Mapping Trollope: Geographies of Power

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 wrote 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 argues that Trollope structures his books not by his stories and plots but by juxtaposing areas and groups of characters; it’s a spatial order we have in Last Chronicle of Barset and I think that’s so for The American Senator. The third definition has to do with genes so I skip it. 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), and because the society had over the 18th century developed an small cottage industry 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 (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” he compared the 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 Galt (Annals of the Parish), 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 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 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 stories take place really all over Ireland. He covered the area in his novels. The question has arisen to me if I should 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; there is a mass meeting in Dublin which opens Kellys and OKellys; murder and clashes occur outside courthouses in Landleaguers. Castle Richmond is there more a matter of contrasting houses (so an Anglo-Irish Ascendency landscape), but in London 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 must be emphasized here as important is this: 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 am not sure as yet if Trollope is mapping over some previous place (or has a specific place in mind; none of the critics say he does nor does he). 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

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For Anthony Trollope’s Birthday

A photograph of him around age 40, completely unglamorized; it’s not often reprinted

Friend and readers,

Anthony Trollope was born April 24, 1815.

Two tributes also not often reprinted, and a brief comment by Proust which sums up what Margaret Oliphant implied in her (also not sufficiently consulted, but too long to quote here) 4+ page review of Trollope’s An Autobiography (reprinted in Trollope: Interviews & Recollections, ed. R.C. Terry, from which the two passages below also come):

What did he look like:

His outward appearance symbolises, or rather pictures, his inner. When you look at his face, you exclaim, with Addison’s Cato, ‘Plato, thou reasonest well.’ For, as that great one said, the soul chooses a fit house wherein to dwell, you must own that the soul of Trollope has fitted itself with a proper and suggestive tabernacle. His portrait is gaunt, grim, partly grey and looks taller than he is; his eyes are noticeable, dark and brilliant; two strong lines down each side of his mouth, lost in a tufted American-like beard, give him a look of greater ill-nature than he possesses. He is unquestionably a gentleman, but of the middle-class look, by no means of haut école. He gives one an idea — that is, if one knows life and town pretty well — that he has seen hard service in the drudgery of some government office; he has cut-and-dried official look, and seems capable of scolding and otherwise irritating his juniors. He looks his age – about fifty-five – and is a man one would hardly choose to confide in …
     – Douglas Jerrold, The Housekeeper, on whom see Spartacus Educational, and wikipedia, his son Blanchard Jerrold’s great picture book is London: A Pilgrimage, illustrated by Gustave Doré

How did his inward personality strike people in his presence:

Nobody could see anything of him without feeling that he was in the presence of an exceptionally high-minded as well as an exceptionally gifted man, a man of strong feelings as of strong sense, but a man who well knew how to keep his feelings in check, and a man whose practice as well as his theory was Christian. He told me once a story — and the story was pathetic enough as he told it with all its details — of a certain work of his having been claimed by someone else, and of the inevitable exposure which followed the claim; and his own feeling was of pity for the claimant. This, told without the impression which his own manner of telling it conveyed, seems a trifling thing by which to illustrate the noble qualities of a man who was great in more than one sense; but the absolute simplicity of it, the complete incapacity to imagine that anyone telling such a story could tell it with any other feeling, made an enduring impression on me; and it seemed to me strange to reflect that had he for purposes of fiction had to describe a man with a particle of meanness in him, telling such a story, he would have brought out the meanness in the most easy and most lifelike way. What he would have seized on with quick instinct as a novelist was out of his ken as a man.
      Something has been said as to the wide grasp of Mr Trollope’s powers and intellect, and this applied to what his mind took in as well as to what it gave out. He was, in the truest sense of the word, a well-read man, and he used always to read for a given time in the early morning, before sitting down to his task of composition …
      — Walter Herries Pollock, From “Anthony Trollope,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 66 (May 1883) — Trollope’s neighbor in Montagu Square

Proust (Contre Saint-Beuve)

qu’un livre est le produit d’un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la societe, dans nos vices . . . [The man who appears in conversation and drawing-room essays is ... not] le moi qui a attendu pendant qu’ on etait avec les autres, qu’ on sent bien le seul reel, et pour lequel seuls les artistes finis sent par vivre’. [A book is the product of another self than the one we show in our habits, in society, in our vices .... the self who waits while one is with others, whom one feels is the sole real I, for whom in the end artists live, my translation]

John Everett Millais, “Judge Staveley and His Daughter, for Orley Farm

Trollope said he loved Millais as a man, he certainly loved many of Millais’s illustrations to his novels, he had the whole set for Orley Farm which, it’s said, he looked at many times. This one, my favorite of the series, is a typical one of depiction of imminent loss retrieved.

About another (of Lady Mason, the heroine) he said as narrator of Orley Farm (that is, inside the novel):

In an early part of this story I have endeavoured to describe how this woman sat alone, with deep sorrow in her heart and deep thought on her mind, when she first learned what what terrible things were coming on her. The idea, however, which the reader will have conceived of her as she sat there will have come to him from the skill of the artist, and not from the words of the writer. If that drawing is now near him, let him go back to it. Lady Mason was again sitting in the same room — that pleasant room, looking out through the verandah on to the sloping lawn, and in the same chair; one hand again rested open on the arm of the chair, while the other supported her face as she leaned upon her elbow; and the sorrow was still in her heart and the deep thought in her mind. But the lines of her face were altered, and the spirit expressed by it was changed. There was less of beauty, less of charm, less of softness; but in spite of all that she had gone through there was more of strength, — more of the power to resist all that this world could do to her.

Ellen just now rereading The American Senator

Trollope archive

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Trollope’s Latin reading & books: Apollo in Barsetshire for college students

Here he was wont to sit and read his Horace, and think of the affairs of the world as Horace depicted them. Many a morsel of wisdom he ahd here made his own, and had then endeavoured to think whether the wisdom had in truth been taken home by the poet to his own bosom, or had only been a glitter of the intellect — Mr Whittlestaff, Trollope’s An Old Man’s Love

The words of Mercury are harsh, after the songs of Apollo, Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act 5, scene 2

Grace Crawley proves who or what she is by her reading: G. H. Thomas, “They pronounced her to be very much like a lady”, The Last Chronicle of Barset

Dear friends and readers,

A thread emerged on the Trollope facebook page this morning as important for understanding Trollope as his years in the post office; lack of understanding of the sources of feminism, many widows, interest in debt and suicide, not to omit maps and televisuality: his knowledge of classical stories, people, history, and late love of Latin.

A man on the facebook Trollope page, someone I’m friends with on facebook proper, so to speak (there are different facebook places nowadays), a fellow Renaissance person (loves the poetr too), Graham Christian, told everyone about the Trollope Apollo project: a college teacher had her students read Trollope’s Barsetshire novels looking for classical references and allusions with an eye to writing about how they were used on a website they would create. They found many many. The Barsetshire books are laden with these references, often used comically — if rather externally, e.g., the political satire in Framley Parsonage where the Whigs are the gods, and the Tories the giants. The students had to read these superb books; they had to understand how these allusions were used; they had to work on a website. An incidental effect of all this activity might be they would discover how the materials of Latin classic texts can be relevant to us today.

I’ve known about Trollope’s Apollo since 2006 when she contacted me to ask if I could link the project into my website; I was delighted to do so in several places, and when the thread morphed to ask (among other things) if learning Latin is relevant to useful, I found myself contributing again and again. I found myself agreeing that arguing that we must study X [Latin] because it helps us better understand Y [French] — other such arguments won’t encourage more respect. You have to show students that studying Latin for itself and reading what’s written in Latin is good to do for its own sake — meaningful, fun, absorbing. Like Virgil’s Aeneid is splendid, moving and an anti-war
war poem. Probably the college students are not advanced enough to read the equivalent Latin text to a Trollope novel.

Nonetheless, the teacher seemed to me just the sort of teacher we should have more of. I admired her. And her students’ efforts are touching. At a minimum, now if you want to find a classical allusion in Trollope’s Barsetshire books, now you can. And Apollo is the god of reason, a quality we see too little of in our public media or the public world.

Then someone remembered that Trollope had said the 12 years of his time in school included astonishing wastes of time — as Latin and Greek were so poorly taught as not to have been taught at least to him at all. She said these schools were generally really bad. Trollope’s statement about himself has been shown to be an exaggeration (by who else but R. H. Super? — he loves to rewrite Trollope’s sense of his life), but it is true that Trollope’s knowledge of the language, understanding of classical history and mature use of this material came much later in life. There’s an excellent article on this, which Glenn Shipway cited: Robert Tracy’s “Lana Medicata Fuco: Trollope’s Classicism” (in Trollope: Centenary Essays, ed. John Halperin). I reread it this evening, and hence am putting what I wrote this morning on facebook somewhat altered in the light of what Tracy reminded me of.

