Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character and Other Essays on Victorian Literature

By Seamus Perry

Stephen Wall, ‘Trollope and Character’ and Other Essays on Victorian Literature gathers together the principal publications of the distinguished scholar-critic Stephen Wall. Widely regarded for his writings on the Victorian novel, Wall’s major writings about Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, including the full text of his book-length study Trollope and Character (1988) and a history of Dickens’s reception, are contained in this volume. Also included are Wall’s reflections on Jane Austen and George Eliot and on other aspects of nineteenthcentury fiction, as well as his influential essay on the ways in which English novels should be edited. Together, the essays communicate the mixture of learning, human sympathy, critical intelligence and dry wit that made Wall’s voice so distinctive and trusted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jul 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088195

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Stephen Wall

Trollope and Character

and Other Essays on Victorian Literature

Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series

The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.

Series Editor

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – University of Oxford, UK

Editorial Board

Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK

Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK

Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA

Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA

Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK

Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA

Simon J. James – Durham University, UK

Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK

Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK

Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK

Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK

Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK

Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK

Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK

Stephen Wall

Trollope and Character

and Other Essays on Victorian Literature

Selected by

Seamus Perry

with an introduction by

Nicholas Shrimpton

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 2018 the estate of Stephen Wall with the introduction

© 2018 Nicholas Shrimpton

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

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no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-817-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-817-6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction: Stephen Wall and Trollope

Nicholas Shrimpton

Part 1 ON TROLLOPE

1The Artist as Philistine [1984]

2Trollope and Character [1988]

Part 2 ON DICKENS AND OTHERS

3[George Eliot and Her Readers] [1965]

4Jane Austen’s Judgments [1968]

5Dickens: New Words and Old Opinions [1969]

6[Dickens and His Readers] [1970]

7Dickens in 1970 [1971]

8Annotated English Novels? [1982]

9Affective Intentions [1985]

10Virtuoso Variations [1987]

11Going Beyond the Repertory [1990]

12A Little Local Irritation [1998]

Index

PREFACE

This is a gathering of Stephen Wall’s writings about the great nineteenth-century novelists to which he devoted so much of his generous critical intelligence. It is, naturally, dominated by Wall’s major study, Trollope and Character, published in 1988. Alongside that, I have put his account of Trollope as a letter writer; the historical commentary he wrote for his invaluable Penguin anthology of Dickens criticism; and a number of other pieces, mostly about Dickens, which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and Essays in Criticism, the journal he edited from 1973 until his death in 2010. Among other pieces first to appear in Essays in Criticism was an important essay about the editing of English novels – the implications of which range far beyond Victorian literature – which it also seemed proper to include. The resulting book by no means constitutes a complete collection of Stephen Wall’s criticism: he was a prolific reviewer of new fiction for the Observer, and many of his notices have a lasting value; his essay on Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (Essays in Criticism, 1963) remains one of the best accounts of that novel; and the piece he wrote about his former pupil Ian Hamilton (‘Ian Hamilton and the Poet’s Life’, Essays in Criticism, 2002) memorably captures the achievement of a great man of letters. This volume cannot even pretend to include all his criticism of nineteenth-century subjects. I have not included the introduction to Can You Forgive Her?, written for his Penguin edition (1974), which was largely reworked in Trollope and Character, as were the essays ‘Trollope, Balzac, and the Reappearing Character’ (Essays in Criticism, 1975) and ‘Trollope, Satire, and The Way We Live Now’ (Essays in Criticism, 1987). The excellent introduction to Little Dorrit, which appears in the edition he co-edited for Penguin with Helen Small (2003), remains readily available. Finally, I reluctantly accepted that space did not allow me to print some of Stephen Wall’s shorter fiction, much of which shows the distinct impress of the Victorian literature in which he was so expert.

To avoid irritating inconsistencies, I have standardized punctuation, publication details and the forms of section headings; but I have not generally interfered with the text other than silently to correct obvious typos and missing punctuation. I have not attempted to bring Stephen Wall’s footnotes up to date with references to more recent scholarship. In the essay on Dickens’s critical reception, I have removed page numbers and other cross-references to material included in the anthology, which the essay originally introduced. The titles of these pieces are mostly those they had when they first appeared in print, but where no such title was to hand I have supplied my own in square brackets.

I am grateful to Faber and Faber for permission to print the text of Trollope and Character (1988); to Penguin for permission to include material that originally appeared in Charles Dickens: A Critical Anthology (1970); to the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books for permission to print reviews that originally appeared in their pages; and to Oxford University Press for permission to print the pieces that originally appeared in Essays in Criticism. I have given publication details at the end of each item. I believe I have tracked down all relevant permissions, but of course I would be very glad to hear of any inadvertent oversights.

I am indebted to Yvonne, Stephen Wall’s widow, for her great help, her patience and for telling me about the dedication that was inadvertently dropped from the Trollope volume, which is included here; and, also, to Oliver de Soissons. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst kindly offered his support to this book at an early stage; and Jemma Stewart provided invaluable help with the text in its final phases. I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the Oxford English Faculty and Balliol College, Oxford. Nicholas Shrimpton kindly provided an excellent introduction, exploring Stephen Wall’s long and profound engagement with Trollope, for which I am most grateful.

As this book will amply demonstrate, Stephen was a fine, versatile critic; he was also a gifted and giving teacher, and a kindly, generous, funny man. Personally, I owe him a great debt, not least for signing me up as the junior editor of Essays in Criticism, but also for many enriching conversations, including innumerable jokes, insights and anecdotes that have now become part of my own arsenal. This volume is a small gesture of my gratitude to him.

Textual Note: In Trollope and Character, quotations from Trollope’s Autobiography and from individual novels are followed by the number in roman numerals of the chapter in which they appear.

