The key to the whole is power. This can be seen by reconstructing the necessary context the novel creates for itself, which is the political map of Barsetshire — Bill Overton, of Framley Parsonage, The Unofficial Trollope
a book which might better have been called ‘The Chronicle of a Winter at Dillsborough’ — Trollope’s narrator, The American Senator
Dillsborough
Dear friends and readers,
This week on Trollope19thCStudies, I was asked some good questions:
When you have time, will you explain to us just what you mean by “mapping.” I admit I thought you meant you were making maps of the fictional places in the Barset novels … Is it just noting the places these authors mention in their novels? Is it like the scholars who make maps of the journeys through the streets of Dublin that the characters in Ulysses make? Could you give us a definition and what you believe the purpose or benefit of mapping is.
I’ve used the occasion to get down some of my thoughts towards my paper. One of the purposes of this blog is to work out thoughts towards scholarship projects. I write to know what I think. (E.M. Forster — “How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?”; Edward Albee — “I write to find out what I’m talking about.”) I’ve now read the four books I’m focusing on, each chosen because of its creation or use of a map: Castle Richmond, Framley Parsonage, Phineas Redux, and The American Senator, and I’ve found what are going to be my foundational texts. The above header is going to be its title.
So, to answer the question, the first thing I did was go back and look over 3 of these foundational texts, all by Franco Moretti: — Atlas of the European Novel, Signs Taken for Wonder, and a chapter called “Maps” in his Graphs, Maps and Trees. I didn’t find a definition of mapping. According to the Concise Oxford: a map is 1) a diagrammatic representation of an area or land or sea showing physical features, cities, roads; or 2) a dialogue or collection of data showing spatial arrangement or distribution of something. One critic (Jerome Thrale on The Last Chronicle of Barset) argues that Trollope structures his books not by his stories and plots but by juxtaposing areas and groups of characters; it is a spatial order we have in Last Chronicle of Barset and I think that’s so for The American Senator, and I can think of other novels by Trollope which lend themselves to this kind of movement — he goes from place to place to introduce us to each set of characters. The third definition has to do with genes and biology so I skip it, just ending on the common place truth that we talk metaphorically about mapping all sorts of things.
In Atlas Moretti “mapped” the European novel several ways. He demonstrated to his satisfaction at any rate that England and France were dominating places for the development and dissemination of the realistic novel of the 19th century: it was in these societies they were written because the society lent itself to the typical themes of such novels, such as following an individual career in society, marrying for love which may be regarded as a career choice for women. Also these societies had over the 18th century developed small cottage industries of printing, selling, disseminating such books — the printing and distributed and making of money for writers and publishers grew by leaps and bounds because of advances in technology. Between the two language bases and land masses (French and English) there was also a constant flow back and forth of novels in the original and translation — as well as non-fiction books (travel books for a start).
As part of this Atlas Moretti wrote a chapter where he mapped the stories and characters of the books of several writers. One small section for Jane Austen began it — her map is small, self-contained; she chooses only a small part of even southern England and within that is further selective. Now what has happened is her presence through films and a cult has spread to the point that many readers like to assume the worlds she presents are coterminous with the world of the England in the 18th century. They go so far as to write books where they basically franchise — or do research — within Austen and create a 20th or 21st century Austenland.
Much larger were the worlds of city-dwellers and Moretti’s authors of choice are emphatically Balzac and Dickens. Prelude to these were writers like Bulwer-Lytton (the silver-fork novels of the 1820s, which Trollope read as a young man). What Moretti shows is that when characters in Balzac and Dickens novels move from one place to another they are moving within fields of power. As with Austen, though it’s less noticeable, they are selective; you think you are in a map of London or Paris, but you are not. You are in choice spots. The story of the novel – its narrative — is a story of movement from one place to another and back again.
In Signs taken for Wonders Moretti shows the plot-structure of Balzac’s novels follows his characters’ movement from one site to another where there is a gain or loss of power. Enthralling plots can come from such ordinary experiences. Streets are not where social experiences that matter take place; important experiences are in offices or houses; the characters are ignorant of the larger place they live in except as a route from one site to another. Finally characters can be ruined by other characters they’ve never met (might not have heard off), and they are treated as transformed by the place they live in.
In his chapter “Maps” Moretti compared imagined maps of Mary Mitford (Our Village) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford), which he drew after reading these books, with the Parisian maps by Balzac and and rural Scottish maps by Galt (Annals of the Parish), and real rural maps (in John Barrell’s book on landscapes). As opposed to real maps and maps by Balzac, Mitford and Gaskell did not try to map routes out of their district to cities or towns outside these where things might be gotten that are not in the village; instead in Mitford’s village and Gaskell’s Cranford, most roads lead round and round the village or Cranford; we see one of two go outside but they are drawn only so far as the place. We do not want to go out to the city unless it has something we need for real and can’t get in their village or Cranford, and this is apparently rare.
