Anthony Trollope post-texts for Twelfth Night: Joanna Trollope, The Choir; MR James, Stalls of Barchester Cathedral

From a BBC Ghost Stories series: opening still from M.R. James, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” (1971)

Gentle readers and friends,

I got the idea to read for Christmas a few non-traditional sequels to Anthony Trollope’s work one day at a Trollope Zoom meeting when Christopher Briscoe presented his imaginary history of Barchester (scroll down, it’s there). I had heard that Joanna Trollope’s The Choir was another early Trollopian original story (using her legal, not the pseudonym, Caroline Harvey), where the cathedral itself was central.

I had so enjoyed Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife a sympathetic modern version of the story of Mrs Crawley from The Last Chronicle of Barset, and the film adaptation with a favorite actress, Lindsay Duncan, well I didn’t quite rush out, but went to my computer to buy the book, and soon I was acquiring the DVDs to the serial (Region 2) and an audio reading of the complete book by Nadia May. I now vow to read some later books by J. Trollope, not sequels to a 19th century vision, but about 21s century social and other issues (her Other People’s Children, for example, about adoption)

I also pulled out from its shelf with Henry James books, a book Jim used to read aloud to me from: a beautifully produced (art paper) and illustrated (by Rosalind Caldecott) Ghost Stories of M.R. James, and read a few. All intended for Christmas, to evoke the time and the unknowable natural world through the uncanny. One alluded to Anthony Trollope.

And I’ve now seen two versions of The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, one done as a group of actors listening to one man playing James reading aloud to them and/or telling the whole story in a setting that looks like James’s rooms in Cambridge at Christmas, and one acted quietly well with Clive Swift as Rev Haynes (Swift was Bishop Proudie in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles).

Rev Haynes confiding his tale to his friend played by Peter Vaughn

Sally Ashworth (our heroine, Cathryn Harrison) eating companionably with her friend & father-in-law, Frank (again Peter Vaughn) from the BBC The Choir, Episode 1.

As you can see a cathedral and its atmosphere (stone gargoyles) are never far from overt consciousness in these books & films

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As with The Rectors’ Wife, The Choir is an original novel in its own right, which at the same time creates characters and events reminiscent, even closely of Anthony Trollope, especially the church politics of the Barsetshire series. What makes it inimitably Trollopian in feel and art is an intertwined cast of closely-associated characters who when they should be working together, compete against one another to achieve intensely desired private goals (of love, friendship, personal fulfillment of talents and tastes), which will create a social world they must all share (they cannot escape) and each would love to dominate or control in some way.

It fits Elaine Showalter’s study of academic politics, Faculty Towers, which she claims got their start in Barchester Towers, just as Mr Slope interviews Mr Harding for a job he already has. In the case of The Choir, it is the cathedral which is discovered to be crumbling (from damp and neglect) when, out of vanity, Dean Hugh Cavendish (played by Edward Fox), decides to install modern aesthetic lighting arrangements for atmosphere. A great deal of money is needed.

Choir practice

Just then, Frank Ashworth (Peter Vaughn), a long-time labor activist, a socialist, decides the gardens of the cathedral close are going to waste because they intimidate the average citizen, and proposed to buy a beautiful 18th century house the head master, and a canon of the cathedral, Alexander Troy (David Walker) has lived with his wife, Felicity (Jane Asher), just now run away. Frank also wants to reorganize the boys’ choir his own grandson, Henry (Anthony Way) sings in, as he says it is as presently recruited for elitist. And as part of his personal life, he has a good friendship with his daughter-in-law; his wife long ago left him, and his son, Alan, Sally Ashworth (Cathryn Harrison)’s husband is unable to establish or keep up genuine relationships with other people. Alan works in Saudi Arabia. He has been in flight since his mother left his father; the book suggests some empathy is needed, but not the film. In the serial, he is your philandering hypocrite.

