship to his Irish work corresponded with the birth of the Young Ireland movement. In that, however, there could be nothing which appealed to his imagination with anything like the force of the human wastage, daily in some new form presented to his eye.
But if his surroundings seemed saddening, almost, at times, to stupefaction, Trollope gradually extracted from them food for honest and severe thought, as well as a stimulus for invigorating exertion, both of body and mind. In Ireland for the present he had to live. Ireland therefore should yield him the material out of which he should make for himself a name among State servants, as well as reputation and perhaps fortune with his pen. When the forties were drawing to a close, railway development was among the specifics periodically applied to the healing of Irish distress. But when Trollope first knew the country that mode of treatment belonged to the future. The popular method of locomotion was that begun in the year of his own birth, 1815, by an Italian settler, who thought he saw the beginnings of a fortune. Charles Bianconi started his operations in 1815 by running cars from Clonmel to Cahir. Of these conveyances he had travelling in 1841 as many as sufficed regularly at short intervals to touch all the more important southern and western towns. The daily total of the collective miles covered by them was three thousand six hundred. The animals used would have been enough to mount a cavalry regiment. Half the secret of Bianconi’s success was, as he explained to Trollope, the discovery of short cuts between the different stages, and ensuring to his vehicles a maximum of speed with a minimum expenditure of motive power. Trollope was not slow to profit by the hint, nor would he ever have done so well as he did in the capacity of surveyor but for Bianconi’s itinerary instructions. The shrewd Milanese also took him behind the scenes of the Irish people in their daily life. “The most apparently poverty-stricken of the peasant farmers for whom my cars have found fresh markets,” he said, “are very often, notwithstanding their dirty and dilapidated dwellings, comparatively well-to-do. And when, filled with pity for a man looking sadly out-of-elbows, you drop some sympathetic word, you must be prepared to hear that his cows and sheep upon the mountains are to be reckoned by tens and scores, and to be told that he is, maybe, richer than your honour.” Thus early in his Hibernian apprenticeship did the new surveyor, as regards the state of the people among whom he was to live, receive the extra official lessons that, supplemented by his own later observation, made him a sounder authority on most Irish subjects than nine-tenths of the statesmen legislating for them at Westminster.