It’s so easy to come across horror stories about public school life for boys in the 19th and early 20th century, it’s probably true it was a bad place for many kinds of boys — especially in the areas of the inculcation of bullying, the lack of decent food and accommodations, the wretched way many of the tutors (underpaid, despised) taught. Trollope says his brother literally whipped him and Tom did not deny that. Thackeray is rare truthful person who as an adult conceded the vicious sexual goings-on — I’m not referring to homosexual patterns per se, but the way these were done in an environment which defined them as sinful and ugly. A great novel revealing this is Simon Raven’s Fielding Grey (Raven wrote the scripts for The Pallisers and the first, now wiped out, The Way We Live Now [1969]). As a boy Trollope was accused of some kind of homosexual behavior (or perhaps masterbation) in one school (Sunbury) and the boys who had done it knew he had not, and let him take the rap. He says as of the time of writing he remembers their names.

In one of his books Thackeray writes of wanting to expose all these realities and the indifference to all this of the parents who send boys to such schools — as they knew about it: what they care about is the boy comes into contact with boys of wealthy, well-connected people and makes friendships that could lead to good jobs in later life. (Today people will go into heavy debt to go to schools with such people in them.)

Laurence Alma Tadema, Reading Homer

All that said, studies show some boys survived these schools without too much apparent damage and many even did learn to love and read the classics, if not in Latin, in English translation, though sometimes it includes Greek, e.g., Richard Jenkyns’s The Victorians and Ancient Greece. Some went home almost immediately. It depends on the child or young adult. There are many Victorian studies of the influence of the classics on writers and art in that age. Many of the great English poets show this background from Johnson and Thomas Grey to the Edwardians and there’s a whole Latin literature which at least some people read. You can reach it through English translation.

As a genuinely intelligent imaginative young man when Trollope overcame his depression (in Ireland) and slowly worked his way into a social and professional success, he could and did find it in himself in his late years, to turn back, re-teach or teach himself for the first time how to read Latin well and make such texts a source of happiness to himself. While he partly laughs gently at Mr Whittlestaff, he is Mr Whittlestaff. Early on in his writing career, he wrote and published a learned review critiquing his friend Merivale’s History of the Romans under the Empire. After he improved his proficiency (or in improving it) he became fascinated by Caesar, admired the Commentaries and wrote a book on it which he defends in his Autobiography as “a good little book,” readable, one which could inform all people, “old and young,” about Caesar. An early admiration gave way to a sense of the terrible harm such a “great man” can inflict on his society, and he preferred Cicero, the thoughtful friend, and his letters and wrote a portrait of Cicero as a political study (rather like his Palmerston). He was very hurt at the condescending sneers his book attracted from classical scholars. From the references of his early books to classical characters and stories, to having his characters read and enjoy classics, Trollope points out analogies between the ancient world and his own. Tracy says Trollope projected his own character traits onto Cicero and imagines Cicero intensely enjoying London social life in the 19th century.

From the 1974 BBC Pallisers: Alice (Caroline Mortimer) reading

For myself I like the more thoughtful worked out allusions to classical themes and people of his later books, and it often charms me to read of characters in books loving this or that author. I like to remember John Grey sitting down to read of the French revolution and Alice Vavasour calming herself with Carlyle (!). The ironies of the way Josiah Crawley uses his knowledge of English & Latin classics to buoy up his shattered pride and the witty dialogues between say Plantagenet Palliser and his sons are amusing and touching. Tracy says when Palliser tells his sons “Money ought to have no power of conferring happiness, and certainly cannot drive away sorrow,” he then misquotes a Horatian text in a way that undermines what he said, that Melmotte is Trollope’s late idea of a Caesar type.

One of the Trollope Society yearly lectures (printed in a Trollopiana) is about a less pleasant or admirable side to Trollope’s use of Latin and the classics. To quote a Latin tag or line is to demonstrate you are upper class, went to a public school or had a tutor in Latin. By using Latin, Trollope identifies himself as a gentlemen with other gentlemen. This by implication excludes those who haven’t Latin or haven’t read these books even in translation. It excludes women for the most part too. We can see this use of Latin in the George Housman illustration at the beginning of this blog. Grace Crawley proves her status as gentlewoman by the way she reads and what she reads. That which is used to signify belonging is also used to stigmatize, make coteries. I can’t remember the name of the author of the Trollopiana article, only that it was a London Society lecture and written in deconstructionist jargon; I cannot think it went over very well …

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Mandelbaum’s translation of Aeneid with original cover

Fast forward to today where the evils of institutionalized bullying and ugly attitudes towards sex are mostly gone (not all), and you can find people who learned to love Latin or profited from it. My personal interest in this area comes in here. My husband loathed his public school; he went there as a day boy and wore a different colored uniform to show he was poor; he was caned 5 times, once for making his “f’s” perversely. A searing memory is how as an 11 year old he and others were made to stand in the pouring rain holding up a salute as some politicians whizzed by in their limousine. But until today he really enjoys and knows about the classical world, reads about it, gets a kick out of jokes and works which burlesque it. He has a lovely polished prose style from his years in public school.

Last night I read aloud a long funny passage from Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy where the central characters put on a play, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, itself a savage bitter satire on the Trojan characters. The characters each take such pride in playing a particular famous character, and the ones chosen highlight their absurdities as well as the way they are experiencing WW2. Jim laughed and laughed.

My younger daughter, Isobel, loves Latin itself, minored in it in college, could be a Latin teacher if there were positions and she were trained. A friend who has a blog (mirabile dictu she calls it) loves Latin – she majored in college and has written about the Aeneid. Izzy loves Horace and Catullus in the original; she much enjoyed studying Latin history in post-graduate courses at GMU for a couple of years.

My favorite story is of my older daughter, Laura, who took Latin for two years in high school and again preferred it in college to satisfy the then language requirement in college. She was very popular during lunch because she clung to an priceless irreplaceable book we have in our house: a copy of the Aeneid in Latin with an English translation placed in-between the lines in such a way as to unravel (so to speak) the order of the Latin so that it resembles the ordering of English words in sentences. It’s an interlinear Vergil by Hart and Osborne. Laura never let this book out of her sight while others used it.

An example of an interlinear translation text

I’m one of those people who after a couple of years of college Latin could stumble through an advanced exam in medieval Latin (the “that” clauses are all set up in the English manner) like one does a puzzle. I like some Latin very much in translation. I love the Aeneid as translated by Allen Mandelbaum and the Georgics by C. Day Lewis. I really enjoy Pope’s Horatian poems — though I’m told that they are far more Juvenalian than Horatian.

From yon old walnut-tree, a show’r shall fall;
And grapes, long-lingring on my only wall,
And figs, from standard and espalier join:
The dev’l is in you if you cannot dine.
Then chearful healths (your Mistress shall have place)
And, what’s more rare, a Poet shall say Grace.
Fortune not much of humbling me can boast;
Tho’ double tax’d, how little have I lost?
My life’s amusements have been just the same,
Before, and after Standing Armies came.
– 2nd Satire of 2nd Book, Horace “paraphrased by Pope

Ellen

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Why there is no effective feminism in Trollope?

Emily flirting with Colonel Osborne (rare visualization of Ch 20, Oxford classic, ed. John Sutherland, 191-92); 2004 HKHWR (scripted Andrew Davies)

Gentle readers,

The reason is simple. It goes beyond the pragmatic ordinary reality position that Trollope frankly said women should not be allowed to compete with men for good-paying jobs as competitors, and their work outside the home for money should cease upon marriage. He is candid about his refusal to consider that women should have a right to vote too, e.g., “After all it is question of money; and a contest for that power and influence which money gives” (see “The Rights of Women”, North America).

It’s that he does not see the direct causal relationship between sexual control through violence and the raw deal women get from men and their experience of life. I saw this so clearly in my recent reading (just finished) of He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now in tandem. Or maybe I read them alternatively: so many chapters of one one night and so many chapters of the other the next. I’ve written at length about HKHWR in the third chapter of my book, and the illustrators to TWWLN in the sixth chapter in Trollope on the ‘Net (and may put the chapters on line eventually.)

The lack of connection is seen most strikingly in HKHWR which treats so directly of a story about a man’s (Louis Trevelyan) sexual jealousy and anxiety and his desire to control his wife, and her (Emily vis-a-vis Colonel Osborne) sexual boredom and desire to socialize including teasing flirting with whom she pleases. When Trollope takes aboard a discussion of women’s rights he presents Wallachia Petrie whose ideas about women’s right are presented as abstractions on equality about power and money and jobs. Her apparent asexuality or sexlessness is not attached to her position beyond the idea she is jealous of her friend, Caroline who is attractive to men and prefers to marry than stay close friends with Wally. The right of a man to have custody over his children is questioned, but only for the sake of the child’s emotional health.

