THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER

[Footnote 1: Sir William Blackstone'sCommentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-1769]

With this as the law of the land, one can begin to see that a young husband, new to the demands of marriage, might feel that his very manhood required that he exercise his authority. (There is a downside to chivalry.)

And on the other side of the equation, we are told that Emily has been brought up away from England, in the Mandarin Islands, where she has developed an independent spirit. Friends of both parties urged them to soften their positions, but both felt that their honor was insulted, and that they could not retreat or compromise.

Today's reader observes pretty quickly in this disaster that such an impasse is less likely to occur these days because women have more rights. And though Trollope never officially endorsed the rights of women, he allowed Emily, and other women in other novels, to be compelling in their arguments. Emily voices these early in our story:

"It is a very poor thing to be a woman," she said to her sister."It is perhaps better than being a dog," said Nora; "but, of course, we can't compare ourselves to men.""It would be better to be a dog. One wouldn't be made to suffer so much. When a puppy is taken away from its mother, she is bad enough for a few days, but she gets over it in a week. … It is very hard for a woman to know what to do," continued Emily, "but if she is to marry, I think she had better marry a fool. After all, a fool generally knows that he is a fool, and will trust someone, though he may not trust his wife."

"It is a very poor thing to be a woman," she said to her sister.

"It is perhaps better than being a dog," said Nora; "but, of course, we can't compare ourselves to men."

"It would be better to be a dog. One wouldn't be made to suffer so much. When a puppy is taken away from its mother, she is bad enough for a few days, but she gets over it in a week. … It is very hard for a woman to know what to do," continued Emily, "but if she is to marry, I think she had better marry a fool. After all, a fool generally knows that he is a fool, and will trust someone, though he may not trust his wife."

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," and we are mercifully diverted by the subplots, which occupy approximately fifty-four of the ninety-nine chapters of the 823-page book (one of Trollope's longest).

Miss Jemima Stanbury occupies a position of similar prominence among the subplots as she enjoyed in the city of Exeter. This is stated in a single sentence (of some length): "It is to be hoped that no readers of these pages will be so un-English as to be unable to appreciate the difference between county society and town society—the society, that is, of a provincial town, or so ignorant as not to know also that there may be persons so privileged, that although they live distinctly within a provincial town, there is accorded to them, as though by brevet rank, all the merit of living in the county." And Miss Stanbury was universally regarded as "county" rather than "town." "There was not a tradesman in Exeter who was not aware of it, and who did not touch his hat to her accordingly."

Miss Stanbury was rich. She had been engaged to a young banker, Mr. Brooke Burgess, who had jilted her, subsequently died, and left to her "every shilling that he possessed." And she, in her own romantic way, was determined that her inheritance should be hers only for life and that at her death it should revert to the Burgess family and not stay in her own family.

This is the formidable woman who paid for the education of Hugh Stanbury, Louis Trevelyan's best friend, and then cut him off from all support because he abandoned the study of law to write for the "penny press." She then wrote to Hugh's mother asking her to send her younger daughter Dorothy to live with her. "I shall expect her to be regular at meals, to be constant in going to church, and not to read modern novels."

The great problem for Miss Stanbury arose when her beloved niece Dorothy fell in love with and agreed to marry young Brooke Burgess, nephew of Miss Stanbury's late lover. But young Brooke was to inherit the Burgess wealth that Miss Stanbury intended to return to the Burgesses. And if he should marry her niece, it would diminish her posthumous triumph in returning the wealth. So he must not marry her niece. Her niece must marry Mr. Gibson, a young clergyman of Exeter.

Happy endings are permitted in the subplots, and the young people have their way. That is, most of them do. Miss Stanbury comes around with a late night change of heart and grants her blessing to Dorothy's marrying Mr. Burgess. Mr. Gibson receives his just reward. He is claimed by two sisters of the parish, one of whom so terrifies him that he reneges on his engagement to her, escaping her long kitchen knife when a kinsman is summoned to take it away from her, and Mr. Gibson then takes the younger of the two lovely sisters.

There is yet another subplot involving the Rowleys and the Stanburys. Hugh Stanbury, best friend of the unfortunate and stubborn Louis Trevelyan and rejected beneficiary of his Aunt Stanbury, is in love with Nora Rowley, beautiful sister of the also unfortunate and also stubborn Emily Trevelyan. But Nora's parents have their hearts set on her accepting the proposal of one Mr. Glascock, soon to be Lord Peterborough on the death of his father. A handsome and pleasant young man, his proposal comes only after the beautiful Nora has lost her heart to radical young Hugh Stanbury, and Mr. Glascock is refused. We then have the opportunity to follow Mr. Glascock on his journey to Naples to see his dying father, in the course of which he happens to travel with, by great coincidence, Louis Trevelyan himself, and two young Spalding sisters from America. This gives the young Trevelyan, separated from his wife, an opportunity to describe another variety of wives, the American ones, who are "exigeant—and then they are so hard. They want the weakness that a woman ought to have."

