Trollope’s Small House a Allington & “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne:” the first class

The Cornhill Magazine opened to the place where installments of Trollope’s Framley Parsonage was appearing, prefaced by an illustration by John Everett Millais

Dear friends and readers,

Since I’ve had an unusual number of people subscribing to my blog as followers since I put up the summer syllabus for reading Trollope Small House at Allington together, and a couple of people have said they look forward to it, or compliment me by saying they wish they were in the class, and the opening lecture of the term was (for me) unusually coherent, I thought I would share it here.

I reviewed Trollope’s life and career up to the success of the Barsetshire books, and his move to London, the first four Barsetshire books, and we discussed “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne” as an introduction or framing of one of the central issues in The Small House. I find knowing the author’s life and experience central to understanding his art: Trollope’s books emerge from his imagination and experience and abilities of their author. What I call seeing them as lamps. They reflect, rework and comment on the era they are written in. Books as mirrors. (From Abrams’s famous The Mirror and the Lamp). The Small House has another kind of source: a previous literary work: I’ll show that SMA is a re-working, a more realistic and full and frank maturation of the characters and situation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and how Trollope’s art relates to Austen’s.

The sisters: Lily Dale as a re-worked Marianne Dashwood, Bell Dale, Eleanor (Emma Thompson and Kate Winslett)

The lone widow: Trollope brings out Mrs Dale’s loneliness, sacrifice of herself (1995 S&S, scripted Emma Thompson, directed Ang Lee)

Authors and what they write are also constrained by the place they are published in, the imagined audience that is to be pleased — and, in the case of a periodical, buy again. I’ve discovered ordinary readers don’t think of that enough; they remember it in the case of movies — but books are a commodity too, paper, ink, printers, costs of distribution, stores to place books in matter.

Lilies, illustration in Good Words (from The Victorian Web, scanned in and text by Simon Cooke)

I’m just now reading on line with a group of people Trollope’s two volume somewhat idyllic novel, Rachel Ray. “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne” (1861) is one of two short stories written just around this time that dwell on love, sex, marriage — as The Small House does (begun 1862) and Rachel Ray, the novel he wrote next (1862). He had a contract or understanding from Good Words, a magazine intended for evangelically-minded readers run by a Rev Dr Norman Macleod; Trollope submitted for Macleod’s perusal about half the first volume, and Macleod was shocked, wrote back, how could you write this for my audience? Trollope had warned Macleod that he thought the kind of novel he wrote and his outlook might not be suitable to an evangelical audience. It appeared Macleod thought that Trollope would alter himself almost radically. In the event, Trollope had to find another publisher: happily, he was doing so well by that time that Chapman and Hall, a very respectable publisher took the novel on. But there was a 2 year hiatus between the time of writing Rachel Ray and its publication.

It was intended that Millais would illustrate Rachel Ray; he did but one: Rachel meditating

In the case of The Small House, the Cornhill started to serialize it before Trollope was finished so the ending was not written until well after readers had begun to read and react to the book. In the fourth week of this course I will send along another essay on the connection of the Cornhill to The Small House. I sent one last summer on the Cornhill and Framley Parsonage. The Cornhill I remind those who were here and tell newcomers was the New Yorker of its day. Framley Parsonage helped make it. It was a central text for an imagined community aimed at mostly middle class financially well-off or genteel at any rate (like the Dale women) people, many complacent about their world. They like a little intelligent criticism but don’t want to be too disturbed or disquieted. The New Yorker has articles which ought to disturb and disquiet (say conditions in prisons in a May essay, how we treated mentally distressed people), the drone killing program. But you don’t have to read those. It’s upbeat entertainment. It puts you in the swing of things: the first article in the Talk of the Town tells you what was this week’s important story to “everyone:” everyone in a narrow group who can afford to, reads, and enjoys this magazine.

