Trollope’s Small House at Allington: 5 weeks of close reading

Emma Thompson, a study of her as Carrington in the film of that name — for me a suggestive 20th century image of Lily Dale as conceived by Trollope

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve not followed up on the first lecture for this summer’s course on Trollope’s Small House at Allington because for much of the sessions that followed I offered only introductory perspectives, after which for an hour or so we worked our way through the text for the day, in other words, the give-and-take of discussion. This does not lend itself to the blog form, although it is he way this novel yields its rich insights and pleasures. Although hardly ever out of print, and by all impressionistic accounts, a memorable favorite among Trollope readers, the novel has not garnered much recent published writing, I surmise because it is rare among Trollope novels not to have an election, to remain steadily and (even) fiercely within an erotic (and marital) purview. All the more reason to offer up some thoughts out of the perspectives and close readings I and my class (mostly older retired adults) reveled in for some five weeks.

Lady Julia and Johnny Eames near close of novel (Millais illustrations)

For summaries of the story and plot design, consult these records of an on-line reading and discussion of the novel in 2000.

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From the second and third session:

Ellen Gosse, Torcos, Devonshire — I have only a black-and-white image of this painting but it seems to be suggestive of what Trollope wants to convey about the small house, that it is cut off from the corrupting worlds attached to London

I began with a summary of Juliet McMasters’ essay on his novel (and by extension other novels of romance and marriage in Trollope), “The Unfortunate Moth: The Unifying Theme of The Small House at Allington, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 26:2 (1962):127-44

What McMasters takes to be the unifying theme of the book explicitly stated in a long passage thtat you might think it about Lily Dale, or Adolphus when he goes to Courcy Castle, or Johnny Eames, but it’s about Cradell who we are told “never found of happiness” from the “intimacy” (that’s the word and to Victorians “intimacy” suggested sex, actions like petting and the like at least) he had with Mrs Lupex.

When the unfortunate moth in his semi-blindness whisks himself and his wings within the flame of the candle, and finds himself mutilated and tortured, he even then will not take the lesson, but returns again and again till he is destroyed. Such a moth was poor Cradell. There was no warmth to be got by him from that flame. There was no beauty in the light,—not even the false brilliance of unhallowed love. Injury might come to him,—a pernicious clipping of the wings, which might destroy all power of future flight; injury, and not improbably destruction, if he should persevere. But one may say that no single hour of happiness could accrue to him from his intimacy with Mrs. Lupex. He felt for her no love. He was afraid of her, and, in many respects, disliked her. But to him, in his moth-like weakness, ignorance, and blindness, it seemed to be a great thing that he should be allowed to fly near the candle. Oh! my friends, if you will but think of it, how many of you have been moths, and are now going about ungracefully with wings more or less burnt off, and with bodies sadly scorched!

People don’t tend to identity Trollope with Dostoevsky; but a unifying motif is the perversity of our desires, how we go after what will poison us, especially in erotic entanglements. We are told Craddell cannot have “another dip into the flame of the candle” because Miss Spruce is in the room. If you want you can pay attention to when Craddell is said to be “in the room” with Mrs Lupex and no one else there. Whose room? What room? McMasters makes a convincing case and writes beautifully clearly.

The chapter on the Widow Dale a very moving one: she has given up any chance to have a life of her own – not that she had much, by after her husband died, leaving the city, putting herself in a place where she does not meet anyone but those who come to this great estate. It’s been infinitely easier financially, and as we shall see when the Dale family prepares to leave the Small House and go to Guestwick it’s a big step down. Third person indirect discourse allows Trollope to go in an out of her mind as well as comment: she has been made to feel if she were out of the way the Squire would be more generous. He did not approve of who his brother married; she did not bring anything with her, money or connections.

The theory of her life one may say was this—that she should bury herself in order that her daughters might live well above ground. And in order to carry out this theory, it was necessary that she should abstain from all complaint or show of uneasiness before her girls. Their life above ground would not be well if they understood that their mother, in this underground life of hers, was enduring any sacrifice on their behalf. It was needful that they should think that the picking of peas in a sun-bonnet, or long readings by her own fire-side, and solitary hours spent in thinking, were specially to her mind. “Mamma doesn’t like going out.” “I don’t think mamma is happy anywhere out of her own drawing-room.” I do not say that the girls were taught to say such words, but they were taught to have thoughts which led to such words, and in the early days of their going out into the world used so to speak of their mother. But a time came to them before long,—to one first and then to the other, in which they knew that it was not so, and knew also all that their mother had suffered for their sakes.