We see a good bit more of the Spalding family in Florence, where Mr. Glascock decides that the elder sister Caroline is his favorite, and after a suitable diversion to other subplots, the reader learns that they have become engaged, Caroline having demonstrated her wit with her response to his question about American "institutions:"

"Everything is an institution. Having iced water to drink in every room of the house is an institution. Having hospitals in every town is an institution. Travelling altogether in one class of railway cars is an institution. Saying "sir", is an institution. Teaching all the children mathematics is an institution. Plenty of food is an institution. Getting drunk is an institution in a great many towns. Lecturing is an institution. There are plenty of them, and some are very good—but you wouldn't like it."

Mr. Trollope must have had some unpleasant experiences with one or more American women who served as his model for Caroline Spalding's friend Wallachia Petrie, "the Republican Browning," a "poetess" and a feminist and an outspoken opponent of "European" ways. Inveighing against the "courtiers" of "Europe," Miss Petrie vows that "the courtier shall be cut down together with the withered grasses and thrown into the oven, and there shall be an end of them."

We may hope that the future Lord Peterborough will not be obliged to listen to such speeches at Monkhams, his ancestral home.

But all is not diversion with subplots. The main business at hand is the progressive madness of Louis Trevelyan, who has his young son snatched by his private detective Bozzle (a well-meaning agent who eventually allows his wife to convince him that his own suspicion is correct, and that Trevelyan is mad) and carries him off to Italy. There he becomes progressively weaker, failing to eat, and Emily comes to rescue her son and provide hospice care for her husband. Was he mad? The author answers that he was "neither mad nor sane—not mad, so that all power over his own actions need be taken from him; nor sane, so that he must be held to be accountable for his words and thoughts."

The case of Louis Trevelyan is a tough one. The author, noted for his realistic portrayal of the world, makes a convincing case. And one must remember that Trollope was, after all, a story teller; and the story of a man who went mad because his wife would not accept his authority—because she would not recognize his position as master of his house, where his word was law—was a story worth telling. The subplots and the comedy and the realism are all background, but the strange story is the event in the foreground. The story may have taken its author further than he had intended to go. His own comment on the novel in his autobiography has been often quoted and is worth reviewing:

I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story. It was my purpose to create sympathy for the unfortunate man who, while endeavouring to do his duty to all around him, should be led constantly astray by his unwillingness to submit his own judgment to the opinion of others. The man is made to be unfortunate enough, and the evil which he does is apparent. So far I did not fail, but the sympathy has not been created yet. I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad. It is in part redeemed by certain scenes in the house and vicinity of an old maid in Exeter. But a novel which in its main parts is bad cannot, in truth, be redeemed by the vitality of subordinate characters.

It may well be that Louis and Emily Trevelyan got away from their creator, just as their quarrel took on a life of its own and got out of the control of its two participants. Even with an author who prided himself on discipline in his writing, the pen can sometimes take off with a will of its own. Though the author professed to be displeased with the result, most critics have viewed the result with more favor, and I am inclined to agree with them. As to the strangeness of the story, the more one sees of life, how can anyone say that anything cannot happen? The storyteller's job is to take strange stories and make entertaining stories out of them. When I was in training, one of my chief residents had a comment that he used for strange cases: "You see that sometimes."

He knew he was right, but he was wrong.

On the day that I finished reading Trollope'sThe Vicar of Bullhampton, the following appeared in an email from a friend: An Irish daughter had not been home for over 5 years. Upon her return, her father cussed her: "Where have you been all this time, you ingrate!" The girl, crying, replied, "Dad … I became a prostitute." "What! Out of here, you shameless harlot! …" "OK, Dad—as you wish. I just came back to give Mom this fur coat and you this new Mercedes Benz. …" "Now what was it you said you had become?" "A prostitute, Dad" "Oh, you scared me half to death, girl. I thought you said a Protestant."

This is one of the major plot lines ofThe Vicar of Bullhampton, though not its conclusion. Plots are standard and repetitive. The success of the work relies less on the plot than on its window dressing. Trollope's Carry Brattle has been gone from home, and everyone knows what she has become but delicacy forbids use of the word "whore." Her father forbids her return. Will she come back? How will she be received? This theme apparently was a daring innovation in the mainstream Victorian novel; Mary Magdalene rarely appeared in the printed pages of the nineteenth century.