The Cornhill was perhaps more intellectual, hard to say. It was a different time: but the Crimean war was not a central topic for the Cornhill, nor workers strikes in Manchester. That was for Dickens’s Household Words. Happily and I’m going to say this there was no vocal social media on the Internet to object this or that, and reviewers first wrote about The Small House in 1864, 2 years later. So Trollope had no vocal interference. But he was writing for his audience and making himself a career precisely through this series, and his success in this endeavour may be seen: these six books are those most readers who know Trollope know first — or at least. Last summer when I read Framley Parsonage with many of the people I made the point several times that FP was shaped, its tone, what Trollope could present by a mostly middle class financially fine audience and that it differed considerably from some other novels he wrote at that time. Trollope’s others were much franker, one questioned religion centrally, another autobiographical, included Dickensian attacks on institutions. Nonetheless within its limits So too SHA.

It matters that “The Parson’s Daughter” was printed in the London Review: Captain Broughton is a Londoner, a man about town with whom male readers might identity.

For example, maybe this will whet appetites as you might feel yourself wading through the minute description of Squire Dale’s house and the roads around Allington and Guestwick, with the sentimentality of the love of the mother and her daughters in the book’s opening: a few modern critics argue that Lily Dale lost her virginity well before Adolphus Crosbie took off. It’s presented very discreetly but I agree it’s there and it explains a lot of what happens and understanding this shapes how we see Crosbie, at least ought to. In 1862 when a couple engaged it was understood they might indulge sexually, even going (that old fashioned) phrase “all the way;” that’s why when a man jilts a girl her family can litigate. But the pressure to remain a virgin was strong and in some circles (doubtless the evangelical readers of Good Words) this would be utterly unacceptable. For all the novel is so fat it’s a set of simple stories that delve very deeply young love in all its varieties, sex, and what marriage is in their and today too our society — for the very deep feeling, to the shallow, from the socially conventional to transgessors. Trollope questions marriage as a solution to anyone’s desire for happiness given how it’s conducted: this book offers no (blessed relief to me) no wedding. We watch people haggle irritatedly over the price of carpets as what’s necessary for a marriage. An indirect presentation. “Parson Daughter” printed in the London Review, so city people is a lot more downright. Only one story where in The Small House we have at least 7 couples, 8 if you include Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Griselda and her Dumbello as one triangle with Lady Glencora and Burgo Fitzgerald just introduced as the engaged couple made to break it off, the core opening of the Pallisers.

John Millais, “Christmas Story-Telling,” “Christmas Supplement,” for the London News, 20 December 1862

So Trollope’s inner self his experience, the era, and its ways of doing things, and the magazine will form our context for this book. If you look at our online syllabus you’ll find I’ve added the Barsetshire map drawn by Trollope himself late in the series. It includes where Allington is. I’ve also offered a choice at the end, instead of the hard-to-read article on the Cornhill I’ve linked in the second short story on love and marriage written immediately before Small House, “A Journey to Panama,” a colonialist story, in my view one of his greatest – as is “Parson’s Daughter” so fine. As with “Parson’s Daughter” “A Journey to Panama” is short, on the Net, and about how marriage is practiced in the era, the pressures to do it, and an escape.

Contemporary illustration of a story about emigration

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So an abbreviated version of Trollope’s life up to the time of Barset and a little after this time to remind some some – people need more to be reminded than informed – and to situate others, with a brief resume of the four Barsetshire books before The Small House .If you’ve seen the mini-series called Barchester Chronicles (1983, Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Susan Hampshire) you will at least have been introduced into a close enough version of what is in the first two. Fellowes’s Dr Thorne is a travesty, but it sort of gives the essentials of the outline of the story, and most of the characters — leaving out alas the doctors (Fillgrave, Reerchild, Century, and there has never been a film adaptation of FP. There was a BBC mini-series of Small House in 1960 but it was wiped out. Video tape was expensive then, and the BBC simply wiped out or recorded over brilliant dramas, hard-worked earnest mini-series with popular junk (sports shows).

A photo of Anthony Trollope (age around 40?)

So Trollope’s life quickly told.

