Wm Frederick Yeames (1835-1918), On the Boulevard, Brittany
Dear friends and readers,
As with Barchester Towers, since I and my class had such a good time over Dr Thorne, even though I’ve already put on my website more than enough on a reading and discussion of Dr Thorne, my “Trollope and his Contemporaries listserv” enjoyed years ago, I’ve decided to share some of my notes from my lectures and the class discussions over four weeks. We also had special topics, on illustrations (which when well done I love), Trollope’s epistolary art (which I’m interested in and have written and published about, and the effect of The Cornhill on his books, and Mary’s illegitimacy. Here I include only these last two: as Trollope and The Cornhill; and Women and Property Rights.
Among the joys of doing this is I can share what my younger daughter, Isobel wrote at age 14 about the novel. She was asked in a middle school class to pick a book (it needed to be approved), read and answer questions about it. She said that the teacher was a bit surprised at her choice but also delighted: here she is on Dr Thorne versus Dr Fillgrave; and on that most painful of chapters, the abjection of Augusta Gresham before the cold treachery of Lady Amelia de Courcy.
As most people interested in Trollope or mini-series costume drama know, Julian Fellowes is now scheduled to do a 3 part film adaptation for ITV of Dr Thorne. Despite what I say of Lady Arabella Gresham as a character below, I hope that Fellowes does not make her the witch of the piece, like her daughter, Augusta, she is a creature of values that actually help to ruin her own life (in the brilliant epistolary chapter, “De Courcy Precepts and Practice,” which my daughter treats of just above and I and my class do further below).
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Arthur Clifton Goodwin, View of a Garden in Boston (1866)
The difference between Dr Thorne and The Warden; The Warden and Barchester Towers; and Barchester Towers and Dr Thorne, reminds us of how when Trollope set out, he did not think of himself as a writing a roman fleuve or serial at all, and in this novel he eschew recurring characters (essential to romans fleuves). OTOH, the second “sign” you are in a roman fleuve or series of novels is the imaginary place and in this opening we begin to see a map emerge (see map on syllabus).
The place. Suddenly Barsetshire subdivides (like a zygote) and we have a west and east Barsetshire. Trollope says this was not very good for the county, soon they were having antagonisms between them, but in order to obey the reform bill and have more equal representation this was done. Of course it’s a joke as it’s he who has subdivided it.
West Barsetshire is Whig, great whig magnate lives there, the Duke of Omnium in Gatherum Castle. Trollope rightly identifies the great country house first by its political function. Pleasant as books about them often are – because of the beauty of the places – they were there to enforce a hierarchy, maintained considerable controls over their tenants and farmers, the people in the houses were magistrates, JPs, controlled institutions; you had to get letters to go to a house, needed a “character” if you were to get another job (overwhelmingly most people were servants still in the first half of the 19th century). Chaldicotes, Sowerby’s house is there (comes out in Framley Parsonage), an appendage of the duke’s as Sowerby is a client, and we hear a lot about Courcy. Both will emerge full and complete in Framley Parsonage. On the other side of the divide is Greshambury and Boxall Hill; they are northerly with Barchester itself, the cathedral town close to the center. In a map drawn later we find St Ewolds, Puddingdale. Plumstead Episcopi, and the other more obviously comically named places to the south (Crabtree Canicorum). Plumstead is a plum; puddings are hearty things and so on.
People love a stable place and ongoing characters. It gives us a sense of security and permanence and beliefs in survival. There’s been a terrific resurgence in this form in the last 10-15 years and not just because it fits the TV medium.
This political map is going to count in the story. Now the clerical world is encased in a larger one. There is a railway to London too – as well as an Old Coach Road. This is the first of many novels where Trollope’s visualized amps central means by which he organizes and expresses the social, political and psychological relationships of his characters and themes. What you own expresses you; what you lose expresses you; we can plot where a character is in life and how he or she is doing by his or her relationship to a place. So when Mary is for a time exiled that is very hurtful – and Dr Thorne very mad about it. Later on Trollope will grow more explicit about these geographies of power. But we see it start here.
Deep past. We are to be immersed in the feelings and thoughts of fully realized presences. Trollope here signals his allegiance to the idea that character or personality is not just the result of an evolution of the particular person’s circumstances, class, and background (family, genes), but shows how we are the product of a long evolutionary development over time. Freud said he learned a lot from novelists, well Marx’s idea of how there is this class struggle and antagonisms and development interacting with changes in means of production and social realities came from the 19th century novel, beginning Scott. This are Marxist chapters – and throughout the book Trollope notices change and how it effects everyone and everything. He did read Marx who wrote in newspapers. But it was more from Bulwer Lytton.
In the 18th century and in Barchester Towers character emerge full blown and there is a sense in which their characteristics stand for types, like archetypes. Not here. We might ask what is the difference between a historical fiction (one written today and set in earlier times – Wolf Hall in early 16th century and Poldark in later 18th) and historic fiction, like Dr Thorne, fiction written in the 19th century. I suggest we strongly tend to read them the same way – we watch the characters as products of time and place, circumstance, slow change. George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Hardy all do this, Bronte in her Shirley, Dickens not so much because his characters are not psychological sociological studies in the same way. We enter into the characters as if they think and feel as we do inflected by the time, space, events.