Sensational as this story line was, the novel appears to move rather slowly. All plot lines revolve around Mister Fenwick, the vicar. He and his wife encourage their house guest, Mary Lowther, to accept the suit of Mr. Fenwick's best friend, Harry Gilmore. She doesn't love him; she refuses him and shortly after falls in love with her cousin Walter Marrable. She accepts his proposal, but they jointly agree to call it off when his prospects in life are ruined by his father's reckless wasting of Walter's inheritance. Against her better judgment she accepts Mr. Gilmore. Then Walter's prospects for an inheritance improve. So she breaks her engagement to Mr. Gilmore and resumes that with Captain Marrable. Like Alice Vavasor inCan You Forgive Her?she becomes a double jilt, and she is roundly criticized by many for such grievous behavior.

Perhaps the most entertaining of the story lines is a church issue reminiscent of the Barsetshire novels. Mister Fenwick is insulted by the great landowner of the county, The Marquis of Trowbridge, and he succeeds in repaying the Marquis with more insults. Here Trollope's familiarity with church sensitivities brings us the Marquis's revenge: he allows a Methodist chapel (not a regular Wesleyan Methodist chapel, but a Primitive Methodist chapel) to be built across the road from the vicarage, where its ugly red bricks and loud discordant bells are a recurring nuisance to the vicar and his wife.

But then: the vicar decides to consider the chapel to be his hair shirt, and he obtains the promise of his wife (who will never open her front door to look at the chapel) not to mention it to him again. The vicar considers the matter closed; but his wife's sister visits with her husband, a distinguished barrister, who volunteers to investigate the matter. He discovers that the land on which the chapel is being built is glebe land! (Glebe land is that which belongs to the vicar for his personal farming or gardening.) And here the vicar refuses to shed his hair shirt.

His clerical mind allows him to demonstrate his virtue by tolerating the chapel, though his poor wife may be obliged to endure the sight and sounds of it without being allowed to complain to him. But the perpetrator of the chapel is not to be spared, and the vicar writes a stinging letter to the marquis, in which he explains the use of very strong words:

He showed the letter to his wife."Isn't malice a very strong word?" she said."I hope so," answered the vicar.

He showed the letter to his wife.

"Isn't malice a very strong word?" she said.

"I hope so," answered the vicar.

The pace of the gentle life in Victorian England was surely a leisurely one. This pace is reflected in the whole page that is given to the thoughts of the Marquis of Trowbridge when he receives the insulting letter from Mr. Fenwick; and his reflections are further supplemented by the author's reminding us, if it were not already evident, that the Marquis is an old fool:

His lordship's mind was one utterly incapable of sifting evidence—unable even to understand evidence when it came to him. He was not a bad man. He desired nothing that was not his own, and remitted much that was. He feared God, honoured the Queen, and loved his country. He was not self-indulgent. He did his duties as he knew them. But he was an arrogant old fool, who could not keep himself from mischief—who could only be kept from mischief by the aid of some such master as his son.

Trollope can be more pithy, as when he describes the Marquis's reception and reaction to the letter from the vicar: "His intelligence worked slowly, whereas his wrath worked quickly."

The vicar subsequently feels himself cheated of his revenge after the Marquis's son Lord St. George succeeds in "pouring oil on the waters." But others pursue the matter for him, and in the end the chapel is pulled down.

The vicar is actually rather well portrayed and could stand with his clerical brethren of Barsetshire if he were given six novels in which we could follow his career. He shows himself to be a naive clergyman who thinks he can intervene in the problems of a pretty, banished prostitute without incurring any risk to his reputation. He urges the miller Jacob Brattle to accept his daughter, ignoring the father's refusal to speak to him about Carry. He visits Carry's brother George, urging him and his wife to take her in, facing the wife's wrath after George advises him not to raise the issue with her. He visits Carry's brother-in-law Mr. Jay the ironmonger with similar lack of success. He visits Carry at the small town inn where she is staying and pays for her lodging. Just when the reader begins to wonder whether, in the words of the song inThe Music Man, "Hester will win just one more A," the vicar's wife Janet finally persuades him to lower his profile in the matter, but he never seems to understand the damage of gossip.

His instincts are shown to be correct in his championing of Sam Brattle, who is accused of murder but subsequently exonerated, and of Carry Brattle, who returns home and finally regains her father's affection. Carry's return is after setting out on foot, exposing herself to the elements in desperation, half expecting to die of exposure as did Lady Dedlock in Dickens'sBleak House, and as Gerald Crich would do in D. H. Lawrence'sWomen in Love. Did such a recurrent fictional device reflect an occasional practice of the times?

