THE CURSE OF CONSUMPTION

[Footnote 3: Τυπτω—to "thump", that is, cudgel or pummel by repeated blows; by implication to punish]

How to respond? Here is the crux of the story. There are, to be sure, interviews between Dr. Wortle and his bishop, and Dr. Wortle seriously contemplates a suit for libel against the gossip sheet, which will bring the bishop into court. But perhaps the most pertinent interviews are those between Dr. Wortle and the colleague whom he selects as his confidante and advisor, Mr. Puddicombe, rector of a neighboring parish. Mr. Puddicombe effectively plays the role of Jiminy Cricket, the conscience of Dr. Wortle. In Chapter XIII, "Mr. Puddicombe's Boot," Dr. Wortle first goes to Mr. Puddicombe with his resolution to reply to the "Broughton Gazette," which has written, "Parents, if they feel themselves to be aggrieved, can remedy the evil by withdrawing their sons."

Mr. Puddicombe tells Dr. Wortle that he has fallen into a misfortune and advises restraint:

"It was a misfortune, that this lady whom you had taken into your establishment should have proved not to be the gentleman's wife. When I am taking a walk through the fields and get one of my feet deeper than usual into the mud, I always endeavour to bear it as well as I may before the eyes of those who meet me rather than make futile efforts to get rid of the dirt and look as though nothing had happened. The dirt, when it is rubbed and smudged and scraped, is more palpably dirt than the honest mud."

Would that each of us had a Mr. Puddicombe to keep us out of trouble!

There is an obligatory little romantic subplot, with a romance between Dr. Wortle's seventeen year old daughter Mary and a noble young boarding student, Lord Carstairs, age eighteen years. Are they too young for an engagement before he even enrolls at Oxford? Will the young lord's father Lord Bracy accept the daughter of a clergyman into his family? After a moderate amount of reflection, these issues sort themselves out.

Mr. Peacocke's journey to America to seek the grave or the person of Ferdinand Lefroy occupies the two American chapters. Peacocke goes in the company of Ferdinand's brother Robert, an unscrupulous but ingenious scoundrel whose inventions are matched by the determination and bravery of the intrepid Mr. Peacocke. These adventures provide an opportunity for Trollope to vent some of his observations about American manners:

He found his wife's brother-in-law seated in the bar of the public house—that everlasting resort for American loungers—with a cigar as usual stuck in his mouth, loafing away his time as only American frequenters of such establishments know how to do. In England such a man would probably be found in such a place with a glass of some alcoholic mixture beside him, but such is never the case with an American. If he wants a drink he goes to the bar and takes it standing—will perhaps take two or three, one after another; but when he has settled himself down to loaf, he satisfies himself with chewing a cigar, and covering a circle around him with the results. With this amusement he will remain contented hour after hour—nay, throughout the entire day if no harder work be demanded of him.

This is one of those Fantastic Premise books, in which a credible story is built around the Fantastic Premise—in this case, the Enoch Arden story of the man who goes off to fight, is presumed dead, and returns home to find his wife married to someone else. Not so fantastic, perhaps; considering the time, distance, and inadequate communication techniques of the period, it is only surprising that such occurrences did not take place more often. The story carries itself along with a good pace; but the greatest reason to read the book is to follow the struggles of Dr. Wortle, sucked into challenges to his pride, wrestling with how to dig himself out.

And for readers who like to close a book with a take-home lesson, one could do worse than to remember what to do and what not to do with muddy boots.

I was six years old when I met Tommy Wallace. He spent a good bit of time with his Aunt Rushie, who lived two doors down from us, while his mother spent a year at the Booneville Sanatorium with tuberculosis. We still see an occasional patient with tuberculosis nowadays, but the sanatoriums are all closed or used for other purposes. However, it still causes 1.5 million deaths worldwide each year, trailing only respiratory diseases, AIDS, and diarrheal diseases as the leading infectious killers.

Tuberculosis, known back then as consumption, was widespread in the nineteenth century, causing one out of four deaths in England in 1815. It only began to subside between 1850 and 1950, when deaths due to tuberculosis decreased tenfold, from 500 per 100,000 population in 1850 to 50 per 100,000 population in 1950. Improvements in public health reduced the incidence of tuberculosis even before the advent of antibiotics in 1946 with the introduction of streptomycin. Poor living conditions and the development of resistance to antibiotics have contributed to its resurgence and worldwide threat.

Before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the common understanding of consumption was that it was a constitutional disorder with a strong hereditary element, giving a pale, even "haunted" look to the sufferer. As such, it played a prominent role in literature and the other arts. John Keats, Frederic Chopin, and Franz Kafka died of consumption, as did Edgar Allen Poe's wife, Virginia. Among the familiar victims in our collective consciousness are Mimi in Puccini'sLa Boheme, Violetta in Verdi'sLa Traviata, and Camille, played by Greta Garbo in the MGM film of 1936. Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887, and his bloody cough figured prominently in the 1993 filmTombstone. Consumption claimed a number of characters in Dickens's novels: Little Nell inThe Old Curiosity Shop, Nell's friend Kit, Nicholas Nickleby's faithful companion Smike, and both Richard Carstone and the boy Jo inBleak House. Thomas Mann'sThe Magic Mountainportrays a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. Other victims include Ralph Touchett in Henry James'sA Portrait of a Lady; Edmund Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill'sLong Day's Journey into Night; Fantin in Hugo'sLes Miserables; Dostoevsky's Katerina Ivanovna inCrime and Punishmentand Kirillov inThe Possessed; and Jane Eyre's best friend in Charlotte Bronte's novel.