In the important chapter in HKHWR at Casalunga (so praised by Henry James) where Louis and Emily talk there is no sense that the sexuality that has so troubled Louis is the issue, is its core, it’s rather this particular man is weak and felt he lacked power over her.

Felix attempts to rape Ruby (2001 TWWLN, scripted Andrew Davies)

The same lack of connection is found in TWWLN. There is no sense in the book that Felix Carbury tries to rape Ruby. We are led to feel that some violence (but not specified what) is what she herself incurred on herself by breaking conventions; that’s all. John Crumb then protected her. These conventions are seen as meant to protect her and seriously believed in as sufficient protection. If anyone is presented as violent in the book it’s Mrs Hurtle whose wrath at Paul Montague’s desertion of her is the result of their having had a liaison in the US.

In North America Trollope says these women’s rights people are “undoing what chivalry has done” (NY, Knopf, 1961, 260). In this travel book and in HKHWR the narrator refers to “male chivalry” as what protects Petrie and other women as if it were a right males had to attack her somehow which with great gallantry they are giving up — as long as they what? don’t talk like Petrie? are grateful. Obey conventions.

The heart of the issue (as Ellen Willis among others in the 1970s) argued for the first time is male control not just of jobs but of women themselves sexually in the way the heart of capitalism Marx said rightly was the ownership and control of property and law to back it up. Trollope sees Melmotte’s violence but never sexually. The one sexually violent person we are shown is Mrs Hurtle who wants to whip Paul for not staying faithful and Trollope believes she is violent because she is sexually free; the two go together as animal women in his mind. This is mistaking what one has to do to protect oneself in Trollope’s society for the cause of the real pervasive violence and threat of it (contained in Trollope’s own reference to male “chivalry”).

All the elements that come together in feminist insight are found in both HKHWR and TWWLN, but they are not put together, the paradigm is not seen, including Trevelyan’s right to take possession of his child (not hers). We see possession of the child is the male’s weapon but not how this comes about (pp. 737-38 in Oxford edition by Sutherland).

It’s been a while since I read John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women. As I recall Mill’s concern is to show how the subjection of women in our society transforms womens’ character so we cannot as yet say anything about them for sure since they are forced to live dishonestly. He sees how men control women but his emphasis is not on how private sexual experience is at the heart of what’s abjected.

2002 Forsyte Saga: Soames asserting his right over Irene

Now we do see this connection in Galsworthy’s Man of Property. The insight is not centrally dramatized in scenes; it’s kept at a distance (as are the liaisons as experience by the principals), but Galsworthy makes the connection sex=property and the control of powerful men over the desirable women the heart of the perversion.

Why I think Trollope cannot see this is he is forbidden to go into sex openy. Trollope cannot rely on his imagination to teach him. HKHWR and TWWLN take hundreds of page to uncover realistically what society conspires to hide but then Trollope punts on women.

Louis fears for the power of men by which he means but is too mortified to say sexual domination, the power to control Emily’s body in every single one of its phases including flirting. All that is made explicit is his power to tell her where to live. He insists she say she was literally and fully sexually unfaithful so he will see he has full power over her even in the area of flirting is as far as Trollope brings sex and control together. And HKHWR does not concentrate on Emily’s lack of money so property is lost from the equation.

Melmotte has no money, no way to make large sums honestly either. His beating his wife and daughter are seen as urges to wrest money from them or simply release his frustrations. Paul Montague does accuse Roger of being an old man wanting to marry a younger woman, but he does not go further than that (the way Davies does in the movie which is to suggest this paradigm of older powerful man takes young rich bride is the heart of the property-system.

Clearly in Trollope, the 1st phase feminism is unacceptable. No vote, no control of one’s property, no job. The 2nd phrase would have horrified him as he does not see or refuses to think general the violence of men wreaked on women, the marriage ceremony, to control them sexually. As to the 3rd phase, if you want to baby-worship, ladies, he is willing for you to do that to your heart’s content.

Ellen

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Returning to Trollope via maps, televisuality & Australia (!)

David Suchet as Melmotte facing them all (from Davies’s 2001 TWWLN adaptation — in the last phase Suchet has in mind Charles Laughton’s moving performance as Quasimodo)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve returned to Trollope with a plunge. A writer for our time. Like Dickens, a geographer of our imagination, utterly televisual (via Andrew Davies), and aptly post-colonial.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been reading his (magnificent panoramic) The Way We Live Now and his brilliant psychological-social masterpiece, He Knew He Was Right. I had begun them once again (I’ve read both at least twice) and gotten about one-third of the way through each when I wrote a proposal for a paper to be part of a collection of essays on British Historical Costume Drama on TV (from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey), and though I’ve not had an absolute acceptance, it’s as near as firm yes as one can get. The only doubt will be if the group can get enough essay proposal to go forth for a fat volume.

Donald Pleasance played the character whose presence began for Trollope his Barsetshire novels: here he plays his cello (1982 BBC Barchester Chronicles, Alan Plater)

It would not be due until next fall, but my problem now is my proposal for Mapping Trollope was accepted by Sharp, and that will be due mid-summer. To map Trollope, to delve his re-creation of London, the mythic Barsetshire, the counties of Dillborough and surrounding areas from The American Senator (Ayala’s Angel), to say nothing of Barsetshire country (which includes both series, Barsetshire and Pallisers), I shall have to read in detail, taking down specifics from several very long novels. I know from experience the whole picture of Barsetshire first emerges in Doctor Thorne, that the chronology of the Barsetshire and Palliser books is more or less consistent and the mapping say of TWWLN fits into that of the Pallisers. And I did want to include the careful mapping of Western Ireland in Trollope’s 5 Anglo-Irish novels and two stories (consistent with the Phineas books), which are no where well enough known.

One world Trollope.

On top of this from my trip to NYC to listen to a lecture at the NY Trollope Society by Prof Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee as historical fiction, I’ve again come into contact with this generous scholar who years ago (really) encouraged me to send him a paper on Trollope’s travel books for his Antipodes: a Global Journal of Australian/NZ literature. He told me he loved my book (I never forgot that), especially the Irish sections where I argued for the central importance of Ireland in Trollope’s life and work. I found myself unable to write the paper because at the time I didn’t understand post-colonial theories and perspectives, and the only thing I could think of was descriptive and that meant (I felt) going to Australia. Jim won’t listen to that (cost, distance), and how could I begin to spend enough time anyway.

Walhalla, Victoria 19th century print

Since then I’ve learned about post-colonial theory (see my blogs on Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora and Diasporic Jane and Indian films) and have been able to come up with a perspective which would enable me to discuss say the relationship between Trollope’s travel book, Australian and New Zealand and his novels set in Australia — without going to Australia, or if I did for a relatively short time (I do long to go). On line I’ve done that for his American Senator and North America, which we read in conjunction with one another on Trollope19thCStudies when it was still Trollope-l.

Trollope’s section on New York City and American culture as fuelled by a worship of money ever relevant (see this week’s New Yorker column, George Packer reading TWWLN).

I told him my idea for “On Living in A New Country: Inventing an Australian Identity” (a play on Patrick Wright’s On Living on an Old Country), and he seemed to like it very much, and more or less told me I could be on his pane, “The Australian Trollope,” in a coming Trollope conference. Yes a group of Trollopians are not waiting another 25 years to get together again (see Exeter conference), and in fall of 2015 plan to meet in Belgium at the University of Leuven. If I did that it would mean reading another set of long Trollope books but some new (and to me) interesting Australian literature which I have grown to love. I should say I was once part of a group looking to publish on Trollope as traveler (this was 10 years ago) when I read AngloAustralian novels (e.g., Henry Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlin) and Australian & New Zealand famous classics (Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River, Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson’s enormous trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin as Ada and Flora McGrath (1993 The Piano, Jane Campion)

The rest of my blog summarizess my proposal to discuss the film adaptations of TWWLN and HKHWR (“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope”) and throws out a few ideas for “On Living in a New Country.”

*********************
“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope” will include two great artists, Andrew Davies as well as Trollope. I will show that

in Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Trollope Davies developed sophisticated televisual techniques expressively to convey Trollope’s interior monologues, epistolarity, and panoramic plot-designs and Trollope’s themes of delusional sexual paranoia and anxiety, and economic corruption. TWWLN and HKHWR rely on filmic epistolary sequences, montage, flashbacks and voice-over; Davies also breaks naturalistic conventions to allow for characters directly to address the TV audience, and for the TV screen to picture emblematic allegories. We will also see that Davies engages with Simon Raven’s famous 26 part Pallisers to replace a cynical patriarchal Tory implied author with a humane, liberal feminist one, and while so doing, critiques Trollope’s texts from a feminist and Oedipal standpoint ….

