Pallisers 12:26: Retrospective

Susan Hampshire as Lady Glen realizing no one will help her not marry Plantaganet Palliser and that on her own she cannot withstand the pressure to marry him (1:1)

Dear friends and readers,

This will be my last Palliser film blog for now. It’s a commentary on 12:26 (how the Duchess died and yet remained and was victorious at last); a perspective on the three parts of the series which (with a few adumbrations from 10:21 to 11:23) comprise The Duke’s Children; and a brief look back over the whole 26 part series.

Nearly one-half of 12:26 is given over to the Duchess’s death. Very un-Trollopian this because Trollope does not dwell on deaths themselves, but as they affect the living coming up to the death and afterwards when the person has vanished (Trollope is deeply secular in his impulses.)

From the time of the Duchess’s death a portrait of her when young (and it really looks like Susan Hampshire dressed as a young modest Lady Glencora Palliser) hangs in the front room where a great deal of the action happens, the most important scenes and the ones where we come upon the Duke. The camera is deliberately pointed many times so she is a silent presence watching over what happens (the feel is benign). Many scenes begin with the Duke sitting in an alcove inside the ubiquitous bow-window with many panes (which is a motif throughout the series as I’ve said many times); the colors we see through the window are muted blues and greys. From this window he can see Glencora’s grave.

Our first sight of the window, shortly after the Pallisers return from Switzerland; she is given nothing to do, experiences the place as a prisoner (1:2)

Throughout the part we see the Duke at this window whose many scenes make it a central symbol of lost time and shared ambivalent memory in the last two episodes. The last moments of the episode show him first looking one way to see Lady Mary, Tregear, Silverbridge and Isabel Boncassen meeting in a slightly different direction over against the priory, all joy and forgetting the older adults as they move to kiss and hug and begin their lives. The two young women hug in a form that recalls Millais’s picture of Mrs Orme and Lady Mason at the close of Orley Farm, a pose Lady Glen as Duchess and Madame Max enacted mid-way through the series when the old Duke died (8:15)

The two girls are dressed in dark but colorful equall bell like dresses and cheerfully bonding. He then looks in the other — at Lady Glen’s grave. When he walks from the priory after succumbing to Mrs Finn’s argument that he must let Tregear come in order on his own to think about Silverbridge, he stands in front of Lady Glen’s grave.

These are her children — including Tregear. Apparently in the full-length Duke’s Children (not yet published) Trollope makes the point that Tregear’s character is a male version of the Duchess’s. It has throughout the series been carefully established how close Silverbridge and like his mother in character, and now that the Duchess blessed the coming marriage of Mary and Tregear because she identified, and as she lays dying what Lady Glen wants is for Lady Mary to have control over her income so she may be free. She never gets that, and in near her last moments Lady Glen is excited and in an anguish at her attempts for this. When the girl stands up to the father and refuses to give up Tregear she brings up how the Duke’s money is largely from Lady Glen and how her mother wanted her to have some of it freely (without control) He grows intensely silent and grave and is electrified with memory for a moment.

From the first walk in the Priory, Lady Glen telling Alice of her grief and loss (2:3)

In Trollope’s The Duke’s Children the Duke is remembering Lady Glen a good deal of the time, though the memories are different. In Trollope’s novel the Duke objects to the marriage of Lady Mary and Tregear because he too identifies only in his case he sees Tregear as another Burgo and to give Lady Mary to Tregear is somehow to betray all the years he has given to Lady Glen. It’s too painful to him to admit or think Lady Glen still regretted the marriage.

The case is just about completely altered in the 3 films. In the scene in 12:25 between Lady Glen and Mrs Finn just before Lady Glen collapses, Lady Glen does say she wants the marriage because she suffered so, but she accedes she is no longer suffering and it was for the best. In Trollope’s novel Lady Glen never admits this, she does not show this intense love for the Duke and respect and tenderness, and in the movie it seems a principle with her, not that her life was taken from her. This is countered by Lady Mary’s argument to her father why does he want to make her life so much less and in effect miserable, but as time is such a motif in the film some viewers might dismiss Lady Mary here.

