Anthony Trollope as postman: two cheers for epistolary liberty

Anthony Trollope in old age, photograph by Julia Cameron

Friends,

An interlude. I interrupt our regularly scheduled programming about books, movies, cultural events. I promise not to go on for too long …

I’ve written about Trollope as a semi-epistolary novelist (many times) and how the way he maps his imagined communities structures the working bones of his fiction (and his characters’ lived lives) into social, political, and psychological relationships.

Trollope’s map of Barsetshire

I may have talked about how both connect back to his 37 years as a post office official, but tonight, as a result of recent political developments in the US (and elsewhere) I thought I’d commemorate and mourn what is happening to his non-literary work, what he accomplished in his day job for the post office and liberty of communication among ordinary people.

I thought of Trollope two days ago as I made my confident way to my local postbox (pillar in British English) around the corner from me, fully confident that the bunch of bills (which I do still write checks for and mail) would get where they are supposed to go with no interference, no surveillance, no need for a bribe. I had spent a number of hours at this work, plus began the stressful arduous task of thinking about my tax forms. This year I plan to go to AARP which offers tax services for someone like me (over 65, under a certain income) for free. And my daughter too. On the Trollope face-book page — undaunted by the Pizer court, fascistic Patriot’s Act, recently whose extensive surveillance powers over people’s private correspondence the US congress re-affirmed by a large majority here tonight — I raise a metaphorical glass of wine to him on this account. Joyce in Finnegans Wake (so I’m told, having not been able to read that one) does tribute to St Anthony for his work in the post office.

We had had brief thread on my small (272 members) Trollope yahoo list, Trollope19thCstudies@yahoogroups.com (about to to move to groups.io as TrollopeandHisContemporary@groups.io or [Trolloper&Peers]) as we are reading The American Senator now – where the ethnography, mapping of social and economic, psychological and political is pretty thick too (see postings from reading and discussion in 1999). On how Trollope’s task to map the areas he was making sure were also honest partly led to his visual mapping (in exquisite diagram in the case of Barsetshire) of many of his novels’ politically, economically socially arranged space. A member wrote that Trollope had gotten used to thinking about this from his postal work.

Trollope says in his Autobiography that he feared (predicted) the “angelic nature of his mission” to leave around southwest England and various areas in Ireland working freely-operating secure postal routes “was insufficiently appreciated.” People today talk of his contribution to the postal box (pillar), as if he were solely responsible: not at all. He was important in facilitating its practical implementation — which seems to me so in character. As important was how he made sure the mails were delivered without corruption (sans privatization to commit a Franglais phrase). Trollope’s travels to Egypt and the US and elsewhere also included post office work. He negotiated for treatises; he looked into the working of the local post offices where he traveled to (Washington, DC was one such place recorded in his North America). I remember how appalled he was appalled at wastage, inefficiency and indifference to ordinary people’s needs, their supposed mission, the patronage system in the US caused: every four years a huge number of people were fired; before the present civil service (previous I should say because the post office is no longer quite a federal agency) system. What kind of experience could be built upon for constructive work and employees this way? Trollope asked.

He thought the business of government agencies was to serve its people.

Someone made mild fun of me on the Trollope face-book page — based on my spelling of the word check (an Americanism); the subtext was to hit out at my whole attitude against gov’t surveillance and make fun.

I’m stubborn and admit to not caring for teasing, so said check is an American spelling and that “in the US banks issue checks. I spent much of yesterday writing checks. I still pay by check for some things. I order books of checks from my banks.”

And I went on to be more explicit, and in case the comment is lost or vanishes (for whatever reason, sinister or otherwise) I put it here as it is important perspective on Trollope’s ironically politics in his novels. He is guarded; he wants a larger readership. He never admits publicly when he attacks individuals or systems, which he does.

I should probably have given the larger context than contemporary (21st century corruption and surveillance) in my mind: I have also published in early modern to 18th century literature, and the women’s letters I’ve read (a specialty in publishing I once had, and still my truly favorite reading are women’s memoirs, letters, and poetry), women’s letters, I say, are intensely guarded and worried. Letters were routinely opened and read by gov’t agents; you could write one and it never get where you wanted it to because it was simply taken by someone who could use it against your family. That would include Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara in the 16th century in Italy whose letters I’ve read. The wealthy hired their own couriers. Anne Finch, the wife of a non-juror aristocrat (later 17th to 18th century) left very few letters.

The first era to show some compunction and sense that people had a right to privacy was the later 17th century in parts of Europe; the first reforms in the UK occur in the 18th; these are associated with Ralph Allen, a wealthy philanthropist and man of integrity. You begin gradually to see larger routine delivery of correspondence, postal rates settled (the person who received the letter paid); even so in the 1790s with Pitt’s crackdown on ordinary people and established extensive spy system, letters were used as evidence against people in trials (see Kenneth Johnston’s Pitt’s Reign of Alarm). Coleridge’s letters show he knew his were read, and feared pressure, hounding, loss of an ability to rent a place in the Lake District. John Thelwall, a friend, was refused accommodation by Coleridge and Wordsworth when he came north looking for a place to stay. Against Thelwall the state acted directly by arrest, interrogation, imprisonment, trial, conviction, punishment and later also unusual suspect; he found how difficult it was to get out of political catchment, how the distinction between personal and political is non-existent. William Godwin had to turn to anonymity, become a non-person to survive in his later years. Thelwall was arrested as one of the 12 and Godwin’s Cursory Strictures laid out argument defense counsel used. While Godwin supported Thelwall in the treason trial, later he wrote arguments which gave some ammunition to gov’t bills of gagging and no assembly.