Anthony Trollope's two sisters and two of his three brothers died at a young age with consumption, an "established sorrow" described in his autobiography as the horrid word, Consumption. With this experience, it is no surprise that Trollope should write a novel,Marion Fay, about a young woman with consumption. The wonder is that it took him so long to write it; it was more than thirty years after his first novel that he wroteMarion Fay, which was finished in 1879.

Marion Fay's story is a sad one. A Quaker's daughter and the eldest son of a marquis meet and fall in love with each other. She refuses to marry Lord Hampstead, however, pleading first that it would be an unequal match for him, but finally admitting she has a strong family history of early death and does not expect to have a long life. Hampstead's emotional reactions are described in great detail, and much of their story is told from his point of view. She is determined from the first that she will not marry, and there is little more to think or say about it. She gradually becomes more open with him as her illness progresses, writing frequent letters from her seaside location. Most of the agonies belong to him, while she appears relatively tranquil, though she does indulge in a Trollopian flop onto the sofa to bury her tearful face in a cushion.

The reader is shielded from some of the details. For one thing, the descriptions emphasize the mental processes. There are no bloody scenes. The color would sometimes rise to Marion's cheeks, and those in the room would hear only a preparation for a cough, not the cough itself. This preparatory sound, the author tells us, is the one so familiar to those obliged to follow the downward course of someone dear to them. And that's it. Marion's illness is said to be a description of the course of Trollope's sister Emily, and she is said to have had a quiet and peaceful course and death. Apparently, if she had a hacking cough or brought up bright red blood, Anthony missed it. In any event, the reader is spared.

As Marion becomes more ill, a frustrated Hampstead, who has fallen under the Victorian illusion that a woman is obliged to obey the man she loves, fails to understand how he cannot control the situation. He has difficulty accepting the inevitable fate she has predicted. A woman has no right to accept such a fate. Such things must be left to "Providence, or Chance, or Fate, as you may call it."

On the other hand, Marion's friend Mrs. Roden confirms her understanding and acceptance, and she marvels that Marion can soar above weakness and temptation. This angelic portrayal is surely influenced by Trollope's recollection of his sister Emily.

Two chapters of comic relief follow the end of Marion's tragedy, and the author's ironic touch is shown in his summation of the Civil Service, which had figured in the novel's subplots and was personified by Lord Persiflage: "Everybody knew that Lord Persiflage understood the Civil Service of his country perfectly. He was a man who never worked very hard himself or expected those under him to do so; but he liked common sense, and hated scruples, and he considered it to be a man's duty to take care of himself,—of himself first of all, and then, perhaps, afterwards, of the Service."

Interestingly, the word "consumption" is never mentioned. Trollope had written about Henry and Emily's illness in his autobiography, saying that though she was doomed and he knew it, the word was never spoken.

The edition published by the University of Michigan Press in 1982 features the original illustrations of William Small, in which we see the Marquis of Kingsbury (father of Lord Hampstead) looking remarkably like the author, who was used as the model for the Marquis.

No one can begrudge Trollope his novel about consumption. His brothers and sisters died from it, and he used his observations of his sisters to create Marion Fay. The tragedy of the fatal familial curse is presented, and, though it is quite sentimental, it is not badly done. The artist in Trollope knew that he had to leave ‘em laughing, and he backed away from the central sadness of the story to return to his objects of fun. Good. He was better at comedy than he was at tragedy.

"Secret" is a powerful word—secret police, the Secret Service, The Secret Garden, a secret passage, family secrets, trade secrets, secret recipes, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." And secrets are sometimes too good to keep—"That dog won't stay under the bed." Such a secret is the subject of one of Trollope's last novels,Kept in the Dark, written in 1880. Relatively simple and short, the story is a cautionary tale, one of those that could be recommended as a lesson in life.

A man tells a new female acquaintance about a recently terminated engagement, and the young woman, who has also terminated an engagement recently, fails to respond with an immediate, "Oh, really! Why, that's just happened to me!" And then she feels that she doesn't want to take anything away from his story by sharing her own. And later he proposes to her, and for some reason she postpones making the full disclosure that she knows she must make. And then circumstances fail to provide her with a good enough opportunity; they part, to meet again only shortly before the wedding, and it gets harder and harder for her to tell her story.

Why doesn't she tell, the reader keeps wondering; and the reader is told, in great detail, why she dithers, and of the great pride of the new husband, whose wrath will now be terrible when he is told.

The frustrated reader is now diverted a bit by the closest thing to a subplot in this short and straightforward story line: the young bride (Cecilia Holt) has a friend, Miss Francesca Altifiorla, who is sufficiently bored with the advantages of the single life that she has been espousing to Cecilia, that it becomes clear that the great secret, which of course is known to everyone except the happiest of men (Mr. George Western) is not safe. Miss Altifiorla is not proof against the wicked plans for revenge being plotted by Cecilia's first fiancé, Sir Francis Geraldine, who is smarting from having been jilted with good cause. (Instead of continuing to court his prospective bride after the engagement was made known, he took himself off to the races at New Market, saying that he would be back in a few weeks in time for the wedding, thinking that his title and relative wealth gave him such privileges. Cecilia, with more spunk than either title or wealth, thought otherwise, summarily dismissed him, and then refused to tell her friends who had jilted whom, considering it to be a private matter.)

