The Last Chronicle of Barset: Josiah Crawley, Trollope’s Jean Valjean; and Lily Dale, the shattered tree

“Dogged as does it” — Giles Hoggett advising Josiah Crawley (Last Chronicle of Barset, Ch 61, F.A. Fraser)

‘I believe, as I am sitting here,’ said Lord Lufton, ‘that he has told the truth, and that he does not know any more than I do from whence the cheque came.’
‘I am quite sure he does not,’ said Dr Thorne ….
‘I don’t see it,’ said Lord Lufton, ‘I might have a lot of paper money by me, and not know from Adam where I got it.’
‘But you would have to show where you got it, my lord, when inquiry was made,’ said Mr Fothergill…
‘Nothing on earth should induce me to find him guilty were I on a jury.’ [Lufton]
‘But you have committed him.’ [Mark]
… I simply did that which Walker told us we must do … ‘ (“Mr Crawley is taken to Silverbridge,” “Dinner at Framley,” Last Chronicle of Barset, Chs 8 & 10)

“If you take a young tree and split it, it still lives, perhaps. But it isn’t a tree. It is only a fragment’
‘Then be my fragment.’
‘So I will, if it can serve you to give standing ground to such a fragment in some corner of your garden. But I will not have myself planted out in the middle, for people to look at. What there is left would die soon’ (“The Shattered Tree,” Last Chronicle, Ch 77)

Friends and readers,

There is just no doubt in my mind that had the Rev Josiah Crawley’s story unfolded today, he would have become infected with the coronavirus, & perhaps died, compromised as his health was after years of arduous hard work on scarcely any food, of intense stress from grief, loss, and humiliation because his pay as perpetual curate was egregiously derisory, the nature of his work to go perpetually among the poorest to help them with the plainest tasks, to teach them, the poorest who of course would have been dying in large numbers. We all remember how his wife, Mrs Crawley, almost died in Framley Parsonage, having gotten sick with “typhus fever” (as it was called) from her contact through her husband with the Hogglestock people.

I maintain in this blog that Josiah Crawley is more of a hero for our time than Hugo’s man for Trollope’s theme is how inequality works: Like Jean Valjean, Crawley is accused of the smallest of crimes, he cannot remember where he got a £20 note, which seems to have been used to pay down a debt for desperately needed groceries; but unlike Hugo’s hero, the point our author makes is not that Crawley was driven to steal — neither our author or anyone in the book can believe Crawley could ever mean to do something said to be morally wrong; it’s rather that the pressure of living under such deprived conditions as he must daily endure has made him unable to pay attention to the most embittering of details of open charity. In the book’s first chapter we are shown how Crawley is regarded with distaste and distrust by the males trusted to be magistrates and sit on juries.

Crawley before the magistrates (Last Chronicle, Ch 8, G. H. Thomas)

Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves (from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Rev Crawley’s frequent reading)

By the time of the grand jury trial it has been suggested there is no pity due this man: why did he take this position, when he knew the salary by itself would not provide enough money for him to live as a clergyman with a family, someone asks. The community feeling is it’s somehow his fault his family starves, live in embarrassingly worn-out clothes — his personality is to blame; otherwise, it’s implied he’d have been promoted.  Chapter 5 depicts the acute poverty of the Crawleys. Not one person challenges the establishment which has made such a position for a learned gentleman to work in. No one but Grace seems to pay attention to or value her father’s learning, and she is after all forced and it does her no economic or social good once it’s discovered her father is disgraced.

