This reign of terror happened to occur in rural Ireland; it could have been the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mafia in Sicily, the mob in Chicago, or the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South. But here in County Galway the usual ingredients were to be found: inadequate law enforcement, young men with more testosterone than employment, and a fearful populace.
Less violent but more widespread rebellion had already appeared in the disruption of a fox hunt. The author had learned fox hunting in Ireland, and many of the momentous events in his novels take place at fox hunts. On this occasion, whenever the hunters arrive at a gorse covert, they find the local farmers already there, having beaten the area so that no fox would have remained for the chase.
And the Jones family finds itself the victim of a boycott, a term that had only come into use two years earlier when Captain Charles Boycott, land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo in Ireland, had attempted to evict eleven tenants who refused to pay their full rent. Charles Parnell, the champion of Irish nationalism and a land reform agitator, had already recommended that an offending landowner might be ostracized. Captain Boycott then found himself victim of the process that later bore his name. And in The Landleaguers all the servants but one leave the Jones household. The family is unable to buy anything in town, and no one in the town will buy from the farm. The daughters come to enjoy, in a way, household duties such as cooking, making beds, and churning butter. The family, though, is devastated.
And the women pay a surcharge. As we see Mr. Jones carving the mutton and serving a male visitor first, the author explains: "In a boycotted house you will always find that the gentlemen are helped before the ladies. It is a part of the principle of boycotting that women shall subject themselves."
As the nonviolent civil disobedience changes to murder, the story takes on the dimensions of a western movie when the heralded lawman comes to town to institute law and order and set things straight. This was Captain Yorke Clayton, possessed of two attributes that would lead any man to fame: recklessness and light blue eyes. With these attributes he wins the hearts of both Jones sisters, Ada and Edith. Edith, the younger and brighter of the two, tells herself and everyone else that he will prefer Ada, the elder and the more beautiful. By the time he declares himself to be in love with Edith, she has such a difficult time getting rid of her story that the issue is not resolved within forty-eight chapters. After Florian is killed, Captain Clayton becomes obsessed with the identification of his killer. The villain is assumed to be Terry Lax, an agitator from another county who is guilty of murdering the other witness who was prepared to identify the opener of the sluice gate. This was done in a crowded courtroom with the pistol at the victim's head, and no one could be found who would say he had seen who did it. The author did not live to unravel the murder for us and wrap up all the loose ends; we are assured by Trollope's son Harry, however, that the Captain did marry Edith and that the infamous Mr. Lax was hanged by the neck until he was dead.
Besides all this there is the subplot, a story that moviegoers in the following century would recognize as show-biz melodrama. Young Frank Jones, son of the lord of Morony Castle, is in love with Rachel O'Mahony, whose beautiful singing voice on stage is her meal ticket. "We may best describe her by saying that she was an American and an actress," the author tells us. Rachel came to Ireland with her father, who had "probably" been born in America, though the family was Irish. She is accompanied by her manager, referred to by her as the "greasy Jew" Mahomet M. Moses, who also wants to marry her. Rachel, a tiny thing, holds out against him, but then she receives attention from Lord Castlewell, forty years old, eldest son of the Marquis of Beaulieu, with lots of money and a fondness for young ladies of the theater. Frank has not the money to support her, refuses to be supported by her, and, in short, she accepts Lord Castlewell's proposal—only to change her mind after she becomes ill and loses her singing voice. Harry tells us that Frank was to marry Rachel in the end.
And so Anthony Trollope began and ended his writing career with a novel about Ireland. He didn't live long enough to play this one out, but we're fortunate to have the first forty-eight chapters and his son's assurance of how it was to have ended in the last twelve. His last work was one that reprised some of his favorite themes—the fox hunt, a murder mystery, a young American woman with a smart mouth, a stubborn young woman reluctant to accept a suitor whom she loves, and the ways of the simple folk of Ireland. He was running in full stride when he fell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One hesitates to implicate others in a private madness. A project such as this one requires a certain bit of monomania. However, there are a few who cannot escape complicity.