Mr Gilson overpowered by Arabella French’s chignon, and getting back when she says she will do anything he bids her including of course removing it: modelled on one of Marcus Stone’s illustrations (from Davies’s 2004 HKHWR)

The first part of the paper will examine the filmic art, themes, character types, plot-designs of TWWLN and HKHWR as a similar pair: since not enough films made from Trollope in close proximity have survived, Davies cannot (as with his Austen or Dickens films) conceive of these as part of a subgroup of author-connected films. Instead they belong to Davies’s own political satiric type films made from socially-concerned novels … In the second part how scenes and dialogues in TWWLN allude to scenes in Raven’s Pallisers to comment both on Raven’s and Trollope’s work. I will also show that Davies brightens and makes much gayer and more hopeful the perspective of HKHWR by imitating the décor and kinds of gentle caricature created in the Barchester Chronicles

For “On Living in a New Country” my idea would be to follow Trollope’s unusual (so I think) trajectory of dramatizing colonialism not from the angle of the higher echelons but from that of the desperate lower middle, working class person and family, or the angle of the younger son who is not the heir. It’s such people he tells his fiction about, and it was to them he directed his Letters from Liverpool.

In the part of Australian and New Zealand just on New Zealand where he visited the Maoris and went swimming with a group of them, we have Trollope as Bohemian (sort of), but (and now this is vague) I recall I thought he was prophetic in looking forward to how ethnic politics would work out, how these would be a core of conflict, that they would seem to replace class- and money-based politics. (It was an analogous foresight to those found in his Anglo-Irish novels about how communities react to outsiders, the use of scapegoats, and collusive officials.) Trollope saw that the person or people who live in a “new” country (so they see it) have to evolve a new identity, one connected to the old one, but different and while in his novels (John Caldigate) he warns out “gentlemen” could fall to lower ways of life, he was very enthusiastic about this new identity.

20th century illustration for Trollope’s John Caldigate (originally called Mrs John Caldigate)

I was amused to find that Robert Hughes actually ends his great book The Fatal Shore (one of the great books of the 20th century; it can stand alongside Primo Levi’s If this be man) by quoting Trollope’s graphic portraits of two men kept in prison for a very long time. I did want to produce a paper. I remember seeing a film at the time, The Proposition, which seemed to me to go into the areas I was interested in from an angle of high violence — and “Aaron Trowe” (the protagonist villain share’s Trollope’s initials, AT) is a story of high violence; so too Harry Heathcoat. Here’s a wikipedia article on the Australian film The Proposition just about this group of people, which starred Emily Watson and Ray Winstone.

The Stanleys (very much the sort of couple Trollope writes about).

TMI? If you were wondering what I’ve been reading while watching all these films and going to operas, what thinking about and why, there you have it. Next up will be a blog on Trollope’s novels HKHWR and then (separately) the TWWLN

Ellen

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On behalf of Anthony Trollope’s 34 years of earnest effort for a public post office

General Post Office, St Martin’s-Le-Grand, completed 5 years before Trollope started working there in 1834

Dear friends and readers,

Written on behalf of 34 years of Trollope’s life in public service on behalf of a corruption-free post office: This is prompted by a brief column in this week’s Progressive Populist where the writer opens by with the strawman question, Was it he who killed the post office?. As Leonard points out, this is another area where the Republicans have smelt they can take a public trust and turn it into a an engine for a coterie of rich and well-connected people to fleece large groups of people in need of a service which hitherto or in the last 100 years has been turned into a non-profit which works hard to serve people at little cost, paid for out of taxes structured progressively. Far more taken from the rich than the middle or poorer classes. The Republicans and their allies among corrupt democrats are working at destroying public schools in the US and the post-office by what’s called privatizing

A few data points:

• As a result of a law passed in 2006 that required the postal service to prepay — in just one decade — the next 75 years of future retiree health benefits, “of the $15.9 billion the postal service lost last year, 70% — $11.1 billion — was in future health-care payments.”

• The same 2006 law “prevents the postal service from raising prices for first-class or standard mail by more than the Consumer Price Index, regardless of fuel prices, regardless of what the mail actually costs to deliver.”

• “If you pulled out the pension prefunding payments and an accounting loss on worker’s compensation liability, the real operating loss, according to Lazard’s projections, was only $900 million a year. In a $60 billion company, that’s just 1.5%, and holding fairly steady in a flat economy.”

• The Postal Service’s two main competitors, FedEx and UPS, have spent over $100 million lobbying Congress over the last five years to restrict the postal service from being able to truly compete while at the same time ensuring that both companies can exploit postal service infrastructure.

It is true that in this case they feel they can get away with it as so many fewer people feel dependent on the post office, and indeed do use it less. There is also a strong racist element. The post office (like other federal gov’t places) has been a place that hires black and Asian and Latino people and is looked down upon by many in the white population of the US. Crassly put it, they are not related to the typical post office worker.

IN Trollope’s case precisely what Trollope worked for was to to have a place where no corruption could enter — in his Autobiography he describes scenes of himself in Ireland charging down on people in the country who had been taking money for delivering letters and demanding that others provide addresses of pillars and offices for people to use.

Trollope was a civil servant who thought of letters as objects entrusted to his care, each and every one of which should arrive unscathed and in a timely fashion to where or to whom it was directed. He wrote of his early years in Ireland:

it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural letter-carriers. I do not remember that in any case a rural post proposed by me was negatived by the authorities; but I fear that some of them broke down afterwards as being too poor, or, because in my anxiety to include this house and that, I had sent the men too far afield … I would ride up to farmhouses, or parsonages, or other lone residences, about the country, and ask the people how they got their letters … In all these visits I was, in truth, a beneficent angel to the public, bringing everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery of letters.

Trollope is the only nineteenth-century English novelist to recognise a failure of imagination in the expectation that letters magically turn up on breakfast tables.

If he did not invent the pillar to put letters in, he was part of a team of people instrumental in the practical setting up of such stations.

When he visited the US, he found that the US post office was used as a trough for flunkies of politicians — every 4 years a lot of people were fired and the friends and clients of the winning party put in. He inveighs against this as bringing in ignorant people who had no idea and little interest in what the work was about.

If the PO privatizes, you’ll get another thing Trollope hated: favoritism. Trollope said jobs should be given security on the strict basis of seniority (how many years in), any thing else would lead to favoritism and discrimination on behalf of one’s coteries and associates.

He was passionate about his job and letters too (as an artist in his novels), and it may be said paradoxically quit when he was overlooked for promotion so hurt and grated upon was he. He also did think he could support himself by writing full-time and wanted to, but the politics of the office were partly responsible for his quitting before he would have been entitled to a pension. In later life his widow would need a special pension to carry her through in later life.

Saint Anthony, Joyce called him in Finnegan’s Wake.

Gari Melchers (b. 1860), Penelope (1910)

If the Republicans have their way, Penelope will pay a lot more for her letters, and get far worse service.

The larger picture, again with reference to Trollope: specifically, The Way We Live Now, where Trollope’s central character, Melmotte is a crook who uses the speculative money market already there in the later Victorian era: Melmotte is a money-dealing banker, lying continually about what moneys he has on hand, falsely presenting what is the value of the investments he offers. He used to be seen as an instance of Robert Maxwell (British crook calling himself financier and getting away with it), but now we have a host of CEOS in the US and UK we can see Melmotte an instance of.

Dominating symbolic prison of Dickens’s novel (opening of 2008 mini-series)

Dickens’s Mr Merdle of Little Dorrit comes in here. The Marshalsea was known as a debtors’ prison; Wm Dorrit is there for debt; the second half of the novel when for no work Mr or Wm Dorrit ever did he is suddenly fabulously rich is about the irrational working or functions of money when money is not a direct result of work or goods produced but the result of speculative markets. Mr Merdle’s suicide suggests a deep sickness of the soul; since we are not allowed any insight into his mind we are deliberately left to guess, but obviously oodles of money, the symbol of the best success in this society which all admire is shown wanting. We may infer guilt from losing money of all those people, deep shame at his loss of status (a reason for suicide found repeatedly in Trollope among male characters, and a reason Barbara Gates in her book on Victorian suicides instances as one understood as something men did in the era), perhaps (Davies in his film dramatizes his) disgust and some core of honesty appalled at what his wife thinks is good social life.