We do learn that any scene involving money is traumatic for Josiah Crawley and that’s why he was a vulnerable scapegoat for those who might actually stole the check as a convenient cover for their own crimes.  Mrs Proudie exploits the sort of loophole that often exists in power shared by various people where it’s not clear that the Bishop has the authority to stop Crawley from preaching because he has not been found guilty. We watch Crawley stand up to this treatment and express the agony of his soul in a letter to the Bishop:

I am in a terrible straight. Trouble, and sorrow, and danger are upon me and mine. It may well be, as your lordship says, that the bitter waters of the present hour may pass over my head and destroy me. I thank your lordship for telling me whither I am to look for assistance … But the deeper my troubles, the greater my sorrow, the more pressing my danger, the stronger is my need that I should carry myself these days with that outward respect of self which will teach those around me to know that, let who will condemn me, I have not condemned myself’ (“The Bishop’s Angel,” Last Chronicle, Ch 13)

In this same book Trollope provides another set of characters in London, who are much richer, & get away with very crooked dealings — as stockbrokers with other people’s thousands of pounds; but no one arrests them. Crawley’s intense pride and sense of his own good character make him unable to cope with the scorn and indifference to him, he behaves re-actively, masochistically, and when he refuses to give up his position and salary on the grounds there has been no conviction, Mrs Proudie, the ecclesiastical wife roars he ought to be prison. What is this but a mirror of the “advanced” economies of quite a number of nations in 2020?

The formidable Mrs Proudie about to intrude herself into her husband’s ecclesiastical business (modeled on one of Thomas’s vignettes for Last Chronicle; from the BBC 1983 Barchester Chronicles, played by Geraldine McEwan)

Crawley does stand up brilliantly up for himself when not intimidated by a court of law as when he tells Mrs Proudie: “Opposition to usurped authority is an imperative duty” (“The Bishop of Barchester is Crushed,” Chapter 18), and he does follow his wife’s suggestion to go to London to get advice from her cousin, Mr Toogood (“Where did it come from?”, Chapter 19).

The solution to the book’s mystery (“Where did he get it?”) at book’s end is capable of being seen as having a peculiar anti-feminist and feminist twist. The origin of all the Crawley’s misery is (as is alas not uncommon with Crawley) partly unconsciously self-inflicted. A woman, Mrs Arabin, has inherited a legacy from her first husband (John Bold, way back in Barchester Towers) and she has the power to transfer bills she gets as rent on her property to other people; being a woman she either does not know the particulars of bill transmission or she is careless about it. Thus do we learn women should not be entrusted. She simply slipped the bill into a folder of bills her husband was intent on giving Mr Crawley as charity. (To be fair, how was she to know this bill had come to the tenant from his brother who had gotten it from a crook who saw it fall from the hands of an aristocratic lord’s man of business, snatched it up, and put it forward as rent.)

Now for the feminist twist: hitherto the Arabins had been slipping these sums of money and other gifts into the silent willing hands of Mrs Crawley, but the husband, indignant and irate that his wife should take it upon herself to accept such moneys and not tell him, demanded that people no longer give Mrs Crawley anything but rather make the offers to him. Now had it been Mrs Crawley whose mind is clearer, she would have been able to account for who gave her these bills in this folder. So his taking over the will of his wife, demanding her abject obedience backfired. I am not sure Trollope meant us to see or himself saw this whirligig of time taking its revenges on Crawley as a merciless bully over his wife. Perhaps Joanna Trollope, though, saw how unfairly Mrs Crawley was treated by him and could not bear her abject life (see my blog on The Rector’s Wife as a post-text to LCB).

We began a reading of this book as a group on Trollope & His Contemporaries (@groups.io) with the thought it had perhaps become dated because it is no longer the famous signature book Trollope readers go to first or are recommended to read as his masterpiece. It undoubtedly manifests some obsolete attitudes. We did discuss these and I digress from my central comparison of the parallel between Crawley and Lily Dale to show how they fit into the book.

There is a spectrum in this novel of social-psychological behavior and motives in the characters represented by the old-fashioned world of Barsetshire as we have come to experience it for 6 books, and the modern one of London as depicted here and in, say, the world of Sowerby in Framley Parsonage. The two ends are represented by the saintly Mr Harding, on the one hand; and the unchaste morally imbecilic women and greedy male money-lenders in London, on the other.