From the BBC film serial adaptation of Joanna Trollope’s The Choir: opening still where through the tops of the Cathedral (it’s Gloucester) we glimpse Nicholas Elliot returning to the sanctuary of his choir years (1995)

I will not be party to a scheme that wears an altruistic mask to cover a heart of envy (JTrollope’s The Choir p 69; repeated in Episode 2 of Ian Curteis’ film script) — remember John Bold in ATrollope’s The Warden, gentle reader

The kindly bishop, Robert Young (John Standing) accuses Frank of concocting these reformist schemes because Frank envies the people who get to dwell in such beautiful places and make such rarefied beauty; his scheme will end up destroying what he says he wants others to share. In the event, when city council takes over the headmaster’s house, it does not become the beautiful community center Frank said he was envisioning. As with Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, where the break-up of the church’s unjust use of a 14th century will does not lead to the old men getting a just allowance, so the Dean’s house becomes a hollow shell of offices for people doing supposedly socially-good jobs they have no belief in for real. The beauty of the house now obscured.

Out of obscure envies and resentments of his own, and an absolute determination to be in charge, Dean Cavendish (the Archbishop Grantley character) decides the church can do without its much admired choir of boys singing sublimely, something which means a great deal to Troy. So too another group of characters, beyond Henry:  the organist, Leo Beckford (played particularly well by Nicholas Farrell), Sally (Cathryn Harrison), Henry’s mother whose husband (Alan, see above) lives thousands of miles away from her so he can be free and unfaithful. Sally seeks solace in her son’s achievements and a bookstore she works in. A central storyline dramatizes how Sally and Leo fall in love.

Alexander Troy, the headmaster and canon’s wife, Felicity, has “gone off again” as the novel opens: like Anna Bouverie (yes Flaubert’s heroine alluded to), the rector’s wife, Felicity had much to bear, and finds herself thwarted of usefulness she can value.

Felicity Troy (Jane Asher) spreading posters about (later in the novel, see below)

Reader, there are other complications. Nicholas Farrell (Oliver Milburn), an old boy grown up and now homeless, has returned to the cathedral world, and is given employment by Ianthe Cavendish (Claire Cox), lusting after Leo (who is cold to her).  Ianthe has invested in a record company, run by Mike (Peter de Jersey, the only black person in the cast) who is capable of making money out of music.

It’s worth saying (and important to this depiction of modern British middle class people) that for a number of the characters their love of music, and working at their roles in it is sincere: Leo Beckford, the most striking; Alexander Troy (who defends the choir at the cost of losing his house), Nicholas Farrell (once upon a time and still), Henry, the young boy, and Mike too.

The Cavendish family (parents and children) are the most directly Trollopian elements in the book: Joanna has in mind Archbishop Grantley as the archetype under Dean Cavendish: the same strong materialism, ability to dominate, strong self-esteem, ruthlessness; his wife, Bridget (Richenda Carey) is a Mrs Proudie softened; their children as obnoxious as most of the Grantley children. Joanna has a less than favorable take on the male Grantley figure whom many Trollope fans profess to like (they identify!).

Our sweet Bishop Young harks back to the Bishop in The Warden, only here we see the cowardliness, or reluctance to fight where he should. As in The Rector’s Wife, to me surprisingly, The Choir is seriously examining the place of Christian (meaning unselfish, charitable, pro-community and mystic) beliefs and acts among the characters.

Henry with a cardboard cat, after Sally has left him temporarily, taking with her Mozart, their cat (Joanna Trollope is delightful the way she describes pets’ behavior in her books)

I found myself following intensely how everything played out, with favorite characters experiencing hard blows, really felt and on-going losses, and yet or also support, kindness and courtesy, and help so that they gradually carve or find out a niche in which they can make some happiness for themselves. This sentiment: we have to make our happiness is stated explicitly.  It represents a way of viewing what the characters are doing at the close of The Rector’s Wife.   The idea enables Joanna Trollope to dramatize a modern version of a typically qualified Anthony Trollope ending.

Joanna Trollope is a deft writer who can include so much action and thought in her tightly interwoven threads. She gets a lot in for 261 page book. This one has many allusions to quite a number of my favorite and less well known or not particularly popular or super-respected books that I just like, e.g., Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Merchant-Ivory films from E.M. Forster, and much beautiful music cited and then in the film heard (Bach, Britten, Vaughn Williams)

The film is faithful in its realization of Trollope’s characters, and it makes superb use of Gloucester and Worcester Cathedral (the two churches filmed), and Cheltenham (for the town).  Curteis dialogue is superb (often taken straight from the book).  The serial is particularly strong in the final episode where we experience a temporary resolution and movement for a hopeful time to come, carrying forward love and burdens.