The difference is today or in real life few (or none) killed themselves in 2008; instead shamelessly they engineered deals with heads of gov’ts to supply the losses of themselves and their supposedly rich customers with the hard-earned dollars and tax money of the average person — which was to be paid for by cutting all social services further, destroying gov’t jobs, salaries, benefits.

And you can go to jail for debt today once again, indirectly. I’ve read about the mechanisms but haven’t it to hand this morning. Read John Lancaster in the London Review of Books on this.

Trollope had a highly unusual perceptive mind and his insight into The Way We Live Now (how people were learning to pull money to themselves without producing any goods or services or hard work) was unusual. Today in 2013 most of us still have trouble understanding derivatives –or what happened in 2008. If more understood, the use of the “deficit” to further cut services and people’s salaries & benefits and by so doing lower the standard of living of the average to make them supine would not happen as people would understand this is a false stalking horse

Ellen

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NY Trollope Society’s Winter Meeting: Prof Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee

Death of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, painting by Alexandre Bloch

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve been to NYC with the excuse of hearing an (in the event) wonderfully suggestive lecture by Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee. Prof Birns spoke at the Groliers’ Club, an older building with full library along 44th Street.

On the novel itself, we read this twice on Trollope19thCStudies and I’ve put the postings onto my website so the reader can find many good essay-postings on the novel there. What I have to offer here are notes I took from Professor Birns’s talk: heads of topics, sketches of themes, historical writing, and an insight into the visualization of place in La Vendee which connects it to Trollope’s novella, Cousin Henry where Professor Birns ended his talk.

One problem with the talk wwhich Prof Birns confessed upfront was Prof Birns had not read the French aristocratic woman’s memoir on which book is based: Memoirs of the Marquise de la Rochejaquelin (translated by Scott). It’s very difficult to access. Trollope did much research and other sources are Lamartine’s recent history, The Girondists and a long history of the French revolution by one Archibald Alison whom Disraeli mocked as Mr Wordy. Trollope did general research too — as he did for his travel books, one of which (abortive) was an Irish one around this time.

First Prof Birns offered a preliminary set of thoughts as a preface. This is Trollope’s third novel, and comes out of intimate relationship with Ireland and his experiences of countryside and marginalized world there. Trollope knew French culture and history. Prof Birns suggested that Trollope was looking for successful topic, and his two Irish novels didn’t sell. Representing a place became for him a way to represent hus metaphoric thinking … There is rich forest and landscape in novel. (Trollope is not known for his descriptive abilities but they are important as is his use of place, houses as symbols, landscapes too.)

Professor Birns reminded us that 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. (There was much interest in revolution in this era of open class struggle and the first building of unions.) Carlyle has a real success with his French revolution book which is hard to read; Dickens writes or will write Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. Trollope, though, chooses counter-revolution emerges. Why? He asks and tries to asnwer, Why did peasants not support revolution? They are guerillas. Prof Birns instanced the Spanish peninsular war as analogous complicated event. Prof Birns brought up Balzac’s Les Chouans, a violent book (it seems), but it was of course Scott who Trollope is centrally imitating in La Vendee. Prof Birns also recommended Flanigan’s 20th century historical fiction, Year of the French as a companion insightful book, showing French and Irish parallels? (I have it and could not get into it. Must try again.)

As to the kind of historical fiction, La Vendee represents: Trollope uses real historical characters. It is probably also true that place is central to historical writing. It was Prof Birns’s insight that Trollope resorted to historical fiction to write a book and used the characteristics of historical fiction to try to get into what was to him another time and place and also present an inner meaning or vision about the way human politics works:

What happened was the provinces resisted a central power. Rich lords against any revolution; military leaders had allegiance to ancien regime. This was also a conflict between modern secular groups and Catholic conservatives. Trollope take sides, clearly with rebels. The question would be, why.

The central appealing character killed off in Trollope’s novel, which comes alive around that point. There is an emotionally held-in unhappiness here (said Prof Birns). Trollope also against romanticism and revolution; Prof Birns then connected book to Cousin Henry, a self-flagellating book, where place is crucial. Wales the setting of this novella and Henry ostracized and terrorized by others in the village; Henry cannot understand brutal unsubtle culture.

Prof Birns said Trollope resorts to ekphrasis because he has trouble getting into these cultures. Ekphrasis is a word that has become fashionable nowadays; it appears frequently in academic discourses (and also talk about poetry). Myself I don’t recall Cousin Henry as visual but rather an intense psychological study of a man who is outcast and susceptible to cruel bullying, but I do recall La Vendee is striking in its visual portraiture, especially one scene where the wife of an openly loving married couple (unusual for Trollope) look out a window and the wife describes the battle seen to her husband much in the manner that Rebecca describes a battle to the wounded Ivanhoe.

Olivia Hussey as Rebecca from the famous scene, and a felicitious still of Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe (from the 1982 mini-series)

(Trollope’s novel has never been filmed.)

At this point my notes give out. I was really cheered by the friendly greeting of the man who runs the society, Randy Williams; by meeting Stephen Amarnick and hearing how his edition of the complete Duke’s Children is coming along. Two people told me they are on Trollope19thCStudies and read my postings sometimes. One woman said she could not stand I gave away something about Downton Abbey (! see my P.S). I hope now that I’ve retired to be able to find time to come to NYC to attend the society’s meetings, e.g., go to this year’s dinner and come far more regularly to the lectures.

For the rest of our trip, a diary journal (we saw 3 operas, 1 play, a movie, went to Central Park, the Met Museum, the Strand, and walked a hellavu lot: From NYC: a diary of shopping, theatre-going, walking …

Ellen

Postscript: Still on the train earlier in the day, coming into the station. We are waiting in the space between seats in a crowd of people pushing holding luggage, I see a young man with largish black laptop at the same time watching his screen. I peek. There’s Miss Obrien in her usual corner spot at the table next to her Shirley Maclaine’s maid, POV Anna, across the way Mrs Hughes … .. Later I go to lunch and open New Yorker, first joke I come to: lady visiting prison on phone reporting to husband “the bad news is Lady Sybil died but Bates is home … “

Jim now tells me the man had all 3 seasons of Downton DVDs on his table set up in his seat area …

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Trollope’s widows: we are unaware of quite how many women in black he has

Very first shot of Madame Max Goesler (Barbara Murray) (Pallisers 3:6)

Dear friends and readers,

On the list-serv, Victoria an interesting query: could people cite widows in Victorian novels and what were some attitudes towards them and/or their remarrying? Someone right away mentioned Madame Max Goesler, cited a study in the recent collection Trollope and Gender, with the idea that Trollope’s widows are strong and sympathized-with figures.

That seemed to me (even for a posting) inadequate. Trollope’s fiction (and non-fiction too) abounds in widows using the type with many permutations. the fault-line, what separates the woman off from other women is her assumed sexual experience (knowingness); beyond that she is usually older than women who have never been married and may control property. Towards the type Trollope is ambivalent as he is ambivalent towards aggressive women, which in his fiction except for aging harridans (who usually dislike sex) means sexually pro-active, and women who function as individuals with power and movement outside a husband or family’s control.

The Widow Greenow (a pastoral name) alluring men at seashore picnic (Phiz illustration, Can You Forgive Her?
The Widow Greenow (an early comic example of a woman who knows how to make her “weeds” alluring

A brief suggestive survey (by no means complete). To begin with the most famous: When we first meet Madame Max in Trollope’s books (Can You Forgive Her?) it’s not clear she is a widow; it’s insinuated that she’s paying someone who she married to stay away (a remittance man). Later Trollope drops that when he wants to make her respectable and chaste so Phineas can marry her.

Mrs Hurtle (Miranda Otto) and Paul Montague (Cillian Murphy) at Lowestoffe (they probably go to bed together in the novel, they certainly do in the film, from The Way We Live Now; on the illustration this is based on, see proposal)

Trollope uses this motif for other women whose reputation he wants to cast a slur or hint they are unchaste: Mrs Hurtle’s husband is probably still living (The Way We Live Now). In Miss Mackenzie the women in boarding houses who present themselves as widows are not to be trusted, especially (it seems) in Bath (the hint is they are for sale). Mrs Smith in John Caldigate a very suspicious figure (Trollope’s presentation makes her this way) whom the hero may have married: we are never quite sure, and thus it may actually be that Caldigate’s marriage to the heroine, Hester, may actually be bigamous, whence the title Trollope wanted for his novel, Mrs John Caldigate (to call attention to the reality that we don’t know which of the two is really entitled to be Mrs C).