But the mischievous Miss Altifiorla succeeds in bumping into the recently liberated Sir Francis at the railroad station and subsequently sharing a compartment sitting opposite him on the way to London. From this point, things are foreordained. In the course of giving Sir Francis an opportunity of seeking revenge by letting Mr. Western know of his previous engagement, Miss Altifiorla even has a moment of glory as a temporary fiancée of Sir Francis in her own right.

Their short-lived engagement is the entertainment highlight of the book. Miss Altifiorla sets her trap in the railroad carriage with care and skill. "You know," she said, "that Cecilia Holt was my dearest friend, and I cannot bear to hear her abused." Sir Francis squeezes her hand as they part at Waterloo, and he proceeds to write his poison pen letter to Mr. Western. Considering Miss Altifiorla to be a broadminded woman, likely to tolerate his little ways, and as likely as any to serve his eventual need for a wife, he writes a much more cautious last paragraph in a letter to her: "Don't you think that you and I know each other well enough to make a match of it? There is a question for you to answer on your own behalf, instead of blowing me up for any cruelty to Cecilia Holt. Yours ever, F. G."

Here the clever Miss Altifiorla allows herself to be faked out, and she overplays her hand. Soon, "The milliners, the haberdashers, the furriers and the bootmakers of Exeter received her communication and her orders with pleased alacrity." Unfortunately for her, Sir Francis has already become a bit bored with the wit in her frequent and lengthy love letters; he seizes upon a gossipy mention of his projected marriage in the Exeter newspaper, protests in a follow-up letter to her that he may have expressed himself so badly in his previous letter that she may have understood more than he meant; and then he leaves for the United States.

But as for the husband who has been kept in the dark, and the wife who allowed such a thing to happen: we are given such detailed insights into their backgrounds, personalities, and thoughts that such an improbable understanding begins to seem credible. He takes himself off to Dresden in a huff. (One would think that there must have been a fraternity of fictional English exiles in Dresden, the apparent destination of choice for the disaffected.) He shows all the signs of terminal stubbornness, nursing his wounded pride and making generous provisions for his disgraced wife, who, in her own pride and stubbornness, refuses all such provisions. It becomes apparent that an intervention will be required to break the stalemate, and I had wondered if Sir Francis's disenchanted friend, Dick Ross, who told Sir Francis that he was doing an evil thing, thus giving up his friendship and patronage, would be the agent of reconciliation; but it turned out to be Mr. Western's sister, Bertha Grant, who left her husband and children to make the pilgrimage to Dresden to bring her brother to his senses so he could make the right decision.

It's a short book that tells its story in 176 pages, much less space than was devoted to the similar story of mutual pride and misunderstanding inHe Knew He Was Right. Both are intimate stories of marital relationships. Cecilia Holt may be a little less headstrong than Emily Rowley, but Cecilia's pride is brought out by the mischievous letter of her "most affectionate friend, Francesca Altifiorla": "What has Mr. Western said as to the story of Sir Francis Geraldine? Of course you have told him the whole, and I presume that he has pardoned that episode."

The ploy worked. On reading it, Miss Holt's immediate reaction was that she had done "nothing for which pardon had been necessary."

Cecilia's lengthy reflections go further, of course; the more she procrastinates, the more she dreads the unveiling of the secret. Nothing is off the record, as celebrities and others have demonstrated many times. The more she dithers, the more, heaven help me, I sympathize with her husband. He deserved better. But he did overreact a bit. A little toot would have been in order. Victorian to the core, he indulged in a big toot.

Trollope excelled in the nuances of familiarity between man and woman. This comes across as another variation on the theme of poor communications; "secret" is not one of the better policies.

Dr. William Osler, upon his retirement as head of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1905, delivered a speech, entitled "The Fixed Period," in which he alluded to Trollope's 1881 novel of the same name with comments which, to his astonishment and dismay, brought down a storm of journalistic and popular fury and mockery on his head. Sharing wry and politically incorrect observations which might better have been reserved for private conversation, Osler described two "fixed ideas well known to my friends": the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age, and the complete uselessness of men over sixty. (Osler was sixty himself at the time.) He went on to describe the plot, which "hinges upon the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform." The comments were made in an ironic and self-deprecatory mode, and Osler's colleagues congratulated him. Journalists, however, knew a good story when they found one, and Osler, who was leaving the United States to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was made miserable by the exaggerations of mischievous newspaper reporters and the outrage of simple souls to whom it was not funny. "Oslerization" entered the language and was listed in some dictionaries as a synonym foreuthanasia.[4]

[Footnote 4: Bliss, Michael:William Osler: A Life in Medicine, Oxford University Press, 1999]

And what was the fate of the author of the novel that Osler imperfectly recalled? (The planned technique was the letting of blood from the jugular vein, not chloroform. And it was done at age sixty-eight, not sixty.) Anthony Trollope was sixty-six when he wroteThe Fixed Period. He described himself as an old man, and indeed he died of a stroke two years later, before publication of the novel in book form. Osler was one of the few who could appreciate its ambiguity and irony. The book sold only 877 copies, and the publishers lostmoney.[5]

[Footnote 5: Terry, R. C., editor:Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope, Oxford University Press, 1999]

It's a rather clumsy bit of science fiction, set in 1980, a hundred years ahead of its time. The location, Brittanula, is a small island about two hundred miles from New Zealand. (If the readers could imagine New Zealand, why not Brittanula?) Rapid transit is by steam tricycle. Under the leadership of the aptly named John Neverbend, the Parliament has decreed that each citizen is to be "deposited" in a College in a place called Necropolis at age sixty-seven, there to wait in contemplation until the end of the "Fixed Period" one year later.

