Any scholar must be proud and moved, as I am tonight, to have the privilege of delivering the first in an annual series of lectures: and I hope it will not be too presumptious of me to offer to you, on this inaugural occasion, fraternal greetings from three other Victorian bodies with which I have been associated. I am Chairman of the Tennyson Society: and Tennyson enjoyed Trollope's company, and was oddly linked with him when another of their great literary contemporaries, Robert Browning, offered, first to Trollope and then to Tennyson, as the basis of a narrative, the murder-story which eventually he himself used in The Ring and the Book. I am also a Vice President, and former President, of the Dickens Fellowship. Dickens was dismissive about Trollope's writings, and personally was closer to Anthony's brother, Thomas Adolphus; but Anthony, it must be said, had a blind spot too for Dickens - one of his least intelligent remarks was that 'of Dickens's style it is impossible to speak in praise' (Autobiography ch 13). But the men esteemed each other: Dickens wrote of the 'heartiness' of Trollope's handshake, Trollope of Dickens's skill as an after-dinner speaker ('He spoke so well that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair'- St Paul's Magazine, July 1870). We can all wish it was Dickens, and not one of his commentators, that was addressing you tonight.
So allow me to offer your Society the fraternal greetings of the Dickens Fellowship and the Tennyson Society, and of Leicester's Victorian Studies Centre: my lecture tonight derives indeed from one given in memory of my co-founder of that Centre, the man who invented the academic concept 'urban history', H.J. Dyos. Trollope of course is an essential author for anyone concerned with Victorian studies, as was foretold by one of his most intelligent contemporaries, R. H. Hutton: 'no historian,' he wrote in an obituary tribute (Spectator, 9 December 1882), 'who emulated the style of Macaulay' would even attempt 'to delineate English society in the third quarter of the present century' without 'a familiar knowledge' of Trollope's novels: a judgement echoed by one of the most distinguished modern historians of that period, Asa Briggs -'A more convincing impression of what everyday life in the middle Victorian years,' he writes, can be gathered from Trollope's novels 'than from any other source' (Victorian People, 1954, p 102). Henry James, in another obituary essay (Century Magazine, July 1883, reprinted like most Victorian comments quoted in this paper in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley, 1969), remarked: 'His great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual. This gift is not rare in English fiction; ... (but) his great distinction is that in resting there his eyes took in so much of the field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as well as saw them ...'
He saw and felt London: though when we think of Trollope in spacial or topographical terms it is likely that we most associate him with that 'dear county' as he called it, Barsetshire (Autobiography, ch 8) - an unique literary area, it is worth noting, in that it is imaginary and cannot be visited, unlike (say) Wordsworth's Lake District, the Brontes' Yorkshire, Dickens's London, Hardy's Wessex, Lawrence's Nottinghamshire or Joyce's Dublin. 'I never lived in any cathedral city, - except London,' Trollope wrote (Autobiography, ch.5), 'never knew anything of a Close' (here he was forgetting his schoolboy years at Winchester), but his imagination which has not always been given as much credit as his powers of observation lived so intensely in Barsetshire that, as he said, he knew all its accessories 'as though I had lived and wandered there' (Autobiography, ch.8).
The place, however, in which he had in fact mostly lived and wandered was London. Here he was born, in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, and here he died, not that he meant to do so. He had retired to Hampshire but on a visit to London was fatally but endearingly laid low by a fit of laughter caused by reading Anstey's Vice Versa. He had gone to school in Harrow, and spent his early Post Office clerkship years in London, and for most of his literary career he lived in London or hard-by in Hertfordshire: a choice of residence dictated by his conception of what it meant to be a novelist - as odd, when one thinks about it, as Henry James's famous lament over Nathaniel Hawthorne's disadvantages in setting out to be a novelist in America in the 1820: a country with
No sovereign, no court, no aristocracy, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; .... no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; .... no Epsom nor Ascot! (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1883, p 43).
'I thought,' wrote Trollope (Autobiography ch 8), 'that a man who could write books ought not to live in Ireland' (and here, to be fair, many literary Irishmen would back him, from Goldsmith to Wilde and Shaw and Joyce and Beckett), '- ought to live within reach of the publishers, the clubs, and the dinner-parties of the metropolis.' Well, like James's feeling that a novelist was undernourished without Eton and Harrow and Epsom and Ascot as elements in his imaginative diet, this reminds one of the assumptions about prose fiction in the 1870s/80s, as do so many of Trollope's throwaway remarks in the Autobiography: I particularly treasure his statement, which novelists a few years later would have found quite unacceptable, that 'A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos', (ch. 7). Try that out on Conrad or Lawrence or Joyce!