Trollope is a chatty author. Had he been as reticent as twentieth century practitioners of minimalist fiction, we might not have had spelled out for our curiosity a definition of a gentleman, a recurrent source of fascination for Trollope. Miss Marrable is the author's agent who ponders the matter, concluding that money does not entitle a millionaire to be considered a gentleman. Attorneys don't make the cut by virtue of their profession. A son of a gentleman, however, could maintain his rank by earning his living as a clergyman, a barrister, a soldier, or a sailor. Physicians were not absolutely excluded from the ranks of the gentlemen, but a physician could never participate in the privileges accorded to the Law and the Church. There might be some doubt about the engineering profession, but any man who allowed himself to touch trade or commerce automatically excluded himself. Such men might be ever so respectable, "but brewers, bankers and merchants were not gentlemen, and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray, because people were forgetting their landmarks."

And it goes without mentioning that for Walter Marrable, the option of going to work to make money is never considered. His only recourse is to return to the army.

Obvious generalizations as to class have gone out of style. But Victorian England was a land of class and caste, as shown in this allusion to a hired hand in the mill: "His companion in the mill did not come near them, knowing, as the poor do know on such occasions, there was something going on which would lead them to prefer that he should be absent."

There's also a murder mystery. It occupies several chapters, but at the end it is dismissed with only the limited knowledge of the details told by Carry Brattle and her brother Sam, both witnesses at the trial.

The story of the Mary Magdalene, though innovative, is, after all, sentimental; the love story, perhaps considered essential to sell the book to the public, is tedious; the murder mystery is perfunctory; but I wouldn't miss the story of the Methodist chapel.

The beleaguered father of the twenty-first century might at first look with some longing to the mores of the nineteenth century and toSir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, in a time and place when a father's word was law, and a faithful daughter would not marry without her father's consent. It was not so simple, though, and that's what the book is about. The plot anticipates that of Henry James'sWashington Square, written about ten years later about a family in New York.

Trollope presents the story in a short novel of 172 pages, which means there are no subplots. However, the reader is not shortchanged by any lack of reflections by and about the characters as each turn of the story unfolds. Whereas James regards his participants in a rather detached fashion, as a puppet master who pulls the strings and watches the unfortunate movements that may result, and with relative economy of words, Trollope regards his characters with as much affection as they deserve, spending paragraphs detailing all aspects of the situation as they may appear to each of them all along the way.

The daughter of a wealthy baronet falls in love with her cousin who is a spendthrift and unworthy of her. We must follow the ground rules of Victorian society—cousins may marry, and a father must decide whether to approve of his daughter's intended husband and is indeed obliged to investigate his character. In this case, we learn that the mortal sin committed by the suitor is that he cheated at cards. Remember T. S. Eliot's line about Macavity the Mystery Cat: "He's outwardly respectable. (They say he cheats at cards.)"

For our later generation, Trollope is a patient instructor: We are reminded that an Englishman's home is his castle. "Nothing on earth should induce Sir Harry to see his cousin anywhere on his own premises."

In a society in which inheritance could be all important, the lover of the fox hunt was beginning to suspect that the laws of inheritance were not universally applicable: "And good blood too will have its effect—physical for the most part—and will produce bottom, lasting courage, that capacity of carrying on through the mud to which Sir Harry was wont to allude; but good blood will bring no man back to honesty."

He gives lessons in the art of negotiation: "Lady Elizabeth had not been instructed to propose a meeting. She had been told rather to avoid it if at all possible. But, like some other undiplomatic ambassadors, in her desire to be civil, she ran at once to the extremity of the permitted concession."

A serious interview ensues when George Hotspur plucks up his courage to ask Sir Harry for Emily Hotspur's hand. Two and a half pages of dialogue follow, during which George pleads his losing case well, leaving Sir Harry to decide: "He sat silent for full five minutes before he spoke again, and then he gave judgment as follows: 'You will go away without seeing her tomorrow.'" Trollope follows the narrative to a point further on, at which, "The process of parental yielding had already commenced."

Ever the patient instructor, he here teaches:

On all such occasions interviews are bad. The teller of this story ventures to take the opportunity of recommending parents in such cases always to refuse interviews, not only between the young lady and the lover who is to be excluded, but also between themselves and the lover. The vacillating tone—even when the resolve to suppress vacillation has been most determined—is perceived and understood.