Born April 24, 1815.  He was the fourth son, in a age of primogeniture that’s not a good number; the fifth child of six children, four of whom barely lived into adulthood, ie., all but two died near young adulthood, one after she married, all of TB a terrible disease. When Trollope was in his later teens Frances Trollope began to support them as best she could — because the father was incompetent to do this – by writing. So Trollope had her example before him, and she got him his first publisher as she did his first job, in the post office. He did not go to university, and identifies as both in insider and outsider

Trollope’s father failed at everything he tried, not because he was stupid or lazy, or not well connected: he was very bad at social life, obstinate and eventually violent and half-mad. He is seen again and again in Trollope’s fiction, beginning with Larry MacDermot in the Macdermots of Ballycloran; Joshua Crawley is a deep seeing of this ravaged man. His parents married late, at first a love match too, but when they went downhill (literally from grand house to nearby farm in a dump) she fled to America, with a French book illustrator, Auguste Hervieu, 4 children in tow. Not including Trollope; he was left behind with said father and Tom, his older brother by right of primogeniture sent to college for a while. He had very ambivalent feelings about his mother – these are part of the background of his animus against controlling worldly women.

Anthony Trollope’s writing career came out (he tells us) out of his compensatory habit of building daydreams, stories in which he was the hero. He escaped to these and they mirrored his inner and outer life again and again. He was academically gifted at school but the social life at a public school for a poor boy who clearly couldn’t afford it was not fun: he just couldn’t hold up his head – very snobbish hierarchical place.  His brother Tom bullied him by whipping him. 

Frances Trollope by Auguste Hervieu

Fanny Trollope pulled herself out by traveling one might say, and so did Anthony. When Frances escaped with an Hervieu she was hoping to build a new life for herself with the help of a radical political friend, Frances Wright who had set up a idealistic communitarian camp or community which included free slaves. It failed, abysmally. Fanny just had no idea what America was like. She was astonished at the Mississippi; where she thought the rural world would accept her bohemianism it didn’t. She had to turn to her husband for money (he sent some) and head north to try to survive and joined a bazaar in a mall in Cincinnati, inventing a mountebank act for her son, Henry, to act out  She needed to return, and wrote a searing kind of ethnographic account of the US she saw, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, much as the satire of America in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit English people gobbled this put-down up. It’s not so much inaccurate as distorted by Frances’s values – the US had these uppity servants: she saw some things very clearly, like the strong stream of religious  emotionalism in US life and its hypocrisies.

She came back to debt at Julians, the farm house the family had sunk into, and she had to flee creditors or her husband would be put in debtors’ prison (Trollope in his Autobiography remembers driving the carriage with his father in it, the family passing things over a fence to a house next door); so there was a desperate flit. Imprisonment for debt has made something of a comeback in parts of the US lately. They went to Belgium a terrible time, Emily down with TB and dying, father too, and Fanny held the family together by writing in the nighttime into dawn readable radical novels – condition of England like Gaskell’s North and South: Jessie Philips about a girl who has a baby outside marriage and goes to one of these punitive institutions meant for such girls; Michael Armstrong, Factory Boy. She took time out to nag connections she had into giving Anthony a job at the post office at age 19 and left him in London. she was a courageous and gallant women and determined, individual in thought and action. She and Tom eventually moved to Italy where they did make a successful life for themselves: Tom married well.

Recent photograph (relatively) of one of the large country houses the Anglo-Irish built for themselves: Moore Hall, burnt down by the IRA and then abandoned

How did Anthony life himself up. He suffered bad depression from the time of his early teens until he moved to Ireland. Ireland was not known for cheering people up at the time. But he was freed of being looked down on, of his family, of the disgrace, of the pain and hurt, and of the humiliation of being a low level post office clerk. We will meet some low tax office clerks in The Small House: Johnny Eames is in some ways an idealized version of Trollope himself. Where in London he was despised, in Ireland he was in charge. He was incorruptible and worked hard to de-corrupt the post office, helped set up pillar posts or mailboxes as we call them. He loved the physical life of riding on his hourse as a surveyor. Fox-hunting. He married a woman just that much lower than he not to abuse his image, and began to write himself. It was natural to start with novels set in Ireland and by the end of his career he had written 5 set in Ireland, with the two Phineas Finn Palliser books having an Anglo-Irish Catholic hero. The Irish novels, dark, about colonialism, the famine, were not commercial successes at all, but he was noticed, gained respect through a ten year slog of working 10 hours a day and writing from 4 to 9:30 or so in the morning and in interstices of time while on his job (say when he was traveling on a train).