INTRODUCTION: STEPHEN WALL AND TROLLOPE

Nicholas Shrimpton

Stephen Wall published his first essay on Trollope in 1972, early in a decade that has since come to be celebrated for its ‘re-invigoration of Trollope studies’. Wall’s argument was certainly invigorating. An introduction to the Penguin edition of Can You Forgive Her?, it supplied a robust and ingenious defence of a book Henry James had once dismissed as trivial: ‘Can we forgive Miss Vavasour? Of course we can, and forget her, too, for that matter’. Wall’s introduction reclaimed, not just Alice Vavasour, but the entire novel as imaginative creations that deserved our serious attention. As it did so, it struck several of the notes that would be sounded again, more reverberantly, in his later work. Trollope is ‘more interested in the particular case than the general principle’. The ‘remarkable tenacity of his imagination’ makes possible his achievement ‘in maintaining and deepening his knowledge’ of characters. Trollope’s moral subtlety ‘makes one realize afresh how inadequate terms such as hero and villain are’ in his novels. And (a bold claim this in 1972) ‘the integration of different but concurrent plots into some sort of organic unity may not be as necessary for artistic success as the modern criticism of Victorian fiction often presupposes’.

At the time, both this introduction and Wall’s slightly later article on ‘Trollope, Balzac, and the Reappearing Character’ (Essays in Criticism, 1975) were part of a widespread reawakening of critical interest in Trollope that had actually begun in the late 1960s. Like Dickens, Trollope had fallen into scholarly disrepute without ever losing his popular audience. Unlike Dickens, whose academic reputation began to recover in the 1940s, Trollope remained beyond the pale. He was, it seemed, a mere entertainer: a mechanical producer of shapeless and intellectually insignificant stories. Michael Sadleir’s Trollope, a Commentary, first published in 1927, and the magisterial Bibliography that followed it a year later, might seem to have turned the tide. But Sadleir’s defence of Trollope had an apologetic quality that reflected the power, at the time, of the Jamesian model of what prose fiction should be. James had praised the ‘beauty of intention and of effect’ and the ‘composition, distribution, and arrangement’ he found in Flaubert and Turgenev. Much as Sadleir might regret these ‘modish canons of good fiction’, Percy Lubbock’s influential study, The Craft of Fiction, published in 1921, had turned them into a critical orthodoxy. Good novels were texts in which the story was ‘shown’ not ‘told’, in which there was unity of tone and effect and which operated to create a single, complex but coherent image whose components were organically linked. Compared with the ‘art novels’ of James and his Modernist successors, it is easy to see how Trollope’s books – multiplot, intrusively narrated and tonally heterogeneous – might seem to be examples of the ‘large loose baggy monsters’ James had deplored in the prose fiction of his nineteenth-century predecessors.

Academic opinion was indeed not changed by Sadleir’s Commentary. Lord David Cecil in Oxford and F. R. Leavis in Cambridge (singing, for once, from rather similar hymn sheets) both dismissed Trollope’s claims to significant artistic achievement. The first real signs of a wholehearted willingness to take Trollope seriously occurred in America, with Bradford Booth’s 1945 launch of the journal The Trollopian (later renamed Nineteenth-Century Fiction). The significant critical milestone, however, was the appearance in 1955 of A. O. J. Cockshut’s Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study. This important and original book rescued Trollope from the assumption that his novels were merely a form of light entertainment – doing so by drawing attention to the ways in which he was a ‘gloomier, more introspective, more satirical, and more profound writer’ than had previously been assumed. But Cockshut’s account of a ‘progress to pessimism’ in Trollope’s work was, arguably, an oversimplification of the novelist’s later career and, by itself, the book was unable to change a strongly entrenched prevailing opinion. Dickens had been recovered from academic neglect, on rather similar grounds, in the previous decade. But his fiction conformed more neatly to the new demands for ‘symbolism, irony, and depth psychology’ (Gordon N. Ray’s words) or allegory, didacticism and the microcosmic representation of general truths (Stephen Wall’s categories for the same attitude), which were replacing, or being added to, the art-novel criterion of unity of effect. Not until the late 1960s would Trollope’s work begin to be welcomed, on its own grounds, into the fold of academic approval.

The year 1968 saw the appearance of J. Hillis Miller’s The Form of Victorian Fiction, with its structuralist analogy between the way in which linguistic meaning emerges from the interaction of words in syntactical patterns and Trollope’s novelistic demonstration that selfhood is established, not in isolation, but through ‘interpersonal relations’. This was a striking reassertion of the intellectual interest of a novelist whose work had been thought to be (in James’s word) ‘stupid’. Even more effective for the revival of Trollope’s reputation, however, was Gordon N. Ray’s essay ‘Trollope at Full Length’, also published in 1968, though originally given as a lecture the previous year. Ray pointed to a distinctive technique of ‘amplification’, or significant accumulation, at work in both the structure and texture of the novels, suggested a four-stage process of creative development rather than a single ‘progress to pessimism’, and argued that Trollope was ‘a great, truthful, varied artist, who … left behind him more novels of lasting value than any other writer in English’.