So what happened in the pre-history of this book? Chapter 1 opens on Frank Gresham’s 21st birthday, supposed to be a day of great celebration for the heir. Is it? Why not? We move back to learn some recent history. It seems that Frank’s father was not the firm large able and generous spirited man his father had been, father could not fill the shoes of the grandfather. Is weak (Ch 1, pp 4-6). He has hankered after false gods: married rank, a woman, the Lady Arabella whose idea of happiness is showing off to others, vanity and pride, and he has allowed himself to be lured by the whigs and become their friend and yet he is running as a Tory (p 5). It won’t do. Elections cost – though laws against bribery increasing enormously. That’s why you need campaign managers like NeartheWind and Closerstill. No longer can you just say this is my county, only these people can vote and if they don’t vote the way I want I cancel their leases. There are too many of them. He is also not personable, does not easily know how to make himself hail fellow well met.
My theory (not published except here!) is the Greshams are very realistic versions of Austen’s Mr and Mrs Bennet, he in his library and she all about the mercenary and rank values, materialistic, and shallow, and nagging too. Trollope shows us that such incompatibility is no joke, that a woman with the values of Mrs Bennet taken seriously can wreak far more havoc than stopping a courtship. Squire Gresham is complicit (as is Mr Bennet ultimately): he wants to enact the traditional hierarchy and get its rewards, but at the same run with the new big money world. He finds he or one can’t. When he has no occupation, he takes over the hunt . But apparently not being paid for it as a Master of the Hounds (pp 14-15). This does give him a place among people like himself and those of his tenants and farmers who can afford to ride sometimes too. She resents his occupation – one of his joys. She poisons many wells over the course of the novel (like her tabooing of Mary, stopping her husband’s friendship with Dr Thorne, a mainstay of their family economically through the loans from Scatcherd). The costly expedients are borrowing money at high interest.
What is another? His son. And he has ruined his son – as he sees. By among other things these costly expedients. When Frank says he will “study like bricks” before you despise the meanness of the countess de Courcy’s response, remember she is probably right, for as to making money from his studies at Cambridge it does not at present seem probable. He is not studious and making money from law say requires going to live in London at the Inns of Court and working your way up on the job.
Do we have another deep feeling man who is deeply flawed? Roger Scatcherd. The most brilliant of characters in this novel is Scatcherd: an alcoholic because he doesn’t fit in anywhere. Turn to Chapter 10, p 139: the man “shrieks.” He has real genius and understanding, the kind that does make money. He can do construction well, and recognize others who can, organize teams, and so build a business, and then with his money he lends money out for further people to build railways. But no manners, no reading. I dislike the way he treats his wife: it’s criticized but not enough. I suggest we are to accept his behavior to Lady Scatcherd.
There is a contradiction at the heart of the book: Trollope does honor “blood” (gentility in the genes), does not eschew the violence that put the hierarchical order in place originally (as in his talk about the heraldry), at the same time as he invents a plot-design and characters designed to make us value merit and human bonds and truth to one’s heart. We see this especially in his treatment of Sir Roger’s son, Louis Scatcherd, the way he’s characterized makes Trollope’s writhing condescensions to Slope seems the height of egalitarian decency (Ch 10, p 142). To be a gentleman or lady is a high aspiration, and not everyone has it “in” him or her to do it.
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Manliness, what is it? One of the themes of this book is what makes for manliness, and how the male characters react to its demands; this is a question Trollope comes back to throughout his career though in different permutations. Here Trollope contrasts a man who bullies his abject wife with an inferior son (the Scatcherds), a man who allows his wife to overrule his better judgement and whose son will emerge eventually as “the better man” (Greshams) with our exemplary Dr Thorne.
J. Pettie, “The Country Surgeon,” Good Words, 1862
We learn about the Thorne family; two brothers and a proud father. When the “lousy son” – and we are never told anything good about Henry Thorne – is rejected by the Thornes of Ullathorne, father rejects them. This hurts second son, our hero. We move to violence over sex. Henry Thorne impregnates Mary Scatcherd and when Roger is told he marches off to Henry, sees his insouciant attitude and takes a stick and hits him hard. Does he mean to kill him? (p 24). Trollope suggests we as readers will think a punishment of six months (for manslaughter) too severe! (Connect up to honor-killing). Our Dr Thorne (Thomas his name) is at first mad for vengeance but learning the provocation, “his heart changed.” How does he behave? On one level, beautifully. He takes responsibility and acts to help and support everyone. Manliness includes seeing what is a true priority and exerting self-control. He works to pay for everything. So he is strong. But his strength has its characteristics too: he is very proud. Will not accept overtures from Thornes of Ullathorne. Not wise but human. He is not given to kowtowing, to suffering stupidity easily – patients feared he was laughing at them – that’s for false complaints, for real ones he is tenderness itself (P 37) He does make a connection with Squire Gresham who invites him over and is open and humane (p 25). A respectable tradesman agrees to marry Mary if she will go away from the area where she’s been disgraced — far far away – but will not take the child. I fear this attitude towards another’s man’s child especially when young is not gone from us – and not gone from many societies at all. Older people remarrying and accepting one another’s adult children is different, p 29. The question of manliness with respect to the male’s control over the female’s body is still part of the unwritten code of what’s not admirable or admirable. Notice the language: he was very proud as to family, as to blood, as to respect – in his later years he mellows, but “now promised to take to his bosom as his own child a poor bastard whose father was already dead” (p 29).
Dr Thorne makes the book questioning.