Trollope does all he can to indicate that once engaged to Crosbie Lily gives herself utterly to him (i.e., they have full sexual intercourse). Lily and Crosbie are allowed to go roaming at night by themselves. The most striking passage is the height of the party by which point Crosbie has begun to regret his proposal, to think he’s doing Lily a great favor, and alas, she reinforces this

They were standing in the narrow pathway of the gate leading from the bridge into the gardens of the Great House, and the shadow of the thick-spreading laurels was around them. But the moonlight still pierced brightly through the little avenue, and she, as she looked up to him, could see the form of his face and the loving softness of his eye.
    “Because- —,” said he; and then he stooped over her and pressed her closely, while she put up her lips to his, standing on tip-toe that she might reach to his face.
    “Oh, my love!” she said. “My love! my love!”
    As Crosbie walked back to the Great House that night, he made a firm resolution that no consideration of worldly welfare should ever induce him to break his engagement with Lily Dale. He went somewhat further also, and determined that he would not put off the marriage for more than six or eight months, or, at the most, ten, if he could possibly get his affairs arranged in that time. To be sure, he must give up everything, —- all the aspirations and ambition of his life; but then, as he declared to himself somewhat mournfully, he was prepared to do that. Such were his resolutions, and, as he thought of them in bed, he came to the conclusion that few men were less selfish than he was.

That break or gap between “My love, my love” – what literally happened is the equivalent of a chapter in a 1950s novel where the couple go into a bedroom and the chapter ends; or a TV show where they are passionately kissing and the camera focuses on a nearby fire. Note also Crosbie’s thoughts directly after: firmly he will marry and soon, 6 to 8, at the most 10 months. It takes 9 months. Now had he kept coming but as we all know (and Trollope is writing for adults) it takes a little time. Markwick compares other heroines: Alice Grey of Can You Forgive her? Shudders and others, but we have to be content with what we have. Lily is referred to as “the impassioned girl” during a walk. Lily finally wins her mother to acquiesce in Lily’s decision not to marry when she explains

I gave myself to him, and loved him, and rejoiced in his love. When he kissed me I kissed him again, and I longed for his kisses. I seemed to live only that he might caress me. All that time I never felt myself to be wrong,—because he was all in all to me. I was his own. … I cannot be the girl I was before he came here.

Trollope is exploring variations on sex life and marriage in different classes of people, types, situations. He means us to see the boarding house as sordid and squalid; that’s really the tone. In this era young women who worked as milliners went to bars after work and were seen as promiscuous, fair game especially to gentlemen. Now I hope you’ll agree that with all its riches and luxuries, the tone of mind, thoughts everything about Courcy castle is sordid and ultimately squalid too but they can keep up a front, Amelia can’t. Trollope has some sympathy for her, none for Mrs Lupex (a kind of wolf, lupus means wolf), and he doesn’t respect Cradell. We are to suppose Cradell doesn’t get very far: he is so fatuous as to want the credit for what he doesn’t quite do and not want to take the consequences (but then Crosbie doesn’t either). More than once we are told Mrs Lupex’s nose is no straight, it has an odd curve: her husband has hit her

Nonetheless, there are parallels between Cradell and say the young Courcy men, and interestingly between Johnny and Lily more than Johnny and Crosbie. They refer to an incident where he went up to her room and she looked at him through a chink (repeated over the over) in the door, and then there’s a break, and after he keeps referring to her long black hair. It makes him write the note (p 41) where he tells her he loves her and this is her handle for her threatening letter. She implies he promised to marry her, and he says he never did. She never does say he did. For the Victorian reader does it make the incident any less reprehensible, probably not. If it does, it’s because the reader might look down on Amelia. The notes Skilton provides in his edition of SHA explicating some of Trollope’s references to places and use of phrases whose hum and buzz he expects us to know (but we can’t living so much after him) turn Amelia Roper into someone who has given sex for money, jobs, or simply had it for fun casually.

McMaster mentions A.O. Cockshut who wrote what is still one of the best books on Trollope; he studies Trollope’s books as about delusion, self-destruction, obsession, but he also has a chapter where he says a central them in Trollope’s novels is loneliness. For novels where the characters are so embedded in groups, he offers us dramas of loneliness. Who lonelier than Mr Harding? Does anyone understand? Who lonelier than Mary Thorne? Even the Rev Mr Slope is cut off from others. What Crosbie throws away when he gets to Courcy Castle is something rare and precious which we feel alive in his letter to Lily. If Alexandrina could have provided sexual passion and satisfaction the way Lily did or seemed to, he still would have been miserable: she provides no companionship, nothing congenial, no thoughts and feelings that count to share. We are made to feel that Dr Crofts and Bell will eventually have that.