Donald Pleasance as Mr Harding, absorbed in his violin (1983 Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater)

What made the change were what one might say a combination of three Barsetshire books. One of the things he was doing was mapping Ireland, he rode all over and saw much misery, much injustice, but he did it so well, he was invited to do this for southwestern England – Devonshire, Dorsetshire. The story he told goes that while walking one evening ijn the beautiful purlieus of Salisbury Cathedral, the story of Mr Harding, The Warden just came to him. This conveniently leaves out the themes of this book: it’s a political satire on church caste systems. Trollope told his friend and first biographer, T.H. Escott more fully that he had been reading in the Times about egregious cases in he church where a man was paid a huge sum for doing nothing, a sinecure; the money was supposed to go to support aging poor people; while another a curate starved on money not enough to live. He was also grated upon by the newspapers way of reporting the Crimea. All three came together: he attacks the Times as the Jupiter, exposes church injustices. The combination of his characters and these themes and the milieu of Barsetshire as you have it provided a success d’estime. The upper class has never wanted its secrets to be revealed, and Trollope was against anonymity which he regarded as allowing for non-accountability; but otherwise perhaps we have especially today in the US to deplore Trollope’s lack of apprciation of a free press (where a man is running for president who makes it clear he will do all he can to censor and take revenge on revelations about himself which are true). The Times was becoming a daily imagined community device. He said he still would have made more breaking stones, but when he went on in effect to repeat the story in a 3 volume Victorianization, Barchester Towers, there was a commercial success. BT has a love story, flamboyant Stanhope characters with scintillating satire: I describe Madeline Neroni (subversive yet crippled), Bertie (anti-work ethic exposes others as cheerful jokes), and the ambitious driven Mr Slope.

Trollope did not immediately write Barsetshire 3: he did not see himself as writing a series, but when he wrote Dr Thorne, he got 700£. Dr Thorne is set in Barsetshire but it has characters in another area: a strong and passionate rather like The Small House at Allington. Dr Thorne is a deeply dramatic about issues of class and status or rank; about a clash of a county hierarchy with new money people; it has a brilliant portrait of a wealthy industrialist banker who had been a cement worker, he’s an alcoholic. The heroine is an illegitimate dowerless girl. The hero, her uncle, a country doctor – like our Dr Crofts in Small House. Trollope seems to favor doctors. (Excursis on medicine in the era in answer to questions). Both Dr Thorne and Small House are about characters off to the side of the main characters of Barsetshire. When Trollope came to collect the novels, he had thoughts not to include The Small House but as we shall see it is so rooted in Barsetshire that he relented. To me it’s interesting he never doubted Dr Thorne belonged.

Nor did Thackeray; the break came from the Cornhill. Thackeray was chief editor of this new magazine which was aiming for big success and they wanted a central novel as the piece de resistance, to set them off. He was at the time writing Castle Richmond, about the famine in Ireland, and if English people didn’t want to hear about it, the rest of Europe did, it was published separately around the time of FP and quickly translated into 5 languages. Thackeray told him, my dear Trollope what we want is another of those Barsetshire books. Think of Trollope working for the post office, and writing two novels. One critic said Mr Trollope has taken to having twins. But it was FP that made him, and on the strength of his new income, he moved to just outside London to be part of the literary world at last. 