Our heroine is a bastard and she is the person we are to care intensely about, root for. How beautifully Dr Thorne welcomes her to their home” (p. 39). It matters what you are within not what your rank is – is that the burden of Trollope’s song? Well we have the terrific hurt of Dr Thorne as a young man when the girl he loves rejects him for being concerned in such a scandal (P 31). We feel his intense grief at the girl’s dropping of him. The emphasis in the book falls on the hurt people feel when such arrangements are inflicted on them. A very moving chapter in this first quarter of the book occurs in Chapter 7, The doctor’s garden, p 95. What has happened? Of course Frank and Mary have fallen in love and now Mary for the first time thinks is she a fit partner for him? She has great self-esteem based on herself; we see that in her scene with the DeCourcys and Patience Oriel too, but what if she is illegitimate? That’s the question, pp 99-101. It’s very hard for them to talk about; they use euphemisms. Does she really have the right to call Dr Thorne uncle?
Rights of this type are central to our self-esteem, whether when we know in law someone is not supposed to treat us badly and we see them do, do we protest? Our sense of what rights we really have in daily life is not from law but from something within that develops over time and comes from how others regard us, how we are treated ( ch 7 p 99). That sense of self Dr Thorne develops in Mary Thorne.
Dr Thorne finds he must tell Scatcherd that his will as worded would leave his money in the case of his son’s death to “Mary’s eldest child.” In the chapter called The Two Uncles (Ch 13, p p 169): Roger comes off very well. Why? He wants to see her, his emotions not yet that perverted by the values and norms of his society (Richard Holt Hutton said this was a central thrust of Trollope’s fictions).
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A 19th century semi-comic illustration of a lady come to Mudie’s library to take out a book
Frank goes to Courcy Castle and visits West Barsetshire: Miss Dunstable and Sir Roger Scatcherd; Mr Romer and Mr Harding.
What kind of character is she? Some characteristics? She’s smart, she’s perceptive – who else in the book is smart and perceptive who is an important character? Dr Thorne. I call her an ironic festival figure. She’s on the wrong side of 30, has ridiculous hair (never mind bad hair), big teeth, broad nose, little black eyes, high color, and she’s irremediably vulgar. What she does is what nobody does: she talks money, she does not skirt this topic which others wish she would. When she does, they say, such a card Miss Dunstable and try to change the subject. Now the countess de Courcy wants Frank, aged 21 to propose to Miss Dunstable. : An Ironic Festival Figure She is continually exposing the hypocrisies of everyone else. She deflates everyone around her, all their pretensions. Our joy in her – if you do joy in her has little to do with her spunk or aggression — because she isn’t very aggressive. She fits in. But in this first novel at least she remains untouched by the venality around her, is not angered or embittered, keeps her honest values and integrity and can recognise and become friends with those she recognizes as spirits like her — say Frank and later Dr Thorne and Mary. Is hers really a fun position? An old maid people want to marry who couldn’t give a shit about her for her money. Doe she have any rank? None what so ever. She’s like Sir Roger. They even think no one could possibly marry her for anything else. It’s really hurtful.
Why does she like Frank? He is not yet corrupted at his core. Who is corrupted at his core: the Honorable George for one. Never mind your governor might just pop off any minute now and then you’ll get to spend as you please. What did you think of his proposal letter (p. 242-43). Frank is young and as yet noble-hearted and innocent; how did he get that way? We are back with Tom Jones, that’s his nature but it could be changed. It’s Frank’s business to propose to her and is he doing this? Not quite. Probably he wants a younger beautiful girl too – anyway he’s in love with Mary (inoculated). But he does try to obey. In the Rivals (Ch 18, p 198), things are heating up between these suitors. It’s time for Frank to act and he does make the attempt, but Miss Dunstable cuts him off with how fond of him his aunt seems. Oh yes says he. Tell me, she asks, what was the countess talking to you about last night?
“What did she say?” That Miss Dunstable was beautiful. And her virtues. “How very kind” of her. (p. 239)
“Virtues and prudence! She said I was prudent and virtuous?’
‘Yes’. ‘And you talked of my beauty. That was so kind of you! You didn’t either of you say anything about other matters?’
‘What other matters?’
‘Oh! I don’t know Only some people are sometimes valued rather for what they’ve got than for any good qualities belonging to themselves intrinsically’ (p. 190).
Frank is lying. And suddenly Miss Dunstable’s tone changes, becomes quite sharp. She says sharply out it’s quite out of the question anyone at Courcy castle would value people for what they’ve got.
We are told that Frank doesn’t get it, doesn’t think what he’s doing, he is heir to embarrassed property and as a male he sees other males going after Miss Dunstable so like some lemming to the sea he does so too (p. 24)0
She seems to forgive him – because he does not ask her to marry him because he does not want her, to his aunt (p 250): the aunt says Miss Dunstable is “very fond of you.” “Nonsense Aunt he says.” By the end of his sojourn – I’m skipping the visit to Gatherum Castle – he does ask Miss Dunstable to marry him (Ch 22, p. 269): what happens is when she breaks the code, he tells the truth. She appeals to the better man in him (p 271): she had hoped he was better than all around her; she cannot laugh at the world if there is no one around to laugh with her (p. 271). Has the aunt “blackened you so foully as to make you think of such a vile folly as this?” oh for shame.
I’ve learned in life “shame on you” often doesn’t work as a formula, but it does here: Frank boldy says he never for moment meant to make Miss Dunstable his wife (p 272). He didn’t think it out, and now they can be friends as they have a basis for the friendship (p 273) – truth. How does he feel after this interview? Revolted at himself. Deep sense of disgust at himself. One of his best moments in the whole book (Ch 20, p. 274): when the countess taps him on the shoulder, he looks at her. She knows it’s all over. Her reaction is to get rid of Miss Dunstable – no longer wanted.