The Interior of the New York Post Office (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, II, June 11, 1856)

The coming of the train figures in a modernization and spread of communication to lower rank people. some of the liberalization was the result of capitalism: capitalists and industrialists needed to use mail to communicate, to facilitate transactions, to move goods. The use of a stamp on an envelope and envelopes too were important innovations. So when in Trollope’s era he and others in the UK (there is an equivalent history in France) are working so hard to set up and ensure a system that gives everyone privacy, everyone paying the same rate, routes that can be depended upon, and even pillar boxes you can trust, this is a tremendous stride forward. What an astonishing thing it would have been to someone in the later 17th century say in the UK: walk out and put a letter or check into am iron box in public and assume it will get there; it’s said to be safe!

Thus in our own time we are seeing a disastrous turning in the opposite direction again (I hope I need not detail this but if someone asks, what do you mean? I’ll link in essay) and thus I imagine Trollope who worked so hard for this liberty, for efficiency, and people’s ability to communicate with one another with impunity turning in his grave.

The privatization going must ache his very bones.

Seeing him in this light also provides an enlightening perspective on his politics in his novels and non-fiction, which I’m about to have a paper published on in Antipodes (“‘On Inventing a New Country:’ Trollope’s Depiction of Settler Colonialism”) and have written much about online. To place him with analogous novels and novelists of his period: obviously Thackeray, but also Disraeli, also inventing the political novel. Mr Monk bring Phineas Finn a copy of Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career to read while Phineas is in prison: if you read Phineas Redux alongside Beauchamp’s Career you see close parallels. Gissing is a direct heir, so too Margaret Oliphant. In quiet plain style and realism he resembles Gaskell. His concerns ad topics are parallel to Dickens’s in politics and class and law and justice. A woman’s novel of the 1890s that bears comparison is Elizabeth Robins’s The Convert. Fast forward modern analogues are Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time.

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Am early 20th woman who delivered mail (women working in the post office)

Originally I was going to end here. But my good friend, Diane Reynolds, on our Yahoo lists, which include WomenwritersAcrossTheAges@yahoogroups.com (also moving to become WomenWriters@groups.io [WomenWriters]) rightly qualified my happy progressive narrative. She linked in an essay from the London Review of Books where Bee Wilson brings up an exception, which is worrying as it show how easy it is for local communities and certainly more powerful people at the center of gov’t to intervene and read people’s mails. Wilson reviews The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s Englandby Christopher Hilliard (Oxford, June 2017, ISBN 978 0 19 879965), LRB, 40:3 (February 2008): “Merely a Warning that a Noun is Coming:”

Bee Wilson writes of how in a local post office and community at the opening of the 20th century people could simply snatch a woman’s letters, open and read them to see if she uses curse words, then leap from that to accuse her of anonymous poisonous letters and put her on trial to go to jail. Wilson means the essays as an example of the profanity males practice in a daily way, which we now know are (in the service of hateful bigotry) characteristic of the Trump White House. My reaction was this kind of language is found in many all male environments: my husband, Jim, a Division Chief in the federal gov’t and long-term IT engineer and then professor, told me this kind of language prevails in the 95% IT world — most of the profanity likens things in the software environment to parts of women’s bodies, which are themselves referred to in distressingly crude terms. If a woman is there and protests, she soon finds herself ostracized and/or severely punished.

Wilson’s essay is also about how women are not safe in their correspondence, but in the context of a narrative showing how your correspondence is protected, it’s a further demonstration of how from time immemorial men automatically have rights that women do not. From time immemorial communities think they have the right to invade women. Women have not got the same right to privacy as a man. A pregnant woman’s body, especially if she is unmarried, is fair game. For centuries before such women were accused of baby-killing. This is in the context of communities who put women who got pregnant outside marriage into ritual humiliation in church and then either took the child from her, or refused to support her or the child, thus driving her into street prostitution.

I’ve written reviews after studying this history. In the 21st century laws in the US have made so that doctors have the right to invade your body if you ask for an abortion; a case exists where a pregnant woman was taken off a plane to check if she was trying to abort the child (baby kill). Women used to be murdered for centuries on the charge of baby-killing; now they are imprisoned and chained if they want an abortion. They were guilty if the child was born dead, and had to prove it was dead upon birth to be exonerated.

So if you were a working class woman who wrote letters in the 1920s in Britain, your letters could be snatched and used against you based on what curse words you use. So relentless has been the gendered repression.

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Vanessa Redgrave as Clementine Churchill (2002)

Up next “The Winston Churchill films”: I will discuss The Gathering Storm, featuring Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Linus Roache and Celia Imrie; and Churchill’s Secret (2016), with Michael Gambon, Lindsay Duncan and Romola Garai. After that we’ll return to Anna Karenina films (1985 and 1997).

Ellen