How sum up Framley Parsonage: very hard, it’s a very rich, more varied book than Small House. Gaskell said she wished Mr Trollope would go on writing Framley Parsonage forever. She didn’t see why he should ever stop. I’ll come back to that comment. There is a great increase in intimacy of characterization from Dr Thorne which is yet further subtilized in Small House. In PF Trolliope fills his imagined space out, maps carefully for the fist time; it bifurcated so it can be politicized into East and West Barsetshire. The story of Mark Roberts the hero, is the about the problem of how to go about a career, who succeeds and who fails and encompasses parliament, the problem of making ends meet as you spend money to reach that success so debt, how someone can become corrupted, what we might call the price of the ticket – not just in the church, but in ordinary social life where you want to shine, what relationships you desire to have and with whom. It’s most fascinating character becomes Mr Sowerby, brilliant, but weak; in his effort to secure his comfortable life and rise, he loses everything. Another female festive subversive character: Miss Dunstable. It’s about what ambition does to you and we will see that theme in spades not in electoral politics but sexual politics in Adolphus Crosbie.

Trollope’s own map of Barsetshire

How do you tell a series: there are recurring characters and it’s set in the same imagined space. Both are important and it is true that we have hardly any glimpse of characters from the previous novels: one important one I put a vignette of on the syllabus. When Adolphus Crosbie leaves the Small House and goes to Courcy Castle, he meets Mr Harding in Barchester cathedrale and they talk. But all the characters in Small House then recur in the last Barsetshire book, The Last Chronicle includes plus most of the characters we’ve had in the four previous. It’s a long book. The imagined continuous space — or imaginary matters. Characters can drift away, move and yet not be lost sight of in the minds of the characters still on stage, sometimes for years, and then be brought back. Central ritual parties are moments of transition, connection, epitomizing and occur throughout.

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I chose “Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne” as it rehearses in little conflicting attitudes of mind towards marriage and the nature of love we are going to find in Small House at Allington.

Joseph Wright, Landscape with Rainbow (very late 18th century) — Trollope insists on the beauty of Devonshire

What happens in the story? The way you tell it will probably show something of your response – One neutral way of putting it is the story is an exploration of the nature of marriage. We may say we marry for love or because we desire the personally physically (that’s not so common nowadays as the taboo on sex outside marriage for most of us is gone – not all) but that’s not what this story shows – nor will The Small House. What does Captain Broughton want from marriage? Something far more than love and sex. How does he judge Patience as a wife? For me Trollope is leading us to ask, Why is it better to marry? Not necessarily is the idea or in all or some cases? What do we give up if we don’t?

Another way of looking at it, this is a story about the cost of pride, about the cost of holding onto one’s self-esteem, subtle or intangible as Patience’s concept of this reality may seem to someone who can measure such things only by the clothes she gets to wear and furniture she can wander among. And it gets to where the matter gnaws at the heart. Before we condemn the captain as the only person to whom status matters, let us recall Patience refuses the farmer first. But she does not play with him; she does not try to tell him he is inferior and must be grateful to her for marrying him – of course in the convention she would go down, and the Captain thinks he is bringing Patience. To which the aunt, Miss Le Smyrger objects. Note she never married.

May be the words pride and self-esteem may perhaps not be strong enough to convey all of what Patience would have to give up to marry Captain Broughton; she would lose her soul by marrying the man. She would either have to consent to being his slave or try to dominate him by pretending coldness and aloofness for him to marry her. The latter strategy, even if it resulted in marriage, would backfire on her, as Broughton would doubtless take his revenge once they were safely married. Patience, of course, has no intention of becoming either a slave or a slavemaster. She does not want a relationship where one is dominant and the other submits. Is that possible?

Patience refuses to allow herself to be bullied, to be drawn into a relationship in which she would have to act the part of the inferior person, the person who has to be grateful, who has so much to learn about “what counts” and “how to behave” in the world where powerful “connections” may be garnered, meaning how to please, I had almost said cater to people with access to money, positions.

George Bellowes (1882-1925), Geraldine Lee (1914) — much later, but the expression on her face seems to me to fit that of the bearing-up guarded Patience at the close of the story

The whole story is in fact a piece of subtle psychology — the psychology of disillusionment and quiet despair. She chooses to stay alone. We delve into the sexual longings of Patience in the most delicate and pictorial manner:

“There she would sit, with the beautiful view down the winding river below her, watching the setting sun, and thinking, thinking, thinking– thinking of something of which she had never spoken. Often would Miss Le Smryger come upon her there, and sometimes would pass her by even without a word; but never–never once did she hdare to ask her of the matter of her thoughts. But she knew the matter well enough. No confession was necessary to inform her that Patience Woolsworthy was in love with John Broughton–ay, in love, to the full and entire loss of her heart” (p 236).