Those who present themselves as hurting worse are the Dean and his wife, though he got his way in everything he said he wanted (including firing those who bucked him); she is only momentarily crushed as we see a bitterness underneath her part of her nature. This is not a feminist tale in the way The Rector’s Wife is, and Bridget’s thwarted ambition with no high rank is part of what makes her so eager to vex others.

The reunion and touching coming together of Alexander and Felicity and then their shared fight the Dean for their house appealed deeply to me. I value my house. He was lost without her:

A traditional sequel you see fills out a story that Trollope told (like John Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay, which picks up the Palliser novels from the end of The Duke’s Children; M. R. James did not do this for Barchester Towers, but tells dark tale of a man whose ambition took him into realm where he was out of his depth. I linked in the story-line and an interpretation, this too of church politics, spinster sisters and servants (above) so here let me just provide you with the movie itself — no longer available to buy or to see on Netflix or Amazon prime.

M.R. James is a much darker writer than A or J Trollope, and at his best disquieting (that link takes you to “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook,” after reading which I had to find Jim and sit near him for a while).

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I meant to have written this for “Twelfth Night,” but did not meet my goal by a day. No matter, January 6th will for some time to come not be connected by most in the US to the solstice holidays, but to a criminally-led attempt to take over the US through violence as country via some fragile pretense of legality in order to set in place a White supremacist and fascist dictator state, with all the horrors we’ve seen attached to that in its wake.  Remember 1943 ought to be a rallying cry.

Dean Cavendish (Edward Fox) making a deal with an unscrupulous politician in order to get his way

Ellen

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When is a sequel not a quite a sequel: when it’s Framley Parsonage

John Atkinson Grimshaw (136-93), Autumn, Leeds (1880s) — a Victorian conception

Dear friends and readers,

I am embarked on reading Framley Parsonage with about 30 adults (mostly retired older people) at an OLLI at George Mason University. I am enjoying the novel immensely and hope my “students” are too (probably an inappropriate noun considering its connotations as there are no exams, no essays, no certificates). How intimate the feeling Trollope creates. How he captures the rhythms of daily life as he seeks to write down all around him what is daily and he feels and sees in order to produce this so alive novel quickly.

To begin with (the term), I found myself expatiating upon what is a sequel last week and thought as sequels are so ubiquitous in this year (2015), not just of an original work, but re-boots of adaptations and sequels forty years on, I would write about sequels and what I was surprised to discover is so about Framley Parsonage. Perhaps this will interest a few readers and viewers of film adaptations, say Barchester Chronicles.

Everybody who knows anything about Trollope’s life and career knows it was Thackeray who prompted the writing of Framley Parsonage. Trollope was just then writing Castle Richmond and he had several of his early traveler’s tales available for placement. He was startled and surprised to discover the Cornhill, preceded by a buzz and hum which made it the equivalent of the New Yorker in the 1950s, had yet to secure a central part of its offering: using Fielding’s metaphor in Tom Jones, of a meal, they were without la pièce de résistance, the central irresistible chocolate and wine of a novel. In reply to Thackeray, Trollope offered short stories he had just written; he offered Castle Richmond. In a superlatively courteous reply (“My dear Trollope”), Thackeray declined and said what they wanted was another of those clerical Barsetshire stories. So Trollope set about to produce two novels at once. (If English people didn’t want to hear about the famine and Ireland, the rest of Europe did, it was published separately around the time of FP and quickly translated into 5 languages.) FP made Trollope, and on the strength of his new income, he moved to just outside London to be part of the literary world at last. In 1859 August we find him leasing Waltham House in Hertfordshire just outside London. He lived there for several years, until his income began to fall off (well after he had quit his post office job since he did before he became eligible for a pension). Nonetheless, or more than ever (he needed money now), still working for post office, and famously getting up at 4:30 (Barney, his Irish servant woke him) and writing 4 hours or so before going off to directly remunerated work; he had a traveling writer’s desk made for him so he could write while in railway carriages. Think of it as a laptop without connectivity.

