Pandemic reading of Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope as photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864 — in his travelling hat

Dear friends and readers,

A shorter blog than usual. Not quite from sheer idleness — really from being alone as usual and so aware others are taking time off for fun — and a love of making lists: I decided to make a list of all those Trollope fictions I have read/skim-read, read thoroughly now and again since the pandemic began: 2 and 1/2 years ago and almost came up with this astounding list. I say almost because I had left out three until friends and fellow readers on Trollope&Peers @groups.io reminded me of them. I also preface this list by saying that:  I teach a Trollope novel every fall, I belong to three readings lists on-line two of which are either devoted wholly to Trollope or read Trollope frequently, and all for me were rereads:

Phineas Redux
Framley Parsonage
Last Chronicle of Barset
MacDermots of Ballycloran
Three Clerks
Barchester Towers
The Way We Live Now
John Caldigate
The Prime Minister
The Vicar of Bullhampton
How the Mastiffs went to Iceland
Dr Thorne
short stories: “Malachi’s Cove,” “A Ride Across Palestine,” “An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids”
The American Senator
Orley Farm
The Small House at Allington (now twice over the pandemic time)
short stories: “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne”
Castle Richmond

The above is more or less in the order I read them.

Just now The Eustace Diamonds about which I wrote today:

The appropriate recent cover for the latest Oxford edition

I’m enjoying it very much. Frank Greystock makes a good contrast/comparison to Adolphus Crosbie (Small House, just read by the online group and being read by my groups.io group) because Greystock is just as ambitious, he just as “helplessly” finds himself asking Lucy Morris to marry him, and he _does not go back on his word- — even after much pressure and he stays away. But he never betrays Lucy to Lizzie.

The other thing is I’m finding it a more moral book than people openly admit — I see the morality coming out this way: this time I’m seeing the humor and comedy of the book. I admit I could never see it before. Something in me has changed since last Christmas: I’m not happier not more optimistic (oh no) but I am more cheerful, more able to distance myself. So I am seeing the quarrels between Lucy and her Scottish steward and manager of horses, Andrew Gowran as very funny.
How moral? I see in her impulses in me: I’m recognizing myself in her and since I know she is so awful to recognize myself in her is salutary. The mirror held up is teaching me.

I want to start listening to The Moonstone (I just bought the audio book in the form of audio CDs) as soon as it comes to see if it too obsesses over the jewel. The text of ED and Lizzie both obsess over them. Very funny are her problems with the iron box. It’s big and heavy, attracts attention, cannot be hid, is too heavy for her, but she must clutch it if she is clutch her diamonds. She hasn’t quite got it in her just to put the necklace in her pocket — I thought to myself, has she no inside pockets? But even she does not have the nerve lest they slip out and get lost … I recently wrote and delivered a paper on a Woman and Her Boxes — about Jane Austen and how women were so legally destitute that often it may be said their very identity was in the box they kept their stuff in.

Below you see a Victorian cast iron box for carrying jewels in.

For fall I’ll reread The Last Chronicle of Barset (so a second time during this pandemic time)
two stories: “The Journey to Panama,” “Miss Ophelia Gledd”
at the same time Can You Forgive Her?

I conclude I must find strength and comfort in Trollope over these recent solitary years. His texts are enormously readable. Reading Trollope with others has been a mainstay. I just don’t realize it … all the time.  I do know that many years ago my father brought me a copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton and told me the author was a wise man; the book got me through an awful week in Metropolitan hospital in NYC; and a few years later a battered copy of The Last Chronicle of Barset got me through the ordeal of  a 5 week vacation-stay in Rome (with excursions to Naples, Pompeii, Ischia). I am a more critical reader than I used to be, but my basic emotional reaction has remained the same.

Ellen

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