Stuart Wilson enacting Lopez just before he gets on a train to go to another station with the intention of throwing himself under an oncoming engine (Pallisers 11:23)
Dear friends and readers,
I’m trying to turn over a new leaf, and write blogs that are not only shorter but not worked up as much. Hitherto I’ve been taking postings I write to list-servs and developing and elaborating them before putting them on my blog. Since that takes time and energy (plus often finding the exquisitely-apt picture or exemplary passage), I don’t write as often as I could and many of my postings remain in list-serv archives. I’m going to try to put an end to this over-wrought sense of standard and blog more freely.
*****************
So, to begin this morning,
Over on Victoria (Patrick Leary’s list-serv, mostly academic in content, a forum for discussing every and all Victorian matter), someone asked for suicides in novels and people began to list them. I was prompted to write this because there was one longish posting about a Kipling story (“Thrown Away”) where the person writing the posting seemed to condemn the suicide, especially for having told the truth of what people had done to him, and what he felt. This bothered me. As the person wrote it up, it would seem she was reflecting Kipling who condemned this unhappy male character too.
Original vignette by George Housman Thomas to the chapter in which Dobbs Broughton shoots himself through the head (Last Chronicle of Barset)
Trollope has quite a number of suicides as well as some near-suicides. Many of them fit into Barbara Gates’s default positions (so to speak) in her Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories. Speaking generally, the men kill themselves because they have been or feel they have been publicly disgraced and cannot bear to face people, to live with the position they would not be put down into. These include Melmotte (The Way We Live Now), Ferdinand Lopez (The Prime Minister), and from Last Chronicle of Barset, Dobbs Broughton; from The Bertrams, Henry Harcourt. Lopez is a rare instance where we actually witness the suicide and while it may be hard poetry, I’d call the power of the scene, a huge railway station, anonymous in the modern way and the depiction of the smash poetry.
From The Prime Minister, “Tenway Junction”
Trollope depicts a modern railway station with power. Slowly he builds up a scene familiar to many of us:
After a while he went back into the hall and took a first-class return ticket not for Birmingham, but for the Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it. From this spot, some six or seven miles distant from London, lines diverge east, west, and north, north-east, and north-west, round the metropolis in every direction,
and with direct communication with every other line in and out of
London. It is marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the
uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that
when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them. The
space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for
a large farm. And these rails always run into one another with
sloping points, and cross passages, and mysterious meandering
sidings, till it seems to the thoughtful stranger to be impossible that the best-trained engine should know its own line. Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and
others furlongs in length black with coals, which look as though
they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined
to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes
without a train going here or there, some rushing by without
noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of
substantial lightning, and others stopping, disgorging and taking
up passengers by the hundreds. Men and women,–especially the
men, for the women knowing their ignorance are generally willing
to trust to the pundits of the place,–look doubtful, uneasy,
and bewildered. But they all do get properly placed and unplaced, so that the spectator at last acknowledges that over all this apparent chaos there is presiding a great genius of order. From dusky morn to dark night, and indeed almost throughout the night, the air is loaded with a succession of shrieks. The theory goes that each separate shriek,–if there can be any separation where the sound is so nearly continuous,– is a separate notice to separate ears of the coming or going of a separate train.
I like his sense of how people order themselves. This is something human beings are good at. Like so many small animals in a maze. The way it’s done is each person does attend intently to his particular destiny. My analogue is Penn Station at 34th Street or Heathrow airport.