The irony of Lily’s antagonism to Lady Julia (“hard on the poor old spinster”) is Lady Julia who does all she can for Lily at Courcy Castle but fails. There’s an old optimistic tale by Hans Christian Anderson. The emperor’s new clothes: you may recall it’s about how this emperor is deluded by two crooks into thinking they are making him a super-rich garment which is invisible to stupid people. No one in tale will see they can’t see anything; then he parades down the street and a young boy comes up and shouts Oh he’s wearing nothing. And all the people suddenly admit he’s wearing nothing. Great fable in many ways about using a naif in a story. People often refer to this as having great truth. But what if the stakes are too high. What if shouting the truth at the top of your voice gets you nowhere and that is what happens to Lady Julia: she gets no respect as a spinster. She is put there so Trollope can show us the fallacy of the emperor’s new clothes.

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From the fourth session:

Elizabeth Shippen Green (later 19th century American illustrator)

We had read Mark Turner’s. “Gendered Issues: Intertextuality and The Small House at Allington in Cornhill Magazine, Victorian Periodicals Review, 26:4 (1993):228-34. If you read what is produced in a given issue of a magazine you will find revealing thematic parallels among the articles which have a great deal to tell you about how the magazine editors envision their audience, and if the magazine is popular or long-lasting probably rightly. On top of that if you know what is the context elsewhere for each of the articles, you understand how they are intervening in some hot topic of the day.

SHA lacks overt politics, or any parliamentary elections. What Thackeray, the editor explicitly said, and statistical analysis shows, is that the Cornhill also avoided politics and parliamentary subjects. Thackeray said this was inappropriate for women. After all they were not elected, couldn’t hold office, what would they want to know about such things? What did Trollope think of this policy: in 1867 when he quit the post office and a group of friends and funders started St Paul’s whose remit was specifically politics and for it he wrote one of his masterpiece Palliser or Parliamentary books, Phineas Finn, a great hit.

Instalment No 3, November 1862 contains Chapters 7, 8, and 9 and anti-feminist, maybe misogynistic articles. Now you might think, how odd, a magazine for women who promulgates anti-feminist ideas. But maybe you would not. By feminist I mean something very fundamental: they assume women are inferior in understanding and moral strength, belong in the home; magazines and TV shows can function as forms of social policing. In Trollope’s chapters we find Crosbie’s deep reluctance to marry at all; he longs to escape. A couple of the articles in the Cornhill around that time either take on board W.W. Gregg’s discernment of a problem in society written about elsewhere and talked much about in the period and especially the Cornhill: Greg presents himself as showing us “sound common sense:” there were all these “redundant” (i.e., unmarried) women who had no income or means; his solution, more women need to work at getting married, and men are not doing their duty: they are shirking. The reality was the problem for middle class women is there were no jobs for them to support themselves as middle class unless they married. The Cornhill for that number also includes “Professional Thieves,” something middle class people worry about: not only are women alone a standing target, but the article talks about women who vicious thieves and sneaky and get away with it, and that they the ones who train children to become thieves. Forget Fagin. It’s not Jews, it’s women. Last article about the first women to have been executed in 40 years. Makes her an absolute sinister horror, says it’s only because she was a woman that she was able to “penetrate” the home. There is this idea that home is this sacred place where people are happy, a haven, that is unreal and reinforced.

So this is the local context for SHA. Were there many unmarried women and men in the Victorian era? yes, as there always have been. It’s very hard to get at firm figures because the rate of death and when someone dies is what is measured and it was different for different classes. I did a paper on widowhood in England between the 18th and 19th century and how this was reflected in Jane Austen’s novels. Those who read them may not be aware of how many widows and widowers she had: quite a number of widows, less widowers as Trollope has quite a number of widows, tends to have unmarried men rather than widowers. Widowhood was not associated with old age as people died like flies at all ages, women in childbirth regularly. Statistically it may be shown that in general women do not remarry after 50 because it’s said men are not willing to marry an older woman, while men remarry in large numbers until 70. What we are talking about is women living alone – like Miss Spruce. There is little material on men living alone until very recently in comparison with women. They are embarrassed about living alone; until recently there was this suspicion of homosexuality, so a man could be blackmailed – laws against buggery were draconian. It’s so much easier for them to find a partner; both sexes. but especially women if they had children wanted a partner. Widows come with children: witness Mrs Rope, Mrs Eames, Mrs Dale. The first study of suicide from a secular statistic humane scientific-speak point of view – is by Emile Durkhiem a long chapter on why single old men living alone are most susceptible to suicide (according to him).  To cut to the chase, the problem is women at the time couldn’t get a good job, they were excluded from professional training to start with.