Though the reviews ofThe Fixed Periodshowed little appreciation for Trollope's whimsy, he was spared the violent reaction that Osler suffered. The serial magazine publication was anonymous, and the subsequent book publication was after Trollope's death. Even John Neverbend, the fictitious narrator of the tale, endured none of the ridicule heaped upon Osler. So popular and respected was Mr. Neverbend, President of Brittannula, that he was courteously and quietly, though firmly, whisked on board a steamship and deported to England.

Neverbend finally acknowledges that mankind was not yet prepared, even in 1980, for the obvious advantages of the "Fixed Period." Public works could be funded without debt if the cost of caring for the aged were eliminated. As an inducement to accepting the proposal, the "College" would be an approximation of some conceptions of Heaven on Earth. "There are twenty acres of pleasure ground for you to wander over." Interestingly, the honoree did not see his family. Neverbend, true to his name, never forsook his conviction; on board the English ship transporting him back to England, however, he did realize "how potent was that love of life which had been evinced in the city when the hour for deposition had become nigh."

Events on the island give Neverbend every opportunity to change his mind. His closest friend and colleague, Gabriel Crassweller, is several years older and is scheduled to be the first to be deposited. Even though Neverbend himself offers to do all the honors for his dear friend, Crassweller finds himself reluctant as the time approaches. Neverbend's son is in love with Crassweller's beautiful daughter Eva, and she seems more nearly able than anyone else to dissuade the old President from his fixed purpose. But she can't. The power of the English navy, with its 250-ton steam-swiveller gun, is required. Would this terrible weapon have really been used to level the city? "I don't know, Sir. There are some things so terrible that if you will only create a belief in them, that will suffice without anything else."

Reading the story more than a century after its appearance, the reader is brought up short by mention of the chimneys of the College and how they disturbed the neighbors—perhaps more than did those that later actually appeared at Auschhwitz. Eugenics, ethnic cleansing, and the Holocaust were far in the future in 1880. And current outcries about rationing of care and "death panels" indicate how sensitive the public can be about issues of "life and death" that may not be well understood.

The Fixed Periodis a clever joke that gets old pretty quickly. People have strong feelings about the sanctity of human life, especially when the issue becomes personal. There is a place for black humor, but it must be sought with great care. The appreciative target audience for Trollope's venture into such waters turns out to have been pretty small. Alas, this small audience happened to include a departing great physician.

Our attorney smiled when he came to the passage, "heirs of his body," in going through our family legal documents, explaining that it was an archaic usage derived from old English law. The term, as used in a deed, creates a "fee tail," so that the property in question goes to the recipient and the heirs begotten by the landowner himself. (On the other hand, "fee simple" allows the property to be passed on to the property owner's heirs, whatever their parentage.) Land under these conditions was thus in tail, or entailed.

The law of entail, which was a prominent feature of Victorian English society, is the basis of the plot ofMr. Scarborough's Family. Entail was created in England in 1285 and was useful to feudal lords in keeping property in the family and undivided, with all the real estate going to the oldest son. Landed gentry tended to favor this arrangement, which promoted stability in feudal society; it was not favored by the monarchy or the merchants. Entail was abolished in England in 1925; in the United States, only four states still recognize entail. Similar goals may be achieved, these days, with trusts.

Mr. Scarborough, however, succeeds in overcoming the limitations of the entail. His property is entailed to his oldest son; since he can't do anything about that, he changes his oldest son. When Mountjoy Scarborough, his firstborn, demonstrates an addiction to gambling, Mr. Scarborough declares that Mountjoy is illegitimate, and he produces marriage documents from a marriage to Mountjoy's motherafterMountjoy was born, thus making the gambling addict illegitimate. The second son, Augustus, becomes the eldest legitimate son. No one has any proof of an earlier marriage, and Mr. Scarborough has his way.

Since this was a "three-volume novel" (Trollope's last of this length), another plot was required, and it too involves an entail. Harry Annesley, declared in Chapter III to be "the hero of this story," is the recognized heir to the estate of his uncle, Peter Prosper, who is fifty years of age and has never married. Mr. Prosper, however, becomes cross with his heir, who has failed to show sufficient respect on his visits in his youth, and he begins to consider marriage to a forty year old woman in an effort to "beget issue," an heir of his own. This was a legal and accepted method of attempting to circumvent a burdensome entail, as opposed to Mr. Scarborough's iniquitous method of branding his eldest son as a bastard.

