And so the Barsetshire series is concluded. The Last Chronicle rewards the faithful reader of the previous five novels in the series with reunions with familiar friends. But it stands on its own as an outstanding novel of the nineteenth century, following the dogged Mr. Crawley as he gives his own witness to the less rigid world around him.
CAN YOU FORGIVE A FEW ADDITIONS TO THE TEXT?
CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?
I met Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser when we were in England in 1974. They lived in their own television series, The Pallisers, Simon Raven's BBC television serial based on six Anthony Trollope novels. The Times published a supplement describing the Palliser series as "the finest sequence of fiction ever to be based on British Parliamentary life." Susan Hampshire played Glencora, and not only she, but the entire cast now represent those characters in my mind. And so, although I can be appropriately dispassionate and critical about Anthony Trollope and his novels, loyalty makes it difficult in regard to Plantagenet and Glencora. They are old friends.
Episodes 1-6 of The Pallisers are based on the first novel in the series, Can You Forgive Her? First, the reader and the viewer must understand that the woman we are asked to forgive is not Lady Glencora M'Cluskie, the true heroine, but Alice Vavasor, a distant cousin of Glencora's. Alice's story is indeed the main plot of the book, but Simon Raven apparently realized that Glencora's story would be more appealing to the television audience, and he focused the first episodes on her, starting with events that Trollope had described in a novel of the Barsetshire series, The Small House at Allington. The spectacular set piece in the television presentation is the first scene, a garden party given by the Duke of Omnium and Gatherum. (Trollope was shameless in the selection of names for his characters and places; other favorites include the Marquis of Auld Reekie in Scotland, the law firm of Slow and Bideawhile, and Dr. Fillgrave, who was the competitor of Dr. Thorne.) At this party Glencora flirts with Burgo Fitzgerald, a handsome rake, little knowing that her fate is being decided from on high. Her guardian, the Marchioness of Auld Reekie, is observing all from her chair beside a little Greek temple above the lake. There she negotiates with the Duke of Omnium for a marital alliance between Glencora and the Duke's heir, Plantagenet Palliser. The Duke replies, "I find the thing will suit me well enough."
The innocent reader goes from the television series to the text and immediately finds himself reading about Alice Vavasor, a young woman engaged to a young country gentleman, "John Grey, The Worthy Man." She had been previously engaged to her first cousin "George Vavasor, The Wild Man." We then stumble into subplot number one, in which George's sister goes to spend three weeks with her Aunt Greenow, a well-to-do widow who must deal with two suitors: Mr. Cheesacre, a "fat Norfolk farmer," and the rather disreputable Captain Bellfield.
Where is Glencora? Not yet to be found. By the time we reach Chapter Seventeen, the standard Trollope fox-hunting chapter, we find Burgo Fitzgerald first among the riders—
Burgo Fitzgerald, whom no man had ever known to crane at a fence, or to hug a road, or to spare his own neck or his horse's. And yet poor Burgo seldom finished well—coming to repeated grief in this matter of his hunting, as he did so constantly in other matters of his life.
In the next chapter we learn that Burgo, eighteen months earlier, had almost won the hand, as he had already won the heart, of the Lady Glencora M'Cluskie. Finally. This is page 162. But what about the garden party? About the garden party, the text is silent. That this memorable scene appears nowhere in Trollope's novel is almost beside the point. The dialogue of the BBC production is as Trollopian as any of the rest, which adheres closely to the text. Raven has the Duke later admonish Plantagenet, who has been rumored to be having an affair with Lady Dumbello (another of Trollope's apt names), that he should not pursue such an affair until after he has become respectably married and produced an heir. "After that, you may suit yourself. Only see to it that there's no open scandal. When I was a boy it didn't matter much, but for some reason it does now."