What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I had come to London with the intention of giving classical teaching to any who were willing to pay about ten shillings an hour for it. I had testimonials and recommendations galore from a very varied collection of pastors, masters, and friends. Several of the latter also were actively eager to assist my object, foremost among whom I may name with unforgetting gratitude Dr. David Williams, my old master at Winchester, then Warden of New College. Thus furnished, pupils were not wanting, and money amply sufficient for my immediate needs seemed to come in easily. I did my best with my pupils during the short hours of my work; but much success is not to be expected from pupils the very circumstance and terms of whose tuition gives rise to the presumption that they are irremediably stupid or idle, and the hired “coach” a dernier resort. Such employers as I had to deal with, however, if they assigned you somewhat hopeless tasks, appeared to be satisfied with an infinitesimal amount of results, and I believe I gave satisfaction in all cases save that of a lady, the widowed mother of an only son, a very elegant and fashionable dame in Belgrave Square, who complained once to the clergyman who had recommended me to her, that I had come to her house one Monday morning “in a very dusty condition.” I fear she might have said every Monday morning, for my custom was to walk up to my lesson from Harrow, where I had been spending the Sunday with the Grants, and “immer noch stäuben die Wege” hardly less on the Harrow road, than Goethe found them to do in Italy! I had to tell her that the dust on my shoes had not reached my brain, and that I had no pretension, and entirely declined, to be an exemplar to her son in the matter of his toilet. We parted very good friends however at the end of my engagement. When she said some complimentary words about my work with her son, I could not refrain from saying that I had done my best to prepare myself for it by having my shoes carefully blacked. She laughed, and said, “I could not find fault with your Latin and Greek, Mr. Trollope. And would it not be better if people always confined their criticism to what they do understand?”

I was living during these months in Little Marlborough Street, in a house kept by a tailor and his mother. It was a queer house, disconnected with the row of buildings in which it stood, a survival of some earlier period. It stood in its own court, by which it was separated from the street. I found all the place transmogrified when I visited it a year or two ago. During the latter part of my residence there the lodgings were shared by my brother Anthony, who, as related by himself, had accepted a place in the secretary’s office in the Post Office. The lodgings were very cheap, more so I think than the goodness of them might have justified. We were the only lodgers; and the cheapness of the rooms was, I suspect, in some degree caused by the fact that the majority of young men lodgers would not have tolerated the despotic rule of our old landlady, the tailor’s mother. She made us very comfortable; but her laws were many, and of the nature of those of the Medes and Persians.

Meantime matters were becoming more and more gloomy in the Château d’Hondt, outside the St. Peter’s Gate, at Bruges. My brother Henry had returned thither from Devonshire; and his condition was unmistakably becoming worse. While I was still living in Little Marlborough Street, my mother came over hurriedly to London, bringing him and my sister Emily with her. They travelled by boat from Ostend to London to avoid the land journey, I take it poor Henry was led to suppose that the journey was altogether caused by the necessity of interviews between my mother and her publishers. But the real motive of it was to obtain the best medical advice for him and (as, alas! it began to appear to be necessary) for my sister Emily.

All kinds of schemes of southern travel, and voyages to Madeira, &c., had been proposed for Henry, who, having himself, with the hopefulness peculiar to his malady, no shadow of a doubt of his own recovery, entered into them all with the utmost zest. A kind friend, I forget by what means or interest, had offered to provide free passages to Madeira. Alas! the first consultation with the medical authorities put an end to all such schemes. And my poor mother had the inexpressibly sad and difficult task of quashing them all without allowing her patient to suspect the real reason of their being given up.

She had to take him back to Bruges; and I accompanied them to the boat lying off the Tower, and remained with them an hour before it weighed anchor. And then and there I took the last leave of my brother Henry, I well knowing, he never imagining, that it was for ever.

And now began at Bruges a time of such stress and trouble for my mother as few women have ever passed through. The grief, the Rachel sorrows of mothers watching by the dying beds of those, to save whose lives they would—ah! how readily!—give their own, are, alas, common enough. But no account, no contemplation of any such scene of anguish can give an adequate conception of what my mother went through victoriously.

Her literary career had hitherto been a succession of triumphs. Money was coming in with increasing abundance. But these successes had not yet lasted long enough to enable her, in the face of all she had done for the ruined household to which she had returned from America, to lay by any fund for the future. And though the proceeds of her labour were amply sufficient for all current needs, it was imperative that that labour should not be suspended.

It was under these circumstances that she had to pass her days in watching by the bedside of a very irritable invalid, and her nights—when he fortunately for the most part slept—in composing fiction! It was desirable to keep the invalid’s mind from dwelling on the hopelessness of his condition. And, indeed, he was constantly occupied in planning travels and schemes of activity for the anticipated time of his recovery, which she had to enter into and discuss with a cheerful countenance and bleeding heart. It was also especially necessary that my sisters, especially the younger, already threatened by the same malady, should be kept cheerful, and prevented from dwelling on the phases of their brother’s illness. This was the task in which, with agonised mind, she never faltered from about nine o’clock every morning till eight o’clock in the evening! Then with wearied body, and mind attuned to such thoughts as one may imagine, she had to sit down to her desk to write her novel with all the verve at her command, to please light-hearted readers, till two or three in the morning! This, by the help of green tea and sometimes laudanum, she did daily and nightly till the morning of the 23rd of December of that sad 1834; and lived after it to be eighty-three!

But her mind was one of the most extraordinarily constituted in regard to recuperative power and the capacity of throwing off sorrow, that I ever knew or read of. Any one who did not know her, as her own son knew her, might have supposed that she was deficient in sensibility. No judgment could be more mistaken. She felt acutely, vehemently. But she seemed to throw off sorrow as, to use the vulgar phrase, a duck’s back throws off water, because the nature of the organism will not suffer it to rest there. How often have I applied to her the words of David under a similar affliction!

My brother died on the 23rd of December, 1834, and was buried at Bruges, in the Protestant portion of the city cemetery. Had his life been much prolonged, I think that that of my mother must have sunk under the burthen laid upon it. I hastened to cross the Channel as soon as I heard of my brother’s death, but did not arrive in time for his funeral.