The Cornhill, a central organ of mass print media in the Victorian period, its first number in fact. The Cornhill‘s mission was in part to present an image of acceptable middle to upper class life (not the reality, an idealization of reality, omitting much that was unpleasant to them, like dealing with real servants, city life); its readership could congratulate themselves upon belonging to what produced would be in good taste and the latest politics, information. The title of the first chapter was a Latin tag; someone who could not recognize that tag was a fringe person.

The book is very much a sequel, conceived as a sequel to three books Trollope had written in the near past — as ordered: The Warden (1852-53), Barchester Towers (1856) and Dr Thorne (1857), let us remember just three out of ten novels Trollope had written and published since 1845. Barchester Towers, No 2 and Dr Thorne, No 3, the second and third of these Barsetshire book were not only commercial successes, but had become identifiable Victorian-style middle class novels, and not to have read Barchester Towers especially was like not to have heard of say Downton Abbey in the last three years – where have you been, my dear? You might not have read BT or seen DA, but you should know something about it, get the references, the jokes. I’ve never watched The Sopranos and probably never will, but I know enough about it not to look unknowing when it’s brought up. Barsetshire was nearly a form of social currency, social capital, part of the habitas of cultural references. Framley Parsonage clinched it, and partly unfortunately for Trollope defined him evermore in a wider complacent public eye.

Sequels come in so many forms nowadays I thought I should try to distinguish this one: there are prequels: what transpired before. There are appropriations: you transpose the story and character to another country or era. There are analogies or free adaptations, where the central outline of a plot and the central archetypal character patterns are recognizable, plus a few idiosyncratic scenes or complications. Modern dress: Bridget Jones’s Diary out of Pride and Prejudice through the film adaptatio of 1995 by Andrew Davies. There are commentaries as films: you produce the story with changes which critique it. The post-modern, often post-colonialist new perspective: you retell Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe from Friday’s point of view (Foe); you retell RLS’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from the maid living in the house, and you have Valerie Martin and Stephen Frears’ Mary Reilly, a historical novel in its own right, not belonging just to the RLS franchise (as Jo Baker’s Longbourn does not move outside Austenland). Gone with the Wind from a girl household slave like Prissy. Those who know GWTW well or the movie may remember Prissy’s famous outcry when asked to help Melanie, a secondary heroine, give birth: “Ah, don’t know nuthin’ bout birthin’ Miss Scarlet.” A black person in that audience would not have jeered at her for that utterance. The Wind Done Gone retells GWTW from the perspective of a black female household slave. Or you retell the familiar Tudor matter from the point of view of a man hitherto made into a villain, Thomas Cromwell, only you make him a hero; voila, Hilary Mantel and Peter Staughan’s Wolf Hall.

My plan was to say that Framley Parsonage corresponded to a primary type: the continuation (the closest I can think of in recent Jane Austen sequels is P.D. James’s Death comes to Pemberley, Darcy and Elizabeth 7 years on). A continuation is a novel which continues the story of a group of characters in a book or books after that book or those books have ended. There has thus far been one for Trollope: John Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay: it has centrally recurring characters who live in a single connected imaginary space. It is in Framley Parsonage that Trollope begins to connect up all the places he had mentioned in the first three novels, The Warden, Barchester Towers and Dr Thorne, and Wirenius continues the Barsetshire-Palliser stories after The Duke’s Children closes, through the upper class conservative perspective of Simon Raven, which has become identified as Trollope country. It is just one territory of it I’d say.

The problem I discover is Framley Parsonage doesn’t really. It does not continue the stories of the first or second book or even the third: Dr Thorne. We meet only some of the characters we have met in the first three novels but it’s not their story; they swirl around the main story. The main story gives us wholly new characters and suddenly fills out a hitherto blank space (had we realized there is a map) in Barsetshire: Framley Court and Parsonage and their inhabitants. A few character recur: most important, the ironic festival, frolic charactrer, Miss Dunstable; and Dr Thorne, Archbishop and Mrs Grantly, not to omit Griselda (now the name is become ironic), and the biological son of the Duke of Omnium (returned), now named Lord Dumbello, by the Marquise of Hartletop; Mr Harding appears in order to expose the moral horror Griselda represents. The Rev Josiah Crawley was mentioned as Mr Arabin’s friend of deep integrity, high intelligence, sincere religious belief, to whose poorly paid curacy in Cornwall Mr Arabin would go when he needed uplife. But now he comes on stage and is central to the serious themes of the book:

John Everett Millais, The Crawley Family (from the original illustrations)

The best we can do is call it a traditional sequel because the basic point of view remains the same and the story of some of them carry on and they are in the same imaginary space.