Lawyers are of course involved in Mr. Scarborough's attempt to circumvent the law, and the family lawyer is Mr. Grey. Trollope required many lawyers in his stories, but they generally are presented as two-dimensional role players. Mr. Chaffanbrass, perhaps the best known of Trollope's lawyers, exemplifies the doctrine that his duty is to his client. Defending Lady Mason inOrley Farm, "To him it was a matter of course that Lady Mason should be guilty. Had she not been guilty, he, Mr. Chaffanbrass would not have been required. Mr. Chaffanbrass well understood that the defence of injured innocence was no part of his mission." Mr. Camperdown, inThe Eustace Diamonds, is a bird dog determined to solve the mystery of the diamonds, and he does so. Mr. Furnival, inOrley Farm, proves himself to be all too human in allowing himself to be diverted by the charms of Lady Mason. Sir William Patterson, the Solicitor-General inLady Anna, is a powerful person, adeus ex machinawho forms his own opinion of how affairs should be arranged and attempts to order them so, with little regard for Mr. Chaffanbrass's scruples about limiting his efforts to the pursuit of his client's interests.

But we see Mr. Grey as we see none of Trollope's other lawyers because of his daughter Miss Dorothy ("Dolly") Grey, "motherless, brotherless, and sisterless," about thirty years of age, whom he sometimes calls into his bedroom in the middle of the night to discuss his cases. They also have more formal conversations, as in this discussion of the effort made by Mr. Scarborough and his younger son Augustus to settle Mountjoy's gambling debts. Here she tells her father that he should lay down the law to Mr. Scarborough:

"The law is the law," said her father."I don't mean the law in that sense. I should tell him firmly what I advised, and should then make him understand that if he did not follow my advice I must withdraw. If his son is willing to pay these moneylenders what sums they have actually advanced; and if by any effort on his part the money can be raised, let it be done. … Go there prepared with your opinion. But if either father or son will not accept it, then depart, and shake the dust from your feet."

"The law is the law," said her father.

"I don't mean the law in that sense. I should tell him firmly what I advised, and should then make him understand that if he did not follow my advice I must withdraw. If his son is willing to pay these moneylenders what sums they have actually advanced; and if by any effort on his part the money can be raised, let it be done. … Go there prepared with your opinion. But if either father or son will not accept it, then depart, and shake the dust from your feet."

I can't think of another such father-daughter relationship in any of Trollope's works. The above speech so reeks of wisdom that one suspects the author is merely using Dorothy as a mouthpiece for his own editorial comments on the affairs of his story.

Dorothy herself is one of Trollope's finest female characters. The one o'clock conversations, when she is summoned to her father's room by the "well-known knock" and "usual invitation," afford us an intimate understanding of them both. Unencumbered by devotion to a lover, she goes about her duties with a peculiar devotion that her father only begins to understand after he retires from his practice. She visits her aunt's family every day, though she does not care for them, turning "old dresses into new frocks." She has her own innings, in a sense, when her father presents his junior partner Mr. Barry as a suitor. She reads Mr. Barry's character better than her father has done, and she knows better than to accept his offer.

The woman in the story who is encumbered by devotion to a lover is Florence Mountjoy, who has fallen in love with Harry Annesley and has pledged herself to him by a nod of her head. "A man's heart can be changed, but not a woman's. His love is but one thing among many," she declares to Mountjoy Scarborough in declining his repeated proposal, affirming the doctrine to which so many of Trollope's heroines adhered. Florence shows spunk and determination, standing her ground against her mother, uncle and aunt in the British legation house in Brussels to which she has been brought to clear her head and heart of Harry Annesley.

Trollope was sixty-six years old when he wroteMr. Scarborough's Family. He completed a short novel and almost completed another before dying of a stroke at age sixty-seven. His skills were undiminished. His overall themes and views were familiar ones; he was now looking at life, if not through a rear view mirror, at least with a bit more detachment and irony than in earlier decades. He was still able to generate and maintain detailed story lines, and he continued his mastery of showing many facets of his characters and events, mostly through revealing the inner thoughts of several characters.

Memorable characters continued to appear in his landscapes. Besides Dorothy Grey and her father, there is the old rascal, Mr. Scarborough himself. The others all marvel at successive revelations of his deviousness, and their assessments show us both him and them. All "London had declared that so wicked and dishonest an old gentleman had never lived." Mr. Barry, after traveling to Germany to unearth the documentation of his first marriage to the same woman, in an obscure village, concluded, "In my mind he has been so clever that he ought to be forgiven all his rascality." And now, "Everyone concerned in the matter seemed to admire Mr. Scarborough, except Mr. Grey, whose anger, either with himself or his client, became the stronger, the louder grew the admiration of the world." Mr. Merton, the medical apprentice who stayed with him the last three months of his life, concluded, "One cannot make an apology for him without being ready to throw all truth and all morality to the dogs. But if you can imagine for yourself a state of things in which neither truth nor morality shall be thought essential, then old Mr. Scarborough would be your hero. He was the bravest man I ever knew."

No Trollope novel is complete without several proposals of marriage, and this story includes four to Florence Mountjoy, some of them repeated; but the scene between Squire Prosper and Miss Thoroughbung, in which Mr. Prosper pursues his purpose of getting an heir to disinherit Harry Annesley, must rank near the top of all Trollope's proposals. Miss Thoroughbung is the sister of a brewer and has money of her own; she also has her own agenda, as Mr. Prosper learns. Her encouragement leads him to the point, and he recites one of the sentences he had composed for the occasion: "In beholding Miss Thoroughbung I behold her on whom I hope I may depend for all the future happiness of my life."