Not always a dispassionate instructor, the compassionate narrator at one point has tender words for the doomed maiden: "Then he knelt down and prayed … that he might be as a brand saved from the burning. … Alas, dearest, no; not so could it be done! Not at thy instance, though thy prayers be as pure as the songs of angels."

The story is built with several materials familiar to Trollope readers: the faithful young woman who can never love another, whatever becomes of the love of her life; the father concerned with the integrity of his estate in generations to come; and the young man who never intends to work and would readily marry for money. Whereas, however, in other novels it all comes out all right (Ayala's Angel, for instance, is a comedy from first to last in which numerous young girls succeed in following their hearts without having to pine away) in this story the chips fall where they may, so the ending is a bit of a downer.

By all accounts Trollope considered himself rather a conservative citizen. But whether consciously or not, he holds up a number of Victorian conventions to the test ofreductio ad absurdumand shows their absurdity to a later generation, whatever his contemporary readers may have thought. No feminist, he showed the disadvantaged state of women in novel after novel. And although Father may often know best, his stubborn attempt to prove it might include the risk of disastrous consequences, as shown inSir Harry Hotspur.

There are two Ralph Newtons in Anthony Trollope'sRalph the Heir. One is nephew to the Squire of Newton Priory and is his heir. The other is his illegitimate son. So: why should the title not beRalph the Bastard? First: this is a Victorian novel; such a title would have been unacceptable to Victorian society. Second: even though the squire's son shows himself to be more worthy than his cousin, the central figure in the story really is Ralph the heir. Trollope merely says that heroes of pure virtue and villains of unalloyed vice are rare.

This is what it is about: There was a complicated inheritance issue—not contested, just complicated. I had to draw a little diagram to get it straight, and I then had to refer to it time after time:

family tree

Gregory Newton the Squire, in his youth and before he became the Squire, traveled in Europe and fathered a child (whom he named Ralph, after his father); the mother died before their planned marriage. Outraged at his son's indiscretion, the old Squire then entailed the family estate to the second generation; that is, his son could inherit the estate and use it for life, but he did not have "power of appointment" (a phrase I learned when tracing my father's many trusts to their intended conclusions). That is, he could not pass it on. Unless the first born (Gregory the squire, who had fathered the illegitimate son) should marry and have a legitimate son, the family estate would go to the first born son of his brother Ralph Newton the parson. (We're talking about three Ralphs and two Gregorys in three generations here.) It so happened that Parson Ralph's first born son, Ralph the heir, was a playboy who acquired more debts than he could pay, and he wound up with two choices: marry for money, taking Polly Neefit, daughter of his tailor, who had loaned money to Ralph and would forgive his debts and give him enough money (twenty thousand pounds) to pay his debts and more; or "go to the Jews," that is, put up his birthright as security for a loan to pay his debts.

When Gregory the father of the illegitimate son heard of this (he had now become squire after the death of his father), he saw an opportunity to take the place of the Jews and basically buy the birthright of Ralph the heir, so that he could then pass it on to his own son, Ralph the bastard.

In considering Trollope'sJohn Caldigate, I wondered at the way in which inheritance issues could yield such complicated plots. Obviously there were contested inheritances; today, even without primogeniture, children of a deceased parent often have bitter disputes over the rights to seemingly minor treasures of much greater sentimental than monetary value—not to mention disputes over significant property and money. But did it ever get this complicated? Who knows?

So much for the inheritance issue. There are complicated boy-girl issues also. Ralph the heir becomes the ward of Sir Thomas Underwood, a distinguished but now idle barrister. Sir Thomas has two daughters—Patience, the elder, plain and intelligent; and Clarissa, a beauty. He also has an orphan niece, nineteen years old and "the most lovely young woman he had ever seen," Mary Bonner. So as it starts out: Gregory the parson, brother of Ralph the heir, is in love with Clarissa; Clarissa is in love with Ralph the heir; Ralph the heir kisses Clarissa and tells her he loves her, but when he realizes he needs money he is persuaded by his tailor Mr. Neefit to propose to his daughter Polly. When Mary arrives on the scene he vows to propose to her; Mary keeps her own counsel, but Ralph "not the heir" falls seriously in love with her. Patience may have had some preference of her own but not the looks to express or pursue it.

This tangle of alliances and preferences is a bit like a murder mystery: can the reader guess who will wind up with whom? And in truth, the novel basically stands on its plot. Trollope is sufficiently realistic to show that Ralph never really reforms. One of the most interesting women is Polly Neefit, who is urged by her father the breeches-maker to accept Ralph the heir, after Ralph is persuaded by him to propose. She refuses him twice, first because she doesn't think he loves her, and then, after being somewhat mollified on that score, because he doesn't respect her father and although she could have any one of twenty young men, she has only one father.