We fall back on how we define a series, or roman fleuve: it has centrally recurring characters who live in a single connected imaginary space. It is in Framley Parsonage that Trollope begins to connect up all the places he had mentioned in the first three novels, The Warden, Barchester Towers and Dr Thorne. So it’s a sequel because it clinches the series using the map, some recurring characters, and themes — the egregious injustice in the way clergyman were chosen and paid.

By contrast, the once called Parliamentary (as the Parliament is central to them all) and now Palliser books (since the books were adapted using Simon Raven’s scripts 1974-75), a second set of six novels which came out of the Barsetshire map and some of its key characters (Duke of Omnium) was meant to be a series and does have a central couple whose story is told over 6 books. Each Palliser book has separate characters and stories who are central to that book too, and most of the time like a soap opera they drift off; in the imaginary of the soap opera world, you can call them back, but they more of less vanished, merely heard about occasionally,and the on-going recurring Palliser group ages and matures, and the imaginary space, now Barsetshire on the trainline into London and its 12 novel chronology is more less consistent. So too Downton Abbey (I was struck how in Season 5 we are told Gwen a maid we met in Season 1 and left the abbey to be a secretary has now married). The later series takes us into our contemporary world.

Feodor Vasilyev (1850-73), St Petersburgh Illuminated (1869) — the modern city

This blog serves to point up how the Barsetshire series was not planned as a series. Framley Parsonage (the fourth, which resembles the fourth in other recognizable roman fleuves or sagas, like Warleggan in the Poldark series) lovingly fills in and tries to make consistent and meaningful the map of Barsetshire for the first time. It is about about the ubiquity of sequels or post-texts in our era. Comments and thoughts on post-texts in our time invited – re-booting is nowadays a popular term for re-done film adaptations.

Ellen

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John Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay: Trollope Country

Phineas at Bay by John Wirenius, cover design Judith Cummins, after Delfico, “The Hereditary Grand Falconer,” Vanity Fair (1873)

Dear friends and readers, especially Trollopian ones,

Over the month of December and early January, a few of us on Trollope19thCStudies, read and discussed John Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay, following an installment pattern he devised, with him participating and even his editor on board (so to speak). This (to use the modern capacious term) is a post-text represents an important milestone in the Trollope imaginary.

First it is easily arguably the first full completely realized true sequel to Trollope’s books. Accurately defined, a sequel is a novel which continues the story of a group of characters in a book or books after that book or those books have ended: Phineas at Bay does more than fulfill that desire many fans have to experience more of the characters in a favorite or last book by s favorite novelist: Wirenius takes up the storylines and characters of the six Parliamentary or Palliser novels a number of years after The Duke’s Children has concluded (the version we have been reading is now generally known to have been cut by Trollope himself). Phineas at Bay re-configures the original emphases to make a middle-aged Phineas and Marie Finn an idealized hero and heroine, re-imagines and rehabilitates some damned Palliser characters (the Rev. Emilius and Lizzie Eustace), realigns other characters (makes different parallels and contrasts), and adds in characters from other of the author’s novels, in this case those whose emphasis is on “the upper ten thousand,” like The Way We Live Now, Orley Farm (e.g., Mary, Lady Mason), the Barsetshire series (Mr Toogood). That’s common in these collaborative creations (see Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers). In authors who have cult followings and where numerous film adaptations have been made, these remembered experiences become part of the imaginary. Wirenius also evokes specific actors and actresses’s portrayals of Trollope’s characters (Donal McCann, Barbara Murray, Anthony Ainsley, Sarah Badel, Donald Pickering, Moray Watson, Marvin Jarvis [Frank Greystock]) as they appeared in Simon Raven’s 1974-75 Pallisers, their costumes, settings and environments.