Trollope belongs very much to his time, class and circumstances; that, as the quotations I have made from Hutton and James and Lord Briggs suggest, is part of his fascination and value for us. Like Thackeray's but unlike Dickens's, his literary London is full of clubs. The invaluable Gerould Guide to Trollope, which was such an agreeable joining-up gift to any members who had done without it theretofore, lists eighteen clubs in its 'London' entry, some of them actual (such as the Reform, and the Jockey, and Brooks's) but most of them imaginary, though it omits Sebright's in St James's Square, which is Adolphus Crosbie's place (Small House, ch. 25) and the Oxford and Cambridge, to which Harry Clavering belonged (The Claverings, ch. 5), and maybe others in novels I haven't yet read. In The Claverings we hear of the unfortunate consequences of, not being a clubman' : Theodore Burton has to dine 'most uncomfortably at an eating-house' (ch. 41), and elsewhere in the novels we hear of indigent young men's feelings of deprivation if unable to afford or to get elected to a club: Johnny Eames, for instance, who is living in Mrs Roper's boarding-house in Burton Crescent (now, if you want to view it, Cartwright Gardens off the Euston Road) -
'I say, Cradell, I wonder whether a fellow could get into a club? ... I shouldn't want it to be particularly swell. If a man isn't a swell, I don't see what he gets by going among those who are. But it is uncommon slow at Mother Roper's.' (Small House, ch. 4)
As Michael Sadleir remarks, Trollope's return to London in 1859 for literary reasons was 'an event in his life of the very greatest importance. It established him within easy reach of London: it made possible club-life and all this was to mean to him'and much more that was important to his fiction as well as his personal habits and enjoyments, for, as his first biographer T.H.S. Escott observed, he had seen little of the metropolis since his boyhood and of its 'social life he knew nothing Now began Trollope's introduction into the literary and general society of the capital.' (1)The effect of this move was soon evident in his novels.
His final Post Office appointment was as postmaster of the Western and North Eastern districts of London, and he was offered (but he declined) the surveyorship of the whole Metropolitan postal district shortly before his retirement in 1867. Soon after retiring, he moved to 39 Montagu Square, Marylebone: and in 1882 he died in a nursing-home in Welbeck Street, a few hundred yards 'from the Northumberland Street lodgings in which he had lived as a junior clerk in the Post Office'. (2) Those humble lodgings in Northumberland Street (now Luxborough Street, Marylebone), with a view of the local workhouse where now stand the new buildings of the London Polytechnic, appear in Trollope's fiction: the Reverend Mr Emilius lodges there, in Phineas Redux, and slips out from there to murder Mr Bonteen. Later in that story, Mr Emilius, though not convicted of murder, is justly on the way down socially, and occupies yet humbler lodgings at No 3, Jellybag Street, Edgware Road (ch 59).
Jellybag Street is one of the few metropolitan place names which I have been unable to find in my London gazeteers, ancient and modern. It sounds made-up, like those painfully facetious surnames Trollope gives to his minor characters; but, if so, it is a rare instance of his doing for London what is his normal practice for Barsetshire locations. Almost always he uses real and recognisable London place names. Thus, young Phineas Finn, lately elected to Parliament, tires of his law studies, and of his daily walk from Great Marlborough Street (off Regent Street) to Lincoln's Inn
...... crossing Poland Street and Soho Square, and so continuing his travels by the Seven Dials and Long Acre. His morning walk was of a piece with his morning studies, and he (formerly) took pleasure in the gloom of both. But now the taste of his palate had been already changed by the glare of the lamps in and about palatial Westminster, and he found that St Giles's was disagreeable. The ways about Pall Mall and across the Park to Parliament Street, or the Treasury, were much pleasanter, and the new offices in Downing Street, already half built, absorbed all the interest which he had hitherto been unable to take in the suggested but uncommenced erection of the new Law Courts in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn (Phineas Finn, ch 7)
Another unsettled young law-student, Frank Greystock in The Eustace Diamonds (ch 13), can similarly define his dilemma in street-directory terms:
We could look out and see two altogether different kinds of life before him, both of which had their allurements. There was the Belgrave-cum-Pimlico life, the scene of which might extend itself to South Kensington, enveloping the parks and coming round over Park Lane, and through Grosvenor Square and Berkeley Square back to Piccadilly. Within this he might live with lords and countesses, and rich folks generally, going out to the very best dinnerparties, avoiding stupid people, having everything the world could give, except a wife and family and home of his own. All this he could achieve by the work which would certainly fall in his way, and by means of that position in the world which he had already attained by his wits. And the wife, with the family and house of his own, might be forthcoming, should it ever come in his way to form an attachment with a wealthy woman.... And then there was that other outlook, the scene of which was laid somewhere north of Oxford Street, and the glory of which consisted in Lucy's smile, and Lucy's hand, and Lucy's kiss, as he returned home weary from his work.