The engagement does not last; it falls afoul of the Victorian equivalent of the pre-nup, in which the would-be bride insists on bringing with her a pair of ponies and her friend Miss Tickle. Other financial considerations were negotiable, but the match founders on Miss Tickle and the ponies.

The visitor from the twenty-first century is allowed a few peeks into the world of the nineteenth: A visitor to Mr. Prosper's country place declines to stay for the night, pleading that he has neglected to bring a dress coat. "Mr. Prosper did not care to sit down to dinner with guests who did not bring their dress coats." And courtship follows its own protocols. Harry Annesley goes to Tretton Park when Florence Mountjoy is there, and he

endeavoured to plead his own cause after his own fashion. This he had done after the good old English plan which is said to be somewhat loutish, but is not without its efficacy. He had looked at her, and danced with her, and done the best with his gloves and cravat, and had let her see by twenty unmistakable signs that in order to be perfectly happy he must be near her. … But he had never as yet actually asked her to love him. But she was so quick a linguist that she had understood down to the last letter what all these tokens had meant.

And there was a Victorian equivalent of Las Vegas, where the best entertainment can be enjoyed for the most reasonable prices, because a gambling house is a profitable business, and the entertainment is a "loss leader:"

Who does not know the outside hall of the magnificent gambling house at Monte Carlo, with all the golden splendour of its music-room within? Who does not know the lofty roof and lounging seats, with all its luxuries of liveried servants, its wealth of newspapers, and every appanage of costly comfort which can be added to it? … [At] Monte Carlo you walk in with your wife in her morning costume, and seating yourself luxuriously in one of those soft stalls which are there prepared for you, you give yourself up with perfect ease to absolute enjoyment. For two hours the concert lasts, and all around is perfection and gilding. … Nothing can be more perfect than the concert-room at Monte Carlo, and nothing more charming; and for all this there is nothing whatever to pay.

Rather a leisurely survey of one aspect of the Victorian scene. And as the author brings the story to a close, some of the characters are rewarded with their own chapters, in order to make their exits. Of these, that of Mr. Grey shows us the destiny of the lawyer who tried to be good and to do good. Disillusioned with how the world has changed under his feet, feeling guilty and inadequate after having had the wool pulled over his eyes by Mr. Scarborough, and uncomfortable with his junior partner's more lenient views of professional ethics, he retires and vows to do good deeds, starting with his sister's family of a drunkard husband and five daughters in need of husbands. He rings their doorbell and is met by Mr. Matterson, a widowed clergyman with five children who has offered to marry Amelia, the eldest. He then learns from Amelia that she has no reservations about leaving Papa, who "is getting to be quite unbearable," and marrying the clergyman.

Poor Mr. Grey, when his niece turned and went back home, thought that, as far as the girl was concerned, or her future household, there would be very little room for employment for him. Mr. Matterson wanted an upper servant who, instead of demanding wages, would bring a little money with her, and he could not but feel that the poor clergyman would find that he had taken into his house a bad and expensive upper servant."Never mind, Papa," said Dolly; "we will go on and persevere, and, if we intend to do good, good will certainly come of it."

"Never mind, Papa," said Dolly; "we will go on and persevere, and, if we intend to do good, good will certainly come of it."

And we devoutly hope so. There are two more chapters to tie up some loose ends. But this pretty much wraps it up. Is this what comes from a lawyer trying to be good and to do good?

Some children discovered the first diamond in South Africa in 1867, an event described by Anthony Trollope in "The Diamond Fields of South Africa,"[6]upon visiting the area during the last six months of 1877. The rush for diamonds then duly turned up five years later in a novel,An Old Man's Love, completed just six months before his death. John Gordon is the adventurer in the story; he goes away to make his fortune in diamonds when he is told that he cannot marry his beloved Mary Lawrie because he is a pauper—even though they have never spoken to each other of their love. He returns three years later as a rich man, only to find that Mary has promised, only a half hour earlier, to marry someone else—Mr. William Whittlestaff, who at fifty years of age is the "old man" of the title.

[Footnote 6:South Africa, Vol. 2, chapter VIII, 1878]

No matter that she told Mr. Whittlestaff, who took her into his house when her stepmother died, that she loved Mr. Gordon and would always think of him. A promise is a promise, not to be given or broken lightly. Though she would not allow the "old man" to kiss her, she would not break her promise. Bad timing. The diamonds don't seem to make much difference.

They certainly don't make much difference to Mrs. Baggett, the woman who rules Croker's Hall as Mr. Whittlestaff's housekeeper. She puts no trust in diamonds—"only in the funds, which is reg'lar." She has her own concerns; she is incensed that Mr. Gordon would even presume to come speak to the young woman in her master's house, and she sternly tells Mary that her duty is to see to it that the master has his way.

Mrs. Baggett has her principles. Though she urges Mary to accept Mr. Whittlestaff in the first place, and to keep her promise when the matter appears to be in doubt, yet she maintains that she will not stay to serve under another woman who is mistress of Croker's Hall. Not only will she not stay, she will go to Portsmouth to take care of her drunken one-legged husband. Mr. Whittlestaff cannot shake her from this resolve, and she tells him he must not abandon his engagement: "It's weak, and nobody wouldn't think a straw of you for doing it."