It’s more than a specific region of Trollope country (upper class, lots of lawyers). It represents a readership or perspective on that specific region. Phineas at Bay is a highly intertextual literary book, allusive, bookish (I see nothing wrong with that) whose references are just about wholly to books favored by males, mid-20th century to late Edwardian. A central text is R. f. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, as embodied and shaped by Andrew Davies’s 1980-81 16 part mini-series which rehearses an archetypal nostalgic schoolboy to teacher story. One of the most (for me) appealing characters in Phineas at Bay is named Ifor Powlett-Jones, clearly after David Powlett-Jones as memorably portrayed by John Duttine:

Ifor is a miner in Wales who risks his life to save the lives of fellow miners who have been abusively mistreated by the mine-owner, a ruthless obtuse, sadistic and spiteful industrialist, McScuttle (the book’s one full villain) who accuses the young man of destroying private property and by influence manages to have him thrown in jail for a number of years. We have powerful scenes of a life in prison in this period before Powlett-Jones is rescued (naturally) by Phineas Finn who, with Marie, adopts, has educated by Mr Low (now retired) and makes a sort of nephew-son of the boy, providing him with a career he could not have dreamed of.

Other similar authors, texts alluded to and used significantly are Beerbohm, Mortimer (Rumpole of Bailey), Walter Scott, Tennyson, Wodehouse (a lot), Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Winston Graham’s Poldark series, Thackeray, Dumas’s Three Musketeers, M. R. James (the ghost story writer). Individual lines are plucked from Hugo’s Les Miserables. The inter-related imaginary carved out here is the one Mark Turner (Trollope and the Magazines) first described as central to understanding how Trollope assumed his readership would react. We follow the trajectory — coming of age — of several newly invented young adult male characters, the next generation of the Palliser and Chiltern sons, e.g., Savrola Vavasour, son of George (remember the escapee from Can You Forgive Her?) who met and married Mrs Winifred Hurtle while in the US. Savrola courts Clarissa Finn, despite her Richardsonian name, a fugitive from an innocent girl’s 19th century novel, protected by a series of benevolent parent figures — rather like Lady Rose McClaren in Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey is in evidence too with a butler who acts paternal roles towards Clarissa and anticipates Marie, his mistress’s every need, including sleuthing.

Millais’s beautiful illustrations fit this book

The providential pattern of the book could be put down to its being (in effect) a historical novel whose main (but only main) franchise is Trollope except that another skein of allusion shows the deep structure is a creation of its contemporary author. Wirenius said that when he began the book he had the uplifting (if ironically so) final lines of the book in mind. He wanted to get there. Religious music (song exquisitely by Marie), allusions to church fathers, liturgy, the use of Christmas make it not a book more Victorian than our sceptical and secular (and darker) Trollope, but one intended to speak today in the way praised by John Gardiner (once a best-selling novelist who wrote a post-text himself, to Beowulf, Grendel) in his On Moral Fiction. Its politics are benevolent, left-liberal, and some of the best long-running stories of the book are effective dramatic analyses of politicking within parties, between rivals and enemies and friends, scenes in courts (at least two trials) and parliament, at elections, pressure dealing, very Trollopian some of these (including a politicized sermon). Hunting scenes, dinners, parties, weddings figure too. Good people finally mostly win out and we are invited to celebrate the figures within a pleasing faery aesthetic pattern (or carpet as Henry James would put it).

There’s a lot of kindness in the book, to Lady Laura Kennedy and the Duke of Omnium (Plantagenet Palliser that was), happy at last, fittingly. Phineas works hard in this book, is as acute and successfully manipulative as Hercule Poirot, and for the public good, and is rewarded at the book’s close, with Marie resembling the film idealization of Barbara Murray, a European type also memorably embodied by Stephane Audran as Lord Marchmain’s Cara (Brideshead Revisited anyone?), except she is also a nurturing mother (to Clarissa), businesswoman par excellence (off-stage), supportive saloniere, endlessly there for her man and compliant. The problems with this as feminism are transparent — beyond the truth that women behind the scenes working for men enable the male hegemonic order.