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Photograph of Victoria Embankment, 1875 (a place and project used in political campaigns in the Palliser novels)
My thesis is Trollope was doing what Moretti says Balzac and Dickens (and Austen and Hardy too) did. The story of Phineas is just such a narrative as Lucien de Rubempre. Trollope is as selective as Balzac and Dickens only he selects up — as does Balzac. From what I’ve been reading Balzac is more all encompassing than either Dickens or Trollope say, but it may be those I’ve read (Graham Robb) write, like Moretti, out of strong admiration for Balzac and love of his books. Balzac encompasses much in Paris, really maps a lot of it. And yet some is imaginary; some are imaginary places. Trollope though has parallels with Austen — a prediction for the gentry in the country — and anticipates Hardy in that his characters do move out of their county life and into towns and cities and far away.
So first Castle Richmond and Trollope’s Ireland. Trollope lived for 18 years in Ireland and all over the place or at least several quite disparate places in Ireland: he first came to the midlands (Banagher) but he moved south and south west (mostly Kellys and OKellys occurs here, but also Dublin); he then moved to the North (Landleaguers); also he lived in Belfast; and he summer vacationed (so to speak) in the far west (where An Eye for an Eye takes place).
Not only did he live in disparate places, he literally mapped the place by setting up mail routes and riding over these again and again. He sat and made postal routes — maps. During the time he was writing the The Warden he was in south west England mapping postal routes and part of the impulse was his seeing Salisbury Cathedral now as a part-outsider who had to return to Ireland when this period of his “real” mapping of England ended and he and Rose moved to Dublin.
Roughly speaking his 5 novels which explicitly take place mostly in Ireland (An Eye for an Eye has scenes in England), Phineas Finn and Redux and the two Anglo-Irish stories take place all over Ireland. The question is, should I concentrate on this. What I have read (by Mary Hamer) is what I suspected may be true of his London maps (Pallisers territory): Trollope creates worlds for his novels which seem coterminus with real worlds we experience, but are filled in with imagined places to the point that you cannot quite map Trollope’s worlds with say southeast England, or London, or, for that matter, southwest Ireland of the other cities in the world he imagined so concretely. The problem here is I’m obsessive and once I started on mapping Ireland in Trollope’s books it would take me months to do it right. And that kind of detail is not wanted — even most of the time by most people. It’d be like my Austen calendars.
My guess is if the Anglo-Irish novels were filmed we’d have travelogues of Ireland. Thady flees to the mountains in Macdermots, the desolate countryside is an actor in that novel; the hero in An Eye for an Eye is murdered by a cliff; the lovers have their trysts out of doors by the seacoast of western Clare; a mass meeting in Dublin opens Kellys and OKellys; murder and clashes occur outside courthouses in Landleaguers. Castle Richmond is southwest but it’s more a matter of contrasting houses (so an Anglo-Irish Ascendency landscape), and London where Herbert Fitzgerald realizes how low his status now is by his experience of the city and where he lives.
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Nichols’ reconstruction of Barsetshire (found in Sadleir)
Trollope also invents or maps places onto places already there. He invented Barsetshire which he tells us is a combination of Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, and Sadleir (p. 164) adds Gloucestershire, Wiltshire. He invented it unclearly at first, but by Dr Thorne it begins to be a place called East Barsetshire and by Framley Parsonage he makes a map. The Small House of Allington he once excluded from the Barsetshire books apart from its lack of a clerical theme, it takes place in Guestwick, an invented county next to Barsetshire.
Allingham: Trollope is careful to delineate the relationships between the small and large house and their grounds
What should be emphasized is insofar as Trollope is read and his maps believed, his books skew our understanding of place. There are people alive today reading these Barsetshire novels who will call them accurate — when for example, such abysmal poverty is omitted. At the time they had a striking actually partly because Trollope set them in contemporary UK (Scotland as well as England), refers to real events going on at the time. I suspect Angela Thirkell’s books reinforce this and erase the real poverty, real middle class lives today.
Bragdon Estates (drawn by Geroulds), next to Dillsborough in An American Senator
Turning to The American Senator, it’s a newly developed countryside but I have not come across any criticism or scholarship which names a specific place as the one Trollope had in mind. What I have discovered here is a minute geography of power. As in the Palliser novels across the board of London within the small district of Dillsborough, its outlying area and Bragton estate, as well as the estate of Mistletoe which Arabella Trefoil visits, depending on where you are, and what you are doing you are constrained to do to feel this, you are situated, you have status or not. The very dinner tables are geographies of power. Small House of Allington opens up with same sort of intricate detail of space and place (see above) and it all may be interpreted as to status, but there is also an idyllic romancing going on, nostalgia for past where gentry embedded with its church, tenants, nearby village.