Lily is on her way to being a redundant woman. This is a sort of introduction to next week’s story, “Journey to Panama.” It is the background to Small House at Allington, to its deeper sexual politics. In later life Trollope wrote sympathetic articles about women getting jobs (The Telegraph Girls which I put online), he wrote stories for Emily Faithful. Why do the De Courcys overlook Lady Julia’s telling everyone Adolphus is engaged: the stakes are too high, they want an acceptable willing men for their daughters, someone who will fit in. And this week we found Lady Amelia and Gazebee policing Adolphus lest he get away.

What’s Trollope’s position? Later in life he grew very irritated with all the sympathy extended Lily as well as the complaints: he felt readers were sentimentalizing and called her a prig in his Autobiography. But in this text we he embeds lots of references to the sex that had happened between them, how this affected her, how everyone knew. She could litigate, this would only shame her more. Women were without a weapon. A coward and as Johnny keeps shouting “scoundrel”. The exchange of letters no matter how brief: he to her “I know that you will hate me and will never forgive me,” to which her pride will not listen, Trollope’s narrator as the mother “he left her maimed and mutilated for life” (Ch 30), and this last to me the most strong, “Who can describe the thoughts that were passing through Lily’s mind as she remembered the hours she had passed with Crosbie, of his warm assurance of love, of his accepted caresses, of her uncontrolled and acknowledged joy in his affection” (Ch 30) Johnny who assumes Crosbie will no litigate tells Cradell Lily would never because already “all this will about kill her” (Ch 32). Now I’m not so sure everyone would have been so disapproving of Crosbie as is presented.

We discussed how Trollope just takes this flying leap into making the human psyche, how it works inwardly and where people most often don’t like to look and haven’t got meaningful concise words for even now: he makes that continually the upfront subject whether through letters, through meditation, or through comic scenes. Scenes like the one in the railway car, and when Johnny Eames attacks Crosbie are especially remarkable for their further inclusion of depictions of how people often actually behave in social life, what we respect (like the superintendant on the train station whose prestige and therefore power reminds me of General Kutusov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, only Tolstoy does not also make a joke of it. I think Trollope is as acute as Tolstoy even if his perspective is narrower, he is also more continually ironic about the way we behave outwardly.