Trollope then enters the mind of the man who notices that Lopez is not getting on a train. From the outside we watch the man march, walk this way and that, getting ever closer to the trains. It’s not until the last moment we realize he has worked his way to get as close as possible to the smash. We are (at least I am) led to sympathize since we realize how hard this act must’ve been to him and yet how determined he was. Very efficient. Very businesslike:
Now, Tenway Junction is so big a place, and so scattered, that it is impossible that all the pundits should by any combined activity maintain to the letter the order of which our special pundit had spoken. Lopez, departing from the platform which he had hitherto occupied, was soon to be seen on another, walking up and down, and again waiting. But the old pundit had his eye on him, and had followed him round. At that moment there came a
shriek louder than all the other shrieks, and the morning express
down from Euston to Inverness was seen coming round the curve at
a thousand miles an hour. Lopez turned round and looked at it,
and again walked towards the edge of the platform but now it was
not exactly the edge that he neared, but a descent to a pathway,
–an inclined plane leading down to the level of the rails, and
made there for certain purposes of traffic. As he did so the
pundit called to him, and then made a rush at him,–for our
friend’s back was turned to the coming train. But Lopez heeded
not the call, and the rush was too late. With quick, but still
with gentle and apparently unhurried steps, he walked down before
the flying engine–and in a moment had been knocked into bloody
atoms.
In some of these cases, Trollope’s attitude towards the man who killed himself is ambivalent: he feels for them, he enters into their cases, and Lopez is one of these, so too Melmotte. He does this by conveying critiques of those who showed them up or despised them or dropped them. He also has characters who apparently killed themselves for similar reasons (again males) before the novel opened: this time the loss of an estate, an inheritance, the brother in Belton Estate. In some of these he brings out how important it was to hide the suicide both out of public shame and (apparently) for fear somehow the property inheritance might be endangered (as it would have been in earlier times).
Women kill themselves too, and sometimes violently. Here it’s because they are being driven to marry someone they don’t love, often intensely distasteful to them: the girl in “La Mere Bauche” throws herself off a cliff rather than marry the aging captain her protectress has picked out for her. She cannot be brought back. But sometimes it really is left ambiguous whether a young woman actively killed herself or died of intense harassment and misery: Linda Tressel for example (a kind of Clarissa character). We have a fascinating instance of watching a girl about to kill herself (throw herself from a bridge) and draw back: Nina Balatka. (Their novellas are titled with their names.) Another young woman appears and in part helps Nina not to do it, but we are in Nina’s mind as she’s about to do it.
She had always been conscious, since the idea had entered her mind, that she would lack the power to step boldly up on to the parapet and go over at once . . . She had known that she must crouch, and pause, and think of it, and look at it, and nerve herself with the memory of her wrongs. Then, at some moment in which her heart was wrung to the utmost, she would gradually slacken her hold, and the dark, black, silent river should take her. She climbed up into the niche, and found that the river was far from her, though death was so near to her and the fall would be easy. When she became aware that there was nothing between her and the void space below her, nothing to guard her, nothing left in the world to protect her, she retreated, and descended again to the pavement. And never in her life had she moved with more care, lest, inadvertenty, a foot or a hand might slip, and she might tumble to her doom against her will (Nina Balatka, pp. 183-4)
And there’s a parallel in Trollope’s Autobiography where he describes himself as dreaming or plotting of suicide and going up high somewhere but thinking the better of it and coming down). I can’t think of any young woman who kills herself because she has discovered she is pregnant outside marriage and will have a baby or has had a baby (which would connect in trajectory and motive to women forced to marry someone they don’t want — which would result even if not called that marital rape) — is that not the case of Hetty in Adam Bede in effect? They suffer badly (Kate in An Eye for an Eye); also women ostracized because they have been divorced or lived with someone outside marriage (Mrs Atherton in Belton Estate) but they are not driven to destroy themselves.
Oliver Dimsdale as Louis in his last moments in Italy (He Knew He Was Right, scripted Andrew Davies)
A couple of these cases of “of was it?” do cross gender lines. Louis Trevelyan (He Knew He Was Right) driven by his sexual anxiety, shame, jealousy, may be said to bring his death on himself as he drives himself mad. Lady Mason (Orley Farm) who herself faces public disgrace for having forged a signature to keep her son’s property for him so he can be a gentleman holds on, just, and partly by telling someone. There is one remarkable scene of her brooding depicted by Millais (a picture Trollope pointed out as seeing more into the character than he had).