Her first refusal is a classic Trollopian dialogue. He swears he can love her, but after a lengthy recitation of probabilities, she concludes: "I ain't come to breaking my heart for you yet, Mr. Newton."

Trollope handles the boy-girl scenes very well. But his forte is politics. He had run for a seat in Parliament once himself, and he had become sufficiently disillusioned to paint the political scene in some raw ways. Here we find Sir Thomas Underwood, who has retired from professional and public life to write the definitive biography of Sir Francis Bacon (but never actually takes pen to paper), deciding to try to re-enter Parliament via the rotten borough of Percycross, on the Conservative ticket. It so happens that one of the other contestants for one of the two Percycross seats is Ontario Moggs, a young radical rebel who preaches the virtues of labor unions and strikes, and who is also an ardent suitor for the hand of Polly Neefit. We follow Ontario to the Cheshire Cheese, the public house where he delivers impassioned orations; and we follow Sir Thomas in his reluctant efforts to canvass the electorate. Sir Thomas and his running mate, the incumbent Conservative candidate, win the election, but there is a petition—a demand for a recount and an investigation into possible improprieties in the election.

In the definitive moment of this story, Sir Thomas learns that his reluctant expenditures for campaign costs were only the first of the demands to be made on his purse. After apparently winning the election, he is persuaded by Mr. Pabsby, the Wesleyan preacher, to make a contribution for a new Wesleyan chapel. (Mr. Pabsby has been shown to us as having a "soft, greasy voice,—a voice made of pretence, politeness, and saliva.") But then Sir Thomas learns from his "supporters" that the election will probably be contested, and that he will need the loyalty of his supporters if he is to prevail. The list of requirements—personal donations for all the schools and all the churches, as well as fifty pounds for the old women of the borough at Christmas—goes on and on. Poor Sir Thomas. To make a long story short, he refuses any further favors, the petition overturns his election, and the investigation discloses that Percycross is such a corrupt borough that it has lost all its representation in Parliament.

Trollope occasionally indulged in dispensing little lessons in the facts of life. Early in the story Sir Thomas goes to Portsmouth to meet his newly orphaned nineteen-year-old niece, whom he has never seen. He has declared that he will serve as her guardian, and as he waits to meet her, he is apprehensive. And now as he observes all the men taking turns to offer her favors, he learns about "priority of service":

There are certain favours in life which are very charming,—but very unjust to others, and which we may perhaps lump under the name of priority of service. Money will hardly buy it. When money does buy it, there is no injustice. When priority of service is had, like a coach-and-four, by the man who can afford to pay for it, industry, which is the source of wealth, receives its fitting reward. … But priority of service is perhaps more readily accorded to feminine beauty, and especially to unprotected feminine beauty, than to any other form of claim. Whether or no this is ever felt as a grievance, ladies who are not beautiful may perhaps be able to say.

Walt Disney's film makers understood this in producingMary Poppins, for whom "boxes and trunks seemed to extricate themselves." But even today one can hardly disagree with Trollope that "priority of service is perhaps more readily accorded to feminine beauty" than to any other claim.

It is difficult to dislike a genial friend. And Trollope rewards his readers with his genial approach to his fictional world. In this story Ralph "not the heir" suffers a major reversal of fortune when his father dies before completing the schemes that would have enabled Ralph, the illegitimate son, to inherit the estate and his father's additional fortune. Ralph "not the heir" had resisted ambitions to inherit the family estate. But he had requested permission to propose to the beautiful Mary Bonner when he anticipated some validation of his status. And now it seemed that he would be a "nameless" man without property or hopes of marriage to the woman he loved. At home, his butler continues to be solicitous for his employer's feelings. And the reader feels that the author of his distress has some compassion for the victim. So he does. But the realistic author also adds the butler's observation after finally leaving his young master: "I don't suppose it do come to much mostly when folks go wrong."

But the geniality of the story is shown as the author cruises confidently to his conclusion of the complicated affair, pulling the strings to the satisfaction of as many as possible. Ralph the heir finally receives a reward through the agency of Lady Eardham, mother of three eligible and more or less young daughters. Lady Eardham receives a letter from Polly Neefit's father telling her that Ralph is engaged to marry his daughter Polly. Of course she knows that Mr. Neefit is bluffing, but she shows the letter to Ralph so that he will know she has it. She invites Ralph to call on her the following morning, and when he does, he is toast:

Of course there was nothing done. During the whole interview Lady Eardham continued to press Neefit's letter under her hand upon the table, as though it was of all documents the most precious. … And, though she spoke no such word, she certainly gave Ralph to understand that by this letter he, Ralph Newton, was in some mysterious manner so connected with the secrets, and the interests, and the sanctity of the Eardham family, that, whether such connection might be for weal or woe, the Newtons and the Eardhams could never altogether free themselves from the link.