The very naive John Bold as we first see him in Barchester Chronicles (John Gwillim)
The Election. Mr Romer is a barrister, greatly interested in liberal causes, he’s there to assist Roger. How does he assist Sir Roger to win. There were still few people who could vote in 1858 (first larger franchise comes ten years later); polling places were places where people were pressured and thugs hired to intimate, violence went on until the secret ballot was passed in 1872. And suddenly they vanished. Who says people’s behavior cannot be changed is not very observant. It seems that Mr Reddypalm’s whole bill had not been paid by Mr Moffat or Closerstill. And Mr Romer pays it (p 236): our narrator admonishes us to pay the whole bill, and if you feel you are overcharged, you are getting at least friendly service. “Why make a good man miserable for such a trifle” – irony is you say one thing and mean another. Problem is people don’t always get your message.
Trollope wants you to see the egregious hypocrisy of the unseating of Sir Roger – the reason Mr Reddypalm’s bill surfaces is the Duke of Omnium and DeCourcys cannot bear that their power be overlooked: “Mr Moffat had been put forwad by the De Courcy interest; and that noble family and all its dependents was not going to go to the wall because Mr Moffat had had a thrashing (Ch 22), Sir Roger is unseated (p 290). All that over-the-top talk against bribery means nothing. It’s cant. Now it must be admitted that Sir Roger buys into the code.When he is unseated, he pretends not to care (p 295), ”And the blow to him was very heavy … “ read it. In the wake of this blow little people get blown over, the employees, like Mr Romer,ends up in Hong Kong, (p 295).
Mr Romer is unfairly destroyed (pp. 296-97, Chapter 22) You may pass a law as they did in 1832 against bribery and the Courcys committed bribery as did Sir Roger – stayed just within the limits of the law. But they are not going to stand there and let someone beneath them, with less powerful connections, no rank take a seat. They go to court – if they can’t have it, no one will (p. 294). The election is null and void. The district is not disenfranchised as too corrupt by law. That did happen after 1868 – Trollope lost at Beverley in Yorkshire; went to court, and the place was disenfranchised. Read about in in Ralph the Heir, a novel which reflects his experience directly.
Mr Romer parallels Mr Harding; it may be the law is right to be against bribery in elections, p 292 – a lot of overdone sarcasm about people caring about “purity,” but who gets hurt? In The Warden did the old men get the money they should literally have – no. They were worse off. They have no power for real. Mr Bold was a foolish young man who didn’t understand how the world works – he got a lesson to some extent in The Warden. He was lucky – we are told does not have really to work as a doctor, which he doesn’t much care for.
A poor illustration from an early edition of Dr Thorne, but the moment chosen is right: Sir Roger rasping to Dr Thorne over his will
Sir Roger goes home to drink himself to death. Had he been allowed in, he might have been able to rise to the crown of a career and whether other men drank with him or not been active and proud. Now he will drink alone as he has not been allowed a place. He has been deprived of fulfilling work.
How did they do in their speeches? Well Sir Roger held his own a lot better (pp 229-30). He knows these people, indeed he represents them, can pretend to have the skin of a rhinoceros. It is Sir Roger tells the crowd Mr Moffat’s motive for engaging himself to Augusta Gresham (p 232). Mr Moffat ends up pelted with eggs. He has no motive for getting into parliament beyond getting in. Sir Roger at least has pride and is engaged directly and deeply with economic realities. And then when this crowning achievement of his life is gotten it is taken from him. Whatever chance he had to function as a genius of sorts among his peers – Mps included people from Manchester, he never made it. Trollope waxes quietly sardonic on the phony obituary, portraying Scatcherd as just the happiest, as “serene” – the word serene is used of men because he was such a business success. Sir Roger was anything but. We are told he would have seen the monument put up to him as showing no understanding of what his work was (Ch 25, p 341). Where do these obituaries come from; when someone dies not expected to make the news, one is produced too.
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For the last two weeks of our class discussion, see Dr Thorne and the Cornhill and Novels of Manners; the last quarter of the novel: blood versus true merit; no multiplot and making Pride and Prejudice real; Women and Property Rights; Kincaid and Polhemus: an all-out class war & the moral center; the Barsetshire series on the periphery & re-framed.
Ellen
Dr Thorne and The Cornhill. The Cornhill revolutionized magazines in the era; it was 128 pages set up as a miscellany, advertising itself as about all topics, covering unbiasedly politics and medicine and whatever else was of interest. Famously it’s great attraction was a central novel by a famous and respected novelist. After Trollope’s Framley Parsonage, books included were often Thackeray’s as he was editor but also much respected and read. They aimed not just as respected and entertaining but high status. Thus George Eliot’s Romola which was by all admitted to be heavy going was featured: to get the Cornhill was to have arrived. You might compare it to joining a high status club in your area.
What it was doing was carving out an identity called middle to upper middle class and implicitly saying that is the general reality. If it’s not your reality, it’s what you should aspire to. It’s what everyone wants to be. When I was in my forties and Laura around 10 or so I ordered for her children’s periodical called Cricket. It has better fiction – to have that coming in was the equivalent of buying your daughter an American Girl Doll from Pleasant company. Which I duly did for both daughters. These were largish beautifully made dolls which were set in a historical period, came with books, exquisitely historical right clothes. You were attaching yourself and your daughter to the right group of people – yes it was a matter of income but drivel can cost and so too Barbie’s castle (I refer to the ubiquitous super-sexed Barbie dolls with their unreal bodies and smile of joyful compliance).
