WHAT TO DO ABOUT MUDDY BOOTS
DR. WORTLE'S SCHOOL
Although Anthony Trollope traveled to North America five times and wrote a two-volume travel book, North America, about his second trip, only one of his novels, Dr. Wortle's School, includes any scenes on American soil. It's a relatively short book, 199 pages, and only two of its twenty-four chapters are set in the United States. But it's a robust story, emphasizing action over reflection, certainly in the two American chapters.
Dr. Wortle is a clergyman with a parish that occupies relatively little of his time—time mainly devoted to his boarding school that prepares boys for Eton. To this school comes an "usher" (a subordinate or an assistant teacher at a school) who seems for Dr. Wortle's purposes to be too good to be true. And indeed the mystery that surrounds this overqualified teacher, a fellow of Oxford, and his American wife, who seems equally overqualified for cleaning up after unruly school boys, confirms that they bring with them baggage that threatens the continued existence of the school itself. The author unburdens himself of this mystery at the first opportunity, with a lengthy "O kind-hearted reader" paragraph that explains his intention of putting the "horse of my romance before the cart" by revealing the mystery "in the next paragraph—in the next half-dozen words. Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke were not man and wife."
Mr. Peacocke had gone to St. Louis and become Vice-President of the College at Missouri, where he had met Mrs. Ferdinand Lefroy, whose appearance—dark brown complexion, with hair dark and very glossy, "tall for a woman, but without any of that look of length under which female altitude sometimes suffers"—suggests that she must have been a Creole, even though she was the daughter of a Louisiana planter ruined by the Civil War. Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy had gone to Mexico to seek his fortune, was reported to have been killed there, and Mrs. Lefroy had then married Mr. Peacocke. When her supposedly dead husband reappeared and again disappeared, Mr. Peacocke and Mrs. Lefroy went to England as man and wife.
So here is a secret in an unstable state. The Peacockes' behavior is so guarded—they accept no invitations, say nothing of their history—that a secret is suspected, and when Ferdinand Lefroy's brother suddenly appears and attempts to blackmail the Peacockes, the fat is in the fire. Dr. Wortle remains loyal to his faithful usher, but the hounds of gossip are hot on the scent, and a number of students are withdrawn from the school, threatening its viability.
The unkindest cut of all is a paragraph in a London gossip sheet, "Everybody's Business," alluding to Dr. Wortle's visits to Mrs. Peacocke in the absence of her husband, who has gone to America to seek out the truth about the status, living or dead, of Ferdinand Lefroy.
"It must be admitted," said the writer, "that the Doctor has the best of it. While one gentleman is gouging the other—as cannot but be expected—the Doctor will be at any rate in security, enjoying the smiles of beauty under his own fig-tree at Bowick. After a hot morning with "τυπτω" [3] in the school, there will be "amo" in the cool of the evening."