It may well be that Louis and Emily Trevelyan got away from their creator, just as their quarrel took on a life of its own and got out of the control of its two participants. Even with an author who prided himself on discipline in his writing, the pen can sometimes take off with a will of its own. Though the author professed to be displeased with the result, most critics have viewed the result with more favor, and I am inclined to agree with them. As to the strangeness of the story, the more one sees of life, how can anyone say that anything cannot happen? The storyteller's job is to take strange stories and make entertaining stories out of them. When I was in training, one of my chief residents had a comment that he used for strange cases: "You see that sometimes."
He knew he was right, but he was wrong.
THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
THE VICAR OF BULLHAMPTON
On the day that I finished reading Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton, the following appeared in an email from a friend: An Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return, her father cussed her: "Where have you been all this time, you ingrate!" The girl, crying, replied, "Dad … I became a prostitute." "What! Out of here, you shameless harlot! …" "OK, Dad—as you wish. I just came back to give Mom this fur coat and you this new Mercedes Benz. …" "Now what was it you said you had become?" "A prostitute, Dad" "Oh, you scared me half to death, girl. I thought you said a Protestant."
This is one of the major plot lines of The Vicar of Bullhampton, though not its conclusion. Plots are standard and repetitive. The success of the work relies less on the plot than on its window dressing. Trollope's Carry Brattle has been gone from home, and everyone knows what she has become but delicacy forbids use of the word "whore." Her father forbids her return. Will she come back? How will she be received? This theme apparently was a daring innovation in the mainstream Victorian novel; Mary Magdalene rarely appeared in the printed pages of the nineteenth century.
Sensational as this story line was, the novel appears to move rather slowly. All plot lines revolve around Mister Fenwick, the vicar. He and his wife encourage their house guest, Mary Lowther, to accept the suit of Mr. Fenwick's best friend, Harry Gilmore. She doesn't love him; she refuses him and shortly after falls in love with her cousin Walter Marrable. She accepts his proposal, but they jointly agree to call it off when his prospects in life are ruined by his father's reckless wasting of Walter's inheritance. Against her better judgment she accepts Mr. Gilmore. Then Walter's prospects for an inheritance improve. So she breaks her engagement to Mr. Gilmore and resumes that with Captain Marrable. Like Alice Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? she becomes a double jilt, and she is roundly criticized by many for such grievous behavior.
Perhaps the most entertaining of the story lines is a church issue reminiscent of the Barsetshire novels. Mister Fenwick is insulted by the great landowner of the county, The Marquis of Trowbridge, and he succeeds in repaying the Marquis with more insults. Here Trollope's familiarity with church sensitivities brings us the Marquis's revenge: he allows a Methodist chapel (not a regular Wesleyan Methodist chapel, but a Primitive Methodist chapel) to be built across the road from the vicarage, where its ugly red bricks and loud discordant bells are a recurring nuisance to the vicar and his wife.
But then: the vicar decides to consider the chapel to be his hair shirt, and he obtains the promise of his wife (who will never open her front door to look at the chapel) not to mention it to him again. The vicar considers the matter closed; but his wife's sister visits with her husband, a distinguished barrister, who volunteers to investigate the matter. He discovers that the land on which the chapel is being built is glebe land! (Glebe land is that which belongs to the vicar for his personal farming or gardening.) And here the vicar refuses to shed his hair shirt.