Anthony Trollope’s Two American Civil War Christmas stories: The Widow’s Mite & The Two Generals

Jo (Maya Hawke) in the 2017 British TV serial version of Little Women: opening Christmas scene anticipating the war to come

Gentle friends and interested readers,

For this Christmas I researched into two of Trollope’s little or lesser-known Christmas stories, especially his two American civil war Christmas “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” I had been taking a course in the politics of the 30 year period leading up to the Civil War, and had realized I had misunderstood some of the finer points of Trollope’s two Christmas stories whose context and settings were that of the US Civil War. So when I became aware that no one in our online every-other-week Trollope reading group (sustained by the Trollope Society) had volunteered to discuss “Christmas at Kirby Cottage,” I volunteered to talk of these two powerful and in our era newly relevant Christmas war stories.

My interest in Trollope’s Christmas stories is nothing new for me (scroll down to “Christmas stories”). I’ve been very interested in Victorian and Edwardian Christmas stories, and had over several years led groups of people on my listserv to read not only Trollope’s but other 19th century writers’ Christmas stories. I was fascinated by their connection to the gothic, for many of them are ghost stories. Dickens’s toweringly famous A Christmas Carol is a ghost story (at least 4 of them) whose difference and deep appeal derives from the ghosts acting in redemptive ways — in most ghost stories, including those written for Christmas, the ghost is a revenant coming back seemingly to retaliate on some unpunished crime or evil act, but where the ghost hits out hard on some innocent person who just happens to be around when this ghost arrives.

The effect is often Kafkaesque, with reactions of the characters in the story to the readers listening from uncanny-terrifying to unnerving irretrievable loss to mind-pausing endlessly disquieting unforgettable enigma. I recommend my reader try the ghost stories of Sheridan LeFanu (collected as In a Glass Darkly), Margaret Oliphant’s Stories of the Seen and the Unseen, and the variously published ghost stories of Elizabeth Gaskell, and M. R. James. Our own modern rewrites of these that have become popular are similarly seriously intended traumatic ghost tales, e.g., It’s a Wonderful Life.

This kind of thing is not in Trollope’s repertoire. I cannot remember one re-telling of a dream or nightmare in all of Trollope’s 47 novels and 42 short stories. At the close of “Aaron Trow,” about an English worker who is turned into a raging terrorist after having been put for untold years in a convict prison; he is brutally murdered after he wreaked a violent disfigurement on a lone woman living on the Bermudas. We are told the dead man’s revenant (it is said) may be seen haunting the recesses of this remote place, but it’s not clear this isn’t rumor brought about by guilt of those who destroyed this man.

He found himself driven to write at least eight (eight are found in the Trollope Society edition), or ten — if you include two more which he denominated an Antipodes Christmas story and had published in a number of Good Words called Good Cheer for the Christmas market: Harry Heathcote of Gangoil and “The Telegraph Girl.” It’s my view Trollope did succeed in writing powerful memorable true Christmas stories a number of times — although none that I know of are cozy, magical or readily comforting. The best of them challenge us to think about what a Christmas story should be, what Christmas itself stands for in our imagination and experience, and push us into being better people.

His view of what a Christmas story should contain is found within a longer complaint he made about having to write stories to order for a Christmas market in these words fits these stories:

A Christmas story, in the proper sense, should be the ebullition of some mind anxious to instill others with a desire for Christmas religious thought, or Christmas festivities, – or, better still, with Christmas charity

As Christmas stories in Trollope’s mode, “The Widow’s Mite” questions the nature of charity. What is it? Why do we do it? How does it relate to sacrifice? “The Two Generals” is about a serious communal tragedy, a savage break-up of a society where we see the cost of sustaining and routing out a deeply unnatural evil which hurts too many people centrally, and against which when enough numbers of people objected deeply, has become unbearable. Both are very Trollopian tales with Trollopian political and social complications and tropes — though the core matters, desperate poverty and chattel slavery, are unusual.

For example, Trollope in both stories has a pro-union or abolitionist heroine marry a pro-confederacy pro-slavery male. This is very like what he does in The Warden: there he exposes the exploitation and greed of the church by showing how an income meant to support elderly impoverished workers has become a large income for a wealthy cleric in a caste patronage system; but since Mr Harding is such good and well-meaning man, and we are told (somewhat improbably) unaware of the evil he was perpetrating, we are thwarted from truly acting out the implied criticism of the church’s norms and structures themselves. Trollope is drawn to these perverse collocations. He thwarts us, in these two stores he presents two couples whose choices make it difficult for us to take a side.

I have wondered if these knots Trollope invents are ways his conservative POV amid a radical examination of issues prevents us from having a clear way to talk about it and supposedly act.