Her husband approves her work. The daughters certainly do not object. "The girls, who knew that they had no fortunes, expected that everything should be done for them, at least during the period of their natural harvest." And Augusta Eardham, the first fruit of this harvest, accepted her lot in life with equanimity. And it worked out all right.

Bickerings there might be, but they would be bickerings without effect; and Ralph Newton, of Newton, would probably so live with this wife of his bosom, that they, too, might lie at last pleasantly together in the family vault, with the record of their homely virtues visible to the survivors of the parish on the same tombstone.

This passage comes thirteen pages before the end of the novel. Had I been the editor, I should have insisted that this coda be placed at the very end.

Michel Voss is a hard case. His second wife's niece, Marie, and his son (by his first wife) George want to marry each other. Marie has lived in the Voss household since becoming an orphan at age fifteen, and now at age twenty she is quietly running the family inn, the Lion d'Or at Granpere. But Michel thinks his son, about twenty-five years of age, should prove himself in the world before marrying. "I won't have it, George," he declares, and his word is law. And thereby hangs the tale.

Trollope loved the hard cases. Perhaps none was harder than Louis Trevelyan, whose terminal stubbornness was celebrated inHe Knew He was Right.The Last Chronicle of Barsetrevolves around the celebrated stubbornness of Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate who walked miles through the mud to face down Bishop Proudie and his wife in a triumphant confrontation. Linda Tressel, in the novel bearing her name, falls victim to her Aunt Charlotte, a religious zealot who insists on a marriage that Linda refuses. Mr. Whittlestaff, inAn Old Man's Love, resisted giving up his young fiancée to her young lover for long enough to make a short novel out of it. And there are others—strong characters whose steadfastness of purpose forces everyone else to bend or face a long struggle.

We are told that Michel Voss might have agreed to his son's marriage to his niece if he had been consulted beforehand. As it was, when he hears of it, he immediately determines that it is improper. Considering it his duty to make arrangements for his niece's welfare, he arranges what he thinks to be a suitable match with a prospering—though a bit effeminate—young man who calls at the inn while trading in textiles. M. Urmand suffers in comparison to George in Marie's eyes; to her he is simply a "rich trader," while George is a "real man."

Marie's relation to Michel, the master of the inn, is an interesting one. She supervises all that takes place at the supper table in the inn, "standing now close behind her uncle with both her hands upon his head; and she would often stand so after the supper was commenced, only moving to attend upon him, or to supplement the services of Peter and the maidservant when she perceived that they were becoming for a time inadequate to their duties." When urged by her uncle to sit at table next to Urmand, the anointed suitor, her only response is to gently pull his ears.

This is one of the short novels Trollope set in Europe in an effort to break away from the template of his portrayals of English life.The Golden Lionis in Alsace-Lorraine, and in this memorable image of Marie, Trollope has epitomized the Continental culture, so foreign to the English. Can one imagine a young English woman standing behind her uncle with her hands on his head while supervising his table?

Michel is the character of interest. The others play their parts, with events propelled in large part because of lack of communication. When Marie learns that George is still serious about his love for her, she brings herself to vow that she will never marry M. Urmand; but it apparently does not occur to her that she can marry George without his father's permission. As for Michel himself, he appears to have painted himself into a corner. The Church will certainly be of no assistance to him. The Catholic priest is summoned to consult. "This was very distasteful to Michel Voss, because he was himself a Protestant, and, having lived all his life with a Protestant son and two Roman Catholic women in the house, he had come to feel that Father Gondin's religion was a religion for the weaker sex." He was not troubled by doctrinal differences, nor was he too particular about what betrothal meant. "He hardly knew himself how far that betrothal was a binding ceremony. But he felt strongly that he had committed himself to the marriage; that it did not become him to allow that his son had been right; and also that if Marie would only marry the man, she would find herself quite happy in her new home." Indeed, all Marie's senior advisors—her aunt, her uncle, the priest—fail to give her credit for having a mind, or rights, of her own. After a short time of marriage to her betrothed, she would be perfectly happy with her new domestic arrangements and forget all about the love of her youth.

Trollope does allow the postal service to play its role. When Marie decides to break it off with Urmand, she does so by writing him a letter, and not telling her uncle about it until the letter is safely on its way.