Later, he visualises even more painfully just how far north of Oxford Street loyalty to Lucy might take him: "He must alter his plan of living at once, give up the luxury of his rooms at the Grosvenor, take a small house somewhere, probably near the Swiss Cottage, come up and down to his chambers by the underground railway ...... (ch 18). Or consider the social problems of Mr Maule, who "lived in chambers on a flat in Westminster, and belonged to two excellent clubs", but who had to count his pennies; so his London was mapped out in terms of endurable cab fares:
A cab for going out to dinner was a necessity:- but his income would not stand two or three cabs a day. Consequently he never went north of Oxford Street, or east of the theatres, or beyond Eccleston Square towards the river. (That Ecceleston Square in Belgravia reappears in a later quotation.) The regions of South Kensington and New Brompton were a trouble to him, as he found it impossible to lay down a limit in that direction which would not exclude him from things which he fain would not exclude. There are dinners given at South Kensington which such a man as Mr Maule cannot afford not to eat (Phineas Redux, chs 21, 24).
Years earlier, Dickens had been reproached for the penny-a-lining prolixity of his descriptions of journeys through the streets of London, "every turn of which is enumerated with the accuracy of a cabman". (3) The sneer could be directed also against Trollope, not the cabman but the postman, one of whose duties was to determine the location of those pillarboxes which he introduced into British life. London street names have, however, traditionally been thus available and significant to the novelistic imagination, as have no other British cities except for a few main thoroughfares in Bath, Brighton and Edinburgh. Witness, for example, Defoe's account, nearly a century before Trollope's birth, of Moll Flanders' getaway after stealing the child's necklace, in Aldersgate Street:
I went through into Bartholomew Close, and then turned round to another passage that goes into Long Acre, so away into Charterhouse Yard and out into St John Street; then, crosssing into Smithfield, went down Chick Lane and into Field Lane to Holborn Bridge ......
By Trollope's time, London was, much more emphatically than in Defoe's , the great worldcity. 'The modern world is theirs,' Emerson wrote of the English in 1856. 'The nation sits in the immense city they have builded, a London extended into every man's mind, though he live in Van Dieman's Land or Capetown'- and Emerson remarks, with some exaggeration, that
The essays, the fiction, and the poetry of the day have ... municipal limits. Dickens ... writes London tracts ... . Their novelists despair of the heart. 'Rackeray finds that God has made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe. - more's the pity, he thinks; - but 'tis not for us to be wiser: we must renounce ideals, and accept London (English Traits, chs 5,14).
Trollope, who thought Thackeray the greatest novelist of his day is, I have superfluously reminded you, more akin to him, technically, temperamentally and in terms of subject-matter, than he is to Dickens. His fictional London is similar to Thackeray's, ranging from the aristocracy to the comfortable middle-class, and not often below that level - a world the larger part of which might be defined as one whose menfolk belonged or wished to belong to clubs and whose houses lay 'between Bond Street and Park Lane' (Eustace Diamonds, ch 1). Sometimes he adventures into Dickens territory, where his touch is less certain: the East-end parish of St Diddulph'sin-the-East, for instance, where Emily Trevelyan takes refuge with her clerical uncle, in He Knew He Was Right, an area which Trollope typically describes in terms of its social disadvantages for its few genteel inhabitants ("Of visiting society within a distance of three or four miles there was none but what was afforded by the families of other East-end clergymen" - eh 14). Or there is the Hounsditch firm of Hubbles & Grease, dealers in tea, coffee and brandy, in Orley Farm, of which a reviewer wrote appreciatively that Trollope had here taken
....... a very unclerical direction. From bishops and archdeacon he has gone to commercial travellers; and really he describes all the bagman's little weaknesses as if he had been a bagman himself from infancy. He saturates you with the atmosphere of the commercial room. (Dublin University Magazine, April 1863)
Such Dickensian excursions are rare, however. In The Warden (ch 14), Trollope refers briefly to 'the thickest of London smoke' and 'the sullied Thames,' but not to pursue these matters with the familiar Dickensian resonances, reformist or symbolical; instead, these disagreeable features of London are mentioned for their contrast to the beauty and tranquillity of the Temple Gardens ('the medieval court of the metropolis .... Where can retirement be so completed as here?'). Or, in The Small House at Allington (ch 28), Adolphus Crosbie skirts Dickens-land. With much on his guilty mind, he tries to distract himself by a walk that takes him into Sketches by Boz territory -'up Charing Cross and St Martin's Lane, towards the Seven Dials and Bloomsbury (not then a favoured precinct), into regions of the town, with which he had no business, and which he never frequented'. Nor did Trollope, as novelist, frequent that slummy criminal area of Seven Dials, which had haunted Dickens's imagination since childhood; but Bloomsbury, as a district just habitable by his characters, though then beyond the social pale, was available to him as a place of reference. Thus Harry Clavering, visiting Lady Ongar in her up-market lodging in Bolton Street, off Piccadilly, blushes to name 'so unfashionable a locality' as Bloomsbury Square, where, he has to confess, he is lodging (The Claverings, ch 7). But this area is recommended for indigent newlyweds by that sensible nobleman, Lord De Guest, who advises Johnny Eames that 'with five hundred a year you ought to be able to get along I should live somewhere near Bloomsbury Square at first, because I'm told you can get a house for nothing. After all, what's fashion worth?' (Small House, ch 46). Another kind of person who might equably inhabit Bloomsbury is the lawyer Mr Prendergast,