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Pallisers 8:17: What Lord Fawn saw (from Phineas Redux)
In my proposal I did tell of how when I went to an Trollope Society AGM in London in 1999, we went on 1 of 6 circuitous detailed maps drawn from the Pallisers books, but which had locations for characters across Trollope’s whole oeuvre as well as from Trollope’s own life as far as we know it. We walked round Trollope. The route chosen was the one that the Rev Emilius followed in order to murder Fawn and the one Phineas followed to get home that night. What I’ve got to do here is access the accuracy of the routes obsessively gone over and over of say Bonteen’s murder and see how accurate or inaccurate they are, and I’ve been asked to review a book that may do just that: Emelyne Godfrey’s Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature has a chapter on the street life of the Phineas books.
My hunch is while in the main Trollope is accurate, as in his Irish maps, he also departs imaginatively so as to make points about status, the characters, thematic sites. It’s telling that these scenes and streets have been filmed — in the Palliser parts covering the murder and trial. The Phineas Redux material in Pallisers contrasts a pastoral interlude of Gerard Maule and Adelaide Palliser riding in a city park (a kind of generalized convention and not taken from the book which contrasts London with the warmth and congeniality of Harringon Hall and its hunting in Trumpeton wood).
A bucolic park where Fawn and Adelaide walk, and Maule and she ride together (Pallisers 8:17)
There was some shooting on location for the time in the 1974-75 series, but it was a time when little of this sort of thing was done (the Poldark series was a singular exception and the use of Cornwall and shooting on location was no small part of its success); if you do look at Davies’ recent films of TWWLN especially you see an attempt to get the streets in, but they are not differentiated, situated with respect to one another, nor imitative of what’s in the novel.
(There are also illustrations by Millais showing Phineas leaving the Bunces and taking up residence in a gentleman’s part of London overlooking a park; that is filmed in the earlier parts of the Pallisers from Phineas Finn.)
So that’s where I am.
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Posy Simmons’s Cranford, from end papers of Cranford Chronicles (modelled on Thomas Moule’s 19th century The County Maps of England, see Southern England)
I’ll conclude so many books sell popularly when publishers include maps I’m ever startled by how parsimonious they often are about these. The books of the filmed Cranford Chronicles had as papers Posy Simmonds exquisitely picturesque maps and if I could remember I know I’ve read about how Gaskell slowly invented that countryside and where it relates to.
Writing this blog has helped me be less afraid I’m not getting anywhere. I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew and so think a separate paper to be published just on the Irish novels is something I could do in future but would take too long here and not be appropriate. But I could as an exhibit myself try generally to draw one just to show — to have something to show as I won’t be doing a power point presentation. Jim is not up to it and I can’t do such things myself.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Catherine C: “That’s a wonderful insight, Ellen. Building imaginary worlds is a way of creating security. Many creative people do this, I think. Few have the discipline or the skill to share their worlds with others. And to make their “internal worlds” real. Trollope did.”
Catherine C. Analysing Trollope is always a challenge. He is working on many levels. I think of how Trollope inhabits his own landscape himself. Perhaps because of his travels and his love of walking. (Wasn’t his brother an obsessive walker?) Then there is the fact that in his work for the postal service he walked the routes with letter carriers, so he has a professional/efficiency driven perspective. Then as a writer who wrote to plan with a view to commercial success, there is the overlay of his “novel map.” Trollope was quite frank about his methods in his autobiography. Complex, very complex topic. It is no accident that the term of art “gene mapping” sprang into use. It seems to me as if everyone has created internal maps. They overlay one another in many dimensions.
And it’s still a case he’s left out. It startling to read Moretti and not one mention of Trollope. Your remarks are helpful — for as you can see I’m thinking out “behind” the paper I’m going to write. Much that I mean to say is generally outlined here though.
Writers such as Thackeray , Eliot and Collins admired and befriended Trollope, and George Eliot noted that she could not have embarked on so ambitious a project as Middlemarch without the precedent set by Trollope in his own novels of the fictional — yet thoroughly alive — county of Barsetshire.
I find that all fascinating. I still kind of wanted a shorter 1 or 2 sentence definition, but your discussion makes it understandable why you would find that difficult to do, and I never had any idea about Jane Austen only writing about southern England, although that makes perfect sense when I think about where she lived in Bath, Winchester, Chawton, and those are where the novels are often set, so to some extent she was writing regional fiction perhaps.