The two stories I researched are filled with a particular historical content — the US Civil War — which is today still wreaking racial class and regional repercussions in the US, and closely relevant to food insecurity, heat and electricity deprivation in the UK (class and income inequality). I hope I have given information enough to make clear the nuances in the depictions of the characters and their arguments in the two stories.

You may find the transcript and video on the Trollope Society website here

You can also reach the video of my talk on YouTube.

and the transcript by itself on academia.edu

https://www.academia.edu/93447840/Trollopes_American_Civil_War_Christmas_Stories_The_Widows_Mite_and_The_Two_Generals_

I wish all who read this a satisfying contented — peaceful, happy, joyous (if possible) Winter Solstice holiday and good year to come. The way I observe and participate is to watch Christmas movies. I began with John Huston’s The Dead last night and intend tomorrow night to re-see for an umpteenth time the 1951 British movie of A Christmas Carol (apparently originally titled Scrooge), featuring famously Alistair Sim.

Scrooge at first superficially unnerved by Marley’s ghost (Marley was dead, to begin with …. “)

Ellen

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Into the Woods at the Signature Theater, Arlington: very well done, very touching

The baker (Jake Lowenthal) and his wife (Erin Weaver)

This musical needs no recommendation, but perhaps this particular production as a seasonal favorite does

Gentle readers and kind friends,

The world may be about to burst into flames or drowned seven fathoms deep, people killed senselessly and maliciously or for profit everywhere we look (recently especially the world’s cup with millions watching anyway), a mad-dog version of an older political party about to take over the US House of Representatives, with the aim of doing nothing but destroy, but this year Washington DC can boast of several emotionally fulfilling productions — which (I think) do this by returning to faery tale and fantasy. The usual Folger production is at the Roundhouse in Maryland (and it has been too far for me or I would have seen it more than once), a wonderful Tempest, Wicked at the Kennedy Center, still sparkling, I’d say utterly iconic (the witch looks like Margaret Hamilton), and this past week, I enjoyed the National Theater fantasy caricature of MAAN.

What I liked about this Into the Woods — I’ve seen a number, including a year after Jim died, the Disney adaptation (see the blog for discussion of Sondheim’s motives and ideas about the faery tales) –,  is its clarity. What a wonder.  It is not over- nor under-produced. You were allowed to pay attention to the outlines of the interwoven stories, the characters’ lines, and their simple or archetypal emotions. I don’t know how they managed such a fresh feel, but they did it

At turning points in the plot-design, the whole cast gets together around the storyteller to hear where we are and project togetherness

Perhaps, as may be gathered from Peter Marks’s review (Washington Post), it was just that you were able to grasp the common human emotion driving this fantasy character in his or her ordinary predicament (she cannot get pregnant, the young boy will not be able to make a living, the little girl as a woman is impeded by a predatory male wolf), several of them desperate.

Cinderella in her Russian peasant outfit — the outfits seemed to me redolent of Russian peasants in archetypal movies (especially that of the Baker)

The Cinderella core paradigm of envy among women feels the least humanly convincing, the most exaggerated: the stepmother and three sisters resonated least for me, were most artificial because they were all made so ugly. Curious, the incidents that today hit home: the prince, when his princess has disappeared, aggressively seducing and lying to the baker’s wife, and the witch as the mother who in her need for her daughter’s love rationalizes she’s protecting her, when she’s preventing her from living. I this time admit the witch’s lines to Rapunzel “Stay with me:” “Don’t you know what’s out there in the world? … Stay at home … Who out there could love you more than I? …

Stay with me
The world is dark and wild
Stay a child while you can be a child …

did not resonate as much. I feel the original witch-look (Nova Y. Payton) was too much a caricature, and her black-sequined glamor gown made her not sufficiently a mother, more too much of a “black mamma” sexual object. There is such a thing as over-modernization because our favored cultural images and gestures are so very artificial, relentlessly competitive, and heartless. So there the simplifying didn’t work; the witch role was over-the-top, done somewhat crudely

Alex de Bard as Little Red Riding Hood shrugging off two mothers

I call the ambiance clarity, for this is the first time I realized how many of the characters actually die. Hitherto I thought of this as a story where we are shocked by the unexpected sudden unprepared death of the baker’s wife, but in fact (taking faery as fact), Little Red Riding Hood’s mother and grandmother die, Jack’s mother dies, the storyteller at one point is no longer with us, and I never felt assured the blinding of several characters was reversed. I had taken it the first half ends happily, so we are left to wonder what can keep us to a second half?

The spiky paratextual theme song (“Into the Woods” we go) is essential for keeping the impetus thrust forward going

I wondered what more was there to say? It is really common for Sondheim’s musicals to fall off in the second half (especially clear in Sunday in the Park with George). That was the feel as we re-began . But soon we began to see a lot could happen — that’s why we need all this wishing: the statements “I wish”  begins the production and one more ends it.