The author reaches into his bag of churchmen to produce Reverend Montagu Blake, who is addressed appropriately by his fiancée when she says, "Don't be a fool, Montagu." We see the young curate celebrate his good fortune at the death of Rev. Harbottle, freeing his pulpit for Mr. Blake, and also permitting him to marry Kattie Forrester. "But now that old Harbottle has gone, I'll get the day fixed; you see if I don't."

What of the "old man?" Mr. Whittlestaff listens to his housekeeper's stern counsel to be a man and keep what is his. Then he retreats to a secluded hillside to consult his well-worn copy of Horace (the Victorian gentlemen knew their classics) in an effort to identify the wisdom of the ages. And finally he asks himself whether Mrs. Baggett's lessons correspond to those of Jesus Christ. In these ruminations he is shown as a man who rises above the cardboard cutout of a selfish old country squire in love with his young ward. His deliberations with himself are lengthy; though he consults his volume of Horace, he finds that he remembers Horace's counsel well enough to weigh it without looking; and he finds it wanting.

His moment of critical decision involves a short serious interview with his young fiancée—an unusually tender Trollopian interview—as he prepares to go to London to see John Gordon and offer Mary to him. She puts her arm upon him and entreats him not to go, telling him that he his entitled to have "whatever it is that you may want, though it is but such a trifle."

Mr. Whittlestaff finally settles the issue when she announces that she will burn the letter he had written to Mr. Gordon arranging to meet him; he calls for a sandwich and a glass of wine, swearing that he will start in an hour.

The reader must remember that her original agreement to marry Mr. Whittlestaff was verbal, not physical; she did not allow him to kiss her; nor did she go beyond putting her arm on him and looking into his face on this occasion. Though this modest gesture is sufficient to mark it as a tender interview, one cannot help concluding that this young Victorian woman fought the battle with one arm behind her back.

Mr. Whittlestaff shows that he understands this by the completion of his mission. The subsequent interview with Mr. Gordon in Green Park is hardly a tender one; indeed, it becomes a bit testy on both sides; but the mission is accomplished.

"The most important part of our narrative" is compressed into the last page of the book. Youth is served; but so well has the groundwork been laid in the relatively few pages of this short novel, that the reader closes the book feeling that it has all been a bit more than just a fairy tale.

This was Trollope's last novel to be completed. He was in the middle of writingThe Landleaguerswhen he had a stroke and died.An Old Man's Lovewas published posthumously in 1884.

The sense of urgency that ordinarily attends the last few pages of a novel is absent as one approaches the end—but not the conclusion—ofThe Landleaguers, knowing that the story is to be terminated at the place where Anthony Trollope had the stroke that ended his writing career and, a month later, his life. The reader, instead of racing to the conclusion, tends to linger, watching for any clue as to the impending blow, dreading the moment when the storyteller closes the book for an unexpected interruption, never to return. At least the stroke did not occur during the writing, with the pen dropping from his hand in midsentence. He actually dictated these pages to his son Harry on the morning of November 3, 1882; on that evening he suddenly fell silent while everyone else was laughing at the reading of a comic novel after dinner in the home of his friend John Tilley, and it was apparent that he had had a stroke, leaving him with paralysis of his right side and inability to speak.

Trollope made two trips to Ireland during his last year to familiarize himself with the efforts at land reform and the accompanying violence that he depicted inThe Landleaguers; he returned for a second visit after he had already begun writing it. This was the most topical of his novels, and he interviewed several government officials and other knowledgeable Irishmen, but not any of the Landleaguers—those who advocated reform measures that would infringe on the rights of property. Indeed, he interrupted his story of "our three heroines," declaring it necessary to describe the "political circumstances of the day" with an entire chapter. Although Trollope had personal affection for Ireland as the place where he had spent eighteen years and had begun his writing, he was a son of England first and foremost. He had no sympathy for rebellion.

Events on the ground in 1882 marched right through his story, including a reference to the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish on his first day on the job as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of his Under Secretary T. H. Burke, in May, eleven days before Trollope arrived to begin his research. And in August, five members of a Joyce family were murdered—a tragedy he incorporated into his story.

Ordinarily, an unfinished work is not to be judged, but knowing what we know about Trollope's writing patterns, it seems unlikely that any major revisions would have occurred in what he had already written. We do have forty-eight of the planned sixty chapters, with a short note by Harry Trollope to confirm what any experienced Trollope reader would suspect as to who married whom and who was to be hanged in the end. And as we follow the misfortunes of the Jones family members who occupied Morony Castle, we see the effects of a campaign of terror in a quiet green countryside. Outside agitators, surely from America, have come among the "generous, kindly, impulsive, and docile" country Irish folk, leading them to believe that one man is as good as another (nothing said about the women, of course), and that those who rent land don't really have to pay their full rent to the lord of the manor. Farmers in America don't pay rent to a landlord, they are told. Each man has his own (small) farm. If the lands of America were there to be taken from the Indians, why should not the Irish farmers take it from the greedy landlords?