Such work prepared the ground for the flowering of Trollope criticism and scholarship in the 1970s, of which Wall’s introduction to Can You Forgive Her? would be an early specimen. In 1971 Ruth apRoberts published her important study The Moral Trollope (retitled Trollope: Artist and Moralist for the more inhibited English market). If slightly far-fetched in its identification of Trollope’s moral stance with existentialism, it was wonderfully illuminating in its suggestion of a parallel between Trollope’s views and the Anglican ethical thinking developed in William Whewell’s Cambridge lectures as Knightsbridge Professor of Casuistry in the 1840s. The ‘casuistical’ assumption that circumstances alter moral cases is precisely the issue with which Trollope’s fiction is most deeply engaged, and apRoberts’s book showed there was a learned, rather than merely commonsensical, background to his interest in the matter. Stephen Wall’s observation that ‘being in a dilemma is perhaps the most important recurring situation in Trollope’s fiction’, and his rigorous definition of that term as ‘a situation which allows of two possible resolutions, both of them objectionable’, would help establish this new willingness to take Trollope’s moral analysis seriously.

After 1972 the studies came thick and fast, possibly encouraged by a consciousness in the publishing industry that the centenary of Trollope’s death would fall in 1982. David Skilton’s Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries appeared in 1972; 1975 saw Wall’s ‘Trollope, Balzac, and the Reappearing Character’ article, J. W. Clark’s The Language and Style of Anthony Trollope and C. P. Snow’s Trollope: His Life and Art. The year 1977 brought J. R. Kincaid’s The Novels of Anthony Trollope, with its insistent use of the analytical methodology of Northrop Frye, and John Halperin’s Trollope and Politics. Robert Tracy’s Trollope’s Later Novels, P. D. Edwards’s Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope and Juliet McMaster’s Trollope’s Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern followed in 1978. Two years later Peter Garrett published The Victorian Multiplot Novel: Studies in Dialogical Form, the definitive reassertion of the artistic value of ‘centrifugal’, non-unitary, nineteenth-century prose fiction, and a book that quoted one of Wall’s deft accounts of the reciprocal effect of diverse characterization in Trollope’s plots. Since then approaches have sometimes been theoretical (Riffaterre, on ‘Trollope’s Metonymies’ in 1982, or Priscilla Walton’s Lacanian reading of the Palliser novels in 1995), sometimes concerned to establish his formal skills or the learned allusiveness of his supposedly simple manner (especially his interest in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama), but above all contextual, with a string of book titles built round the connective ‘and’: Trollope and His Illustrators, Trollope and the Law, Trollope and Women, Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy, Trollope and the Magazines.

Stephen Wall’s book, Trollope and Character, published in 1988, shared this titular format but was not contextual. Instead, it went straight to the heart of the critical or evaluative issue. What made Trollope an important writer? What quality was it, exactly, that made him (in Ray’s words) ‘a great, truthful, varied artist’ and thus made it worthwhile for us to study such secondary matters as his knowledge of the law or his relationships with illustrators and magazine editors? Wall’s answer was audaciously traditional. Trollope himself, in An Autobiography, had defined his ‘realism’ as a realism of character: accuracy in the depiction of people was more important, he thought, than other kinds of verisimilitude. Sadleir had echoed this authorial view in 1927: ‘Power of characterization is the superlative quality of Trollope as a novelist’. Stephen Wall reasserted it 60 years later. Truths do not cease to be true because they are not novel, and this was a truth of which we needed to be reminded.

Trollope’s work, in Wall’s account, ‘does not depend on an analytic intelligence that has evolved certain ideas about the world which are then dramatized’. Rather, ‘it comes from a prolonged communion with the characters in his imagination who, like real people, are not to be reduced to category or sample without an unacceptable violation of what makes them individual’. Walter M. Kendrick had made a similar point in 1980 in his book The Novel Machine: The Theory and Fiction of Anthony Trollope, interpreting An Autobiography to suggest that, for Trollope, ‘the ideal novel’ was ‘the time of living-with, when the novelist is engaged in getting to know the characters he has conceived’. Wall agreed but extended this perception into a subtle study of the two different ways in which Trollope, in practice, facilitated, or made use of, this ‘prolonged communion’. One was by returning, again and again, to the same ‘reappearing characters’ in his romans fleuves or ‘sequence novels’. The other, in novels outside the Barsetshire and Palliser series, was by examining how different characters responded, differently, to the same ‘recurring situations’. In the light of this analysis, attacks on Trollope’s later work as repetitious came to seem curiously beside the point.

One of the strengths of Wall’s Trollope and Character lay in its ability to make glancing but decisive comparisons with the work of other writers. Trollope admired Thackeray. But when it came to characterization, ‘nothing could be further from the Thackerayean reminder that all the men and women,’ in his book, ‘are merely puppets’. Unlike Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot did not profess to offer ‘puppets’ and were often praised for the vividness or depth of their construction of character. Wall, however, noted ‘the absence in Trollope of those magical transformations in Dickens like Scrooge’s where the character divests himself of his own nature and is born again, or even of those inspiring éclaircissement in George Eliot where previously egocentric characters are baptized by some event or encounter into a new awareness of altruistic possibility’. All realism is ultimately a form of artifice, in other words, but some forms of it are relatively less realistic than others. Trollope’s characterization stands at the end of the spectrum closest to verisimilitude, and the distinction of his novels derives in part from that difficult achievement. As for Disraeli, his direct experience of the House of Commons might be thought to give his political fiction an exceptional degree of truth to life. In fact, when set beside Trollope’s Palliser series, Disraeli’s Westminster seems shallow and stagey. In Trollope, as Wall points out, ‘there are no Disraelian interludes which are pamphlets in disguise’ or ‘rhetorically presented episodes (such as the Two Nations scene in Sybil) which end in slogans or speeches’. Phineas Finn, ‘for all its absorption in political life,’ is a novel, not ‘a tract for its times’.

