Plantagenet and Lady Glencora Palliser (Philip Latham and Susan Hampshire) on their honeymoon, hotel desk registration …. (1974 Pallisers, scripted Simon Raven)
Burgo Fitzgerald buying some food and drink for a beggar girl, street walker (Hablôt Browne (Phiz), one of the original illustrations for the novel)
For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Tuesday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm,
March 5 to May 7
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20016
Dr Ellen Moody
Alice meets important politicians (Caroline Mortimer, Roger Livesey as Duke of St Bungay and Moray Watson as Barrington Erle) at Matching Priory
Aunt Greenow with her suitors (Phiz again) on the sands at Yarmouth
Description of Course
In this course we will begin a journey through Trollope’s famous roman fleuve: the six Palliser novels over several spring/fall terms. The series mirrors and delves many many levels of society and central issues of life in 19th century Europe. It contains a cast of brilliantly conceived recurring characters in a realistic thoroughly imagined landscape. CYFH? initiates central linked themes of coerced marriage, class & parliamentary politics & contains extraordinary psychological portraiture. As we move through the books, we’ll watch segments of the 1970s film adaptation dramatizing this material in original modern ways
Required Text:
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her, ed., introd. Stephen Wall. 1972 rpt. New York: Penguin Books, 2004.
There are two (!) relatively inexpensive MP3s of Can You Forgive Her?, one read aloud wonderfully well by Simon Vance (Blackstone audio); and the other read even more brilliantly by Timothy West (Audiobooks). I’m listening to Vance and it would be fine if people wanted to listen to Vance or West (who is my favorite reader of Trollope).
Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.
Mar 5: 1st week: Introduction: Trollope’s life and career; the state of the law and customs surrounding marriage, sexual relationships in the upper classes of mid-19th century England; the political situation in the 1860s.
Mar 12: 2nd: read for this week, CYFH?, we cover Chapters 1-10. Read for next week: read also Robert Hughes’s “Trollope and Fox-Hunting,” Essays in Literature, 12:1 (1984):75-84
Mar 19: 3rd: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 11-20. Read for next week George Levine’s “Can You Forgive Him?” Trollope’s CYFH? and the Myth of Realism,” Victorian Studies 18:1 (1974):5-30.
Mar 26: 4th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 21-30. I’ll send URLS to my own essays and blogs on the 1974 film adaptation, The Pallisers; also my essay “Partly Told in Letters,” from my website.
Apr 2: 5th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 31-40 I sent Mary Poovey’s “The Financial System in 19th Century Britain and “Bills of Exchange,” as well as George Watson on Trollope and Tolstoy; I advised them to look at John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women.
Apr 9: 6th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 41-50 Trollope as an original political novelists and discuss other political novelists of the era:, Elizabeth Gaskell’sMary Barton; Disraeli’sSybil, or the Two Nations; George Meredith, Beauchamp’s Career. I also went over Mill’s Subjection of Women. For next week I sent URLS to my blogs and essay on The Pallisers; to on-line pieces by Watson, Tricia Aryton, one on socialism in the 19th century novel.; also Nancy Henry’s Rushing into Eternity: Finance and Suicide in the Victorian Novel from Victorian Investments (a collection of essays); URL to my blog on Mill’s Subjection of women.
Apr 16: 7th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 51-60. If I can I will show clips from Parts 1-4 of the film adaptation. For next week send I send Sharon Marcus, “Contracting Female Marriage in Can You Forgive Her?, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60:3 (2005):291-395; also a thesis by Arlene Rodriguez: Self-Sacrifice as Desire: Eleanor Bold and Alice Vavasour
Apr 23: 8th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 61-70. I send for the next week (penultimate) Bill Overton, “An Interior View,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1976):489-99; “Self and Society in Trollope,” ELH 45978):258-302
Apr 30: 9th: CYFH?, we cover Chapters 71-80. La commedia e finita. For next week I will try to find an essay on travel and travel stories in Victorian novels; and we will discuss Trollope and the Male Career (Nicholas Dames’s essay on the place of career trajectories in Trollope’s novels?) and I will show clips.