Marvelously well written chapters, “The combat, “Woe to the conquered,” and “See, the conquering hero comes.” They are a trio: they all three appeared in the same issue. Instalment No 12, August 1863. I made an effort to download the November 1863 issue of the magazine in several places and failed utterly.
    The topic of whether someone should punish Crosbie and how has been introduced several times, and Trollope seems to feel it is part of Bernard Dale’s selfishness that he does nothing because it’s no longer socially required. And if we think Squire Dale has changed, note his immediate response to De Guest’s suggestion, he contribute regularly to Johnny and Lily’s household (Ch 32). Any comments about how you feel about this resort to violence? It stems from the idea of honor killing: the idea is the family honor is besmirched. By the 18th century Europe had gone beyond murdering the woman, but macho maleness had not gone beyond the duel and by the 19th century the fight. It’s inward, outwardly accurate and funny. The chapter opens with the Earl telling Johnny this is not his affair: he is not related and was not the person concerned.
    Both young men are getting on at the Barchester station (not yet named Silverbridge). Very vividly described. Johnny’s class is signaled by for the first time going first class. He does so because he has a servant, a groom. So it’s not fitting for him to sit in a second class carriage. Adolphus sat there before he involved himself with the De Courcys.
    Trollope comically accosts us if we affect to despise Johnny for wanting to come up in the world: “My friend … [to]… foolish thing.”
    Then we get this real scene of people entering such a carriage. They still have these separate carriages with a corridor in English and European trains – you see them in English films. Old lady and old man who is irritable.
    Adolphus has not been having a good time – and yet he is part of this noble family.
    Then the marvelous inward qualities continually attended to: Adolphus opens his book and we are told: “I will not say his mind … “
    We are are made privy to Johnny’s ‘wretched thoughts” as he sits there with his book: very intense. He does not strike out then because there is a lady in the car.
    But when it’s time to leave, Johnny cannot let go and leaps on Crosbie. He has the advantage of surprise: “you confounded scroundrel”
    Trollope takes the time to describe a real stand at the time, complete with yellow shilling number novel instalments. Just like the one the reader might be reading.
Crosbie falls among the wares, clumsy and Johnny lands a real blow at his eye. He’s already distinguished     himself over bulls.
    And then the Victorian middle class world – these are people taking the train so that means money, traveling, and they side with the police officer. Trollope is very sympathetic to police officers but also uses them for comedy – which still happens on TV today. Johnny is too determined and too strong in his feeling of rightness to care. The dialogue is believable enough.
    Crosbie has lost in the encounter: he is disgraced. Blackness signifies inward bleeding around his eye, plus red streaks. So it’s not innocent – in Dr Thorne Frank Gresham whips Moffat and Moffat is put out of public view for weeks. The police are on his side because of who he is too, but he wants to escape and have no publicity. They won’t listen to that because it’s their job to take this pair of men in unless no one presses charges. Which is what happens.
    We seem to go through layers of Crosbie’s mind: not on the surface but deep in some inward thoughts he curses himself.
    The aftermath: much worse than the physical experience is the social response. People who are disabled often say (rightly) it’s not their disability that hurts them so badly so much as the society’s way of reacting to a disabled person and a disability they don’t understand. It”s in this one Crosbie realizes he has lost points in the world’s respect for him. Maybe they would not have been so condemning as I suggest but perhaps there is a sense of what is just and right in people.
    The scene of Butterwell, Optimist, Major Fiasco; each character acts in character; they couldn’t care less really about Crosbie but are reacting as they see themselves. Fiasco gives everyone a hard time.
    The Gazebees: De Courcy is beginning to have had it. Gazebee I’m afraid deserves Amelia. Crosbie’s story mocks them. False etymologies still popular, so false stories about family’s origins. Will he stick it? We see a hope come into his mind that they will throw him out if he is insolent enough and he can return to Lily. There will be no return to her – for a long time to come.
    For the rest of the novel Trollope will not tire of punishing Crosbie though his ending may be what he wanted if only he could have seen this without the intervening engagements and marriage. He could not get beyond the hegemonic demand he marry. He found himself in situations where erotic feeling was the whole point of the exercise. What’s a guy to do?
    Johnny’s great triumph: a Handel rousing song. Eames is rising in the world because like Crosbie he can do the work and well. Trollope take out time to tell another story: this one of the bags. It’s intermixed with the Amelia matter: she too has been misused in effect. Raffle Buffle cannot punish Johnny because custom is not against it. So he flails away.
    And we end where we began: the earl and Johnny’s correspondence and Johnny knows he has not hurt himself with the earl.

Lily Going Mad Counting the Figures in the Wallpaper:

“(Lily speaking to her mother, about getting out of her sickbed, which is in her mother’s room) ‘I am so tired of looking always at the same paper. It is such a tiresome paper. It makes one count the pattern over and over again. I wonder how you ever can live here.’
‘I’ve got used to it, you see.’
‘I can never get used to that sort of thing; but go on counting, and counting, and counting.'”

Bruce reminds us of how Lily feels herself going mad when she is prostrate in bed, having retreated from a world which in the person of Adolphus Crosbie has betrayed, abused and would now, she fears, either quietly ridicule or look down on her. She has no options beyond living out the bourgeois myth. There’s a famous later 19th century American short story, the Yellow Wallpaper about a deeply repressed woman, who has been having babies endlessly. Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Finally the direct roman a clef here: Sir Raffle Buffle, also called Huffle Scuffle who Trollope cannot resist portraying so he has him transferred from the General Committee Office in Whitehall as the ultimate boss of Adolphus Crosbie to a supposedly much lower rank office, Taxes where he presides over Johnny Eames, without bothering for an explanation of this demotion. It’s a remariable coincidence, no? He is Trollope’s irritated portrait of a person much admired at one time: Sir Rowland Hill, who executed important reforms in the post office, some with Trollope’s help. He is said to have been “a brilliant but difficult man,” and I’ve read that “Huffle Scuffle” was actually a derisory nickname for him. When in 1867 Trollope was overlooked for a deserved promotion and took retirement in order to devote himself to his writing career fully – he was angry and surprised. Did he not think Hill knew of Huffle Scuffle? Trollope’s books are roman a cles (books where people are recognizable) and he tells aspects of his own life directly and indirectly. Apparently once as a young postal clerk he misdirected a bag of mail. Not only is Johnny him, but aspects of Dr Crofts with Crosbie a release valve for himself.

One of my papers I called Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men; this is a romance novel written from a male point of view tempered by insight into and compassion for women.

