Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate: a group reading

The Last of England (1855) — Ford Madox Brown

Dear friends and readers,

This too is an unusual blog or has become unusual. I’ve not for a long time advertised (in effect) one of the many group reads I participate in: I used to do this for those I lead on my listservs. We’ve been reading non-Trollope books on Trollope and His Contemporaries @ groups.io lately, books relatively unknown by women, colonialist and post-colonialist novels (Mary Taylor, Miss Miles, Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration from the North) and have come to read one of these by Trollope, and I’m hoping this relatively unknown but strong book will provoke interesting conversation. We read it once before on the list, but twenty years is a long time and the world has changed so that I feel we would come away concentrating on very different things than we did the first time round. Then we talked a lot about the sexual promiscuity and bigamy stories:

From modern illustrations by Francis Moseley in the Folio Society edition: John Caldigate glimpses Mrs Euphemia Smith for the first time aboard the ship going to Australia

Now I surmise we’d be a lot more interested in the cultural and social conflicts undergone and conflicts arising from these.

On Trollope-l (at the time the name) we read after JC after Is He Popenjoy? and The American Senator as three relatively unknown novels by Trollope. N John Hall says it is nonetheless among his best (!) — I’m not sure about that. In said Folio Society edition, R. C. Terry gives the novel high praise: he connects its matter to The Way We Live Now with its “evolving world of money, greed, and materialism in which ethical issues are becoming more urgent and difficult; it has a romantic myth of a young man who disappoints his father but wins out through high adventure, court-room scenes and stints in jail. There is much autobiographical resonance in the depiction of the estrangement and then coming together of the father and son.

From N. John Hall — in my own words: It has a number of chapters set either on board a ship bound for Australia or in Australia itself. Trollope had twice (1871 and 1875) journeyed to Australia to see his son, Fred, and had completed a long travel book about his time there, Australia and New Zealand (published 1873). It is one of several fictions set in Australia or on the way “out” & back to a colony (Harry Heathcote, “The Journey to Panama”, “Catherine Carmichael”, “Returning Home”). The toughness of the life presented, the frankness which which life is lived connects John Caldigate to Trollope’s Irish books as well as to other novels with romantic and adventuresome locales. The intransigent (and anti-sex) mother of the heroine, Mrs Bolton, recalls a similar female in Linda Tressel; the intolerance of everyone Nina Balatka. Although many of the novels’ chapters are set in England and explores English provincial life, particularly the narrowness of a provincial community, its lack of choices, what happens on board and in Australia initiates everything else, and we return to Australia in order insofar as this may be done vindicate the eponymous hero in the end.

It did help Trollope’s reputation. After several novels which were strongly criticized or didn’t sell very well (including The Prime Minister), this one was liked and sold, and reviewed favorably. Trollope hadn’t placed it quickly but when he had he got £1,200 from Chapman and Hall for exclusive book rights, and £600 from Blackwood’s for serial rights. It was serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine from April 1878 to June 1879.

It connects back to Is He Popenjoy? (written October 1874 to May 1875) because it too is said to have been inspired by the Tichborne case: just about everyone who has written about it tells how Trollope wanted to call it Mrs John Caldigate or John Caldigate’s Wife because it focuses on bigamy, and has people turning up thousands of miles from where the hero thought he had left them forever in order to lay claim to an estate. The question is again legitimacy. It is also linked to Trollope’s Dr Wortle’s School (a novella written 8-9 April 1879) and to “sensation” novels like Ellen Wood’s East Lynne and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. There’s a dramatic trial, a disreputable past (clandestine sex is what happens), and some harsh emotional violence between a mother and daughter over her sexual and emotional allegiance to the man she calls her husband.

To join click on the link; here is our schedule:

June 12, Chapters 1-8
June 19, Chapters 9-16
June 26, Chapters 17-24
July 3, Chapters 25-32
July 10, Chapters 33-40
July 17, Chapters 41-48
July 24, Chapters 49-54
July 31, Chapters 55-64

While there has been no film adaptation, there has been a graphic novel by Simon Grennan. It was announced, described, made available at the Leuven Trollope conference in 2015, and on one of my blog reports from the conference I reprinted one page of the pictures and one side of the endpapers — a beautiful depiction of a very gothic looking house, which I transfer here:

This could be either Caldigate’s father’s house or the Bolton’s — probably the Bolton’s, an imprisoning fearful emotionally violent place.

tt is a kind of unusual graphic novel because 1) the pictures are not close-ups; we are kept at a distance from the characters. And 2) there are few words — or far fewer than some of these graphic novels use when it comes to a serious “classic” 19th century novel. I don’t see a summary of the plot but I did read it and beyond omitting the comical post-office part of the novel at its ending), Grennan makes a couple of other modernizing changes. There are aborigines in the story

This is from my blog:

The team chose this novel as a less familiar one, one never adapted before. They cut the post office sections of the novel as they felt a graphic novel could not make these appealing Grennan decided he would try for pictures that projected what he thought were the aesthetic emphases of the novel. He wanted to visual equivocation, to keep readers and viewers at a distance from the characters in the way Trollope does: there would be no close-ups and even few middle distance shots and the point of view would be of a camera low-down. He was seeking a rhythmic roundtable of points of view; all the costumes reflect the way 19th century people of that decade dressed, the kinds of rooms they lived in. He did not want to use styles associated with classic comic; he wanted to capture this previous time as something strange. He developed a story of aborigines, practiced historical verisimilitude.

Grennan later told me he dressed Mrs Smith so she would have been recognizable in the era as a “Dolly Varden:” she is a character in Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge whose coy highly-sexualized self-presentation (Dickens just salivates over her) was taken up by music hall performers — after all Mrs Smith has been and returns to the stage (though the reader never see her do this). (I admit I prefer to imagine Mrs Smith in her more somber outfits as a mature woman who confronts life and men frankly as their equal.) Simon chose dark deep rich colors (purples and browns) where-ever appropriate, and reserved yellows and golden browns and greens for suggesting seasons and landscapes. There is an French edition if anyone is interested, but be warned there are very few words.

So, come one, come all, you are not likely to find this book read by a group of people anywhere else this summer.

Telegraph Depot, Ninety Miles up the Roper River, Northern Territory,” Illustrated Sydney News, 31 August 1872

To Trollope-l

Ellen