John Everett Millais’s original full-size illustration of Mary Lady Mason deep in thought (Orley Farm): Skilton shows Trollope was criticized by his public for having such woman (who gets off by the way) for his heroine
I would say Trollope might well disapprove in a novel of a character telling the full truth of what happened to him or her and leaving it in a letter. Just about all of his suicides do it without telling. But the near self-destroying tell; Josiah Crawley (Last Chronicle) for example, a genuinely tragic figure in letters described by the narrator as noble in intent.
It’s in these moments in his fictions that Trollope (as Henry James puts it of the closing sequence of He Knew He Was Right and Nina and Linda) that Trollope does himself justice. Had he ever written this way … I am not sure that today we have gone as far from Victorian condemnations as at least I would like to think, so Trollope’s empathy really speaks home to us.
I’ve written this to counter an implied spirit I felt from some of the postings on Victoria of self-distancing and judgmental evaluation from the point of view of social status of those left or the person’s reputation among them after he or she has died. There were excellently informative ones too of course.
I’ll try to find a similar posting I wrote about disability in Elizabeth Gaskell where I was startled to see on this list reflected a lack of understanding (much less sympathy) for what a disability is and how its worst aspects come from how other people respond to the person’s particular disability (how they won’t let the person be him or herself otherwise). Like Trollope on suicide, Gaskell on disability is still well above the narrowness and blindnesses of our as well as their own time.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I got into a telling and relevant conversation with a friend about my blogs on my mother’s death, on “Boxing and Bagging 2 Lives Away and the stories the things told.” She said her spouse was shocked at my telling such things, though she said he would not have been had they appeared in a book. She also thought his response was partly typical of an upper class person (“a class thing”).
Here’s my reply:
I did want to say something to you comment that it shocked your husband to read what I wrote in a blog but had he read it in a book he would have accepted it. My guess is that is true for lots of people. I’ve wondered why this difference? I’m not sure it’s that solid or distinct but I think it’s there. First I’d say that few autobiographies tell truly unadmirable or verboten things; Styron’s memoir about his depression is so admired and yet if you read it, it says hardly anything concrete about the real causes of his depression; Carolyn Heilburn who preaches to other women to tell of their real lives writes a pollyanna one of herself. It’s often so disappointing to read memoirs of reading for they too don’t tell. Yet a few do and it’s more acceptable than on line. I wonder if it’s because people can answer you — by email if necessary. You are unguarded, or unframed by some barrier which endows some automatic prestige? or impersonality? I don’t know because reviews can be merciless to autobiographers who tell real truths. the novelist who told of her divorce for real was called frivolous, indulgent, distasteful; people who write of their parents for real when the parents are famous are vilified.
My argument is Virginia Woolf’s (and Carolyn Heilburn’s though she does not enact it): to tell is to break open the prison of shame and oppression and let others see and each time this happens another link in public taboos is hurt, weakened. It makes what happens in private houses to prisons less viable. You may be exposed. It shows the person that to tell such things makes no shudder in the universe, that people shrug and move on or they say I felt that way too and wish I could have written it. Lady Mason’s telling saves her from insanity, and (ironically) though she is declared “not guilty” given the nature of society where people will separate themselves from people who have lost status no matter how unfairly and in the end lives privately in another place. And Trollope lets us know more peacefully than she had before when she lived under her ungrateful son’s oppressive social control.
I felt better for it and wish others would tell the truth too. Maybe if we did we could stop being ashamed and false views of family life could not be exploited.