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From the fifth and last sessions:

Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding walking away from the hospital and his position as Warden (final shots of The Warden from BBC 1983 Barchester Chronicles, scripted Alan Plater)

Like The Warden, The Small House at Allington has a strong underlying tragic pattern. It presents itself as comedy, and the whole realistic stance of the narrator, the structure, and the presence of this ironic narrator whose importance in this and other of Trollope’s novels cannot be underestimated deflects us from seeing the nadir, the loss of aspiration, hope, dreams just about all of our major characters end up with – or without. Pair of chapters to end on: showing how Mr Crosbie again became a happy man deeply ironic: so quiet and so intense; we hear of quarrels; how she did break down asking for a carriage. She does not break down now. He is glad to make do with little money to get rid of the burden of her existence. Lily vanquishes her mother. Johnny moves out of the boarding house, lives alone, takes to eating mutton chops at a public house. Soon Johnny will get into a better place with Earl’s help.

And then very like a Mozart’s Don Giovanni especially, onto the stage come the ordinary prosaic characters to carry on: here Mrs Dale chooses to Remain not Leave; we get a miniature re-prise of Hopkins’ coming near to utter destruction but the Squire who has now learn to give in, gives in. The squire tells Lily the pain is that Hopkins did it before everyone, so this incident also refers to the Earl’s advice that if you live with a fox gnawing at your entrails, you stand there and smile. In the Spartan story the boy allows the fox to gnaw him to death under his undergarments rather than show his pain to anyone. The story thus undermines itself. The great joke of the concluding incident (let’s say before the curtain) is about a pile of shit: don’t underestimate the importance of shit in making beautiful gardens.

A central subject matter of this set of chapters is our deep usual disappointments in how we end up on the social spectrum in life, whether it be at our remunerative jobs and in this week’s chapters this includes characters from Mr Lupex with his yearning to be a painter of canvasses and sense he had talent, better at color with a truer eye for drawing than people who make thousands to Mr Butterwell who doesn’t want Crosbie over-reaching himself to dominate the board, to people like Dr Crofts who presumably acts out of some altruistic motives yet wants to live not in debt, with pride of face before others. We discover a bunch of characters living out their lives – at least some of them, those with the capacity for dreams of something beyond the pragmatic, who reject in part what are the common goals and norms of ordinary life – in quiet desperation.

The depiction of careers in this novel is more subtle than the analysis of the results of ambition in Framley Parsonage: the way Mark Robarts is treated may be read as “learning a lesson not to overreach beyond his income; Mr Sowerby is more complicated but he is made a semi-sinister kind of villain and he loses all. Crosbie doesn’t lose all; he gains what he thought he was after; maybe Mr Lupex is right and the kind of success he feels he had it in him was not in the cards he was handed from birth. I’d say we cannot attribute to Johnny’s wonderful qualities his success: there he is sexually jealous of Cradell because Cradell is now having sex with Amelia, Cradell in a remarkable scene of social insight is shown not to understand how pride should control his language before the man he envies and wants to butter up and fears is dropping him. He does not realize if someone is determined to drop you, you must endure it and work very slowly to counter that, silently.

The inkstand missing for three years (Millais’s illustration)

There are seemingly irretrievable decisions or words you can’t recall the other person is not going to forget as they seared some part of their mind and feeling. There is a whole sub-motiv or secondary set of stories about the pains and disillusionments and fear of moving. For women alone in this book it’s traumatic, whether done comically or not. Mrs Roper is likely to lose her livelihood (and a friend, Miss Spruce). Moving depictions. A central one for plot-design: the dramatic confrontations of Squire Dale and Mrs Dale. She is rightly very hurt and angry at his bullying and accusations and says she cannot live in that house on these terms any more. So off she goes to tell him she’s moving (Ch 37). Does she get to say what she wants? Why not? He refuses to recognize she has any justice in moving; he refuses to agree to her priorities: her feelings not her pocketbook and status.