The intense pain of the novel is in other words mitigated into hard sorrow in the film; the pain Raven’s Duke feels is the loss of the wife, sheer loneliness for her (not to be underestimated as the sense of loss keeps him at that window). Trollope’s Duke remembers life with Lady Glen had been very checkered and in unspeakable moments in his mind her continuing apparent regret at her loss of Burgo,(why in the novel she encouraged Mary’s marriage to Tregar).

The crisis moment in the series where she turns away from Burgo (Barry Commoner, 2:4)

So in the novel her regret was unending apparently if unspoken most of the time.

In the film the Duke objects to Lady Mary’s marriage solely on grounds of the young man’s rank and lack of money. He is not one of us. “Not our kind.” This phrase resounds through the film. The theme here is one which connects to how the Duke is in principle for equality, but for himself, not so, and is part of Raven’s pro-Tory text. We see the limits of democracy and how we have to have good and kind and moral leaders who are well-educated and so on and so forth. It’s moving when the son leaves the Tories (based on personal dislike of Orlando and finally his understanding he cannot be free of his family in other’s eyes and will be used by Orlando to hurt and embarrass his father) and preaches in much simpler language the doctrine the Tories are selfish and the Whigs want equality more and a prosperous life for all. But this is countered by Silverbridge obviously maturing into a self-controlled decent and powerful man (and made more moral we are to feel because free of a need to exert himself and with much honorable self-esteem), and by his father’s stance against a marriage “outside our kind.”

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From the perspective of all three parts of the Palliser films adapted from The Duke’s Children, the whole story of Lady Mary is secondary, to Silverbridge’s. We lose the last of our ambiguous hero-gentlemen: in the uncut novel he is in the final scene and given a remark which by retrospect can be seen as ironic. Tregear married Lady Mary also to climb high. Raven’s Tregear is a poet type who is intellectually Tory and just loves Lady Mary, was hurt at being cast off by Lady Mabel but there’s no going back (this is what Silverbridge also says to his father when he says he will not break with Isabel).

The centrality of Silverbridge is is in accordance with the previous 3 episodes which through a variety of added scenes (some going back to the episodes which contained Phineas’s trial, with Silverbridge as a boy with Gerald neglected by the father but also misunderstood and yet the father wanting him to do what he recognized was right, i.e., study and read “like bricks” in his language). Armanick tells us the ms of The Duke’s Children also is titled Lord Silverbridge. Silverbridge’s relationship with the father is the second center of this film.

Lady Mabel’s grief too, something central in Duke’s Children where she loses Silverbridge (and does not love him), needs money, and wants Frank back and i last remembered by Frank as “howling” in a tempest. Trollope’s Lady Mabel is one of his great characters; this woman is just a mistaken husband-hunter and desperate type who is willing to use Silverbridge; it’s piteous how he can grow and mature and then cut her easily and even tell her what to do. He says that she must not come to Matching the way the father wants or he’ll not give her an allowance eventually – in the Trollope’s The Duke’s Children Lady Mabel does come and for weeks.

This is not to say the film is not deeply moving (I wept the first couple of times I watched); only that the pain is that of a man left alone and a good marriage cut short because of pneumonia. Raven could use pneumonia as why she dies because even now people die of pneumonia — and then there were no antibiotics whatsoever. It’s consoling too to see the son and father grow together and see how Silverbridge is taking over, becoming what the father can respect and how the boy loves the father. To an older person who has grown children this may function as moving wish-fulfillment.

Lady Glen pregnant and on her way home from Basle, her cousin Alice Vavasour (Caroline Mortimer) with her (3:6)

The now published abridged version of Trollope’s last Palliser novel, not particularly political in thrust, is also used to validate a mild Toryism. I’ve met so many people who take Trollope to be a Tory; the kind of reading of the novels we find in Raven’s text and the influence of these films provide a framework which insist this interpretation (an inaccurate one) is right and out of which readers who do read the novel see the novels.