When John Caldigate first comes upon Mrs Smith: a ship journey remance (Folio Society illustration)

It is true that if a woman is menopausal and remains physically attractive, she is usually presented as sympathetic as well as powerful (Lady Ludlow the best-known from Framley Parsonage), but if she actually exercises that power to thwart a young man of his sexual desires, she is stigmatized (Rachael Ray’s mother) or made a sort of monster (Lady Ball in Miss Mackenzie). If she openly breaks sexual taboos (married for money even though this is allowed men), like Lady Ongar (The Claverings), she is punished harshly.

Mary Ellen Edwards drew Lady Ongar as large — here she’s trying to re-engage the hero’s sympathies (Claverings illustrations)

If she remains attractive, she has ever to be on the watch for the suspicious and distrustful: Lady Mason (Orley Farm) is under her son’s thumb and is seen as a target (and she knows it) before her son’s inheritance is questioned (partly due to his tactlessness). There’s great sympathy for Lady Mason and we are to admire her for winning a case where she was is accused of forgery — when she actually did it. Millais’s illustrations curiously make her out to be even younger than Trollope’s text suggests.

Millais’s Lady Mason shrinks from her needed lawyer Mr Furnivall’s suspicious (jealous) wife (Orley Farm illustrations)

To me though the most interesting uses of this ambivalent type of women in Trollope is where the woman has used the title to cover up a period between one relationship (marriage) and another (a second man where she has not waited until the first one was dead to “protect” herself) and Trollope sympathizes with her: Mrs Mary Askerton (The Belton Estate) now respectably married again had a period where she wasn’t a widow; she became one when her alcoholic (and presumably abusive husband) at long last died; she seems to be a parish still, shunned; it’s not clear that she couldn’t break out in to society, but at any rate only the heroine. Clara Amedroz defies the worst minds and befriends Mrs Askerton. There’s much sympathy in Dr Wortle’s School for Mr and Mrs Peacock; he married her but it’s not clear the previous husband died, and again (as in the case of Lady Mason) personal animosity leads someone to attack them to get Dr Wortle (in whose school they teach). Madame Max can be related to these until Trollope conveniently forgets about her remittance man.

Showing either that Trollope’s particular configuration of sympathy for the transgressive woman is not share today, or his more devoted readers do not think about this aspect of his fiction enough, there were no original illustrations for these widows, nor have the novels they appear in been filmed or even adapted for radio. The Widow Greenow was cut from the filmed Pallisers. And by Phineas Finn Madame Max has been turned into a chaste type widow who refuses the Duke of Omnium’s proposition that she become his mistress.

After a violent scene where Lopez needles Emily (Sheila Ruskin) over how she enjoys sex with him, and flings her to the door, she shudders (Pallisers 11:23, from The Prime Minister)

Erasures or forgetting aspects of Trollope’s presentations of widows today sometimes work to reinforce his views. When in The Prime Minister Emily Lopez believes herself “polluted” from having married an amoral and (it’s more than hinted) sexually lascivious (and Jewish) man, Ferdinand Lopez, in the novels she at length refuses to remarry the Gallahad-figure Arthur Fletcher (who she loved first and we see again loved during her marriage, causing sexual rage in Lopez). Trollope seems to assume all women should be married. That is the be-all of their existence. The TV programs cut all this. Raven does not make her collapse into the other hero’s arms quickly either. Anticipating the end of Andrew Davies’s The Way We Live Now, Raven’s Emily (like Trollope’s Lily Dale) has been seriously disillusioned, abused, and we are given to understand will marry no more.

Emily prefers her father, Mr Wharton (Pallisers 11:23)

Marie Melmotte (Shirley Henderson) closes the door on everyone (TWWLN 4:12)

While at the Exeter conference (6 years ago now) and today again the question came up why Victorians seem to have a prejudice against widows remarrying. At the conference I remember participants saying widows were a threat to the chances of unmarried women. That’s certainly in Trollope. But he also likens the black widows wear (which he disapproves of when it is too heavy or goes on for too long as hypocritical) to Indian women undergoing suttee where he makes an explicit analogy between how the family of a widow’s husband do not want her children from a second marriage interfering with the inheritance of the first husband’s children. The impulse is to erase her future, not allow her any lest it get in others’ way. And he shares the strong prejudice against women having a pro-active sexual life too (an impulse not gone from our world today).

At the Exeter conference too some of the men showed they were allured by Trollope’s widows, especially Madame Max. I’ve noticed on list-servs that male viewers often have a crush on Barbara Murray who played the part splendidly. This even though in the novels she is given masculine roles and the words used to describe her by Trollope make her into more of a gentlemen than lady, and in the films she adds to the erotic sophisticated veneer Trollope gives her much comedy (she is given funny scenes rejecting Derek Jacobi as Lord Fawn) and much poignancy and dignity at the series’ close. Early in her career the actress was a powerful Anna Karenina; and in a Wednesday night play the mistress of a broken man played by Donal Mcann.

But rather than repeat what everyone notices, I’ll end on the Widow Bold who was acted equally well (the role quite different) by Janet Maw from Alan Pater’s wonderfully scripted mini-series, Barchester Chronicles:

Another Emily faithful to her father, Mrs Bold looks out anxiously at Mr Harding and the Rev Arabin (English, clergyman, upper class, an ethical ideal for Trollope), and is never taken in by either Mr Slope (the intensely ambitious outsider, Alan Rickman just behind her) or

Bertie Stanhope, the idle ne’er-do-well who wanted her money for his family and himself:

She has just let Bertie (Peter Blythe) know he hasn’t got a chance

She is strongly sympathized with; she is pro-active on her own behalf, sexually passionate; she is liked because she breaks no taboos, loves her little boy and is loyal to her idealistic father

Women in black … The illustrations and stills tell us that for Trollope these are highly sexualized women. They don’t tell us what his narrator and book descriptions do: that Trollope’s taste was for thin women; he was allured by olive-skinned women, women had narrow wrists and small breasts (“narrow shoulders”). (The Victorian ideal is the fecund big blonde, the Juno type Trollope’s narrator calls her, does not attract him personally.)

Ellen

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Boston MLA: Public poetry; paintings & photos in films & novels; audio books; today’s French cinema

Tony Harrison’s is the voice-over; from the TV program aired Nov 4, 1987

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been four days since I reported on three of the 18th century MLA sessions I attended at the MLA held in Boston early this January, and more than a month since I described the trip, where we stayed and what we did outside the MLA.

I’ve got five sessions on poetry on TV and in community centers, on the radio; on paintings in film and doctored photos in graphic novels and newspapers. Two of the great pleasures of my existence — listening to a complete great book read brilliantly while driving my car, and watching the episodes of a long-running great mini-series nowadays mostly on my computer’s DVD player — were the topics of two more. The last I’ve put in my comments section, Agnes Vardes, French film families and how to make a cross-over French hit in contemporary cinema.

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Perhaps the best session in the whole of the MLA I went to was Public Poetry in Britain (No. 289, Jan 4th, Friday noon-1:15 pm) where I heard intelligent discussions and poetry read aloud beautifully either by the speaker or the poet on TV or tape: Emily Bloom on Louis MacNeice’s autobiographical poem, Autumn Sequel, and his career on the BBC radio; David R. Sherman on Tony Harrison and Linton Kwesi Johnson’s political communal poetry; Kelly C. MacPhail on Edwin Muir. Theme: how poets attempt public poetry, to be public poets.

Emily Bloom began with MacNeice’s 22 years as an Anglo-Irish personality on the BBC and then went on to Autumn Sequel, a terza rima poem, where MacNeice claimed that the BBC failed to create a public poetry world which reached out to the wide general audience of Britain. Radio even played a roll in the spread of fascism. He was angry at the BBC as cowardly, filled with hackwork. He did not leave because there was little alternative to the BBC if you wanted to be a responsible public poet. She chose stanza from the poem relevant to 2013; MacNeice needed to cross back into the private sphere to speak.

David Sherman contrasted the white traditions of art-folk poetry of Harrison to the Jamaican rhythmic music hall Reggae chanting renditions of African folk song of Johnson. Mr Sherman suggested that poems become public when the community can rally around the poet himself as object/subject of public memory. V is a 448 line poem where V stands for Victory, Victim, Versus. It’s a deeply anti-war poem, compassionate for working people from which Harrison comes. He stands in a snowy graveyard, remembers Leeds where he comes from and begins to read; we get images of police beating up strikers; of Mrs Thatcher with her fingers making a V sign for victory;we hear Scargill’s voice about how in his house there was one book, a Bible. The program was discussed in many newspapers; MPs publicly protested. We see him quietly reading to a group of what looks like well-educated people in a community center.

This makes a striking contrast to the dialect poetry sung by Linton Kwesi Johnson on a tape of a time in a night club. Johnson’s poems were performed around the time of a riot insurrection in Brixton where many black people were badly hurt, jailed. The lines are angry and accompanied by loud percussive instruments (very strong drums). The theme is how Black Britain has to re-invent itself and challenge the rest of the nation to accept them.