There were other kinds of magazines. A little later in life after Trollope left his job as a post office employee when he was overlooked for promotion once too often, he tried himself to create and run magazines appealing to different niches. St Paul’s was a political magazine, the Fortnightly Review was in the vanguard of thought. G. H. Lewes a scientist and atheist (George Eliot’s partner) wrote in both; Ruskin for FR, while you might find a liberal politician in St Paul’s. What’s less talked about is how gender specific these magazines were. We are used to this today: House Beautiful is for women; Bride I presume for women; Good Housekeeping. Many magazines today aim at a specific gender as well as interest. The New Yorker is rare for appealing broadly; it’s the closest thing we have today to The Cornhill.
I mentioned when we first began that censorship in this era was fierce, especially sexual censorship in lower middle to upper class magazines. (Penny Dreadfuls were something else: lots of euphemisms and lots of graphic violence; bought at railways for pennies.) Well there was a place where men especially could reach some stories acceptable to their self-image as a male as well as sexy; guess what? St Paul’s was one of them. You reached your male audience through polite euphemisms and stories where sexual transgression, and depictions more truthful to middle class male life were found there. Trollope’s short stories appeared there.
We see in Trollope’s fiction, in books like the Barsetshire Chronicles the effects of the intersection between fiece sex censorship and what middle class people wanted to think they were, or wanted to become and ape. The New Yorker no longer performs this disciplinary function, but if you were to research the 1930s you might be startled at how it presents what to do about the depression. The cartoons are all basically innocuous even until today: gently ribbing people. It reflects upper middle class life in NYC and other cities around the US.
The result is a book like Dr Thorne which anticpates Framley Parsonage. It is not not not a reflection of Victorian life at the time – it’s a semi-dream image rather like Upstairs Downstairs in the 1970s.
Now Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (you may have seen the film adaptation on PBS by Andrew Davies) appeared in The Cornhill as did a novella very like it: Phillis. They could be mistaken for Jane Austen mid-century. But her book based on a strike, depicting Manchester as far as she dared, North and South (you may have seen the film adaptation) appeared in Household Words. Who ran Household Words. Dickens. Sutherland in that book I brought the second time, Victorian Publishers and Novelists argues that the reason some tremendously talented writers were able to write works of great genius is they freed themselves sufficiently from the marketplace not to have to dumb down. That was the case with Charles Lever and quite a number of now semi-forgotten or “minor” novelists of the era, and he presents Dickens as opening his own press, running his own magazines in order to write to his taste and standard. But there is also AJLiebling’s famous quip which I quoted this term: freedom of the press belongs to the person who owns one. Dickens was able to write radically questioning and gloomy fiction because it was his press. It sold because he was a better businessman that way than Trollope and his fame remained transcendent. He was loved for his grotesques and the black humor; he went round reading it aloud. Died at 59 – of overdoing it probably.
I think if you want to understand a published book you need to ask yourself why does it have the content it has. I used to ask my students to write a paper on their favorite book from childhood or teenagehood if they were older. They’d cite titles after a while. Often they cited the same ones. I’d ask them how did you get that book into your hands. Who bought it for you? Who published it? There used to be an argument that there is no such thing as children’s literature, there are books parents allow and approve of as fit for children. Broken up today somewhat with children getting out from under censorship but still now it’s the teachers and schoolboards. Why is Hunger Games the huge best seller? It began with getting one of these super-respectable awards for teenage fiction; and presented as readable. With the death of the old classics what’s a high school teacher to do? She wants to please school boards. Hunger Games was put on high school curricula.
We are told in lots of books, and this week Adam Gopnik repeated this: Trollope wrote novels of manners. Trollope trending. Well what is a novel of manners. Gopnik neglects to tell us. It’s a phrase used for English novels in general – from Barchester Towers to Brideshead Revisited. American novels symbolic: man called Ahab goes about chasing whales called Moby Dick Women wear red letter As under their blouses. William Styron has a hilarious short stories about a hospital for sick military men: each has a yellow Letter V under his shirt – or maybe it’s S – syphilis.
They are about customary codes of acting, behaving and thinking, and some of us agreed that no police are needed in Barchester Towers because the codes are enforced and policed by everyone in the community.
In Chapter 21, not only did Mr Moffat need a policeman but he needed someone to call a policeman and someone to hold onto to Frank to stop him before he wreaked some serious damage on Mr Moffat. Trollope treats the incident as a joke where everyone admires Frank for scapegoating and making public Mr Moffat’s detestable behavior to his sister. Never mind that everyone put Mr Moffat up to it, that Augusta acquiesced as did Lady Arabella and the Squire was willing to borrow 10,000 pounds to see it came off. Augusta we are told was upset about loss of face but more about loss of carriage.
Why not sue for breach of promise? marriage was a serious moral, political and social event: as well as personal. The impulse of many readers reading books like this is to talk about what happens to the characters in ways that defend the modes of behavior, especially the unspoken and unwritten ones, and criticize characters who don’t come up to it. So why didn’t they sue for breach of promise. Is not that what the chapter is about? Frank obviates it. I suggest to read Trollope this way is to miss the point – to read him in terms of the values and norms he is dramatizing.
What Trollope does that makes him worth reading – and other novelists worth reading – is to expose these systems as systems, and the values attached to them, and show how they work to protect the positions of those in power and in this novel at any rate how they hurt others not in real power.
The whole category is part of a pious fraud which allowed good novels like this to slip under the radar of The Cornhill disciplinary image – also under the radar of Geralding Jewsbury over at Mudie’s Magazine who went through Barchester Towers asking Trollope to change words like “stomach” to chest. Stomach is too graphic.