I’d say Trollope’s novel includes betrayal: the original betrayal of Lady Glen; the betrayals of years; Lady Mabel’s planned betrayal of Silverbridge (which he catches in time) and Frank’s betrayal of her and the past which may not be retrieved. In the film there’s no need to retrieve the past. The past is different, a new age is before us, but the past was not bad and the new age is idealized.

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Interesting that a novel written in 1880 centers partly on women, women’s losses, ambiguous betrayals, and becomes in 1974 a novel centering on men and the women’s losses are presented as momentary and they as having no choice or idea of anything but marriage — only Lady Mabel is vestige of this and she’s in love with Frank and now desperate and her case dismissed by Duchess. The novel written in 1880 presents an ambiguous marriage and much ambivalence, love and more hunt (and according to Steven Armanick the full text has more of Lady Glen’s bitterness and difficult nature for the Duke anyway); the movie in 1974 presents the longed-for basically contented pair. Some will say this is the result of films being for a mass audience; well, Trollope was not a feminist and meant to sell widely. Perhaps the Victorians were more candid than we in some areas: about the realities of marriage, they openly attacked religion as fostering hateful impulses, they openly discussed death.

The last three films are done with great dignity and grace. I can see that it would not be done in this way today and why (why defer to this ideal which is so unreal) and yet I regret it.

Mrs Finn (Barbara Murray) has been the most exemplary figure for women in the films, with the Duke (Philip Latham), Phineas Finn (Donald McCann) and now Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) embodying versions of ideal masculinity. Lady Glen (Susan Hampshire) and Lady Laura (Anna Massey) were great roles of flawed women. There was a whole variety of flawed men. The minor women were bullies, bossy, and sluts (so the old sex control comes in too) or stupid about sex (Emily Wharton and Lizzie Eustace some in here). It’s not coincidence there is so much more for men and that the woman who is ideal is not one who wanted any kind of public career.

Mr Bunce (Haydn Jones) who needs Phineas to bribe a policeman to get him out of jail after a demonstration (4:7)

In the interest of actually bringing some evidence to bear that a film can be as good and better than a text, just different because it’s grammar, devices, strategies, means are different: one overarching theme of the Palliser series is the importance of history. This is conveyed by the use of mise-en-scene: the pictures, the costumes changing and the rock-bottom insistence throughout the films that history matters and this particular even if fictionalized history.

One reason these films seem obsolete is an ignoring of memory and recent history (never mind older) is endemic and growing among older people — this was ever common among the young. The stills of the Duchess and the Duke in the priory and the whole panoply of stills of places now gone and changed is the point of this costume drama. Lady Mary on our groupsite space stands next to a mouldering cathedrale; she is dressed as we no longer do but once did.

The slow pace, and attention to detail are part of this message about history as well as an attempt at historical accuracy which takes money. Some “cross-over art and commercial films and TV quality drama seeking a wider audience do their best to modernize the past.

The effect of the effect of having more than one story in each of Trollope’s novels and thus each of the series films: in most adaptations one might have one or two subplots but that’s all and all three come to an end around the same
time. In the Pallisers following Trollope’s novels we have some stories which appear at various points of the 26 episodes are resolved and the characters never seen againL Andrew Davies gets seven pairs of lovers and stories in in his HKHWR: Louie and Emily, Nora and Hugh, Caroline and Glascock, Camilla and Arabella and Gibson, he adds Lady and Sir Marmaduke Rowley, we have Mr and Mrs Boffit, Dorothy and Brooke Burgess; extras are Priscilla, Colonel Osborne, with Aunt Stanbury having story of lover; Caroline’s friend made very marginal.

Having different stories over the course of a long mini-series is again to make us feel we are watching history and show us continuums of upper class (mostly because that is the purview of Trollope’s Palliser books and Raven’s predilection too) males coping with life’s demands. Each set of characters care about themselves, but we begin to see them as players or people with transient parts
against a backdrop of history.

