To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive — RL Stevenson: a blog on books, films, art, music, culture
A briefer blog than usual (as to space): October 21, 2022, Kate Howe interviewed, the present Chairman of the London Trollope Society
Dominic Edwardes very perceptive on Trollope’s long fiction; he tells of Trollope’s place among his peers, his reputation then and now, his life, the mission of the Trollope Society to keep his books in print and read by as many people as the Society and internet can reach; Dominic also confides how he (DE) he came to read and love Victorian novels, then as among the best of them, Anthony Trollope, Dominic’s first introduction to the Society (he went to an event which he thought would be in costume and it turned out no such thing, so he was the only one there in costume) & what the Society is doing now: yearly dinner, lectures, trips, and a vast growing website where you find recorded information on Trollope’s fiction, on the illustrations to them, on editions, from many talks given at the every-other-week online general reading group, and information about other more local reading groups and lectures.
As prelude or preface to the interview, she includes a cornucopia of beautiful and effective illustrations from the fiction of the era — the sort of thing you find in the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels.
“Oh, George, if you knew all … ” (Francis Arthur Fraser, illustration for Trollope’s Golden Lion of Granpere, not included in Howe’s set, but the same sort of thing)
My theme is how the original illustractions intersected with the text of Trollope’s novels to produce unexpected and expected angles, and interpretations; that the pictures in the books have influenced the film adaptation scenes; and, how all, taken together and apart (mood and place, parallel and contrasting characters and events), reveal and display the unity of the Barsetshire series.
One of 17 vignettes/letters which Millais drew for the 1st edition of The Small House at Allington: Mr Crosbie Meets an old Clergyman on his way to Courcy Castle
“Evading the Grantlys” — Donald Pleasance as Mr Harding wandering in Westminster Abbey in an uncannily similar shot in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles (script Alan Plater, director David Giles)
Dear friends and readers,
I hope you are not tired of these. It was my honor and delight to give yet another talk to the London Trollope Society online reading group. This time my subject was the pictures found in The Small House at Allington. I thought that after the two and half-years we’ve been going, and have read all but one (The Warden) of the Barsetshire books in this order: Framley Parsonage, The Last Chronicle of Barset, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, and now The Small House — an appropriate talk would be to try and see if I could show unity in Barsetshire through their original illustrations. The question if the books are unified even if they were not originally conceived of as a series, and what unified them had come up during the reading of The Small House, and if they were not unified, which ones would you eliminate?
Obviously I could not go over all the pictures, especially when I began to realize and remembered how the two more or less film adaptations of three of the Barsetshire books, for The Warden and Barchester Towers, the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles, had scenes which mirrored the original illustrations, and themselves projected this same inner quality or specific kinds of parallels their eponymous books did. So I chose to examine and describe as a group and example epitomizing Millais’ illustrations for The Small House, George Housman Thomas’s for The Last Chronicle of Barset , and the typical and typifying kinds of mise-en-scène created for the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. I also instanced a couple of examples from Millais’s six for Framley Parsonage, and a couple of scenes from the 2016 ITV Doctor Thorne (script Jerome Fellowes, director Niall MacCormick) to help demonstrate my idea that what unifies the Barsetshire books is they are a English-inflected fractured pastoral idyll (how’s that for a mouthful).
This is a letter from the 1857 Last Chronicle, for Chapter 9, “Grace Crawley goes to Allington” — it helps trace the friendship of Lily and Grace, here sewing together by candlelight
I used a delightful book, Hugh Hennedy’s Unity in Barsetshire to help me describe central repeating or parallel kinds of events and characters across all six books. And I adhered to Trollope’s claims that to him this was a real single multiple dwelling and landscape place filled with people he invented, knew and loved, and that his originating first and main aim had been to tell stories of how in England a clerical vocation, career, and particular individual’s sets of values works out.
One not unimportant aim of my talk is to demonstrate that for the 19th century reader the experience of these books was an interaction between text and pictures: the pictures played off one and reinforced another (vignette and letter matched with full page). These offered other perspectives and added unexpected elements to the experience. They anticipate the way a film adaptation nowadays can add to our pleasure in re-reading a book (if the adaptation is intelligent).
The talk is now online at the London Trollope Society website where you can find the video of me giving the talk, transcript of the talk and best of all, all the pictures in a row to be looked at at your leisure:
I admit that this time my delight came from being able to share for the first time since I first saw them a representative number of the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels. It was in 1999 that I spent many days at the Library of Congress in its rare book room pouring over these illustrations as they appeared for the first time in the British periodicals (inside magazines) or as separate numbers (sort of little pamphlets) as instalment publications.
The Library of Congress is a deposit library and at the time got copies of the major British publications, which were those Trollope’s books appeared in. I saw in total about 450 images altogether. I am very fond of many of them and I think at this point equally so of all the extant film adaptations (alas five were wiped out early on), though I have favorite stills from the movies, which you may observe me repeatedly put on this blog.
Tom Hollander as Doctor Thorne working at his desk is one of these favorites (2016 ITV movie)
Not because I’m fond of this still, but for the sake of Mary Thorne (Stephanie Martini), a favorite character with me because of her belief system as felt here:
I’m with the 1970s Robert Polhemus who says the “moral core” of the book can be found in a conversation between Mary and Dr Thorne, where Thorne says “money is a fine thing” and he would be a “happier man” if he could “insure her against all wants.” Mary interprets this as “that would be selling me, wouldn’t it, uncle? … No, uncle; you must bear the misery of having to provide for me — bonnets and all. We are in the same boat, and you shan’t turn me overboard.”
He: “But if I were to die, what would you do then?”
She: “And if I were to die, what would you do? People must be bound together.
They must depend on each other” (Doctor Thorne, Chapter 11)
Now 23 images (which is what you’ll see in the video and on the Society website is nowhere near 450, but I describe for the first time the series for themselves, and make an argument for the idea that the original readers of Trollope’s novels expected as part of their imaginative experience an interaction between the texts and the pictures. We can see this as an anticipation of the way some readers delight in faithful film adaptations of beloved books.
The pictures enrichen, complicate and add to the pleasure and meaning of the text (even when they undermine, ironize, or sometimes go very far from the author’s apparent intent). I did show 17 images for my “Trollope, Millais and Orley Farm” so if you add that onto the 24 illustrations in my book, Trollope on the Net (there I deal with other books, including Golden Lion of Granpere and The Way We Live Now), plus what I’ve managed for my website (the Pictorial Trollope) and occasionally for this blog, I believe I’ve shared a representative corpus.
As I’ve done for my other three talks, I put the text of the paper itself on academia.edu, and I transfer the video here onto the blog so you can watch it here for your convenience (if you don’t want to click to another website).
But you are missing out not to go to the London page as everything is made so lovely there and you can see the pictures and read the text separately (without having to listen to my high voice, New York City accent, and at moments awkward reading style)
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 