Mr Harding is the only person in the novel simply to guess how naturally and probably Mr Crawley happened to have the note: he was given it by Mrs Arabin, whom the novelist artificially keeps away from Barsetshire and her husband too by travels into Europe. He writes Eleanor to ask, thus himself initiating a bearable ending for Mr Crawley. He compounds this deus ex machina role by dying and asking the Archdeacon to give his sufficiently remunerated position to Crawley. The Archdeacon still has to be pressured into it as Crawley is not the type the establishment will respect & will not kowtow to the Archdeacon. Through Mr Harding Trollope also makes fun of the complicated explanatory plots of how things occur in a Wilkie Collins detection novel. We agreed on the list that Mrs Proudie has to be killed off or she would have prevented Mr Crawley from taking a decently paying position by persuading the Archdeacon (not hard to do) that Mr Crawley is surely unfit.

Trollope both jeers at and disdains the London women, showing no understanding or empathy for how a woman can come to sell sex and her body in the commercial hierarchical world of London. They must be sub-human in their stupidity and animal-like in their tastes. His problem is to link them in (perhaps the Broughton-Dalrymple plot is material he had worked up on its own) through John Eames and he cannot in this respectable novel show Eames is coming to Madalina Desmoulins to go to bed with her. He does show that Eames enjoys triumphing over her when she accuses him of using her. He just (almost inexplicably) cannot keep away unless threatened by marriage. (John Eames is supposed to be a kindly generous man, but not here at all.)

Trollope’s nasty misogyny reaches its height by having Conrad Dalrymple, a male artist (friend to Eames) paint the corrupt nasty wealthy woman’s daughter as Jael in the Jael-Sisera story of the Bible (see Judges 4-5, the Book of Judith). Jael kills Sisera by driving a nail into his head, a woman’s revenge story of the type Artemisia Gentileschi painted. Women painted this kind of thing from time to time, not men. In Trollope’s novel such paintings of stories are not women releasing anger but merely glamorous titillating sexy silliness. This conclusion or contempt for such paintings is represented by having Dalryple tear his painting, showing how little he thinks of it.

One of G. H. Thomas’s vignettes in the concluding London chapters of the book

The height of cruel bullying and punitive values in the novel is, however, shown in  Mrs Proudie’s behavior to her husband, to Crawley and a height of self-inflicted punishment (Dalrymple could have asked a large sum for his picture) is matched by the persuasive brilliance of the depiction of the complete collapse of her hold on her unfortunate husband and her subsequent death.  What has she to live for if she cannot inflict her power through pain on her husband and through him on other people? (she is the Trump of the book insofar as there is one). And the distastefulness and egregious stigmatizing of the London women is matched by the depiction of crooked real business dealings among the London males, and the collapse of Dobbs-Broughton’s business and his suicide.

Here too we have simulacrums of the modern world but mostly wholly out of spirit with what readers of contemporary novels and watchers of contemporary movie series accept as readable and watchable entertainment — not altogether unfortunately: you can find this kind of material on Fox TV and recent violent sexed-up movies in the form of mystery thrillers and fascistic fantasy action-adventure movies.

There is also a somewhat obsolete story in the romance of Major Grantley and Grace Crawley.  He insists on marrying her because he loves and values her, even though his parents are horrified at the thought of having as a daughter-in-law and wife to their son, the daughter of the impoverished and now accused Rev Mr Crawley.  I’d say it’s not wholly obsolete as today many a wealthy parent will move heaven-and-earth to prevent an adult child from marrying down, which in our world means to people of less money and less prestige.  But there is (out-of-date?) cloying element in the story as Grace is ever so grateful to Grantley and herself regards herself as beneath him and his parents. The material also includes a debate over the the obligation of an fully adult upper class male in the book (Major Grantly, a widower with an adolescent daughter), to marry only with his parents’ full approval of his chosen bride.

Further twist, the Archdeacon is as Major Grantly’s father, had persuaded his son to give up a good income in the military in order to live the life of a gentleman of leisure near his parents. Now he is wholly dependent on that father and the father is (an act of betrayal, of going back on his word) going to take the son’s income (an allowance) back if the Major marries the accused much despised impoverished non-networking curate’s daughter. He is put up to this by the malicious Griselda Grantley, now rewarded with one of the highest ranks for women in the book (Marchioness of Hartletop). Trollope empathizes with the Grantly’s parents’ idea they have the right to ask of their son he not lower their status in the world by his life choices.