Ellen
After I wrote mine, I note today (a day later) a excellent posting which I quote from:
Regarding how suicides were adjudicated, you might also look into the context of coroners and their juries, tasked with investigating and then passing verdicts on the causes of suspicious deaths. In a standard work on the subject, *Bodies of Evidence,* Ian Burney points out that “deaths that might pose a social, financial, or emotional burden on the surviving family–attributable to syphilis, alcohol, and suicide, for instance–were commonly thought to be systematically underreported” (70). A coroner’s jury makes an appearance in The Prime Minister after Lopez steps in front of an oncoming express train (mentioned by Chip Tucker). “There was an inquest held of course,—well, we will say on the body,—and, singularly enough, great difference of opinion as to the manner, though of course none as to the immediate cause of the death. Had it been accidental, or premeditated?” (2: 195) That jury concludes “accidental death.” In Dombey and Son (mentioned by Dagni Bredesen), after Carker’s similar obliteration-by-train, his remains are carried off. Dickens was never impressed by coroners’ inquests and ends the chapter without suggesting what had to follow: an inquest on the body and, more than likely, the verdict of accidental death. For more on whether Carker’s death was accident or suicide, see Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain. For literary representations of inquests, see the VICTORIA archives and a very useful dissertation by Alicia Garnica (USC, 2009).
—
Paul Fyfe
I asked someone in Inimitable Boz (Max) if Dickens had ambiguous and other kinds of suicides. He replied:
Ellen, I know of accidental deaths which do look like quasi-suicides. In OT Sikes hangs himself with his own rope as he tries to escape his pursuers,
In the Old Curiosity Shop, Quilp drowns himself, it isn’t quite clear whether he falls accidentally into the water and throws himself out of desperate madness. Hugh seems to rush headlong toward his final ruin in Barnaby Rudge.In Dombey Carker the manager falls accidentally under a train or does he precipitate himself? in BH LD rushes to her death or dies of despair. Magwitch , too, is on a self-destructive course. in Great expectations , but does not take his life.. In A tale of two cities Sydney Carton takes Darney’s place et walks to his death at the guillotine–(a suicide in disguise or self-immolation?) in OMF Ridehood and Headstone the headmaster murder each other by drowning themselves together.
Me; To put it a little comically, then is it true to say Dickens does not have male characters who shoot themselves in the head, take poison, or throw themselves in front of trains. He does not have females who jump off cliffs, drown themselves. This kind of overt action is uncommon in Dickens?
It’s common in Trollope; not only does he have these instances which are ambiguous (self destruction whether slowly or more rapidly – by not eating, by going mad, by solitude, in a depression), but he has many instances where it’s clearly suicide even if denied in the courtroom later or by relatives or hidden by the person. The narrator tells us.
That is interesting to me if it’s so. One of the reasons I like Trollope is he has this strong intense melancholy vein — as does Gaskell (hers in the areas of people simply dying everywhere and ambiguous disabilities)
Ellen
Later that day some people thought of suicides in Dickens:
The only one I can think of who was a genuine suicide, is Jonas Chuzzlewit. Lots of people threaten suicide when things aren’t going their way e.g. Micawber, Mantalini, but I think Jonas is the only one who actually does it. The death of Nemo is a bit ambiguous – suicide or accidental overdose? Oh no, just remembered. Merdle in Little Dorrit is a genuine suicide. (If this is a spoiler, please remove) And of course, Ralph Nickleby hangs himself.
*************
Jonas’ death, of course, in Martin Chuzzlewit. Definitely a suicide. Ralph
Nicleny’s, too. Nemo’s death is like Quilp’s–ambiguous.Merdle’s, I forgot about him. Out of hundreds of characters and quite a lot of deaths, really very few, indeed, when you come to think of it. It is an interesting point, you are raising, Ellen
To Max, it comes out of my reading Kaplan’s literary biography. It makes me consider what was Dickens’s temperament and how it’s reflected in his novels.
Dickens left no official autobiography — of course he’s everywhere in all his writings, but still only the letters, travel books and say parts of essays are probably (strictly considered) life-writing.
Trollope tells us he had a long period of depression as a young man and at one point did climb to the top of a tower and told himself he was considering jumping. Maybe he was. This is reflected on one incident where a woman character climbs high on a bridge and pulls back. I’ve not time to find the passage in the autobiography but the language is very close. And of course suicides as part of a story come out of serious social criticism.
Barbara Gates has a book showing a gender faultline in how people killed themselves and what for typically in Victorian records. As today, men were inclined to be much more violent on themselves (and therefore harder to rescue).