.... one of those old-fashioned people who think a spacious substantial house in Bloomsbury Square, at a rent of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, is better worth having than a narrow, lath-and-plaster, ill-built tenement at nearly double the price out westward of the Parks. A quite new man is necessarily afraid of such a locality as Bloomsbury Square, for he has no chance of getting any one into his house if he do not live westward. Who would dine with Mr Jones in Woburn Terrace, unless he had known Mr Jones all his days, or unless Jones were known as a top sawyer in some walk of life? But Mr Prendergast was well enough known to his old friends to be allowed to live where he pleased, and he was not very anxious to add to their number by any new fashionable allurements (Castle Richmond, ch 35)
Another old-fashioned person with strong views on localities is Mr Longestaffe, of very ancient family, and his chosen London area is accordingly very different from lawyer Prendergast's. His townhouse is in Bruton Street, off Piccadilly (a favourite street for Trollope characters: Sir Harry Hotspur, Lady Lufton and Bishop Proudie also have their town houses there):
It was not by any means a charming house, having but few of those luxuries and elegancies which have been added of late years to newly-built London residences. It was gloomy and inconvenient, with large drawing-rooms, bad bedrooms, and very little accommodation for servants. But it was the old family town-house, having been inhabited by three or four generations of Longestaffes, and did not savour of that radical newness which prevails, and which was peculiarly distasteful to Mr Longestaffe. Queen's Gate and the quarters around were, according to Mr Longestaffe, devoted to opulent tradesmen. (And so on he goes.) ... and old streets lying between Piccadilly and Oxford Street with one or two well-known localities to the south and the north of these boundaries, were the proper sites for these habitations. When Lady Pomona, instigated by some friend of high rank but questionable taste, had once suggested a change to Eaton Square, Mr Longestaffe had at once snubbed his wife (The Way We Live Now, ch 13).
Eaton Square, however, was where Lady Alexandrina De Courcy would have wished to live when she married Adolphus Crosbie, but they could not afford it. She suggested St John's Wood, but he objected; her preferred 'one of the new Pimlico squares down near Vauxhall Bridge,' but she objected:
Her geographical knowledge of Pimlico had not been perfect, and she had nearly fallen into a fatal error. But a friend had kindly intervened. 'For heaven's sake, my dear, don't let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square!' had been exclaimed to her in dismay by a faithful married friend. Thus warned, Alexandrina had been firm, and now their tent was to be pitched in Princess Royal Crescent.
This was a fashionable area, still being built, off the Bayswater Road, and
... it was acknowledged to be a quite correct locality. From one end of the crescent a corner of Hyde Park could be seen, and the other abutted on a very handsome terrace indeed, in which lived an ambassador, - from South America, - a few bankers' senior clerks, and a peer of the realm. We know how vile is the sound of Baker Street, and how absolutely foul to the polite ear is the name of Fitzroy Square (Small House, ch 40).
Here the narratorial voice is clearly ironical, though sometimes Trollope seems to be participating in these social manoeuvres rather than viewing them with proper detachment.
"There was.... a great ball at Lady Bardolph's, in Belgrave Square,' remarks the narrator in Disraeli's Tancred (1847, Bk 1, ch.12); adding 'One should generally mention localities, because very often they indicate character.' Indicate class and purse, one might object, or character as influenced by those contingencies. Trollope's novels abound in such localised social notations. The parvenue Mrs Val in The Three Clerks provides a pleasant early instance of this. As the well-left widow of a city stockbroker, she has married the thriftless son of an earl and, as the Honourable Mrs Valentine Scott, is determined to get into society. Flower-shows are a boon to such social climbers, Trollope notes, being 'open to ladies who cannot quite penetrate the inner sancts of fashionable life, and yet they are frequented by those to whom those sancts are everyday household walks. There at least the Mrs Scotts of the outer world can show themselves in close contiguity, and on equal terms, with the Mrs Scotts of the inner world. And then, who is to know the difference?' (ch 17). Other such social-mixing opportunities are offered by charitable bazaars (satirised in Miss Mackenzie) and other such philanthropic affairs. Well, Mrs Val gives a ball, and in spite of her'oft reported assurance that they would have none but nice people, she had done her best to fill her rooms, and not unsuccessfully,' though she had drawn the line at inviting members of her first husband's family, 'who resided some north of Oxford Street, in the purlieus of Fitzroy Square (that dread placename again!) and some even to the east of Tottenham Court Road' (ch 26). Mrs Val also much enjoys the opportunity to patronise the newly-wed Mrs Alaric Tudor, upon whom she calls:
'Oh, my dear, 'said Mrs Val . what a dreadful journey it is to you up here! How those poor horses will stand it this weather I don't know … The Tudors … lived in one of the quiet street of Westbournia, not exactly looking into Hyde Park, but very near to it; Mrs Val, on the other hand, lived in Ebury Street, Pimlico; her house was much inferior to that of the Tudors; it was small, ill built, and afflicted with all the evils which bad drainage and bad ventilation can produce; but then it was reckoned to be within the precincts of Belgravia and was only five minutes' walk from Buckingham Palace. Mrs Val, therefore, had good ground for twitting her dear friend for living so far away from the limits of fashion. 'You really must come down somewhat nearer to the world; indeed you must, my dear, 'said the Hon. Mrs Val.