Disaster strikes in the form of a never-seen female monster-giantess. Feel free to allegorize? We watch our left-standing characters re-group again and again — after some squabbling. I remembered the death of the Baker’s wife since it was emphasized in the Disney film (and the other deaths skipped or slid over somehow), but that this was the incident in the film which provoked the lyrics that I began to keen over once again: here it was Red Riding Hood who suddenly missed her grandmother

Sometimes people leave you
Halfway through the wood
Others may deceive you.
You decide what’s good.
You decide alone.
But no one is alone …

Jim has left us (me and Izzy) halfway through the wood. I just moved stiffly further back in my chair as I tried to dissociate myself from the audience, theater, all about me, lobby outside. Once again I was not quite recovered when four of the characters and baby were left bonded into a new family, and then, one by one, the disappeared characters returned  onto the stage, and became part of a singing your soul out ensemble.

Don’t miss it. Magical fairytale, It’s a Wonderful Life without the miracle. Dogged as does it.

Cast towards the end singing their hearts out

I need to tell you how I managed to go. I had a win last week when I went to the Phillips with the same friend who accompanied me to this musical and then in Shirlington to dinner out in a quiet restaurant with delicious Thai food. So I am no longer immured at night even if public transportation has once again been cut — as long as there is not yet another cab or bus to take once I arrive near my destination. Very nervously I obtained the address of the restaurant from a waiter, clicked away on Lyft, went outside when it said 1 minute to go and found the car (by license plate) and man (by name, Khalid).  It is against the backdrop of what’s happening across the world, a reactionary deprivation of the majority, more and more isolation from many causes (though we have had a pushback this election cycle) that these musicals (that do not refer to the Christian myth) can best be understood.

Ellen

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Much Ado About Nothing set inside a TV news-as-entertainment program — Shakespeare Theater Company at the Harmon Theater (DC)

Beatrice (Kate Jennings Grant) and Benedick (Rick Holmes) as TV news anchors

Readers and friends,

As many local people (DC, Maryland and Virginia) know, the Shakespeare Theater Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing (now running until Dec 11th) has been getting rave reviews. Some acknowledge you have to suspend your common sense when it comes to matching words to the action, or consistency in what happens right before us; the reviewer’s reply:  “So to Shakespeare purists I say: Reason not the need.” Supported by a strong case (I agree a number of the center actors are very good), we are to turn ourselves over to those who want to give a party

Intermittently the stage revolves and we find ourselves at a ball (this is the last scene of the play)

I don’t like being called a Shakespeare purist:  to me that means I want to see Shakespeare’s play for real at some level, a production that does justice to his text and genius. I think rather that we need not dismiss Shakespeare at all, that the production does present a coherent enough reading of the play, its transformations witty  & some appropriate. I admit as the play opened, my first reaction was to feel appalled: for a start, the characters were not following the original play’s script. I could barely hear Shakespeare’s language, there were flashing lights everywhere, lots of noise and neon. How did the production win me over until by the end I was enjoying it and had participated in genuine grief and happiness from the play?

We were in SNN (Shakespeare News Network) and hearing of episodes in Shakespeare’s other plays retold in reductive or caricatured funny ways; these punctuated the action, and they became more hilarious and more daring as the play went on. Some of the funniest had Shakespeare’s other characters’ lines as tweets. The two central stories gradually unfold, and as far as I could tell, most of Shakespeare’s best lines were kept: perhaps Kate Jennings Grant as Beatrice was too loud, too aggressive; she was (I felt) overdoing the assertion, but she was matched by Rick Holmes as Benedick undermining her. What they were doing (and I’ve seen this in other productions of MAAN) was trying to cover over, blend together two disparate stories: Hero and Claudius come near tragedy, and far from iconoclastic, and subversive of anything, they are over-the-top conventional. So the actors (Nicole King and Paul Deo, Jr) were made to speak what they had similarly loudly and with accompanying comic and romantic business also dressed absurdly:

Hero (King), Beatrice and Leonato (Edward Gero)

The theme of Shakespeare’s play is the danger of gossip, of rumor, of misinformation, and it’s from that angle the news-show as entertainment fit its themes. I found myself amused by the ingenuity of the appropriation’s details. We were worked through the farce of Benedict being fooled into thinking that Beatrice loves him and Beatrice vice-versa, with them listening from behind going into all kinds of conniption fits. Then the actors were working so hard, meant so well and at moments winked past their costumes and the action to signal to the audience. Beatrice ends in a garbage bin; when she emerges hurls a piece of pizza across the stage, she looked pointedly at us to applaud her. That sort of thing. Then we see the videotaping of two characters dressed up to resemble Hero and another man. A kind of falsification of evidence we are familiar with. As in all productions, one is then pushed into the pathos of Hero and made to feel the cruelty of the way the men humiliate Hero and her father, never giving either a chance to explain or justify themselves, and become emotionally involved:

Margaret (Dina Thomas) to the side; Benedick as in all productions ends on the side of the women

Then back to farce with the intervention of Dogberry (Dave Quay), Verges (David Bishins) and two unnamed cops as an incompetent surveillance team and secret service; at moments it all felt inspired as we moved back to hear more of what was going on in other of Shakespeare’s plays (everyone dead on the stage in Hamlet, the war in Egypt not going so well &c&c). In the better productions I’ve seen this interlude of Shakespeare’s play is not downplayed but used centrally as it was here:

I’m not going to make it better than it was. Like this summer’s DC production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, this was a frolicking, rollicking version of one of our national ritual plays meant to rouse us out of ourselves — and here, however lightly, skimmingly, to comment on our own world that has such ridiculous TV shows:  it won’t bear philosophical or political scrutiny. I wished too that Gero had been given more space and time to convey Shakespeare’s old man’s grief (I remember when he was doing the heroes of Shakespeare’s plays), but it is a kind of compliment to this play if it were not such a trek for me to get there, I’d see it twice so as to take in what was happening. I wished I were closer to the stage to hear what was said or we had surtitles.

I’d like to end on the idea that were it filmed as Kate Hamil’s dancing Sense and Sensibility has been, I’d go to see it in a theater or (better yet) stream it up close to me on my computer in my home. At the same time, as with Hamil’s staged production, a lot was done that was fun that only works in a live theater. Each time I go to a play since the pandemic entered this later stage, I am reminded that wonderful as it is to watch them from London on my computer, much is lost without the lived real presences and its accompanying sense of risk taken.

Ellen

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“The irony of A Christmas Carol reboots in the age of billionaires”

A Whole Lot of Humbug (New York Times)

Dear friends and readers,

This NBC review of two new movies for the Christmas market is superb and ironic; at moments nearly scathing: Anibundel offers a sort of history of Dickens’s story in commercial terms (how many sold), a concise synopsis, and then these two new rewrites (?): Scrooge and Spirited, the animated one with a stellar cast (including Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley).

The irony of “Christmas Carol” reboots in the age of billionaires is “too bad neither “Scrooge” nor “Spirited” knows how:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/netflix-christmas-carol-reboot-spirited-misses-elon-musk-irony-rcna59889

Egbert says the ide of Spirited is there is a spirit industry in the business of redeeming a new miser each year; Metacritic finds Spirited a “whole lot of Christmas fun”

Scrooge, the animated one, is [more than] “slightly off key (another NYTimes review)

As Anibundel says, today’s super-rich are not finding redemption by being charitable …. I add they are not seeking redemption even …

FWIW, it seems from her description these contemporary versions have not made Scrooge into a miser. To make the “trick” work the very rich old man must both be a miser, seen as socially isolated, finamentally alone and somehow embittered.  Central to the assumptions of the modern versions of Dickens’s tale is it is terrible to be alone; to keep Christmas is to be with others in a kindly spirit.

Opening scene of 1951 movie

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FWIW, my feeling is Dickens’s story would have to be so changed to speak to people today that it would really take the sort of thing a brilliant sequel or post-text once in a long while does. Some new character or perspective not in the original, or some minor character. The new character or perspective is Mary Reilly (Valerie Martin) out of RLS’s Jekyll and Hyde. The minor characters. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Stoppard) out of Hamlet.

Donna Reed as the unmarried Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life

A minor character ignored is the woman Scrooge loved as a young woman and who rejected him, and is seen fleetingly working in a poorhouse. Why has no one thought to re-write a post-text centering on her? Give her a memorable name? Remember her in the last scenes of memory of in the presence of Christmas present? … Probably not, and this morning I cannot locate my DVD of the 1951 movie and this moment is nowhere on the Net. Only the absurd picture of George Bailey’s wife, unmarried, an old maid librarian (a fate worse than death in It’s A Wonderful Life); Scrooge’s ex- grown old finds worthy fulfilling self-sacrificing (of course) charity to be performed.

See my review of the British 1951 movie, A Christmas Carol, with the imitable Alistair Sim, where the film-makers and audience could still respond to Dickens’s ghost tale.

Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey

I’ve written many reviews of Christmas movies meant for the Christmas market and others which have become Christmas movies over the years. But as a reboot, It’s a Wonderful Life deserved a blog of its own.

Roubaix in A Christmas Tale (a recent favorite with me)

Ellen

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