He is showing us bogus ways of thinking about what happens and why these things happen. He is exposing to us that why and how.
The tradition and the way people often gossip about the characters as if they were people is ideologically conservative: characters are supposed to be admirable within the terms of the code. What Trollope does is he makes these codes talk, everyone is forced out of hiding. Miss Dunstable his accomplice.
Ellen
A cover for another edition of Dr Thorne from the 20th century
The last part of Dr Thorne narrows the book’s perspective. Once Sir Louis dies, what we have left is the struggle of the young people with Dr Thorne’s help to marry. We closed on who were Mary’s friends – who identified with her and attempted really to help her. How Beatrice is not one of these. Lady Scatcherd sees who she is, but of course she thinks Mary is simply a poor bastard even if brought up to be a princess-lady.
Two things to notice, one a little unusual for a Trollope longer novel: there is no multi-plot. And the other how Trollope can dialogue with other novelists. We saw him simply burlesque Dickens but he has novels where he seriously debates with him or is clearly thinking of Dickens’s novels: The Three Clerks about bureaucracy is one of these. Trollope defends bureaucracies – though he shows corruption in other ways, bribes, embezzlement. Here I think he is remembering Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, especially the long scene between Mary and Lady Arabella: Mary holds her own just as strongly as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice against Lady Catherine de Bourgh. She is not a gentleman’s daughter but as a human being with her own real merit she has every right to marry Frank as he has to marry her. Chapter 40, p 541 in my edition, “What can you give in return?” (pp 546-52). Trouble is Lady Arabella does manage to get to Mary, make her feel very bad. In Barchester Towers when a chapter was labelled “War” it was funny (Dr Grantley marshalling his troops against Slope) but in chapter 26, p 343 it’s not funny at all. Mary ought to hate her really: she has spent a long time literally “tabooed” is the way Trollope puts it, and it’s said more than once how horrible this makes her life. And yet she sends this painful letter offering to release him.
Trollope then makes realistic comedy about how letters move about in the world – he was a post-man himself – but it is not comic for Mary whose letter almost doesn’t reach Frank, and when it does it’s with Lady Arabella’s framing it.
When Mary is found to have money, Lady Arabella does this reverse as surely as Mrs Bennet – suddenly nothing is too good for Mary. It does take a little longer than Mrs Bennet but not much. Nowadays people who read P&P and then discuss it often defend Mrs Bennet but if she were dramatized more realistically, maybe you would not. I suggest that Lady Arabella is based on Mrs Bennet but seen realistically.
This theme of blood – of rank, of hereditary is central to this last part of the book. It is behind what my daughter, Isobel said in her late teens when she listened to this book read aloud in my car with me (by Timothy West) that is the most painful chapter in a book she had read thus far.
Chapter 38, p 491 in my edition, “De Courcy Precepts and De Courcy Practice.” What happens in this chapter? Basically Augusta Gresham who probably feels as much for Mortimer Gazebee as she is capable of, is induced by Lady Amelia de Courcy to give him up because he is beneath her in rank and rank has its duties. Poor Augusta. Why do I say poor Augusta? She likes him. She adduces the marriage of Mr Oriel to Beatrice – Mr Gazebee has more money. Yes but who was his grandfather? Funny that she does not mention Mr Moffat but we are not to connect back too strongly. What’s the difference between practice and precepts. Lady Amelia turns around and marries him herself. Treachery.
For me though what is the painful aspect is the relationship between the two women – which Trollope brings out acutely. I use the word deliberately (p. 497): our narrator tells us that Augusta prayed very hard, but prayed in vain. You see she cannot get herself to throw over the person she has allowed herself to become emotionally dependent on, to define her – so much easier it is to yield and then they hug you and it’s okay. But it’s not all right, not really (p 503). Deep truth about human natures interacting.
At some point we saw the way this novel worked was to have strong dramatic scenes between two or at most three people. Chapter after chapter, scene after scene that’s how the book is set up. That’s not true for Trollope’s fiction in general, not to be so tightly focused on one story and then within it these sort of dialogic debates, some comic as between Dr Fillgrave and Dr Thorne, but many variously plangent.
Or hard ironies from the implicit author: as when the Squire is so upset that Frank “should have to do something to make a living.” Ch 39, What the world said about blood, p 515. Trollope himself worked 37 years in the post office and when he retired before he became eligible for a pension he worked incessantly to keep up his lifestyle, pay for some insurance policies.
Dr Thorne does say to Lady Arabella, “it never occurs to you to put him in prison, tie him up (ch 26, p 277)
There is a real contradiction at the heart of the text though: Sir Louis Scatcherd who is the enabler – the burlesque element of it being Mary who provides the money requires she not be seen as having money and then suddenly inheriting it; so the death of young Scatcherd. He is presented as someone harmed by being sent to the better school because he was recognized as beneath the others.
