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 George Mason University
Day: Wednesday later morning, 11:50 to 1:15 pm,
March 27th to May 8
4210 Roberts Road, Tallwood, Fairfax Va
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. Read for first week, Chapters 1-11
Mar 27: 1st week: Introduction: Trollope’s life and career; three approaches: women’s issues; as a great political novelist; the artist in hiding: Trollope and the epistolary situation; read for next week, CYFH?, Chs 12-23; read also Robert Hughes’s “Trollope and Fox-Hunting,” Essays in Literature, 12:1 (1984):75-84
Apr 3: 2nd: The state of law and customs regarding marriage, custody of children, women’s property; political parties and the electorate; for next week read CYFH?, Chapters 24-35; read for next week Chapters 35-46, and George Levine, “Can You Forgive Him? and the myth of realism,” Victorian Studies, 18:1 (1974):5-30
Ap 10: 3rd: film clips; Characters; plot-design; POV, the ironical narrator; men’s worlds; women’s friendships; for next week I’ll cover Mary Poovey’s the financial system (sent as attachment) and bills of exchange; for next week read Chs 36-46; I’ll send URLS to my own essays and blogs on the 1974 film adaptation, The Pallisers.
Apr 17: 4th: CYFH?, Political worlds in the 19th century, coerced marriages and adultery; read for next week Chapters 47-58, and I’ll cover Mill’s On the Subjection of Women; Nancy Henry’s essay: “Rushing into Eternity:” Suicide and Finance in Victorian Fiction,” Victorian Investments, New Perspectives on Finance and Culture (a chapter from this book); I send Sharon Marcus, “Contracting Female Marriage in Can You Forgive Her?, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60:3 (2005):291-395
Apr 24: 5th: CYFH?, Read for next week Chapters 59-70. I will try again to show clips from the 1970s film adaptation. Alternatives: Dames, Nicholas. “Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition.” Arlene Rodriguez, “Self-sacrifice as desire: on Eleanor Harding and Alice Vavasour, a masters thesis. Or an essay on travel and travel stories in Victorian novels.
May 1: 6th: CYFH?, Traveling abroad; Trollope and the Male Career (Nicholas Dames’s essay on the place of career trajectories in Trollope’s novels); The official Trollope takes over; read for next week Chapters 70-80 and Bill Overton, “An Interior View,” Modern Language Notes 71 (1976):489-99; “Self and Society in Trollope,” ELH 45:2 (1978):258-302.
May 8: 7th: CYFH?: La commedia e finita. Anticipating 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 may be found across three chapters in The Small House at Allington: 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/chapter23.html
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/allington/chapter43.html
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/trollope/anthony/allington/chapter55.html
It is also dramatized in 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. I will myself the first or second session of class retell these three chapters.
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, “The 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
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
What fun this would be. I like just reading the syllabus.
Christine
On Wed, Mar 20, 2019, 2:16 AM Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two wrote:
> ellenandjim posted: ” 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 ” >