I  think Trollope meant us to see at least how dangerous it is to give up one’s monetary independence based on a promise. What happens, however at moments cringeworthy the romance  (especially the scene between the Archdeacon just about salivating over the docile Grace) is at least capable of a humane turn of interpretation. Trollope enables us to see that Grace need not be punished all her life for the way the community regards her father; nor Grantly’s possible experience of joy taken from him because his longing for a gentleman’s life tempted him to give his father such power over him. Grantly fils can in modern terms choose an authentic existence; Grace can live with someone who will appreciate her talents. They can go to live more modestly on the continent. Of course our deus ex machina (see above) prevents this less than prosperous future.

“She read the beginning, ‘Dearest Grace'” — we see to the left, Grace Crawley intently reading a love letter from the Major; on the right, Lily Dale more relaxed posture, from the back, reading her newly arrived letter, with Mrs Dale with the newspaper in hand, a middle class breakfast scene (Last Chronicle, Ch 36, G. H. Thomas)

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For a few days — for a week or two, when the blow first struck here, she had been knocked down, and the friends who were nearest to her had thought she would never again stand erect upon her feet. But she had been very strong, stout at heart, of a fixed purpose, and capable of resistance against oppression. Even her mother had been astonished, and sometimes almost dismayed by her strength of will … (“Down at Allington,” Last Chronicle, Ch 16)

Lily and Grace Crawley sewing together, early in the book, becoming friends (a vignette by GH Thomas)

The book’s second traumatized character, Lily is (I gather from group discussions) often attacked for refusing to marry. I cannot say Trollope is wholly on Lily’s side. The Last Chronicle in part rehashes a story told in The Small House of Allington where Lily Dale is stunned and her deepest private feelings violated; she also experiences a Crawley-like public humiliation.  After not only engaging herself to Adolphus Crosbie, but making it plain to all she has given him her heart and soul (and perhaps body too), made herself abjectly his, Lily is, within less than a week of the engagement, cast aside by Crosbie for a cold rich titled woman. A young man, Johnny Eames, has loved her as a boy and offers himself in marriage, but apart from her never having been attracted to Eames sexually, she is emotionally shattered in ways analogous to a raped girl. In LCB, Crosbie, now a widower, of small but adequate means (his wife’s family having fleeced him), I suppose similar to Major Grantley, thinks to offer himself again to Lily.

The problem is Lily still loves the man who betrayed her. Lily’s idea that what is most painful is Crosbie’s notion he is making it up to her. In other words, he considers she cannot do with him. He is doing her a favor. And we are made to see that given his shallow nature, were she to marry him, he would soon act on the idea she needs him far more than he does her. He would let her know it, he would not appreciate her since she did not value herself enough. Her mother hates him & writes the cold distance rejection (Ch 23). It is very nervy of him to offer himself again to her. Again there is a parallel with Crawley: Lily’s pride is as strong as Crawley’s (and Major Grantly’s) and she could not bear a life of isolation with Crosbie, who is not accepted by any of her friends. In all Trollope’s novels, pride is central to people’s mental health itself so badly are we all in need of self-esteem.

In the later parts of LCB, in London and Allington (Chs 45,52, 76), we trace Lily’s coming to choose an independent unmarried life. She only goes totally to pieces when she is directly confronted by Crosbie in front of all the others but inwardly she craves peace and calm in order to be able to live with herself with any kind of psychological security.  It’s not Eames’s strategy to confront her with the demand she must marry to have a legitimate life, but he does send women friends to make this point!  Lily’s deepest impulse now is self-protection; she will not open up to sexual and social hurt, not  any one (man or women) the opportunity to control and humiliate her again. She knows that Eames has been “toying” again with another woman, but her refusal is predicated on her shattered state.