[Louis] had more pocket-money than any other lad in the school, and was possessed also of a certain effrontery which carried him ahead among boys of his own age. He gained, therefore a degree of _éclat_ even among those who knew, and very frequently said to each other, that young Scatcherd was not fit to be their companion, except on such open occasions as those of cricket matches and boat- races. Boys, in this respect, are at least as exclusive as men, and understand as well the difference between an inner and an outer circle. Scatcherd had many companions at school who were glad enough to go up to Maidenhead with him in his boat; but there was not one among them who would have talked to him of his sister (Houghton Mifflin Dr Thorne, ed EBowen, Ch, 24, p. 319)
Again, Louis shines with ‘a ghastly glare’. He’s set up to die too
I’d like to believe that we could read the novel as showing us that Louis Scatcherd has turned out the way he has because the worlds he was put in rewarded him for the wrong things: the boys at school valued him only for his money; the roues he found himself among valued him only for paying for their vices and with them he became a drunkard and man very mean about money. He does not know the code. The ironic problem is he has not understood an important rule of the code is never be explicit about money. Very vulgar – and don’t embarrass others in public over their manners or money. But I don’t believe it. He lacks gentility in his genes — he lacks “blood” (an atavastic belief).
Everybody but Miss Dunstable advise Frank not to go through with it before the money comes through, including Harry Baker. There’s also her talk about promise: he promised so he must marry, no he ought to marry her because they love one another and are suited by personalities, (Chapter 45, p 589). Or would they have suffered badly had she not had the money and years from then regretted it?
Chapter has funny lawyer names: we meet Slow and Bideawhile for the first time, Sir Ricketty Giggs, Neversaydie
Real respect is given Sir Roger as his father who dies sorry over what his son has become. On death itself, Trollope shows us the kindness thing you can do for a dying person is to admit they are dying – take them seriously (p 329). Trollope didn’t need to read Atul Gawande’s latest book, Being Mortal.
As A. O. J. Cockshut has pointed out (every good critic on Trollope usually does at some point), what is remarkable about death scenes in Trollope is how he does not draw out the moment of death in an unreal pious-maudlin way with the dying blessing all, going to heaven, and the novelist pulling out every stop so that we grieve at a loss that the text is sedulous to avoid. These deaths are all fake, as death is mostly painful, often ugly, easiest when it happens in the wee hours of the morning while the person sleeps. Trollope skips over the actual death and gives us the realistic leading up to it, and the aftermath as experienced by those who must now cope on alone.
When Louis dies after his father, here’s Lady Scatcherd (Chapter 43, p 563): deeply moving. She didn’t possess much with this pair of men, but now she’s all alone..
Trollope can hit these deep emotional moments like no one else. I find such a moment at the close of Chapter 46, p 607: read aloud deeply felt: “Oh Frank; my own Frank! my own Frank! we shall never be separated now.” As far as I was concerned he should have ended there, and skipped the final chapter.
A couple of famous still well respected critics talking about Dr Thorne. James Kinkaid says premises of usual novels of manners are overthrown. We have the new world of money – from Sir Roger a kind of victim, and Miss Dunstable, against the old world of blood, one based on violence originally – -as seen in the heraldry of the Greshams. We sort of experience an all out class war. When the money comes in, it solves all the central problem started on Frank’s 21st birthday, but unless you have someone to be with in your retreat and can keep the world at bay private realm not a solution either. The Squire had resisted the new money world but retains the values of the old as will his son. There is no victory except that we are supposed to be sure Mary will suffer no more.
Robert Polhemus thinks we can rest secure in the ending for Mary – -and those who hold onto their money, like Miss Dunstable, or who can make it, like Mr Gazebee, or at least take care not to overspend, we assume Dr Thorne. Because of the moral core of the novel. Here is chapter 11, The doctor drinks his tea; this is a lead-up to where Mary asks who she comes from, does she have the “right” to call Dr Thorne uncle. I’ll read from the middle of the page to the end, p 153. He has told her he will buy her the fancy French bonnet from Paris so she can keep up with Beatrice,
“After all, said he … money is a fine thing ….” He wishes he could insure her against all wants, and Mary replies marrying her to a rich man would not so insure her. Mary: you have to accept me and the obligation, “bonnets and all. We are all in the same boat, and you shan’t turn me overboard.”
Dr: But if I were to die, what would you do then?”
Mary; “And if I were to die, what would you do? People must be bound together. They must depend on one another.”
That means something more than depending on one another for money and shared property because some people can lose their bit.
In our own society this kind of a value has been overthrown to some extent, at any rate the rhetoric for this is gone because things are desperate.
Richard Redgrave (1804-88), The Walk from Church (a detail from which forms the cover illustration for the 1980 Oxford, ed. David Skilton) — the older Victorian framing
In recent history of criticism and scholarship about Trollope the Barsetshire novels have been placed to the periphery. I made the pragmatic argument when we started that they are only 6 of 47, but of course if they are the best or if they are somehow peculiarly representative, to keep them at the center makes sense. I think they are not peculiarly representative, at least no more than quite a number of the other 47; the 5 or 7 anglo-Irish novels are at least as representative, the highly political ones, the novellas set in Europe with ethnic conflicts at the center. There used to be and still is a theory of encroaching pessimism, darker books but Trollope’s first was deep dark tragedy, Macdermots of Ballycloran.
I don’t see these Barsetshire books as especially optimistic. My feeling is they are misread or not read with attention,and like any book can be re-framed to fit a political moment. So David Lean made Dr Zhivago into a vitriolocally anti-communist book (or anti-socialist) when it is no such thing. The latest film adaptation has presented a much truer view of that novel. I’m really not keen to see what Fellowes does to Dr Thorne.
We mentioned Gopnik; the first three articles in the TLS for the same week were on Trollope, and the third one announces the republication of all six Barsetshire novels with new introductions, newly edited, new notes at the back. So newly framed. Here they are once again – as with The Pallisers I suggest it’s the size of the group, their likeness, set in one place as a kind of set that calls attention to itself. They’re famous still. So that’s a selling point.