Mr. Jones's problems at Morony Castle begin when his sluice gates are opened, flooding eighty acres of good bottom land. His ten-year old son Florian, who happened to witness the event, is terrified into silence by his father's discontented renter who makes him swear not to tell, invoking the Catholic religion that the lad had innocently adopted as a bit of filial rebellion. After months of pressure and wheedling by his sisters, who guess correctly that he knows, young Florian finally names Pat Carroll as the culprit. On his way to the courthouse with his father to give testimony, he is shot through the head and killed by a double barrel rifle poked through a hole in a stone wall along the road.

This reign of terror happened to occur in rural Ireland; it could have been the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mafia in Sicily, the mob in Chicago, or the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South. But here in County Galway the usual ingredients were to be found: inadequate law enforcement, young men with more testosterone than employment, and a fearful populace.

Less violent but more widespread rebellion had already appeared in the disruption of a fox hunt. The author had learned fox hunting in Ireland, and many of the momentous events in his novels take place at fox hunts. On this occasion, whenever the hunters arrive at a gorse covert, they find the local farmers already there, having beaten the area so that no fox would have remained for the chase.

And the Jones family finds itself the victim of a boycott, a term that had only come into use two years earlier when Captain Charles Boycott, land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo in Ireland, had attempted to evict eleven tenants who refused to pay their full rent. Charles Parnell, the champion of Irish nationalism and a land reform agitator, had already recommended that an offending landowner might be ostracized. Captain Boycott then found himself victim of the process that later bore his name. And inThe Landleaguersall the servants but one leave the Jones household. The family is unable to buy anything in town, and no one in the town will buy from the farm. The daughters come to enjoy, in a way, household duties such as cooking, making beds, and churning butter. The family, though, is devastated.

And the women pay a surcharge. As we see Mr. Jones carving the mutton and serving a male visitor first, the author explains: "In a boycotted house you will always find that the gentlemen are helped before the ladies. It is a part of the principle of boycotting that women shall subject themselves."

As the nonviolent civil disobedience changes to murder, the story takes on the dimensions of a western movie when the heralded lawman comes to town to institute law and order and set things straight. This was Captain Yorke Clayton, possessed of two attributes that would lead any man to fame: recklessness and light blue eyes. With these attributes he wins the hearts of both Jones sisters, Ada and Edith. Edith, the younger and brighter of the two, tells herself and everyone else that he will prefer Ada, the elder and the more beautiful. By the time he declares himself to be in love with Edith, she has such a difficult time getting rid of her story that the issue is not resolved within forty-eight chapters. After Florian is killed, Captain Clayton becomes obsessed with the identification of his killer. The villain is assumed to be Terry Lax, an agitator from another county who is guilty of murdering the other witness who was prepared to identify the opener of the sluice gate. This was done in a crowded courtroom with the pistol at the victim's head, and no one could be found who would say he had seen who did it. The author did not live to unravel the murder for us and wrap up all the loose ends; we are assured by Trollope's son Harry, however, that the Captain did marry Edith and that the infamous Mr. Lax was hanged by the neck until he was dead.

Besides all this there is the subplot, a story that moviegoers in the following century would recognize as show-biz melodrama. Young Frank Jones, son of the lord of Morony Castle, is in love with Rachel O'Mahony, whose beautiful singing voice on stage is her meal ticket. "We may best describe her by saying that she was an American and an actress," the author tells us. Rachel came to Ireland with her father, who had "probably" been born in America, though the family was Irish. She is accompanied by her manager, referred to by her as the "greasy Jew" Mahomet M. Moses, who also wants to marry her. Rachel, a tiny thing, holds out against him, but then she receives attention from Lord Castlewell, forty years old, eldest son of the Marquis of Beaulieu, with lots of money and a fondness for young ladies of the theater. Frank has not the money to support her, refuses to be supported by her, and, in short, she accepts Lord Castlewell's proposal—only to change her mind after she becomes ill and loses her singing voice. Harry tells us that Frank was to marry Rachel in the end.

And so Anthony Trollope began and ended his writing career with a novel about Ireland. He didn't live long enough to play this one out, but we're fortunate to have the first forty-eight chapters and his son's assurance of how it was to have ended in the last twelve. His last work was one that reprised some of his favorite themes—the fox hunt, a murder mystery, a young American woman with a smart mouth, a stubborn young woman reluctant to accept a suitor whom she loves, and the ways of the simple folk of Ireland. He was running in full stride when he fell.

One hesitates to implicate others in a private madness. A project such as this one requires a certain bit of monomania. However, there are a few who cannot escape complicity.

Chip Paris of Williams/Crawford & Associates has added great value to this and a previous book with graphic design of the cover. Amanda Holland's creativity has allowedThe Way They Lived Thento present itself to the reader in a fashion that has been pleasing to me and all who have been asked to comment. Kay Aclin, two of whose paintings hang in our house, provided valuable last minute advice on the color scheme of the cover. Chip's father Charles Paris is an old friend who provided the photograph of the author.

Todd Stewart and I share a few eccentricities, but he is far ahead of me in understanding how to prepare and publish a manuscript. I don't want to know how many hours he has devoted to promoting this and our other joint ventures.

Professor Rebecca Resinski of the Classics Department of Hendrix College maintains a web site for classical allusions in Trollope, www.trollope-apollo.com, which has been a handy way to try to keep up with Trollope's training in Greek and Latin. More important has been her personal encouragement.

My wife Mary read all these reviews, and nothing went out of the house, nor did I ever dare punch "Send," without her ok.

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