Kelly MacPhail’s talk on Edwin Muir was wide-ranging, about Muir’s life, his career, his personal friendships and conflicts especially with Hugh MacDiarmid. Muir involved himself in the political changes in Scotland as the Scottish slowly dealt with having been forcibly unified with England from 1707; Muir took changing positions but remained steadfast in his written Scots-English. He wanted to create a national (Scottish) poetry and this required (it was felt) a true language apart from that of the English. One language that had emerged was a dialect formed in the lowlands as a new standard form of Scots. This seemed to me the language that Burns used. This dialect is, however, much contested. His friend and rival, MacDiamid, who was born in Glasgow, where his parents and siblings died when he was young, went to Paris and studied French, seems to have supported this form of Scottish while late in life Muir (who had married a middle class woman who influenced him) argued poets had a choice of two languages: the genuine ancient Scots tongue, Gaelic, or modern English. Mr MacPhail read aloud from Muir’s Scottish Journey, written while Muir was depressed (1936), about the predicament of a Scottish sensibility who may have to adopt modern British English in order to be readable.

Can anyone speak for an entity called Great Britain?

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Scarlett Johansson and Tom Wilkinson in Girl with Pearl Earring

Origin of Tracey Chevalier’s book from which film adapted:

1665 painting by Vermeer

A crowded session I expect many of my readers might have enjoyed as much as I and Jim did occurred the day before, mid-afternoon (Jan 3rd, Thursday, 3:30-4:45 pm, No 90), I attended a rich session on Paintings and Photographs Remediated in Film, Graphic Narrative and Newspaper. David Richter gave another fine power-point presentation of a series of films, this time those using paintings. He began Rohmer’s Perceval where medieval painting shaped the visuals of the film; Rohmer wanted to thwart the viewer’s usual desires. He began with the idea that space in a painting is a static interior, while in a film it move and the screen is implicitly without boundaries. Paintings can be used as set decorations; as protagonists; as providing thematic context (for example in a movie where the characters are discussing war, Pascal’s Guernica is seen against the wall behind them); as paradigms for themes; they enable us to enter the century the film’s story occurs in; they justify symbolic presentations; they foreshadow; they set up parallels; they explain further. In each case he had specific movies which he played clips from and showed us the movie turning into a painting.

A young Colin Firth was the painter (as he later was Vermeer): here he contemplates his work and interprets the original painter’s intent and presence

Prof Richter had left out paintings painted for a film as rare. He did not seem to know of A Month in the County, a film adaptation by Simon Grey and Patrick O’Connor from J.L. Carr’s Booker prize gem novel; there a painting of a Last Judgement was made for the movie and the uncovering of it is central to the film.

Genie Giamo discussed the autobiographical graphic novels of Alison Bechtel, especially her Fun Home, where as in her other novels she lays bare the anguish, tragic events (her father may have killed himself) and fractured memories of her real family. Giamo told us Bechtel doctored the photos she had in order to present a story line about her family that concrete evidence does not support (though it may be true). Giamo defined remediation as a process whereby a pollutant is cleaned from an area; it makes environmental space less hazardous. By publishing her memoirs Bechtel rehabilitates the dark recesses of her mind and life; it’s an act of living in itself. This kind of memoir is done by other women; Bechtel’s also show a sense of humor like when her heroine-self says “I forget to get a job for the last 50 years.” Her family becomes a realistic Adams family. (She seemed to suggest that it didn’t matter whether the photos were “real” or undoctored or not. I disagree. The talk afterwards revealed what one might expect: Bechtel’s family were angry about the books.)

A typical mix of photos and drawings with revealing utterances by Bechtel’s father

A third presentation by Lisa Zunshine was about how people communicate by misinformation and miscommunication, and how art seeks to flatter us into thinking we see inside characters and read photographs and visuals accurately. We are invited to be superior voyeurs. She showed the photograph that was printed in US newspapers of Obama, Hillary Clinton and other people high in Obama’s administration watching the murder of Osama bin Laden, and wanted us to see the interpretations given the people in the photo were imposed by stereotypical preconceptions. The people at the session found her lively sceptical presentation effective.

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Six volume Oxford edition of Barchestershire novels

Jim and I were glad we stayed late that Thursday night to attend a session on a type of TV drama I’m addicted to: Serial TV across Boundaries (No. 169, 7:00-8:15 pm). From Kathryn Van Arendonk I had the rare treat of a paper on Trollope and the mini-series, Northern Exposure. As I’ve been pointing to in my blogs on Downton Abbey, Trollope’s serial art is analogous in forms and motifs to serial drama on TV. Northern Exposure gives us a case where a mini-series changed its stories to de-emphasize the male protagonist to give us a portrait of an on-going community, causing the male lead to sue. A love triangle, a place where people gather (bar) become shaping forces. Trollope’s Barchester series shows the same re-forming to create a narrative system, whose preludes or codas can occur in a previous or later novel. The material is capable of perpetual proliferation.

Sean O’Sullivan’s talk on Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective has led me to rent this series from Netflix. Michael Gambon plays an obscure fiction writer in hospital with a painful and ugly skin disease. The BBC allowed Potter creative latitude so that the series was built by putting together fragments of memory; individual episodes were independent of others (they could stand alone) within 3 interwoven stories. We see time unfold with the different floors of the hospital representing different phases of the protagonist’s life; all is integrated with music. The films investigated the personal and communal experience.

A advertising poster for the movie-house version of the film, Mulholland Drive

Jason Mittel’s talk was on Mulholland Drive, which he argued is today a much acclaimed but misunderstood movie because it originated as a mini-series. The pilot episode was re-designed to be a self-contained film to allow the producers to release it to commercial theaters. He showed how the interpretations of the movie as now constituted bring out how a serial film has an uncanny dream-like underlying structure.

The talk afterward was stimulating. Ms Van Arendook said one could learn much by showing how a tightly-knit classic novel (say Austen’s Emma) was changed when it was turned into serial art. It was here I heard what I’ve come to see is true of Dickens: he breaks up his narrative so as to erase their original instalment publication pattern. People deplored the tendency at HBO in the last decade or so to go for the 6 hour mini-series in lieu of the 13-hour one.

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To me the most personally gratifying was a session very early Saturday morning (Jan 5th, No. 432, 8:30-9:45 am) called Aural Communications and Close Listening. For years I’ve listened to people apologizing for listening to audio books, explaining (half-apologetically, self-deprecatingly) that listening is almost or as good as silent reading; or, assertions that such experiences must be inferior: you can’t control the speed of the utterance, have no text in front of you & so on. (Well you can control it, you can rewind or click ahead and back, and who says you can’t have a text in front of you or consult it before or later? Many audiobooks come with a downloadable e-text nowadays.

Philip Madoc’s reading and Andrew Davies’ mini-series showed me the reactionary reading of this book is all wrong

Matthew Rubery did more than answer these objections & explain their origins; he defended listening to books as different and sometimes better than silent reading. It is a new embarrassment, because until the later 19th century one form of entertainment in reading households was for the group of people to sit round a fire and listen to someone read aloud a book that was written to be read aloud — as most good novels are. Why do people question the “legitimacy” of aural communication: besides the two I’ve already cited: it’s felt they threaten close or deep reading; the reader is passive and allowing someone else “to do the work” of interpretation; they are abridged. The one objection that he let stand was they are often abridged and abridged poorly, leaving just the bare-bones of a plot. But one need not buy or rent an abridged book.

Two of my favorite readers made this book a deep love of mine

The defense: the narrator is an imagined voice in the book and the reader-narrator is bringing this to life; acoustic performances can deepen and enrich your experience of the book. You are led to see nuances and feelings you might not on your own. Logically, the more times you listen to different readers, the more you see in your book. I’ve listened to whole Trollope novels read aloud by different narrators and can vouch for that. Audio books offer sensuous resonating language when the reader’s voice is trained. (I just love David Case’s voice.) They help you understand the book, and can bring out its ideology. Im a sense audiobooks function the way film adaptations or stage dramatizations do only the text is not change. If their interpretation differs from yours, no one stops you from reading the book on your own. It can be difficult to discern paratexts but a good reader will include (by dropping his or her voice) a footnote, the introduction, notes.

Audio books also enable the phenomenon of the secondary activity while reading. For me listening to books turns what would be excruciatingly frustrated time in traffic jams into privileged time. Some people exercise, others clean their houses; they jog and walk their dogs. There is the wonderful element of imagined company. The drawbacks that Rubery registered were 1) the tendency of these companies to chose voices whose intonation are upper class, thus reinforcing false associations of value with one set of aural sounds rather than another; and 2) that it is difficult to find out what’s out there once an audio company goes out of business or is bought out by a larger company. The profit motive and fear of free downloaders makes the companies unwilling to pool their information into any standard source.