'We are thinking of moving; but then we are talking of going to St John's Wood, or Islington,' said Gertrude wickedly.
'Islington!' said the Honourable Mrs Val, nearly fainting.
Gertrude's then-unforeseen move is, however, to a sittingroom and bedroom, for seven shillings a week, at No 5, Paradise Row, Millbank, with a view of the Penitentiary where her husband, led into evil ways by Mrs Val's brother-in-law, is serving a six month sentence. By now, Gertrude, who had been nurtured in salubrious Hampton, is disposed to 'look back on her London Life as bad, tasteless, and demoralising' (ch 63)
This may remind us of Emerson's characterization of the attitude of Trollope's master, Thackeray: 'we must renounce ideals, and accept London', heartless London. Trollope does indeed often adopt the age-old presumption of satire and of pastoral, that the metropolis is corrupt and corrupting. Seymour Betsky identifies this important aspect of Trollope - if he over-identifies Trollope with it when he remarks that for him London is the scarlet city, 'the city of dissipation, ostentation, snobbery, gambling, drunkenness, sexual incontinence, idleness, drift'. (4) His late novel The Way We Live Now was written, Trollope said, in bitter protest against 'what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age' (Autobiography, ch 20) Even the notion of a club has been perverted by the prevailing moral malaise. The Beargarden, 'in a small street turning out of St James's Street', where Sir Felix Carbury and his cronies foregather, exists only so that its members can gamble and get sozzled into the small hours. It
...... had lately been opened with the express view of combining parsimony with profligacy This club was not to be opened till three o'clock in the afternoon, before which hour the promoters of the Beargarden thought it improbable that they and their fellows would want a club. There were to be no morning papers taken, no library, no morning room. Dining rooms, billiard-rooms, and card-rooms would suffice for the Beargarden (ch 3).
This is fittingly the dominant club in this novel, the main plot of which is concerned with the fraudulent financier, Augustus Melmotte: the money-market is seen as another kind of gambling, with a plentiful supply of card-sharpers. This is a frequent theme in Trollope: Gertrude Tudor's husband is in jail for misdeeds which began with an involvement with shares, in a novel written nearly twenty years before The Way We Live Now. This preoccupation of Trollope's becomes, indeed, a limitation, for as Asa Briggs remarks, albeit with some exaggeration,
For Trollope the world of wealth was completely dissociated from both the world of land and the world of industry: it was concerned not with the creation of real capital in the form of machinery or buildings but with senseless speculation, dangerous bubbles and 'the infamous trade of stock-jobbing'. In its intrusions into politics it destroyed old values without suggesting new ones: it subtly insinuated itself into the old aristocracy as well as into the new business community. In all Trollope's novels the share-pusher - often a Jew - is a conventional villain. (5)
It represented, one might suggest, a too London-centred view of the British economy, like Cobbett's inveighing against 'the great Wen'.
Another reiterated comment upon the corrupting power of London was based upon Trollope's personal experience (it appears in the Autobiography and even in a lecture on the Civil Service as well as in novel after novel): the moral perils of young men of decent family, living alone in London lodgings during their bachelor years. They fall into debt, lead irregular and somewhat dissipated lives, spending their nights 'in billiard rooms and worse places, 'as he decorously puts it in The Vicar of Bullhampton (ch 52); they get involved with barmaids or other such unsuitable young women. 'I was always in trouble,' Trollope writes of his early Post Office years, and he recalls one of his worst moments, when a not very ladylike female visitor arrived and, refusing to wait in the ante-room, marched into the general office, loudly enquiring 'Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?' As he drily remarks, 'These little incidents were all against me in the office' (Autobiography ch 3). This episode, like much else from these early years, is incorporated into The Three Clerks (ch 27), one of the novels in which Trollope puts to good account his knowledge of routines in the Civil Service and the seamier side of shabby-genteel London life. Johnny Eames is another character who inherits a lot of Trollope's early shortcomings and misfortunes. As he struggles out of his 'hobbledehoyhood' he reflects that his career in London so far has not been 'one on which he could look back with self-respect. He had lived with friends whom he did not esteem; he had been idle, and sometimes worse than idle ...' Poor John Eames had been so placed that he had been driven to do his flirting in very bad company (Small House, ch 51). Trollope, as a young man, had in fact received invitations to decent houses, but out of shyness or shame had generally declined them.(6) How low he had sunk, when 'worse than idle' in 'billiard rooms and worse places', we do not know (maybe R.H. Super's announced biography will tell us more), but manifestly his experiences left a scar.