Sarah Badel and Anthony Ainsley as Lizzie and Emilius playing with one another

There is at the same time a real tolerance for amoral worldly-vicious types of people, the distruptive, the mean, and those complicit with, obedient to those who do evil, as Barrington Erle (who experience an ultimate ironic hard fall). She seduces, harasses, attempting to ruin (by insisting on an engagement) and takes to court another of the novel’s young adult heroes, the new young Lord Chiltern, John Standish (as hot-tempered and self-destructive as his father once was). Lizzie is willing to marry to spite Chiltern and as a way of triumphing over a society that has despised her. She is allowed to exit the court scot-free. She is not a modern rendition of the Victorian Becky Sharp, but agreat-great-grand-daughter of Eliza Haywood’s 18th century school of fiction, which include versions of slash fiction (sex writhings on the floor, mutual masturbation, no need to particularize further); all the more does Lizzie attract and resume her old relationship with still corrupt (now Mormon) Rev. Emilius who (we recall) in Raven enjoyed hurting women. John Wirenius cited Nietzsche in attempting to say what Emilius stood for. Rather his and Lizzie’s sordid doings (some monetary) are not post-modern nor at all nihilistic because the book and its main characters recognize them as reprehensible. They are framed more like Fielding’s Blifil in Tom Jones, their punishment is to go on being what they are. John Wirenius cited Stephano and Trinculo of Shakespeare’s Tempest. Emilius and especially Lady Eustace are in this fiction not minor easily swatted-away pests on the world’s continuum of vileness. It is interesting to consider for what different reasons Trollope loathed his Emilius and castigated his Lady Eustace; this pair resemble Trollope’s Melmoth, only they are not really admired by anyone we see in the book and are at the same time made less desperate.

There is a lot of fun in the book for the Trollopian too. Quotations. Recurring recreated characters. Lawrence Fitzgibbon remains Phineas’s friend. Quintus Slide has acquired a secretary, as snide as he. The Duke of Omnium has a set of books which include a Trollope (rather like in Raven’s Pallisers when Bryan Pringle as Mr Monk begins to read aloud The American Senator to Phineas while in jail and stops himself rather than read this old-hat interminable author). For the person who reads Galsworthy (another masculinist book of upper class life alluded to) and who knows the 1967 Forsyte Saga well, there are quiet allusions linking Trollope’s characters to Galsworthy’s via particular actors you will enjoy more if you recognize the carry-over.

Marvin Jarvis is Frank Greystock in Raven’s mini-series, Irene’s darling son in the 1967 Forsyte Saga, and alluded to in Phineas at Bay as part of his role as the leader of the Tory opposition to Phineas

My one personal complaint was there is no woman in the book for me to identify with, no one to bond with, but I have to admit that until recently this often happened to me in Trollope’s fictions. I did bond this year for the first time with Trollope’s Madame Max in Phineas Finn because the emphasis was clearly on the price in loneliness and hollow relationships, veneers she had to keep up in order to live the proud existence she craved, but most of the time except for Alice Vavasour (as conceived in Trollope’s book), and various marginalized women in Trollope’s fiction, or the occasional figure in the short stories (Miss Emily Forrest in “Journey to Panama” comes to mind), without some “downstairs” contingent there is no one there for me. A Miss Garnett, a typist clerk who somehow improbably is welcomed into the Chiltern family, several years older than young Chiltern, as a sobering wife-influence, all complacency just doesn’t hack it. Give me Miss Sarah Bunting any day.

Daisy Lewis as Miss Bunting refusing to be coopted

Phineas at Bay is a strongly realized, highly intelligent book with many believable characters, some bite and beauty in its use of allusions and reality-feel in its depictions of places (including mines). It’s very readable and erudite too. I found I needed annotation because several law decisions of specific cases are central to the outcome of the trials and other scenes in the book. John Wirenius’s “Behind the Curtain” (a sort of coda) cites a slew of insightful rich histories of the later 19th into the 20th century. Its political and economic parables are relevant (McScuttle attempts to own the prime minister), and we see the birth of a small labor party. Clearly it is world just begun, meant to be continued and invites others to do likewise.