The second speaker, Cornelius Collins, talked about how in our culture the visual dominates the aural so that the aural is not sufficiently discussed and less money is spent on top-of-the-line sound mix and/or readers. Music today is massively compromised to fit i-tune requirements. Audio books are not compiled in a central place and the amateur readers remain under-rated, ignored. Much that is recorded is quickly in danger of being lost within a couple of years. Collins asked, What does it mean to listen closely? citing Peter Zendy’s Listen: A History of our Ears (about how to critically listen), said the way to do this is break the experience into segments (the way one does a movie). We need to discuss it and find a vocabulary for the quality of sound and someone’s tones.

More briefly: Justin St Clair discussed the new phenomenon of novels published as sound tracks, or with sounds of music accompanying them (hybridized reading); Linda Hutcheon’s Adaptation has a section on this new book. One problem here is the sound track is used as an ad for the book, and do not provide a meaningful atmosphere. Lisa Hollenback’s talk was on poetry and music on MP3s. These invite nostalgia is the recording is from time past. Vast websites on line provide experiences of sharing, swapping recordings. Music and story listening become social activities experienced in partly-imagined communities. It is much easier to collect and list music that’s recorded than books because of the free on-line collections.

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Izzy and I saw the Agnes Vardes’s film, The Beaches of Agnes (it is every bit that good) that was part of the discussion of Contemporary French film (Jan 5th, Saturday, 10:15-11:30, No. 479). I almost missed the session because the title of the paper no where indicated she was its central subject.

Agnes Vardes speaking at a retrospective series at the Harvard Film Archive

See comments.

Ellen

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“A revolutionary view of Trollope and why we read him …

The photo is by Margaret Cameron, the hat the one Trollope traveled in and the emails for him and his characters invented by me

Dear friends and readers,

It’s never too late. I’ve had a third official — published — review of my book, Trollope on the ‘Net, and I am so chuffed. Tyler Tichelaar alone took seriously and described “the other half” of my books, the part about my and other people’s experiences in cyberspace, mostly reading Trollope novels. That’s what’s revolutionary (as John Letts’s introduction says). I place as of equal interest and weight to that of scholars, the views of the other readers and myself on the list-serv the discussions occurred on between 1995-6 and 1997 (a majordomo list-serv managed by Elizabeth Thomson).

He’s placed it on his website: The Gothic Wanderer

and on the Amazon site where used copies are still for sale.

I’m so pleased by what he says in an immediate way when he refers to how Trollope is still denigrated as simply writing for money, not out of an irresistible powerful creative imagination. Just the other day on the Trollope Society face-book someone quoted Jane Smiley who had trotted out that prejudice: his routine shows he was was somehow mechanical. No one who has read Trollope’s books with their mind alive and experienced his characters, stories, dramatic scenes, narrator’s presence, just spilling over and intertwined could think this. One of the members of the face-book group quoted one of Trollope’s powerful descriptions of his experience of his imagination. I did try to counter this in my book — I’ve a chapter on An Autobiography as a book which contains a remarkable percipient description by Trollope of his own reveries: he had a pictorial dramatic imagination and would see a character in a dramatic scene identified as say “the brother” or “the sister” and from that evolve a situation, and from that a story.

I’m writing this blog partly to say I have about 3 boxes of the books left (maybe 36) from the original print-out beyond the ones sent to the members of the Trollope Society the year the book was published (2000). I’d be happy to send a copy to anyone for the literal cost of the book and postage ($15). My email: ellen.moody@gmail.com. Honestly it’s not for the money but because I’d like to make more people aware it’s about the Internet and takes an unorthodox view because of its dual context.

As Tichelaar says, this is not to say it’s not scholarly. The two official reviews — published — I had thus far paid tribute to that part of the book. In one of the yearly round-ups of Trollope studies, Mark Turner devoted two gracious paragraphs to it, like Tichelaar commending my chapter on Trollope’s illustrations of which I am (I admit) particularly proud since I did most of my original research there — including wonderful days spent at the Library of Congress examining over 460 illustrations. Many of Trollope’s novels were published in instalments and it was these that got the illustrations. They were a way of selling the numbers. Customers were attracted by putting some of the full-page pictures in shop windows. I am hoping to give a paper on these illustrations at a coming Sharp-l conference (fingers crossed). But he felt that the “other half” of my book got in the way, took up too much space. I’ve since been told by other scholars my opening chapter would traditionally place my outlook in the context of other scholars instead of placing it in the context of how I came to get on the Internet and lead reading groups. I held scholarly contexts off to every other chapter when after whatever book we read is covered, I put that book in its Trollope context (as Trollope’s Irish novels, or as Tichelaar, says his novellas, books under 300 pages of which Trollope was very proud).

A well-known illustration by Phiz for Can You Forgive Her?: see see Burgo’s casual generosity to the desperate beggar girl — this one was a favorite of John Letts and the frontispiece for my book

Margaret Drabble (astonishingly) read my book — she was a friend of Letts, and came to Trollope meetings, and she paid tribute to the readings of the novels. But she was amused at the Internet groups and thought reading on the Net might be like adult education. It’s not.

I call these official because they are not my only reviews. Since my book was published I’ve had letters and notes from all sort of people on the Net saying mostly kind things about my book. Occasionally someone has put a review of it on a list-serv. Like Jane Austen (and probably others) I’ve saved each and every one and have a folder of them (not that slender).

Nowadays the list-serv is called Trollope19thCStudies and is equally on other Victorian writers, and has been so (though the accurate name is recent) since around 1997-98 when Michael Powe opened a new list-serv on Yahoo, partly so that we could expand beyond Trollope. We moved four times: Mike handled it off of his own server; my husband ran the group using French software, but it’s very hard for individuals to keep up (as Elizabeth Thompson presumably found) and so we are back at Yahoo once again. And we carry on with Trollope too, and this past fall read Castle Richmond and starting in February we’ll be reading An Autobiography again. We are now only one of several groups reading Trollope: another on Yahoo (just called “Trollope”), several on the Trollope society site. I’ve been told of other Yahoo groups reading Trollope novels (19th century literature at Yahoo), I remember a third site I was told of (though not where it was). And there are other commemorative sites beyond mine: a teacher read the Barchester novels with her students looking for classical references. There are a mighty number of them, enough to keep high school students busy making a website: Apollo

In physical space, who knows how many library and home reading groups there are. The two Trollope societies (really one, but located on either side of the Atlantic, NYC and London) have lectures: one is coming up in February in NYC which I am now hoping to attend: Nicholas Birne on Trollope’s La Vendee (a book we’ve read twice in our Yahoo group.

Judge Staveley walking with his daughter, Madeleine: by John Everett Millais for Orley Farm, this is one of my favorite illustrations (Trollope loved Millais’s illustrations for this novel too) and is one of 24 positioned throughout my book

As Tichelaar notes, and I say as the opening statement of my website where I have much on Trollope: “Anthony Trollope is one of the greatest nineteenth-century novelists with who (oddly) the majority of readers come into contact on their own.” And in spite of the “rise” of minor and women writers, and changes in the canon which have helped Trollope’s reputation there is still a stubborn tendency to omit Trollope from syllabi except for advancd English majors and graduate students. I put it down to his original reception in part: he was not seen as the towering figure Dickens and Thackeray were, and his refusal to allow himself to write his fiction to a particular agenda. He is willing to buck his readers. In Dr Wortle’s School, he tells his readers he has a couple living together outside marriage so it they don’t want to read about such a pair, then shut the book. Trollope loves to be self-reflexive and ironically half-break the spell of reverie and tell us much of what’s going to happen at the end. We should read his novels for how a thing happens, not what.

The force bethrothal of Plantegenet (Philip Latham) and Lady Glencora (Susan Hampshire) from 1:1

I’ve grown to love the film adaptations of his novels, all of them that I’ve seen and written about them too. I find others love these films, especially the two mini-series, earlier (1974) Pallisers and (1982) Barchester Chronicles (alas only 2 of the six adapted). See He Knew He Was Right out of Moll Flanders.

But enough. As Shakespeare’s friends to whom we are so indebted for the plays, John Heminge and Henry Condell, say of Shakespeare,

read him … and againe and againe: and then if you doe not like him, surely you are in some manfiest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends, whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you need them not, you can lead your selves, and others. And such Readers we wish him.

Trollope in his mid-40s, a rare photo

I like to think my book is one place where you will gain such understanding. It’s intended for his real readers wherever they are.

Ellen

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