All is not peaceful and morally serene in Barsetshire or the other provincial outposts of the Trollope world, but commonly virtue resides there, to be contrasted with or threatened by the mischiefs of the metropolis. Often it is there, in the country, that live the wholesome but unglamorous young women from whom Trollope's heroes are tempted to stray by the houris of the city or by high-society debutantes: or else the city-slicker invades and despoils, temporarily or otherwise, the morally superior provinces. This situation had, of course, appeared in earlier literature, in Jane Austen, for instance, a predecessor who has some affinities with Trollope - think of the ill effects of the Crawfords from London, in Mansfield Park - but London looms much larger in Trollope's non-metropolitan novels, as was admirably pointed out by R.H. Hutton in that obituary essay. The difference, Hutton remarks, reflects the social changes in rural life between the beginning of the nineteenth century and its third quarter; even Barsetshire is now 'possessed with the sense of the aggressiveness of the outer world'. In Austen, he continues, we see little of London, even in the effect it has upon the country, but
In Mr Trollope's novels - the Irish ones, of course, excepted nothing can be done without London ... while ten out of every dozen of Mr Trollope's stories turn chiefly upon London life. Nothing is more remarkable, in reading the two series of novels together, than the self-centredness of the country in Miss Austen, and the constant reference to London in Mr Trollope Re change from Miss Austen to Mr Trollope is the change from social home-rule to social centralization. (Spectator, 9 December 1882).
The railways and other developments in communication had, of course, a great deal to do with this. Hutton's point is well illustrated by that famous episode in which the telegraph features, the opening chapter of Barchester Towers, with Archdeacon Grantly tempted to wish that his dying father, the bishop, would die quickly, before a new government comes to power, which will not nominate himself for the vacant see: he telegraphs Downing Street the moment his father dies - but already the news has arrived in Barchester, 'by electric telegraph' that the government has fallen. London appoints Dr Proudie, a Londoner, who brings with him as chaplain, Mr Slope, lately 'preacher at a new district church built on the confines of Baker Street'- or, as the soon-exasperated Dr Grantly calls him, ,a clerical parvenu, .... a fellow raked up .... from the gutters of Marylebone' (ch 4,6). Eventually the egregious Slope is defeated, and leaves Barchester, 'shaking the dust off his feet as he entered the railway carriage,' marries a comfortably placed widow from his former parish, and 'possessed himself, also, before long, of a church in the vicinity of the New Road, and became known to fame as one of the most eloquent preachers and pious clergymen in that part of the metropolis' (ch 51). Londoners, evidently, had a taste for his kind of humbug; Barchester is well rid of him. Such interactions between London and the provinces are a frequent cause of the comedy, and of the un-comic, in Trollope.
Trollope, it is often said, specialises in the traditional part of English society: but even his Barsetshire is 'nowadays'- a frequent and significant word in Trollope as it is in Hardy beset by 'new men and new measures' (Barchester Towers ch 13). There is a useful book on this topic, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope, by Robert Polhemus. Relations between the metropolis and the provinces are changing; London itself of course is changing, as several of my quotations have reminded us. It was growing, new suburbs were being created:
It is very difficult now-a-days to say where the suburbs of London come to an end, and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country, have turned the country into a city. London will soon assume the shape of a great starfish. The old town, extending from Poplar to Hammersmith, will he the nucleus, and the various railway lines will be the projecting rays (Three Clerks ch 3).
In Castle Richmond he describes one of these new suburbs being created, down in St Botolph's in the East, Spinney Lane:
It was a street of small new tenements, built, as yet, only on one side of the way, with the pavement only one third finished, and the stones in the road as yet unbroken and untrodden. Of such streets there are thousands now round London. They are to be found in every suburb, creating wonder in all thoughtful minds as to who can be their tens of thousands of occupants. The houses are a little too good for artisans, too small and too silent to be the abode of various lodgers, and too mean for clerks who live on salaries. They are as dull-looking as Lethe itself, dull and silent, dingy and repulsive. But they are not discreditable in appearance, and never have that Mohawk look which by some unknown sympathy in bricks and mortar attaches itself to the residences of professional ruffians (ch 39).