One type of suicide missing from Trollope is the woman who kills herself because she is pregnant outside wedlock or has a baby and is then harassed, bullied, punished I think it’s not there because he does not want to create too much sympathy for such women. It is a motif in Victorian English painting and illustrations. Does Dickens have this kind of suicide? (To be fair in his first novel Trollope shocked his readers by having a heroine miscarry on a floor and die within a couple of hours – she is not married. The novel did not sell, as it was as truthful depiction of Victorian Ireland)
E.M.
0, I know of nothing like in Dickens concerning women. Sylvia will correct me if I am mistaken. Miss Havisham sets herself on fire accidentally, one of the many fatal Freudian slips, actes manqués, in CD’s novels.
It seems to me that women either die as (young) mothers–their sons, then, long to be reunited with them—.or they live on as castrating shrews — they are so many you just cannot tell how many they are. A few of the latter are good (pleasantly mad) shrews like aunt Betsey.
E.M.
In between there stand a line of good girls like Florence (Dombey), Agnes, Esther, Amy, Biddy (GE), Lucie (ATOTC), Lizzy (OMF) Good but mostly
uninspiring females to contemporary readers
Amitiés
[…] Comments « Suicide — or was it? in Anthony Trollope and other Victorian novels […]
Re suicide – another reference – in ‘Marion Fay’ – the odious Mr Greenwood, under threat of being turned out of the Marquis’ house & employment, is discussed and it is decided that as he will not have enough to live on he will ‘probably have to go to prison or else hang himself’. All pretty casual!
Someone on Inimitable-Boz spoke of a suicidal temperament and said she supposed Dickens did not have one. This as a result of the thread we had there on suicide in Dickens.
So I wrote as follows — much of this is on Trollope so perhaps it will be of interest here:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a suicidal temperament. Freud argued there are two profound impulses in the human psyche and found across societies (this is a blunt summing up where I avoid all the terms that translators may be partly responsible for), one I’d call constructive, the other destructive. He and others have shown that some people are more prone to melancholy, depression than others — that does not mean they will emerge that way; a personality is the interaction of its history and innate nature. From Kaplan’s book it’s hard to tell which exactly was Dickens’s predilection: Kaplan just does not quote Dickens’s letters or books enough and the outer man was controlled. Probably one really needs to read lots of his letters and his books over and over.
For Trollope I have read all his letters. They are not that revealing; he made a policy of destroying all letters sent to him (see my “told in Letters” to see how Trollope regarded letters — documents which could be used against you is part of this) and he was very careful what he wrote down. But still some are telling. And I’ve read all his fiction, some over and over.
There was a long period of real depression, from I’d say his early teens to later twenties. He says as much in his Autobiography. Lots of good reasons for this. If anyone wants to know them, they need only read the first two chapters of my book (ostensibly on Trollope’s Anglo-Irish fiction) and then the chapter on his Autobiography. He broke through, came out of it when he went to Ireland which freed him of the stigmas and class identifications he had so suffered from (like Dickens he never went to university and parents went broke) and also placed him sufficiently far away from all the people and places he had suffered in. It was a new lease on life. Alas, part of this new lease was he thought himself superior to the Irish. Not all the reasons for throwing off depression are supposedly socially admirable. Then when he came to write his fiction he understood deeply what such states were, and since he wrote a fiction based on introspective analysis, he could impart great depths to his fictions — and understanding. He became (on the surface at least) one of these calm artists and his narrator is a partial invention or projection of his personality. This is one source of his greatness. Thus there are long stretches of analysis of what one could call depressed characters, usually in terms of the story and circumstances, and it’s not hard to think of instances where, when driven too much some kill themselves or contemplate it.
One of the great stretches of the Phineas books is Phineas’s depression after he is declared not guilty of the murder of Bonteen in Phineas Redux. Unfortunately in the film adaptation this is represented by one of these moralizing didactic speeches given Plantagenet Palliser to Phineas to buck up, cheer up and how he’s got to accept how others have seen him. There is no such silly useless kind of speech (in context) in the book.
Ellen
[…] 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 […]