Wall’s insistence that Trollope was ‘more interested in the particular case than the general principle’ and his hostility to thematism (the demand for larger significances, or the sense that a character matters ‘more for what he represents or illustrates than for himself’) were timely and appropriate. His essay on ‘Trollope, Satire and The Way We Live Now’ (Essays in Criticism, 1987) was a cogent demonstration of the way in which the narrator’s growing sympathy with the fraudulent financier Melmotte undercuts the satirical quality of the book and casts into doubt the attempts, fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, to read it as a straightforward indictment of late-nineteenth-century capitalism. That said, it is possible to feel that Wall sometimes allowed too little to the presence of thematic significance in Trollope’s novels. The fact that Trollope’s greatness does not depend on the discovery of ‘themes’ does not mean he is never capable of suggesting them. Wall’s stress on character could, also, sometimes lead to a neglect of Trollope’s remarkable ability to depict the larger social matrix in which his individual characters were set. ‘Life in society’, rather than ‘individual destiny’, was (in Gordon N. Ray’s words) ‘Trollope’s primary subject’, and the comedy of manners, which Trollope wrote so brilliantly, is at its best when the social context is minutely and persuasively established.

But these are incidental flaws in a work of criticism that is all the more impressive for the unusual elegance of its construction. Stephen Wall knew full well that Henry James was both the worst and the best of Trollope critics: crudely dismissive in the 1860s, sympathetic and incisive in the valedictory essay he wrote in 1883, after his rival’s death. Trollope and Character is designed to lead us, subtly, from one of those Jamesian positions to the other. We begin, on the first page, with James’s early sense that ‘there was in him a certain infusion of the common’. We end, almost four hundred pages later, with James’s acknowledgement of Trollope’s genius and with his assertion that ‘Trollope’s great apprehension of the real … came to him … through his desire … to tell us what certain people were and what they did in consequence of being so’. Halfway through, Wall pauses to note that, even in his early criticism, James’s use of the word ‘empirical’ to describe Trollope’s procedures anticipates the key insights of his later view. Widely pervasive though the account of Trollope as ‘common’, ‘trivial’ or ‘stupid’ had been in the early and mid-twentieth century, Trollope and Character leaves us in no doubt that it is the Jamesian judgement of the 1880s that is to be preferred. By 1997, J. Hillis Miller could refer, almost in passing, to the late and little-read Marion Fay as ‘a characteristic work of Trollope’s genius’. Stephen Wall had played no small part in the critical endeavour that made such an assumption possible.

Part 1

ON TROLLOPE

1

THE ARTIST AS PHILISTINE

The first editor of Trollope’s letters, Bradford A. Booth, thought that ‘no good purpose would be served by printing in full all the letters and notes that have been collected’ and, in his 1951 edition, he often resorted to précis. N. John Hall, whose excellent new collection will clearly supersede Booth’s, adopts the now standard policy of printing verbatim absolutely everything that has survived, however trivial.¹ There are not enough remaining letters by Trollope for this edition to rival in bulk those of his fellow novelists now in progress, such as Hardy (a projected seven volumes) and Dickens (whose correspondence in the Pilgrim Edition seems likely to stretch as far as thought can reach). Nevertheless, Professor Hall gives us twice as many letters as Booth did as well as the complete texts of those that Booth summarized, and anyone who cares about Trollope is bound to be grateful. His edition necessarily builds on his predecessor’s and, indeed, his annotation – although more extensive than Booth’s – often echoes as well as amplifies it. Some of the newly added letters are certainly of the kind that Booth would have regarded as not worth printing – Trollope’s one-word reply (‘Delighted’) to an invitation in 1873, for instance – but taken together they at least help to fill out our picture of Trollope’s daily life. They don’t, however, tell us anything substantially new about it – or about the inner emotional and imaginative world of the man who combined outspokenness and reticence in so curious a way.

The great gap in our knowledge of Trollope is the absence of any detailed information about his early years in London as a depressed, insubordinate and barely competent clerk in the General Post Office. We have largely to rely on what he himself tells us in the Autobiography, with its characteristic but baffling mixture of apparent candour and laconic evasiveness. Booth was only able to list nine letters before 1847, by which time Trollope was already in his thirties, had made good in Ireland, had married and had begun to publish novels. Apart from printing a letter of Anthony’s mother’s about his strange serious illness in 1840, Hall is only able to supplement this meagre gathering significantly by a letter Trollope wrote in 1838 (when he was 23) to a Miss Dancers. The tone is owlishly flirtatious. It gives a fleeting but tantalizing glimpse of the sort of bachelor behaviour often said to be reflected later in the fictional characters of Charley Tudor (The Three Clerks) and Johnny Eames (The Small House at Allington). It may be, however, that here as elsewhere in Trollope’s work the relationship between life and art is not so straightforward as it looks at first sight. Certain incidents – such as the embarrassment of being dunned by a moneylender at the office – are admittedly autobiographical, but they don’t remain the exclusive property of the fictional person supposed to have such an intimate connection with the author: Phineas Finn is only one of a number of Trollopian characters besides Eames who suffer from importunate creditors. In a late letter to his son, Trollope says indignantly, ‘I never make use of stories from private life’, and he was consistently hostile to suggestions that his novels were less than pure fiction. The one newly discovered letter from Trollope’s early days hardly provides sufficient evidence on which to resolve the question of the degree of self-portraiture in Tudor and Eames.