Nevertheless, though Trollope is much concerned with change, it is mostly with change in the traditional parts of society - the aristocracy, gentry and genteel world, people to whom the London ,season' is meaningful, and their associates, and people who are trying to gain entry into this social world, by marriage or by the deployment of wealth (Melmotte being the grotesque instance of the latter class, and Miss Dunstable, the ointment-heiress, being a pleasant and creditable one). The novels are full of references to the annual patterns of migration, as 'London'- or its fashionable part - fills and empties as the 'season' and the Parliamentary sessions come and go. As even the foreigner, Madame Gordeloup, knows 'There is only de one place to live in, and that is London, for April, May and June' (Claverings, ch 18). Even shabby-genteel people try to make their annual pilgrimage, Colonel Askerton in The Belton Estate contriving to get six weeks' joviality in London during April and May away from his wife (ch 2), or Lady Macleod in Can You Forgive Her? spending June in town whenever she could save fifty pounds by skimping-it in Cheltenham, battening on her relatives but hiring ,a little parlour and bedroom' in King Street, St James's, where she 'lived a hot uncomfortable life' (ch 2). It can be felt as a great grievance if the family cannot afford to come to London for the season. Recall the resentment of Georgiana Longestaffe, whose father, though of ancient lineage, is hard up. 'It isn't for pleasure that I want to go up, 'she protests, but - as a spinster in her late twenties 'it behoved her to be in London at this time of the year that she might - look for a husband' (The Way We Live Now ch 21, 32). By July, fathers were counting the cost of it all, and becoming 'cross and stingy', and daughters who had not been proposed to were declaring to themselves 'that it was all vanity and vexation of spirit' (Sir Harry Hotspur ch 7).
By August it was all over; the season ended with the prorogation of Parliament, usually timed to occur just before grouse-shooting began, though the exigencies of politics might make it earlier or later. Thus, one summer young Phineas Finn finds himself 'alone at his club, and alone in the streets. July was not quite over, and yet all the birds of passage had migrated. Mr Mildmay (the Prime Minister), by his short session, had half ruined the London tradesmen, and had changed the summer mode of life of all those who account themselves to be anybody' (Phineas Finn ch 33; Framley Parsonage, ch 38, has a similar passage about the tradesmen's dismay, but provincial publicans' delight, over the destruction of the season by an early dissolution of Parliament). The next year, Phineas is detained in London when controversial legislation keeps the House sitting in late August. 'I shall never get over it,' says the whip, Mr Ratler. '...Think what it is to have to keep men together in August, with the thermometer at 81 degrees, and the river stinking like, - like the very mischief' (ch 47). Phineas runs into Madame Max Goesler, at whose Park Lane residence he has lately called, to find her 'not at home' - but, she now explains, 'What can any woman do when a gentleman calls on her in August?' (ch 48). Trollope is perceptive about such arcane rituals and conventions of the season.
'The hot desolation of London' (The Claverings ch 44) is a frequent topic of the novels, as are the resentment and self-pity felt by those whom duty or indigence keeps in town during these dead and dreary months. For Mr Maule, that cabfare-counting gentleman, 'there were ten weeks in the year which were terrible to him. From the middle of August to the end of October for him there was no whist, no society, - it may almost be said no dinner This sad period of the year must always be endured without relaxation, and without comfort' (Phineas Redux ch 21). October, Trollope remarks in The Small House at Allington (ch 5), was 'perhaps the most highly esteemed (month) for holiday purposes', 'a month during which few (choose) to own that they remain in town'. (Like his characters, he often slips into this locution, which identifies London with the few thousand 'who account themselves to be anybody' and overlooks the other few million.) Ever willing to give his own opinion, he confides that 'For myself, I always regard May as the best month for holiday-making; but then no Londoner cares to be absent in May' (ch 5).
Phineas Finn, an Irishman, spends his first recess as a Member in Ireland: five months with his father and with the wholesome Mary Flood Jones who he is destined to marry and whom Trollope is destined then to kill off quickly so that Phineas can resume an interesting life in the metropolis and in the associated country-houses. For Phineas,
At last (after Christmas) came the time which called him again to London and the glories of London life, - to lobbies, and the clubs, and the gossip of men in office, and the chance of promotion himself; to the glare of the gas-lamps, the mock anger of rival debaters, and the prospect of the Speaker's wig (Phineas Finn ch 16).
For Trollope, too, London is not only 'the Scarlet City' as asserted by Seymour Betsky. It is the seat of government as well as the social and commercial and publishing centre, and what he says in his Autobiography (ch 16) is echoed by many of his characters and restated by himself as narrator in the novels: 'I have always thought that to sit in the British Parliament should be the highest object of ambition to every educated Englishman'. Not to have gained the right to walk through the Members' entrance into the House is, he interjects in Can You Forgive Her? (ch 45), 'to die and not to have done that which it most behoves an Englishman to have achieved'. Trollope, who himself stood for Parliament, disastrously, had perhaps rather more zeal and purpose in so doing, but not much, than he describes as the attitude of many 'well-born and well-to-do English gentlemen'. This comes from his book on Thackeray, where he is describing Thackeray's unsuccessful venture in this kind: 'They go there with no more idea of shining than they do when they are elected to a first-class club; - hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and the House of Commons is the place where a man ought to be - for a certain number of hours'. (ch.1) This corresponds to the spirit of much of the Parliamentary activity in his later political, or 'Palliser', novels. As a reviewer of the second in this series of six remarked, in 1869:
.... the Parliamentary life is a little tame. Mr Trollope sketches it too completely from the social side. As a mere reflex image of politics in London society it is as good as could be. But stronger political feelings than these go to make up a true politician, and we have only the faint drawing-room or club-room echo of those feelings (Spectator, 20 March 1869).