The Squire feels he should be obeyed, should have some say in who Bell marries, against Mrs Dale’s resentment of his attempt to interfere with her role. He accuses her of teaching the girls to look at him with suspicion; she accuses him of trying to take her place and come in-between her and her daughters. The emotions here are real enough, hard. The Squire tries unconsciously to needle his sister-in-law into doing what he wants by insinuating she’s afraid to tell her daughter to marry Bernard:

“‘You mean that you are afraid to tell her so?’
    ‘I am afraid to do what I think wrong, if you mean that.
    ‘I don’t think it would be wrong, and therefore I shall speak to her myself’
    ‘You must do as you like about that, Mr Dale; I can’t prevent you. I shall think you wrong to harass her on such a matter’

Each puts his or her spin on what’s happening. The dialogue turns and twists as they accuse, counter-accuse, reinterpret, at each point ending up in the stasis or positions from which they started. She goes home very unsatisfied because she left without making it clear she means it; she does not need to think about it – as Bell does not need to think about saying no to Bernard. She is recharged by Bell and Lily and returns to the battlefield (Ch 38). Each of them tries to take advantage of the other. All right she is giving rent-free house, status, luxuries. He gets her on the axiom of duty: somehow it’s her duty yet again to mortify her own feelings so as to keep others behaving towards her girls as if they were the daughters of the squire. She loses ground for a moment when he says “‘your duty is to think of them.” Since she buys into his conservative values, she has no grounds from which to fight him on the score of violated individual feelings.

Lily’s insistence they are not to say anything adverse about Crosbie is a form of punishing her sister and mother because she can’t punish Crosbie. There’s a line where she remembers being in the field with him and responding to his caresses (as Crosbie remembers those days or early evenings as he sits across the way from Lady Alexandrina) which may be intended to excuse her (ch 40): during preparations he remembers her passion as he caressed her. She gave up so much and was just thrown away. It’s a form of self-tormenting too.
Some might find it hard to believe that Lily Dale does not show more anger toward Crosbie. Her remarking that she would like to be the godmother of Crosbie’s child is especially difficult to believe. The chapter is saved only by her breaking down an crying at the end, revealing how brave she is trying to be but still how much she is hurting.

One could get very Freudian and admire Trollope for suggesting that Lily feels that the child she would have had with Crosbie is going to emerge from the wrong womb, and her desire to be the godmother is Trollope’s way of hinting to us that her deepest pain is she is replaced as a sex partner and the woman who will therefore bear Crosbie’s children. Trollope saw himself as interested in perversities of behavior. People often quote his comment in He Knew He Was Right on the jealous Louis Trevelyan’s desire to gather proof his wife has betrayed him sexually: anyone who is surprised or incredulous “do not understand that a man may be brought to hope that which of all things is the most grievous to him;” they “have not observed with sufficient closeness the perversity of the human mind.” In this sequence Crosbie has chosen a self-tormenting path, Johnny, Mr Lupex, Mr Cradell. We have comic analogues for the grave anguish of Lily and Crosbie.

Adolphus’s actual experience of marriage: the preparations for the wedding. Money has to be arranged, a flat rented or house bought. At the last moment we see maybe Alexandrina is not so sure when she says she will not marry if not given the right clothes for the day, the right trousseau. The carpet, the correct locality – status, status, status. Lady Alexandrina will not go for a walk lest it be seen as a come-down. She would not enjoy walking because of this. She gives as much trouble to the store clerks as she can. Adolphus’s brilliantly mocking fable of the cook: mock on how rich like to present themselves, a home-y source of income; in fact it was often hard exploitation, Henry VIII making followers out of taking over church’s property and rents. Alexandrina knows she’s cold-shouldering Crosbie: she doesn’t want babies; her sister did. I’ll give it to Lady Amelia when she took Gazebee from Augusta Gresham she wanted him – or she wanted the marriage she could turn life with him into. He’s learning to hate them all. Gazebee and Amelia have long seen that Crosbie is bitter in heart now and has repented of his bargain. Crosbie meant to make his life a success we are told. That’s what seems to hurt most of all. Lily wanted love; he wanted to be successful in the world’s eyes and his own.

Trollope’s depiction of men in this novel: taking into account Johnny Eames, Cradell, Lupex, the De Courcy males. They are seen as people under pressure: to support others, to be seen to do well and they may not have the resources (skill or connections) for this. He undermines stereotypes for male experience.

Mary Lady Mason and Mrs Orme part at the close of Orley Farm (Millais)

Our last essay was Sarah Gilead’s “Trollope’s Orphans and ‘the Power of Adequate Performance,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 27:1 (1985):86-105.

It is very common in 19th century novels to have this long-suffering pathetic orphan children, or half-crazed beggars. Trollope has very few children in his novels and not one presents a child’s subjective mind as the nexus of the book. The typical Dickens character sweeping the streets is not here. But repeatedly in his novels characters come close to disaster or they walk right into calamity (as Juliet McMasters says moths to the flame, or Trollope himself about how we don’t sufficiently study the perversity of the human mind or pay attention to what is going on around us), but most of the they are left appearing to cope. Some do throw themselves under on-coming trains, or take some agonizing poison, but it’s not common. I would have preferred Phineas Finn as an example because all novel long he is a political compromiser in order to rise, putting aside his conscience which only comes to the fore unexpectedly in the denouement of his book.