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Coburn’s frontispiece for Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady

The most interesting question for me that this book raises is, What does and will this book tell us about Trollope’s mainstream readership? what they value in Trollope? One reason there has not been a true sequel before is there is so much Trollope and really so varied. He wrote 47 novels, 42 short stories, 5 travel books, his autobiography, essays, criticism. Among these he has written his own sequels in his Barsetshire and Palliser books, Ayala’s Angel is a kind of sequel to The American Senator, he planned to (he said) to write an Australian set of books out of Lady Anna; his Anglo-Irish books carve out a Trollope terrain or another country in western and across Ireland. When I taught a course wholly devoted to Trollope for the first time this past fall, I found I had surprised those in the class who thought they knew Trollope and had read numerous of his books before. This book would’ve fulfilled their expectations much better than my syllabus. Trollope as a European novelist (Nina Balatka), his dark tragic vein, his dwelling centrally on outcast figures, the subversiveness of his short stories, is another Trollope terrain within the country they had been led to half-expect. I regretted not being able to screen for them Henry Herbert’s Malachi’s Cove (from Trollope’s great short story, where Donald Pleasence who played Mr Harding in Barchester Chronicles enacts Malachi).

As Barchester Towers focuses on a father-daughter relationship (Janet Maw is Eleanor Bold) so does “Malachi’s Cove” (story and film)

First formulations matter. The one book by Jane Austen which soars in readership above all others is her Pride and Prejudice, something like 90% of the sequels have been out of Pride and Prejudice and after that Emma. In 1940 the MGM screwball Pride and Prejudice directed by Robert Leonard, scripted by Jane Murfin and Aldous Huxley (featuring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier) and again in 1979 the BBC Pride and Prejudice directed by Cyril Coke, scripted by Fay Weldon (featuring David Rintoul and Elizabeth Garvie set the terms of the two types of Austen films made in theaters (simpering unserious comedy) and for TV (familial Oedipal melodrama) for decades thereafter. The famous 1995 Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice (featuring Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle) is a close repeat of the 1979 movie; Amy Heckerling’s Clueless does a screwball on Jane Austen’s Emma. These aural-visualizations bring out into the open discussable socially recognized ways of reading, understanding, framing their eponymous books and its long-dead author.

Among the earliest of Trollope’s books filmed by the BBC was a The Warden in 1951 (totally wiped out). After that The Eustace Diamonds, Last Chronicle of Barset and The Small House at Allington. The Way We Live Now a first version by Raven followed in 1969; so Trollope was Barsetshire-Palliser with The Way We Live Now vying as a signature book 50 years ago. All wiped out and (thus forgotten). The film performing the work of the first two P&Ps is Raven’s 1974 mini-series, somewhat reinforced by Alan Plater’s complacent comic pastoral 1983 Barchester Chronicles, and these together assumed milieu-world-norms that other Trollope film adaptations have had to align themselves with or overcome. Unfortunately Henry Herbert’s 1976 Malachi’s Cove has left hardly a trace in Trollopian public memory, though Andrew Davies’s 2001 The Way We Live Now has made some inroads, his daring 2004 He Knew He Was Right with its strong feminism and weak men out of Trollope has not found favor.

Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay is an analogous first step to Raven’s mini-series in the textual arena. We have a reconstituted world of Trollopian fiction. How will it affect Trollope’s novels as understood by a wider readership? Reinforcement? Raven was a pessimistic atheist, strong cynic, sceptical; Wirenius turns back to Trollope and softens what is there. Modern film adaptations often make what is back-story of a 19th century book and make it front present story. Wirenius chose instead to make a new group of young mostly male upwardly mobile winning-out protagonists. There is said to be a new graphic novel in the works of Trollope’s John Caldigate, a post-text called Dispossession which takes the low-life desperate working class characters and the unchaste Mrs Smith and makes them the central characters of the story.

If the above news is not a hoax, what kinds of interactions will be negotiated between different perspectives? If a woman should write a post-text, which story and characters in Trollope would she appropriate? What books would be alluded to, what 19th to mid-20th century intertextualities? Will anyone develop out the Anglo-Irish fiction so different from the Palliser world? and reverse front stories to become back-stories, and of course bring out the implied sexualities. What will future Trollope fan fiction be like? Will it help to extend Trollope’s readership beyond the usual 15 books read? Or not.

Illustration by Elizabeth Shippen Green — a late 19th century American illustrator

We wrote many postings on Trollope19thCStudies during the reading of this book and I couldn’t in the space of a blog include the details of many of all, nor John Wirenius’s various explanations; those who might like to read them after the book have only to join the Yahoo listserv to read them; that is, if Yahoo does not shut the groups down or make the archives inaccessible by debasing the software yet some more.

Ellen

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