May 7: 10th: Last thoughts on CYFH?; Clips from Parts 5-6 of the film adaptation. the problem of Trollope’s reputation. Looking forward to Phineas Finn (Palliser 2)
George Vavasour and Scruby, his campaign manager (Gary Watson and Gordon Gostelow) looking over a check to cover costs of election
Phineas Finn and Laurence Fitzgibbon (Donal McCann and Neil Stacy), two Irishmen entering Parliament (not insiders, last episode of CYFH?)
The interlocking stories and characters of the Pallisers or as it once was called the Parliamentary novels actually gets its start in the 5th Barsetshire novel. The story of Lady Glencora McClusky and Burgo Fitzgerald’s passionate love, clandestine engagement and its abrupt ending and her & Plantagenet Palliser’s coerced marriage is begun in Chapters 23 (“Mr Plantagenet Palliser”), 43 (“Fie, fie!”) and 55 (“Not very fie fie after all”) of The Small House of Allington. You can find them online
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/allington/
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/allington/chapter43.html
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/allington/chapter55.html
And you can watch the first episode of The Pallisers, which covers this early episode from The Small House; it comprises the first 45 minutes of what appears to be a vast YouTube of the whole of the Pallisers (but somewhat abridged). Search on the YouTube site for The Pallisers, Can You Forgive Her, Part 1.
The coerced engagement of Lady Glencora McClusky and Plantagenet Palliser realized symbolically in a park walk (Episode 1 of the Pallisers, from chapters in The Small House at Allington):
Suggested supplementary reading & film for Trollope and Can You Forgive Her?
Glendinning, Victoria. Anthony Trollope. NY: Knopf, 1993. Lively and filled to the brim with a sense of Trollope’s life.
Halperin, John. Trollope & Politics: A study of the Pallisers and Others. University of So. California, 1977. Informative invigorating study.
MacDonald, Susan Peck. Anthony Trollope. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Excellent concise study of the man and his novels.
Mill, John Stuart, “Anthony Trollopee Subjection of Women.” Broadview Press, 2000. Online at: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645s/
Nardin, Jane. He Knew She Was Right: The Independent woman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope. Carbondale: So. Illinois UP, 1989. Balanced, and insightful.
Pallisers. Dir. Hugh David, Ronald Wilson. Screenplay by Simon Raven. Perf: Susan Hampshire, Philip Latham, Donal McCann, Barbara Murray, Anna Massey and Donald Pickering (among others). BBC, 1974, DVD. Available in a newly digitalized version.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Standford University Press, 1988.
Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography. NY: New Amsterdam, 1975. A pleasure to read.
Terry, R. C. Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding. New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977. About how artful the novels are.
Wall, Stephen. Trollope: Living with Characters. NY: Holt, 1988.
Three good general books on the era:
A.N. Wilson, The Victorians. Entertaining, a bit dense, lots of little biographies.
Susie Steinbach, Understanding The Victorians: Culture and Society in 19th century Britain. She may look less entertaining but she writes clearly and reads easily — and about larger issues from an angle that enables the reader to see the larger political struggles in terms of the daily lives, experiences, and attitudes of ordinary Victorians, and thus manages to get at the important difficult terrain of inward mentalities and the actual experience of particular milieus in the Victorian era.
Simon Heffner’s High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. He is a conservative paternalist Tory writer for the Spectator, Telegraph, New Statesman, sometimes the Guardian and his book, fat as it is, gives real insight into what is commonly thought of as politics. A lot about parliament and progressive legislation and how these laws came about. A section on the Great Exhibition.
George and Alice quarrel violently at the fells, Cumberland
Kate Vavasour with broken arm (Miss E Taylor, one of the original illustrations for Trollope’s novel)
Ellen
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