Nor does the new edition of his letters add much to our understanding of Trollope’s maturer intimate relationships. A letter to G. H. Lewes of 1861, saying, ‘If any man should speak well of the married state, I should do so’, appeared in Booth’s collection. All Trollope’s extant letters to his wife – unfailingly affectionate in tone but, like all his correspondence, largely preoccupied with practical matters – were reproduced or summarized by Booth. Hall himself points out that his edition adds little to what we know of Trollope’s friendship with the fascinating American feminist Kate Field, while tactfully reminding us of Trollope’s ‘innocent susceptibility to female charm’ – a characteristic also seen, for instance, in the playful and avuncular letters to a younger writer and friend, Mrs Anna Steele. There are some new late letters to his elder son, Harry, which indicate how much he meant to Trollope at that period. The most moving of these, entrusting his son with the posthumous publication of the Autobiography, was printed by Booth, although Hall has decided against Booth’s possible alternative reading of ‘Need’ for the first word of its touching last sentence (‘Now I say how dearly I have loved you’). This sounds right, if one remembers the unexpectedly powerful gesture of farewell at the end of the Autobiography: ‘Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written.’

Such moments of emotional intensity are not common in Trollope’s letters, but they illustrate nevertheless by sheer accumulation how stable and unswerving he was in family matters and as a friend. Socially, he may have been loud; privately, he was sensitively loyal. John Tilley was not only Trollope’s brother-in-law but a superior colleague in the post office throughout the novelist’s official career. The first and last letters to him are nearly thirty years apart, but their actual friendship began when they were young clerks together and ended getting on for fifty years later, when Trollope had the stroke that led to his death during an evening spent at Tilley’s home. Two other close friends much valued by Trollope were George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. He went to a good deal of trouble to help Lewes’s son to get a job in the post office, and sent George Eliot congratulatory letters when Romola and Felix Holt were published. Though he admits to a correspondent that he finds Daniel Deronda ‘trying’, he protests his love and admiration for the author in the next sentence. His letters at the deaths of both Lewes and George Eliot provoke expressions of personal grief that are only terse because they are manly.

Trollope’s connections with Lewes were often professional, of course, and the letters constantly remind us how much the novelist was in the thick of the literary, and especially the periodical, life of his time. It is not only that they illustrate his negotiations with publishers over payment, serialization, revision and so on – an area in which Trollope stands up vigorously for his rights without the slightest hint of rapacity – but also his involvement in the Fortnightly (where he deputized for Lewes as editor), in the St Paul’s (which he edited after retiring from the post office), and his directorship of Chapman and Hall in the last years of his life. He was quite prepared – seemed rather to have relished the chance – to give Austin Dobson detailed advice about his diction. In his letters to other writers, however, Trollope is generally concerned with the practical, the immediate and the social. He writes to Browning to ask him to dine at the Garrick, and to Turgenev to clear up some problem about the Russian’s honorary membership of the Athenaeum. Trollope’s remarks about his own books are usually only made in response to the comments of others and would seem perfunctory were they not so evidently written in haste. Trollope’s days were simply too crowded for him to have much time to waste on correspondence. Even when travelling, on post office business or to collect material, his letters are mere scraps compared with, say, Dickens’s home thoughts from abroad. They tend to confine themselves to basic information about his progress, although he lets himself go a bit about the considerable discomforts of his tours. He insists on his limitations as a reporter while priding himself on his persistence as a negotiator: ‘I believe one should never give way in anything to an Oriental’.

Political matters get a variable degree of mention, figuring more largely when Trollope or his correspondent is abroad and unable to discuss the news of the day at the club. A newly collected letter of 1870 reiterates the idea, familiar from Trollope’s fiction, that Conservativism aims to maintain those social distances that Liberals wish to reduce, but he goes on to concede that ‘one party is almost as necessary as the other. Accumulating wealth will recreate the distances almost as fast as they are dissolved by popular energy’: no wonder Trollope has been taken as such a significant figure in what has been called the Age of Equipoise. However, the traumatic episode of Beverley, the by-election at which Trollope failed to realize his cherished ambition to become an MP, is mentioned only a handful of times – although Trollope no doubt wrote letters about it that have not survived. He himself habitually destroyed letters sent to him, but Hall has given us the texts of some of them where available – George Eliot’s notes to Trollope are as affectionate as his to her, if more ponderously expressed.

Both Booth and Hall concede that Trollope’s own letters do not have the literary merits of those that appear in his novels so frequently and to such good effect. Oddly enough, the letters in these volumes that most clearly resemble the best of the fictional ones are drawn from Trollope’s official correspondence. Two letters of 1864 – one to Tilley in his official capacity and one to the postmaster general of the day – deal with a departmental row about payment for special responsibilities at much greater length than Trollope usually permits himself for private letters. The issues involved are not of great interest in themselves, but Trollope felt his superiors’ policy was not only wrong in principle but also in some way impugned his integrity. (The facts of the affair are elegantly spelt out in R. H. Super’s monograph Trollope in the Post Office, which supports Trollope’s line.) The sense of injured merit gave Trollope in this real-life case a heady fluency, so that the force of the reasoning expressed on the page is fuelled by indignation. Like many of his most interesting characters, Trollope could not bear being put in a false position by authority, and these letters briefly show the operation of parallel energies in both his life and his art.

In general, however, it is remarkable how separate the two remained, and how little, in consequence, the one tells us about the other. One of Professor Hall’s footnotes quotes William Dean Howell’s opinion that Trollope was ‘one of the finest of artists as well as the most Philistine of men’, and going through his letters in this new edition makes one see the force of this severe paradox. All the same, it may be better to be good than to be clever: George Eliot wrote to Trollope that what she valued in his writings was that ‘the books are filled with belief in goodness without the slightest tinge of the maudlin’, adding perceptively that ‘such things are rather a result of what an author is than what he intends’. The letters, too, overwhelmingly confirm our sense of the peculiar generosity of Trollope’s moral nature.