It interests me because I am a regional novelist, having set all my novels I’ve published to date in Upper Michigan and with only a few exceptions almost completely within the city of Marquette. Then I wrote a history of Marquette that includes maps and I connected all my places discussed in the book – laying it out like a walking tour map – largely to the places I wrote about in my novels, so I guess I’ve been mapping all along. I also edited a book for friend who writes children’s books where I suggested she put a map of where the characters lived and played (they are cats who live in a small neighborhood) in the end papers, which she did.
I suspect to some degree I was influenced in my mapping interests from
reading the Oz book as a child and having the Del Rey editions that included maps of Oz which people had created from reading Baum’s books (and in some cases having to deal with contradictions he made – the Winkies and Munchkinland countries are west or east of the Emerald City depending on how he described them. Anyway, thank you for the discussion. Now I can understand what mapping is and what are its benefits.
Tyler
Reading Mullen more carefully: Although Trollope agreed with Stanhope at an Annual Dinner of the Literary Fund that Balzac invented the recurring character, since in his full reply he is careful not to admit to direct influence (he is “told” Balzac is the man who … ), even as he shows knowledge of the books,and then depreciates the recurring characters attributed anyone, since in Trollope’s book on Thackeray, Trollope praises Thackeray for the achievement of recurring and aging characters across time and in a partly imagined apparently real single place (Thackeray 115, 127) I now suggest that if he was imitating anyone he had Thackeray’s books in mind, which books we know Trollope loved and knew intimately.
E.M.
From Christopher Harvie’s excellent book, The center of things (subtitle the political novel from Trollope and Disraeli to the present), Trollope and Disraeli are central inventors and practitioners in a tradition of political novel beginning in say around the 1840s. Harvie writes how Trollope’s novels are centrally political, how they dialogue with other novels of their era and make a contribution and influence perhaps what was going on politically mid-century. One aspect is about the intersection of power and geography:
The Victorian political novels seem to have a collective presence, akin to that of the two-party system. Disraeli supplies propaganda and the glamour; Trollope counters with an understanding of institutions and human sympathy: together providing an image of metropolitan life – the great club, the rules of the game – against which the constituency, the local arena of individual moral agency, defines itself at election times. Eliot [Felix Holt, Daniel Deronda] and Meredith [Beauchamp’s Career which Simon Raven has Phineas reading while in prison with Monk coming in to comment on it] elevated the election scene to the level of allegory, Trollope supplied the linkages which bound it to the metropolis. This subjective map of the political world, like a medieval mappa mundi, was centred in an immensely detailed West London, the rest of the city rendered adequately; outside it, suburban mansions – the Horns, Belmont, Loughton; beyond them the hunting counties, south-coast resorts; in the far distance the industrial regions, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Between the known world and these distant regions lie the I constituencies – East Barset, West Barset, Barchester: a market-town, two inns which become party headquarters, two newspaper offices, church (or cathedral), chapel, railway station and perhaps one substantial employer, a brewery or a dockyard. Not far away, the Palladian mansion of some Whig magnate, and in the villages the smaller country houses of the Tory JPs.
This solidity is deceptive …”
E.M.
Power is the key? You’re definitely right there. I’m always fascinated by the way all histories, really, of buildings, of movements, of people, are complex stories of power exchange, denial, or achievement.
But it was not only Trollope’s severely pragmatic attitude toward his literary endeavors (how he would have loathed the term “creative writing”!) that sets him apart from the idealized image of literary culture; nor was it simply his candid acknowledgment that money constituted an important spur to writing; there was also his whole mode of life. Contrasting Trollope with such “sedentary” French novelists as Flaubert and Zola, James described Trollope, not altogether nastily, as “a novelist who hunted the fox.” And indeed, among the three chief occupations of Trollope’s life—writing novels, working for the British Post Office, and “hunting the fox”—writing certainly came in third. “Nothing has ever been allowed to stand in the way of hunting,” Trollope declared, “neither the writing of books, nor the work of the Post Office, nor other pleasures.” From the time that he could afford it, in the 1840s, Trollope habitually rode to hounds three times weekly for the entire season, November through April. Although increasingly heavy and dangerously near-sighted—Trollope never rode particularly well—he did not give up the sport until 1876 when he was sixty-one.
Writers such as Thackeray , Eliot and Collins admired and befriended Trollope, and George Eliot noted that she could not have embarked on so ambitious a project as Middlemarch without the precedent set by Trollope in his own novels of the fictional — yet thoroughly alive — county of Barsetshire.
Wonderful maps, all of them. But where is the church in Cranford? Still one in every village today.
Good comment. That’s Posy Simmonds’ art: unlike Trollope and the Geroulds she probably did not return carefully to the specifics of the texts, and so miss an important part of Cranford and the UK today. In the US too churches are a common sight. Thank you for the praise. Ellen