The poignancy of this is contrasted to the “hot” desires the Captain had pressed upon her during his stay:

“On the day before he left Oxney Colne, he had in set terms proposed to the parson’s daughter, and indeed the words, the hot and frequent words, which had previously fallen like sweetest honey into the ears of Patience had made it imperative on him to do so” (p 238).

But let’s look at it from the Captain’s point of view. Trollope offers a very back-handed summing up: he never said the man was not a “brute;” at another point when the Captain seizes Patience’s giving of herself in some way to manipulate her, he has “base thoughts,” a base mind when he thinks of how to manipulate Patience because she is of lower status – so he thinks. Aunt disagrees.

He’s young man from London who is at first attracted to Patience simply by virtue of their propinquity, and then because she holds out. Austen’s Willoughby is a son of Lovelace, and as such can be dismissed ever so slightly as “shaped,” as not quite what we meet in life. Captain Broughton is someone I have met many times; he is himself unaware that he is attracted to Patience because of the challenge she presents; he only feels bored and then letdown because he has, as he sees himself, bought goods which are not quite serviceable for his ambition, goods which are “inferior” as the world would have it, to what he could have gotten–“that great heiress with whom his name was once before connected.”

I have put it too strongly because Trollope’s close is enigmatic; when we are told the Captain is “now a useful member of Parliament, working on committees three or four days a week with a zeal that is indefatible,” we cannot be sure whether he is not happier with his heiress. What do you make of that “gratified” smile that crosses his face when he thinks of the unmarried Patience in the last line of the story. I took it  the man is glad he didn’t marry her, and glad he that far triumphed over her and glad she did not marry too

Anyone want to argue for compromise? An abstract way of putting it is it’s a clash between what we could call the mercantile and romantic understandings of marriage. Is the primary nature of marriage companionate and emotional, or is marriage an institution by which economic welfare is secured or increased? It looked as though we had in Patience (and note that given name) an example of the romantic point of view, whereas the young man from London emphatically had his eyes on worldly advantage. Worldly advantage, of course, is something the parson’s daughter will not give him, despite Miss Le Smyrger’s intention to make her at least a moderate heiress. Money aside, she brings no useful connections, and lacks the social deftness, the polish that will impress his associates back home. Would she have been unhappy? We must not write a fan fiction and imagine children — we don’t know that she would have had them, she could die.

A final level: the story is a look at the plight of women on the fringe of middle-class life in England, where pride can come at a painful price. Not everyone has a dowry of 30,000 pounds; not everyone has influential relatives, or dwells in an area where plenty of suitable partners are on offer. Patience has the education and self-image of a member of the gentry, who will bring no shame on any family into which she marries. She cannot agree that it would need condescension for a gentleman to have her in marriage. This puts her above the touch of the men in her sparse neighborhood, but she cannot offer much to attract men of her own caste. Her sense of self places her above the station of a neighborhood farmer. And yet, from the viewpoint of the fashionable young man from London, Patience lies as much below him socially as she felt the farmer to be below her. Here lies the central tension in the story, when a social gulf that didn’t exist for her mattered too much for him.

Trollope does cheat or make it easy for us to see Patience left alone. She is an heiress after all; the Captain is punished by his hopes for a legacy going to her. They could make her unhappy. The ending is made easier because her aunt leaves her the fortune the Captain came down to try to wedge from the aunt. In real life the plight of most spinsters was poverty, dependence on others whom you had to please and serve. Yes much is left out: for example, we don’t know the inner life of the Captain’s new marriage, only that in a worldly way it worked. In The Small House, we are going to see that the other choice for the high born and well-connected might turn out even worse.

John Singer Sergeant (1856-1925), anonymous gentleman (1880s), man about town: is he too dark for Crosbie as later met in The Last Chronicle?

Ellen