Times Literary Supplement, 3 February 1984

1 N. John Hall (ed.), The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford University Press, 1983).

2

TROLLOPE AND CHARACTER

For Yvonne

I. Living with Characters

The Autobiography

Trollope’s revelations about his working methods would have been suicidal had they not been posthumous: that, at least, has been the usual verdict. The familiar details – the old groom paid extra to wake him up early, the three hours at the desk before breakfast, the regular production of so many words against the clock – were first published in the Autobiography in 1883, the year after Trollope’s death. Since then the mechanical industriousness of such a regime has often been taken to imply a deplorable indifference to the finer literary considerations. Despite strenuous modern attempts to vindicate Trollope’s authorial integrity, Henry James’s complaint that as an artist Trollope never took himself seriously enough has continued to seem a reasonable inference.

In 1875 James had crossed the Atlantic in Trollope’s company and had seen for himself what has been called ‘the Novel-Machine’ in practice.¹ ‘The season was unpropitious, the vessel over-crowded, the voyage detestable; but Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning … [and] drove his pen as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in Montague Square’. James was impressed, but also censorious:

The power to shut one’s eyes, one’s ears (to say nothing of another sense), upon the scenery of a pitching Cunarder and open them upon the loves and sorrows of Lily Dale or the conjugal embarrassments of Lady Glencora Palliser, is certainly a faculty which could take to itself wings … [but] with his extraordinary gift, there was always in him a certain infusion of the common. He abused his gift, over-worked it, rode his horse too hard.

James’s masterly essay on Trollope (in which these phrases occur and which, like the Autobiography, first appeared in 1883) expresses with classical lucidity the unease of serious readers in the face of a fertility that struck the American writer as ‘gross’ and ‘importunate’.

Nothing could be more professional in its way than James’s own attitude to his métier, and he had no objection to copiousness in itself: ‘almost all the greatest writers have been abundant’. The twenty years of Balzac’s productive career had bequeathed a body of work that was ‘immense, heroic, to this day immeasurable’. If Trollope had been really good, how could one have had too much of him? The trouble was that Trollope did not sufficiently respect the nature of his medium and accepted too complacently the limitations of his material. Although James’s acknowledgements of Trollope’s local merits are often surprisingly handsome, the younger novelist could not finally forgive the older one his lack of artistic pretension. The piece-work accumulation of two hundred and fifty publishable words every fifteen minutes (not in itself a negligible accomplishment) might have been tolerable as the necessary means of realizing some grandiose project such as the Comédie Humaine, but although Trollope’s fiction may approach Balzac’s in bulk, it was not comparably ambitious. In the last pages of the Autobiography he waives any title to literary excellence and contents himself with the fact that he has at least published more than Voltaire and over twice as much as Carlyle.

This apparently philistine claim comes just before Trollope’s celebrated table of his literary earnings down to 1879. With the modest confidence of a man who knows his own class, he describes the total – nearly £70,000 – as ‘comfortable, but not splendid’ (XX).² Given the value of Victorian money, such a sum may now look more reassuring than it seemed to Trollope at the time, but for all his industry he made less than Dickens, and even at the peak of his popularity was never paid as much for a single novel as George Eliot was. Although Trollope was far from being grasping in his actual dealings with publishers, his totting-up has fitted in with his clock-watching productivity with disastrous plausibility. He solicits you to think of him as merely a straightforward artisan who takes a justifiable pride in getting the appropriate reward for honest toil with a pertinacity that seems almost perverse. He insists that writing fiction is mainly a matter of getting down to it, arguing that if he finishes Doctor Thorne one day and begins The Bertrams the next, he is behaving as properly as a man who, having made one pair of boots, starts immediately on another. (Why Trollope so often cites shoemakers as patterns of industry remains unclear.)

Trollope’s ‘determination to excel, if not in quality, at any rate in quantity’ (VII) does not sound like the resolve of a hero of art, and it is characteristic of his outlook that despite his admiration of George Eliot as a novelist and his reciprocated affection for her as a friend he should nevertheless have thought that ‘she struggles too hard to do work that shall be excellent’ (XIII). He refused to concede that his own work would have been better had he taken longer over it. The pages were clocked up with little apparent anguish and passed to the printer with relatively little revision. The number of words in the completed manuscript was invariably the quantity previously bargained for: as a scrupulous tradesman, Trollope prided himself on never giving short weight. Altogether, the Autobiography contains all the materials necessary for a portrait of the artist as a conscientious hack.

It also contains enough evidence to suggest quite another picture, revealing Trollope not so much as a man who overworked and abused his gift but as one surrendered to it and was enslaved by it. The process clearly started in his youth. Trollope’s early years were often wretched. Unhappy and ostracized at school, hovering uncertainly between gentility and destitution at home, separated for long periods from his mother and left with a morose and incompetent father, he had to make his lonely way with little moral or economic support. The Autobiography’s narrative of this period has sometimes been thought self-pitying, but a comparison with Dickens’s description of his days in the blacking warehouse makes Trollope’s account of his sufferings seem almost laconic. Indeed, Trollope finally refuses to gratify any expectation of complete candour on the grounds that no one, not even Rousseau, can hope to tell the whole truth about himself. The argument is both typical of Trollope’s hatred of cant and a convenient justification of his endemic reserve. However, the bare facts of Trollope’s case and such comments as his reticence does allow through are enough to indicate that he was driven to fantasy by misery, and that out of fantasy came fiction.