I suggest Lily Dale at the end of LCB is the closest Trollope ever comes to depicting for us a girl who has been raped or sexually abused badly – and in public.  She does say point blank to Emily Dunstable she thinks the better choice for all (it’s implied) is not to marry. Trollope’s narrator insists Lily loves Eames, and that she was near saying yes until knowledge of Eames’s affair (in our period it would be sex) with another nasty women determined her to say no; the sense is MD’s letter informing Lily of the affair made Lily angry over being likened to this base person, made her distrust and regard Johnny Eames as shallow for being able to become involved with her. But Lily does escape the charge of snobbery, self-estrangement and thinking too much about what’s to come from having thought too much about the past. And I maintain that we need not equate narrator with Trollope (as implied author).

Lily Dale and Johnny Eames, a last walk (Last Chronicle, G. H. Thomas)

Driven by Eames and then Mrs Arabin, Lily says 1) she “will not have myself planted out in the middle, for people to look at:” she feels Eames wants her as a trophy, symbol, his pride is what is driving him to want to show people after all she did prefer him; and 2) she is a shattered tree and once you axe the tree its fibers are never the same. It could be Johnny will be kind, generous, loyal, but that does not mean she is not maimed and will be able to respond to him. She cannot be what he wants.

When I have said I was maimed as a teenager by sexual encounters and abuse I experienced, I have gotten back the comment you should not be, & there is something wrong with you.  This is what Mrs Thorne aka Miss Dunstable implies to Lily when Mrs Thorne asserts Lily should be able to get over it. Sometimes it’s implied in ordinary life that the admirable person just emerges the stronger. In a conversation I once had with my father, he presented as an explanatory image a piece of wood, originally strong and fine, but then someone took a big axe and struck hard and the wood was never the same again, immeasurably shaky, un-sturdy. To switch from these metaphors to people, my father was telling me sometimes such a person needs to take care of him or herself in a different way from others. Keeping yourself intact from here on in is going to take work. Modern readers could sympathize more were Lily to go traveling, write for the newspapers, have a vocation, but Trollope is profoundly against regarding women as having value individually, they must be wives & want to be mothers to be seen as useful & respectable & whole. So he will not permit Lily to travel or have a vocation or even get a job.

I have omitted much that is enjoyable and beautifully done in the book. The slow gradual pace, as the pairs and trios of chapters unfold, reach emotional climaxes consonant with the action, occasionally parts of the London stories (especially brilliant, persuasive bitterness between characters over corrupt money dealings),  a host of minor characters well-observed, the pragmatic philosophy of that wonderful sleuth, Mr Toogood, and his goodness. Wonderfully realized believable types: Dr Temple, man of business as clergyman; Mark Robartes now grown older; Miss Dunstable is a disappointment but still herself.  I agree with Stephen Wall, Mr Harding’s visits to his cello are among the most moving passages Trollope ever wrote:

But he would … gaze upon the thing he loved, and he would pass his fingers among the broad strings, and ever and anon he would produce from one of them, a low, melancholy almost unearthly sound. And then he would pause, never daring to produce two such notes in succession — one close upon the other. They were the ghosts of the melodys of days long past. He imagined that his visits were unsuspected .. but the voice of the violoncello had been recognised by the servants, and by his daughter, and when that low wail was heard through the house — like the last dying note of a dirge — they would all know that Mr Harding was visiting his old friend’ (“Near the Close,” Last Chronicle, Ch 49)

To analyse Crawley & Lily & a number of these others (even the waiter at the tavern in Barchester) could take a small book in itself. We did feel maybe there was too much reiteration, so that what had been done with such freshness and subtlety was here reduced a bit — the romance from The Small House, and the thick ethnographic landscape of the Framley Parsonage world, though not Lady Lufton who again springs to complex life. A rare strong good and now at any rate a guardedly independent and forceful woman.

Lady Lufton meeting and besting the Duke of Omnium (Framley Parsonage, John Everett Millais)

The Last Chronicle of Barset is one of Trollope’s masterpieces in the novel way.

Ellen