"Cousin Henry is an original novel," Anthony Trollope wrote his publisher, "but it is not for me to say so." I think Trollope's pride in his accomplishment is justified. It's a short novel (280 pages), and it follows with few distractions the thought processes of a weak and indecisive young man who is summoned to his uncle's large estate in Wales and told that since he is the only male descendent, he will inherit it, "unless you show yourself to be unworthy." Henry's cousin Isabel Brodrick has been living with her uncle, and he would prefer to leave it to her, since it is not entailed and he has the right to do so. The uncle soon deems Henry to be unworthy, but the uncle soon dies, and the will leaves the property to Henry. But Henry knows there was a later will changed to leave it all to Isabel. Only he knows where it is. What is he to do? This is what Trollope considered to be his original contribution: he follows the nephew's vacillating attempts to resolve his dilemma so that not only does the author consider his portrayal of these mental agonies to be plausible, he arranges for the family lawyer, Mr. Apjohn, to guess exactly what the young man has thought and what he plans to do.
Does he convince the reader? Yes, I'll accept it. The author holds all the cards, of course, but I find it believable that a young man could be this indecisive. He wants the farm, but he doesn't want to commit a crime to get it and keep it. Everyone knows that Henry is concealing something, and this is perceived through nonverbal communication. The housekeeper and Isabel notice how pale, wan, and spiritless he has become.
Isabel has a suitor, the Reverend William Owen, and they both show themselves to be proud and stubborn lovers similar to such other Trollope couples as Caroline Waddington and George Bertram in The Bertrams. Mr. Owen withdraws his suit when he learns that Isabel is to be an heiress (by an even earlier will) because he considers himself too poor to press his suit on a wealthy woman. Then when Isabel appears to be disinherited, he makes his proposal, but Isabel refuses him because she considers herself so poor that she would drag him into poverty. However, the author has mercy on them. After Henry is found out by the wily Mr. Apjohn, Isabel boldly goes to her lover's house, steps close to him and urges him to kiss her. (Here the reticent Victorian novelist indulges in a bit of sensuality.) Then she tells him that he could never hold his head up again if he should refuse to marry her after "that."
"And I beg, Mr. Owen, that for the future you will come to me, and not make me come to you." This she said as she was taking her leave. "It was very disagreeable, and very wrong, and will be talked about ever so much. Nothing but my determination to have my own way could have made me do it."
Perhaps it would be going too far to say that all Trollope's women outclassed the men, but the women's victories far outnumbered those of the men.
Mr. Apjohn, the Jones family lawyer, believes that Cousin Henry has cheated Isabel out of her inheritance by concealing or destroying the final will, and he bullies Henry into an effort to clear his name in public by bringing suit for libel against the local newspaper, which has taken great interest in the suspicion of tampering with a will. Mr. Apjohn then deprives us of a courtroom drama when he correctly interprets Henry's body language and solves the mystery. But we do encounter the dreaded Mr. Cheekey of the Old Bailey, perhaps a slightly less unscrupulous and unsavory barrister than the infamous Mr. Chaffanbrass of several earlier novels, but one who still "would make his teeth felt worse than any terrier."
Only a glimpse of a vast English country estate is sufficient to make quite clear the importance of inheritance in the English scheme of things. The oldest male heir gets it all. The other sibs get nothing, unless the father or the firstborn son is gracious enough to make some provision for them. Trollope explored variations on this theme in Is He Popenjoy? and Orley Farm, among others. In Cousin Henry, the entire community plays the role of the Greek chorus and condemns the suspected crime. But the tenants of the estate and the servants are all convinced that Cousin Henry is not the true heir. They don‘t like him, and the servants all give notice of resigning their posts. Trollope allows the victorious Mr. Apjohn to summarize his thoughts about primogeniture. Here is the unabridged sermon:
"A man, if an estate belong to himself personally, can do what he likes with it, as he can with half-crowns in his pocket; but where land is concerned, feelings grow up which should not be treated rudely. In one sense Llanfeare belonged to your uncle to do what he liked with it, but in another sense he shared it only with those around him; and when he was induced by a theory which he did not himself quite understand to bring your cousin down among these people, he outraged their best convictions."
"He meant to do his duty, Mr. Apjohn."
"Certainly; but he mistook it. He did not understand the root of that idea of a male heir. The object has been to keep the old family, and the old adherences, and the old acres together. England owes much to the manner in which this has been done, and the custom as to a male heir has availed much in the doing of it. But in this case, in sticking to the custom, he would have lost the spirit, and as far as he was concerned, would have gone against the practice which he wished to perpetuate. There, my dear, is a sermon for you, of which, I dare say, you do not understand a word."
"I understand every syllable of it, Mr. Apjohn," she answered.
One last detail: The landed estate appeared to confer a personal name with it, which took precedence over a wife's using her husband's surname. The legal maneuvers required by this requirement were quite complicated, but after a detailed explanation by Mr. Apjohn, the result was that when Isabel bore William a son, it is reported that "Llanfeare was entailed upon him and his son, and … he was so christened as to have his somewhat grandiloquent name inscribed as William Apjohn Owen Indefer Jones."
There was always some question as to how Mr. Apjohn should be recompensed for his work as Cousin Henry's "advocate." One would guess that he was rewarded in more ways than one. Among other compensations, he is recognized as the genius who solved the mystery in an early example of the psychological crime study, one that manages to hold the reader's interest through speculative passages about how a man's mind may work under certain circumstances.