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five he kept a journal – shamefacedly destroyed in 1870 as no doubt too embarrassing to preserve. Had it survived it might have given us more insight into the period of Trollope’s life which we know least about but which was probably the most formative. Trollope says that the journal taught him facility of expression, and certainly his later literary career would hardly have been feasible without an extreme readiness of phrase. More important for the future novelist, however, was the development of the habit of making up stories for himself. The mature Trollope felt obliged to condemn such self-indulgence – ‘there can, I imagine, hardly be a more dangerous mental practice’ – but he saw that without it he might never have become a novelist. In these sagas of his early days, Trollope was of course his own admirable hero, but there was more to them than the normal wish-fulfilling dreams of adolescence. As he continued to elaborate these consolatory fantasies – not only as a boy, but well into his twenties, when he became a scruffy and insubordinate clerk in the General Post Office – he instinctively evolved a narrative discipline:

Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months, if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced, – nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable … I learned in this way to maintain an interest in a fictitious story, to dwell on a work created by my own imagination, and to live in a world altogether outside the world of my own material life.

(III)

The controls which the day-dreaming Trollope exercised over his fantasies are prophetically consistent with some of the constraints he was to put upon his fiction: eschewing the speciously sensational, he found his essential interest in the ways in which probable characters move through normal time in an ordinary world. Similarly, he thought of the world of his novels as autonomous, discontinuous with his own life, and free from autobiographical undertow.

Thus what was begun by Trollope as a consolatory alternative to life developed its own reality. In his maturity, this imaginative activity became addictive. Once he had started writing novels he could not stop: at the time of writing the Autobiography he had three completed books in his bottom drawer as well as another in the process of publication. In a touching late letter to his eldest son (21 December 1880) he says: ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they be not published, I think that I can be happy’.³ Such plangent accents are hardly those of an industrious shoemaker, and indeed, from a purely commercial point of view, Trollope’s inordinate over-production (forty-seven novels in thirty-seven years) glutted his own market. Trollope was quite aware that his name ‘was too frequent on title-pages’. The daily stint came to serve deeper and obscurer needs than the simple wish to keep profitably busy.

Trollope was able to write so much so quickly because he lived with his characters so closely. Throughout the Autobiography it is taken as axiomatic that a writer cannot create an interest in his characters unless he himself knows them inside out. This notion may now look almost quaint, and often seems to be disregarded by modern critics – or at best tolerated as an inevitable embarrassment. Nevertheless, it is expressed by Trollope with an unobtrusive intensity perhaps encouraged by the fact that – under the shelter of a recommendation to others – he could here confidently allude to the inner creative life that elsewhere he rarely does much more than hint at. In a passage often quoted by writers on Trollope, but rarely given sufficient weight, he says that the novelist must live with his characters

in the full reality of established intimacy. They must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them. He must argue with them, quarrel with them, forgive them, and even submit to them … And as, here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change, – become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them, – so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him. On the last day of each month recorded, every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first.

(XII)

When Trollope writes of living with his characters in this way, his prose assumes an authority and an energy that is missing when he discusses such topics as the construction of complex plots (which he took little trouble over) or the ethical wholesomeness of English fiction (about which his opinions are conventional if frequently reiterated). In life, Trollope was noted for being assertive to the point of bluster, and taken in isolation the following claim about his characters might seem characteristically overbearing:

There is a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the colour of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned.

(XII)

Each man? Every woman? Trollope had produced getting on for forty novels when he wrote this, and it is natural to be sceptical. Did Trollope really retain so clear a perception of, say, a minor character in The Bertrams seventeen years after creating him or her? Perhaps he did. Although he does sometimes make mistakes in continuity, he says in another late letter (5 December 1881) that ‘the writer never forgets’, claiming that there is not a passage in Barchester Towers that he does not remember. In 1859 he had to put Castle Richmond aside because Thackeray wanted a novel for the new Cornhill (Trollope obliged with Framley Parsonage), but he says in the Autobiography that he could have completed the book fifteen years later had it been left half-finished. As it was, having two novels in mind at the same time created no more difficulty than having simultaneously two separate sets of friends. As he revealingly comments, ‘In our lives we are always weaving novels, and we manage to keep the different tales distinct’ (IX).

To understand what living with his characters meant for Trollope would be to understand what mattered most to him and what still matters most about him as a novelist, and this book is primarily an extended essay on the implications of the phrase. Recent discussions of Trollope have tended to defend him on other grounds, partly no doubt because of a general loss of confidence in the theoretical legitimacy of those ideas about literary character which Trollope shared with his original audience in so untroubled a way. The modern preoccupation with the self-consciousness of the text is obviously hard to reconcile with an assumption that fictional characters have a life beyond it. Nevertheless, Trollope himself worked on such a basis, and the pages that follow here offer not that fully comprehensive, chronological, and critical account of his œuvre that we still need but, more modestly, an attempt to assess some of the consequences of that assumption by examining some of his novels.

It is clear from the Autobiography that the intimacy of the relationship between novelist and character was encouraged rather than inhibited by rapid composition. When ‘at some quiet spot among the mountains’, for instance, and thus able to treble his average quota by writing sixteen pages a day seven days a week,

I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.

(X)

It is a pity that Trollope does not say which novels or parts of novels were in fact written under such conducive conditions, but the enthusiasm of the passage – though unusual – is again more than would be expected from a merely conscientious craftsman. In the same passage, however, Trollope enters an important qualification: ‘the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in the conception, but in the telling of the story’. In itself, the implication that though birth was quick, gestation may have been prolonged is hardly surprising: novelists commonly brood over their fictions for long periods. However, Trollope wrote not intermittently but continuously. He was always at it: voyages – as James testifies and as Trollope himself records – were an opportunity rather than an obstruction; even railway journeys were turned to advantage with the aid of a specially made ‘little tablet’. When this incessant composition is put beside his other activities – his energetically if not always tactfully discharged duties as an increasingly important Post Office official with ultimately high responsibilities, his compulsive hunting, his considerable journalism, his lengthy travel-books, and for that matter his clubmanship and his whist – there does not seem much time left to incubate the Jamesian germ in the notebook-filling way appropriate to the dedicated artist. But where there is little room for deliberate thought there is always time for fantasy, and much of Trollope’s imaginative life must have been devoted to his characters’ lives rather than his own – and as a matter of personal habit and predilection as much as of deliberate authorial policy.