An unrepaired roof in Ireland, gazed at by Phineas Finn, our secondary hero (5:10) who tries to work for his fellow Irishmen while forwarding his own career

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I return to this last part. I find watching this last part at times unbearably moving. The death of the Duchess is everywhere and not forgotten — from costumes to mood to mise-en-scene — in the ruins again, the white sky, the cawing of birds. The lines resonate with modern preoccupations too: Mrs Finn asks the Duke is he prepared to destroy his daughter’s life because the man she loves has a position in life which displeases him.

A position in life which displeases the other person. That wording is not in Trollope. It does describe The Way Many Today Are.

Again the window is used, and it’s elegiac: so much occurs by that window, near the picture of the Duchess; as Duke wakes up the following morning, we see its greenery and now I remember Lady Mabel Grex and Silverbridge, also with Frank, and Mary too with Duchess in previous episodes.

Film adaptations of older high status books often show heroines happy to be in retreat; as I contemplate Mary’s satisfaction in just being with Mrs Finn I remember (2007 Persuasion) Sally Hawkins as Anne Elliot happy in family at Uppercross and so many other scenes of this kind too. Solace — and shows how false is the rhetoric about networking and socializing to many in their hearts — no matter what Mrs Finn’s words to Lady Mary about being better in London or gaiety.

Colors are now sombre: both Mary and Isabel in a sort of dull purple, Mrs F and Duke in black

Silverbridge’s “Now that I will not have” (that he be used to humiliate his father) is the equivelant of Mary’s stout refusal: both firm and good people, and we are to see this and commend the mother — and father too. So this is the happy ending, good young strong adults facing the world — superior to what Lady Glen was (nervous) and more conscious of intimate feelings than Duke was (when young)

When Silverbridge gets on his knees to Isabel it feels like a culmination we’ve been waiting for. Anthony Andrews as grown Silverbridge first appears in 10:20 (high conflicts in political world), last episode where Duchess moving out the door with Mary to face her new career. He is first seen with Tregear too. He has been kicked out of Oxford at that point. So Andrews in 6 episodes as is Irons and Nicholls, 11:22 we first meet Gerald and in the 4 episode go to Venice. So it’s 11:22 we first meet Lady Mabel. She is never a central figure in a continuous story quite the way Alice Vavasour say is. How cruel Trollope is to women who drive themselves to marry to be comfortable and for money. Never so cruel to men.

Going through it while there is enough upbeat (after all the young couples wed, Silverbridge and Mary have firm good personalities; Gerald means well, the Duke returns to public life), it is a very sad sombre final episode on the whole: embodied in the dress and spirit of Mrs Finn, not to omit Lady Mabel.

Anna Carteret makes herself incisively memorable, and her daughter, Hattie Morahan (Elinor Dashwood in the recent 2008 S&S) is a worthy successor. As for the duke, letting go; he’s letting go. It’s a lesson the series also teaches again and again.

Lady Jane Carbuncle (Helen Lindsay, a favorite for me in the series, the character type does not appear in Trollope) relaxing in a carriage coming home from the theater with Lizzie Eustace (7:13).

I find myself wishing Davies had succeeded in persuading someone at the BBC or other organization which does these film series (WBGH, Granada) to allow him to do it. I suspect he wanted them to spend too much money. I think to myself how differently he would have done it. He would not have let Trollope get away with the idealization of the heir. There is far too much deference paid to Silverbridge and it would not be done by Davies I suspect. 70,000 pounds is not too much to spend to part this important person from Tifto? what crap is this? what defense of the status quo and dismissal of other people. In book Trollope does show how idle a rich man’s life Silverbridge leads: from shooting, to racing, to hunting, hardly ever going to Parliament and thn his idea is it’s a club of friends. The Duke is appalled; Davies would do something with this. We’d have had some sense of servants, of another world Tifto is keeping clear of, hard and mean, much more satiric laughter too.

The last we see of Collingwood (Maurice Quick), the faithful servant, serving with Lady Mary to take (in this 1974 series) the numinous privileged male’s coat off.

Ellen