I like Gilead’s explanation: they are made to feel culturally abandoned or betrayed as a result of the norms of the society they live in. They are expected to accept the story of their lives that the public listens to and carry on. So Mr Harding is supposed to accept that he is this corrupt man who devours incomes belonging to others and carry on regardless. Lady Mason that she’s a crook (not that in her case after having accepted an arranged marriage with a hard old man he refused to leave even a small farm to their son, all of it to go to his eldest to make this big splash). Lily that she lost this toy and ought to give over. The people in this novel are hypocrites about women’s sexuality – which by the way makes Johnny Eames’s behavior to Amelia explicable: he couldn’t give a shit who she fucks not really. Not when more important things like class, standing in the world, promotion at his job are at stake: maybe they do matter more.

What they do – Mr Harding, Lily, Mary Lady Mason is they invent a different story, a different identity, one which indicts the society, and live it out. To do this they must retreat or they will endlessly be bothered by the story society wants to impose on them. Lily does not want to risk her psyche again. They are not parentless and not without small resources – -which people often do have or they’d have vanished well before the crisis. They strike bargains with a hostile reality. In Phineas’s case, light is shone on the deplorable condition of the Irish which the English fed off of. They make a bargain; they will keep quiet if they are left alone. To achieve this safety they have to give up society’s prizes including society’s approval

Mr Harding retreats to the smallest possible parish; he does end up living with his daughter. As Gilead remarks he throws overboard the 12 old men he was supposed to care about. Most are dead by the time Barchester Towers begins. Lily has 3000 pounds so a small income, the Small House and her mother. She rejects time, she rejects change. Funeral formality to it; in Last Chronicle Trollope has her quote a latin saying: who goes softly, goes safely. Gilead misrepresents how Lady Mason ends up because she and her son part; she ends up alone writing letters to her one friend, Mrs Orme.

This is not the only essays that tries to account for this depth in Trollope – for this is part of what makes rereading his books worth while. There’s a another point of view I more inclined to – it’s more autobiographical or personal to Trollope. Many of Trollope’s central figures do vacillate, are paralysed and never make up their minds, go off a deep end or allow others to make up their minds for them. Once Mr Harding sticks to his guns, or decision, it’s curious how the other characters’ power over him seems to fade. Alas that’s not true for Lily or Mary Lady Mason. Women are not as respected; people think they are obliged to give themselves over (to children for example)

Why does he do this continually, have his most sympathetic characters perform an escape maneuver, sometimes while winning, act out a reluctant withdrawal? I see in the process self-flagellation on Trollope’s part. The person, Mr Harding, Lily, Mary Lady Mason, Phineas, is under “joint attack.” Everyone around the characters agrees to insist our hero or heroine act out what the world admires and wants (marry the lord not the tailor in Lady Anna), no matter what the personal cost or gyrations this demands. They nag the person, and we are treated to these scenes as when Johnny comes to ask Lily to marry him. She can’t get rid of him.

Trollope is persuading himself he is doing the right thing to compromise in life, stay with his wife no matter if restless, write novels that sell and release himself through irony; through Mr Harding, Phineas, Mary Lady Mason he lives out vicariously the act of integrity and the escape. He’s Miss Viner, Patience Woolsworthy. One of his greatest fictions is “The Spotted Dog” — he said it was his finest story. It’s a later short story; and online. The “spotted dog” is the name of a an inn where a gifted man has sabotaged his life; he has married the wrong woman and become a drunkard. Now that he must find some employments, presents himself openly as a shameful creature no one in their right mind would interview, much less hire to deal with fragile paper indexes and scholarship. Julius Mackenzie unable to cope ends up drunk rolling in the streets, his talents utterly thrown away. We see him struggle hard to emerge and fail. Trollope is teaching himself; there but for compromise go I.

His characters who are punished often make their strongest arguments on the side of utter integrity, of refusal, they get to walk away and display courage doing it. It’s the others’ joint attacks which speak the world’s cant wisdom, prudence and the like. Mr Harding is not supposed to be a saint, but has the courage to walk away. It’s a great release for most – not so much in the case of Lily Dale because the crux issue is a woman’s sexuality, her sexual awakening (the issue in Sense and Sensibility, one of the novel’s probable “sources”) and Trollope is not deeply empathetic with her refusal to compromise the way he is with Mr Harding, Mary Lady Mason, Phineas.

And so the sessions ended.

Ellen