The Autobiography indicates that Trollope’s relationships with his characters were not only governed by their current usefulness. He would keep them in mind whether he was writing about them or not. He notes, as a general tendency of his imagination, that ‘my mind is constantly employing itself on the work I have done’ (IX). Of course, Trollope was only able to reap the full novelistic benefit of this retrospeculation with characters who appear in more than one novel and, supremely, in the Palliser series. He remarks of the main figures in that group that ‘So much of my inner life was passed in their company, that I was continually asking myself how this woman would act when this or that event had passed over her head, or how that man would carry himself when his youth had become manhood, or his manhood declined to old age’ (XVII). This dwelling on his imagined world naturally extended to the physical environment of his characters. It is true that, despite some interesting exceptions, Trollope’s novels are not remarkable for their descriptions of places; since he was nearly always writing about modern life, he was often content to refer his readers to their own observation of it. Nevertheless, he significantly says of the fictitious places in the Barset series that he knew of them ‘all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there’ (VIII). The map of the county which he made for himself has often been reproduced (and even, one must admit, corrected). His communion with the Barset world clearly continued outside and beyond those pages which chronicle its doings, as the well-known case of Mrs Proudie demonstrates. Trollope overheard two clergymen at his club complain that she had become a bore. With typical impetuosity Trollope promised he would kill her off before the week was out, and he was not the sort of man to go back on a publicly announced intention. But although her public career ends in Chapter LXVI of The Last Chronicle of Barset, Trollope himself had not finished with her: ‘I have never dissevered myself from Mrs Proudie, and still live much in company with her ghost’. He did so not because she could be of any further use to him nor because she was herself lovable, but because he understood her: ‘so great was my delight in writing about Mrs Proudie, so thorough was my knowledge of all the little shades of her character’ (XV). Trollope’s remorse over the death of ‘his old friend’ seems to be accompanied by a sense of a prematurely suspended and therefore unfulfilled relationship.

For Trollope a novel was nothing unless not only the reader but also the author sympathized with his characters. It is the main and it sometimes seems the only criterion he brings to bear on his contemporaries. Dickens, although often guilty of dispensing with human nature, lived with his characters ‘in his best days’; those parts of George Eliot’s work in which the portrait-painter prevails over the philosopher are to be preferred; Bulwer is inferior, for all his gifts, because he never knew his own personages; Jane Eyre is certain to last because of the intensity of Charlotte Brontë’s feeling for Rochester and the governess – ‘she lived with those characters, and felt with every fibre of her heart, the longings of the one and the sufferings of the other’ (XIII). Such observations may now look simple-minded, but they clearly indicate the kind of fictive life that Trollope looked for, and they are consistent not only with his own practice but with the advice he gave to others. In Trollope’s view a first novel will come easily enough, since there is bound to be some story or individual that has impressed the would-be writer strongly enough to get him going. But what he writes later will be weary or wooden if he does not give his hand to ‘that work of observation and reception from which has come his power’. This work is not merely something a man does at his desk; it should continue ‘in all his walks abroad, in all his movements through the world, in all his intercourse with his fellow-creatures’ (XII). This labour may be carried on unconsciously for the most part, but without it a novelist dries up, or dries out. This prescription is quite consistent with that incessant activity of the imagination already noted. Despite their origin in fantasy, Trollope’s interior speculations about the development and behaviour of his imaginary characters would naturally involve a continuous monitoring of the world they lived in; they could not be fully envisaged except as part of the society in which they moved, constrained by things as they were.

His record of things as they were is often assumed to be Trollope’s main claim to attention and he has increasingly been presented as a penetrating analyst of his age. It can hardly be denied that his fiction gives a true picture of at least the milder and more presentable aspects of mid-Victorian life when it was just this accuracy that was so often noted by his original reviewers, who were after all in a good position to check. Trollope’s novels may not now strike us as the last word in realism, but the word ‘photographic’ crops up too often in the reviews for his accuracy to be doubted (it was of course a new word then). In describing, for instance, the action of The Belton Estate in a notice of 1866, Henry James remarks that

the three persons whom we have mentioned are each a character in a way, and their sayings and doings, their comings and goings, are registered to the letter and timed to the minute. They write a number of letters, which are duly transcribed; they make frequent railway journeys by the down-train from London; they have cups of tea in their bed-rooms; and they do, in short, in the novel very much as the reader is doing out of it.

The implication of this admittedly grudging testimony (as of other contemporary comments) is that the world created by Trollope’s imagination was eminently recognizable to his first readers as their own.

But because Trollope’s novels have come to have such great documentary value, it does not follow that they were mainly intended as works of social criticism and historical record (as modern critics often assume), and to treat them as such can easily lead us to ignore what is most remarkable about them. Trollope did not propose to himself (as Balzac had done in the 1842 Avant-propos to the Comédie Humaine) the idea of becoming the secretary of his period. Trollope was an opinionated man and in his later years a public figure, and even without such explicit social commentary as his The New Zealander (written 1855–6 but not published until 1972) it would not be difficult to make out from journalistic and other sources his views on many of the questions of the day. Indeed, his ideas are sometimes obtruded into the novels in a quite unfictionalized form: Castle Richmond, for instance, contains Trollope’s reflections on the Irish famine which he had seen at first hand. Such widespread and undeserved distress was likely to prompt unease about God’s purposes and justice in a man of Trollope’s generation, and the question is openly rehearsed by him