This is true: and Disraeli's novels of a few decades earlier show how a larger political content and more ideology can succcessfully he deployed in fiction. Still, 'the social side' of politics, the 'drawingroom and club-room echo 'of - and effect upon - politics, were more significant then than later, besides providing, as Trollope judged, more attractive matter for his readers. 'I was conscious,' he wrote,'that I could not make a tale pleasing chiefly, or perhaps in any part, by politics. If I wrote politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the sake of my readers' (Autobiography, ch 17). The drawing-rooms of the political hostesses such as Lady Laura Standish and Lady Glencora Palliser, and the clubrooms where all men congregated who were or aspired to be anybody, provided useful and realistically credible points of conjuncture for politics with 'love and intrigue and social incidents'. And obviously the move away from the Barsetshire series, published between 1855 and 1867, to the Palliser series, from 1864 to 1880, committed Trollope to a much more extended presentation of London life. There were, of course, dozens of novels which fell outside these two series: and the Barsetshire novels included many London scenes, besides the impact, by telegraph or visitation, of the metropolis, while the Palliser series have many episodes in country-houses, the constituencies, and other nonmetropolitan locations. There were novels such as The Three Clerks and Miss Mackenzie which explored humbler reaches of urban life than the Palliser ones, and there was, above all, that grandly ambitious novel with the splendidly claim-stating title The Way We Live Now which aimed to explore and relate to one another a series of London worlds.
Victorian London was, of course, far too vast and complex an organism for any one imaginative mind to comprehend. I have indicated some of Trollope's favourite social and occupational areas, and more briefly mentioned some of his silences or weaker areas. Dickens's London may serve as a reminder of, predominantly, what Trollope ignores or renders indifferently, though there are, of course, areas of overlap, and it would be fascinating to compare the presentations of Trollope's Melmotte and Dickens's large-scale financial swindler Merdle, or Dickens's Sir Leicester Dedlock with Trollope's landed gentry. But we can't have, and don't want, two Dickenses. 'Vive la difference!' as the Frenchman said, in another connection. It was, as Seymour Betsky says, above all from Thackeray, not Dickens, that Trollope
.... learned to write convincingly of the world of London, encompassing nobility, gentry, and the extension of nobility and gentry in the society of the Continent; lawyers, doctors, clergymen, army and naval officers, painters, architects; civil servants as well as government officials of high rank; the publishing and political world; the world of the prosperous middle classes, in trade, in speculation, or in property; the shabby genteel; commercial travellers. (7).
But if Thackeray gave him a starting point, we may agree with another recent commentator that, in his later novels, Trollope 'reveals an insight and a depth of penetration into the realities of social life beyond Thackeray's', partly because he was 'handicapped by no general view of life'. The point was made by Henry James who, contrasting him with his contemporaries and, as artists, his superiors Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot - remarked that 'his robust and patient mind had no particular bias, his imagination no light of its own .... He has an infinite love of detail, but his details are, for the most part, the innumerable items of the expected' what was then expected, of course, one might interject, for we, a century later, might not, for example, have expected Madame Max's reply about ladies being uncallable-on in August - and in such minutiae of behaviour Trollope is a useful 'correspondent to posterity'. I allude here to Walter Bagehot's splendid remark in 1858 about Dickens: 'He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity' (National Review, October 1858). James continues: 'He represents in an eminent degree (the) natural decorum of the English spirit .... (but) is by no means destitute of a certain saving grace of coarseness' (Century Magazine, July 1883). It is for reasons such as these, and because of his large familiar knowledge of men and things, that - as I have tried to suggest through a few specimen references - Trollope is of special value to historians, besides having a fair measure of those qualities which are not of his age but for all time.
References
- Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (3rd edn. 1945), p 200;
T.H.S. Escott, Anthony Trollope: His Work, Associates and Literary Originals (1913), pp 135,139.
Click here to see this reference in the text - R.H. Super, Trollope in the Post Office (Arm Arbor, 1981), p91. Many of the facts in this paragraph are taken from Professor Super's excellent monograph.
Click here to see this reference in the text - Fraser's Magazine, April 1840, reprinted in Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Collins (1971), p 90.
Click here to see this reference in the text - Seymour Betsky, Society in Thackeray and Trollope, From Dickens to Hardy (Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. 6), ed. Boris Ford (revised edn., 1963), p 161
Click here to see this reference in the text - Briggs, op.cit., p.104; Banks, items cited in note 4.
Click here to see this reference in the text - For the solitude of his early Post Office days, says T.H.S. Escott, 'no one was to blame but himself .... As a fact, not till he reached middle age and fame did he really care for society' (pp 26-7).
Click here to see this reference in the text - From Dickens to Hardy, p 158.
Click here to see this reference in the text