Matthew Ingleby says of the new Framley Parsonage what is emphasized in the approach are the precariousness of everyone’s living and tenancy and indeed they are. In Dr Thorne the new introduction tells us we have an alternative family group: Dr and Mary. There we are. Much is made of the Stanhopes in Barchester Towers, especially Bertie “delightfully unmarriageable.”
By contrast to earlier and more recent accounts, an older study P.D. Edwards covering all the novels and not over-rating or over-emphasizing any particular novel or type of novel looks with pragmatic scepticism at Barsetshire.
I like to set Dr Thorne up against The Bertrams written close in time, part of it set in Palestine, questioning religious doctrine and materialism with allusions to Mansfield Park (so Austen’s books on Trollope’s mind as he writes). If you looked at the chronology you would see that you could connect each of the Barsetshire books to quite a different seeming book which if read would turn out to be dialoguing with it. The Three Clerks is closest in time to Barchester Towers; BT is so detached, The Three Clerks closely autobiographical.
They are also highly individual – Framley Parsonage brings back our ecclesiastical world, but we leave again in Small House, and Last Chronicle has a subplot which takes place in London.
Thanks for this very informative blog Ellen. I loved the Yeames painting. Isobel’s book reviews were very clear, very well reasoned in her judgements, particularly for a fourteen year old. I was also fascinated by The Cornhill passage. I was aware of The Cornhill, but was unaware of its nature.
Women and property rights. This came up when we discussed Mary asking Dr Thorne if she had the right to call him uncle. Could Mary as an illegitimate young woman inherit the Scatcherd estate? I failed to answer the question fully, and took heart from Umberto Eco’s idea in Six Walks Among Woods, that a novel if it’s good tells you all you need to know. We know the will says “Mary Scatcherd’s eldest living child,” and so all Dr Thorne would have to prove is this is so, she is older than her mother’s children elsewhere.
There is the usual Victorian silence we are not encouraged to explore. Where is her mother now? what happens when her mother’s husband hears of Scatcherd’s death? It’s not as if there is not another branch of the family. The silence is explained by the codes of The Cornhill.
I was able to say this from Leecombe’s book and reviews of her book: upon a woman marrying, all her property, any salary and any debts she accrued were her husband’s. She could bring a dowry (portion) and when the man died it was understoood that this property she brought to the marriage should be replaced by her jointure or portion. She would also have customary rights of widowhood: the right to live in the couple’s house; there were fights over personal property like furniture (Henry James uses this for a bitter short story about conflict between a widow and her son). Wealthy people tried to protect their family property given to the daughter and went to court to see that upon widowhood she got her jointure. But I know from reading letters from the 16th through 17th century the widow could be and often was cheated unless she came from a powerful family clearly willing to go to court for her or punish those who didn’t give her what was legally due. In Victorian times the court was Chancery and who does not remember the story of Bleak House?
I elaborated: this is a legal question, fought out in accordance with different bodies of law and in courts: Lee Holcombe’s Wives and Property. It interests me because I am not sure quite why that often Trollope finds male readers among lawyers, not just professional men.
The reform of the way property was handled so that women could inherit property just as centrally as men, own property and their salaries once they married occurred over several decades in the 19th century and it was quite a struggle – because everyone voting was male. It was accomplished by elite women – who spearheaded the suffragette movement too, and higher education for women. The aim was for all women though – to end much of the common law’s attitude towards all women. Modelled on the chartists and the demand for votes and justice for all men regardless of how much property they owned, it basically reallocated property and money – women being 50% of the population and a large percentage working outside a nuclear family. It did not abolish all restrictions on women owning property, rather it amended the law in terms of equity, what was a fair marriage settlement. In the early 20th century welfare payments still made to the head of the family. It did not change the law by regarding women differently than it had.
This was how this new law was seen: not as giving women a different legal personality, but as shoring up families. Giving women more power inside a working class marriage especially – it encouraged people to marry; many remained unmarried because marriage also gave a man the right to beat you and sex too. If you think how often a woman got pregnant and how dangerous, you begin to wonder why any woman did it at all – except that he could get a genuinely paid job, own some property. Marriage brought respectability so you were in a common safety net of decent treatment and police protection (however derisory for lower class women).
It helped the middle class woman’s natal family: they had more recourse against a profligate son-in-law; enforcing money in trust for a women meant going to Chancery and that could be expensive and long-lasting (as in Bleak House). It seems that the laws slowly passed through political infighting and due to male reformers like John Stuart Mill (whose Subjection of Women I urge all to read), not any fundamental sense of a egregious injustice. The intended consequences – which you could see – was another step in gaining the vote, and women’s liberation – which the invention of the diaphragm, improvements in condoms and the fight for distribution did as much for.
E.M.
Many many thanks for such interesting and delightful classes.
Sally Gripman
Had to grit my teeth reading about Mary Thorne’s men with concerns over her future. They had such disingenuous reasons for discussing her inheritance without her knowing or being present and about their deigning to let her in on the happy secret after they had thoroughly enjoyed their own ruminations over what the inheritance would mean to them. Another instance of condescension — but so nobly presented — as the entire society depicted so amply. And, by the way, bears scrutiny today. Rosalie Moyer
Thank you for this comment. Just now on my small Trollope listserv we are reading Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite and there arguably (Trollope almost makes it explicit) that because the heroine is kept utterly innocent of knowledge about life, she is destroyed because she cannot be made to understand how bad a man her suitor is and carries on loving him until a sudden betrayal showing him faithless to her with another woman. But she never grows in understanding that the question was much wider.
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