In the end, it's all worked out by the men. The matter is finally settled when M. Urmand comes to the Golden Lion to settle things, is avoided by Marie, and spends his time playing billiards alone. George is also on hand, and he manages to have some long tramps in the fields with his father, mostly discussing business affairs. Michel enjoys the walks with his son, and a satisfactory resolution ensues.

The story is paced with a light and masterful touch. A climactic scene between Marie and Urmand is followed by stepping away from Marie's little room to a long range view in the first line of the next chapter: "The people of Colmar think Colmar to be a considerable place, and far be it from us to hint that it is not so. It is—or was in the days when Alsace was French—the chief town of the department of the Haut Rhine." It is in this perspective that Michel rests from his decision-making labors to return to his genius for making plans, announcing his plan for a picnic the next day. It's too cold for a picnic, but all go. Urmand is shown to be a friend of the family, speeches are made, and toasts are drunk. All is well.

The Golden Lion of Granpereis a short, straightforward little love story. It gets deeply enough into the details of running a rural inn in Alsace Lorraine to be entertaining. As is usual with Trollope, a number of lengthy paragraphs give the reader no excuse for not knowing exactly what each character is, or is not, thinking. Trollope the traveler learned enough about Europe for a few little short novels. Perhaps they afforded him the breaks he needed between the three-volume English blockbusters.

One doesn't discuss titles and honors much these days. We may even pretend that they don't matter much, and that in these days of democracy and equality we have no ambition for such frills. My wife and I recently spent half a day with a friend of two of our friends, and we were told before the meeting that he was the "Right Honorable" and had recently been made a Knight Companion in the New Zealand Order of Merit after a distinguished political career. Of course this was nothing that I would have mentioned to him; he dismissed very quickly even a comment of recognition I made on seeing his portrait over his staircase. But the title is out there, and I will be hard pressed to report our visit to any of our friends without making some offhand reference to the "Right Honorable."

We tend to smile at the emphasis placed on hereditary and acquired titles in Victorian England. They still exist, however, and the reader can hardly dismiss as completely dated the central role that the issue of a hereditary title plays in Anthony Trollope'sLady Anna. As the title of the novel indicates, the heroine is not just "Anna Murray"; she is "Lady Anna," and the story moves about the efforts of her mother to establish the legitimacy of the title. The plot is an ingenious, if improbable, one:

The unscrupulous Earl Lovel has married a commoner, but shortly after the marriage he informs her that he has previously married a woman in Italy, and that their marriage is not valid. This means that she is not his Countess, and their unborn child will not be legitimate. Needless to say, she does not take this well, and she spends the rest of her life fighting for her title and for that of her daughter. In almost fairy tale fashion, an humble tailor helps her in her struggle, providing encouragement and significant loans of money. In the fullness of time the tailor's young son and the Countess's young daughter move from being childhood friends to sweethearts, and they vow to marry each other. The tailor's son, Daniel Thwaite, becomes a radical advocate of equality for all and abolition of nobility.

The countess becomes obsessed with the defense of her title, and so vehemently does she oppose her daughter's preference for a commoner that she threatens violence and forcibly keeps her daughter sequestered from the young radical.

The late cunning Earl had so arranged his affairs that though his land and title would devolve upon his nephew, his immense wealth was in personal property—stocks and other investments that would go to the Countess and Lady Anna if his previous marriage to an Italian wife were not verified.

A young Earl Lovel appears, heir to the title and perhaps to the late Earl's wealth; whatever had happened in Italy is a great mystery, and the lawyers for the Countess and for the Lovel family fail to find any evidence that they consider strong enough to convince an English jury that an Italian woman should hold an English title. Facing a lengthy dispute, the lawyers for both sides of the family decide among themselves (!) that a compromise should be reached, and that it could best be accomplished by a marriage between the two sides of the family: the young Earl and Lady Anna.

The young Earl is agreeable to this, and he woos and proposes to Anna. All involved parties, most notably Lady Anna's mother, urge the match; but Anna and Daniel the tailor resist all these efforts.

In the presence of such fairy tale elements, the American reader might expect that the author's sympathies would lie with the young lovers, and their fate would constitute either a pathetic failure, or a true fairy tale ending with justice emerging triumphant, with a rousing authorial chorus. But the warring parties are a bit more complex. Daniel Thwaite is initially presented as "a thoughtful man who had read many books." But we are also told that Daniel Thwaite was a man of a certain power. "Men are persuasive, and imperious withal, who are unconscious that they use burning words to others, whose words to them are never even warm. So it was with this man."

And though Trollope had a predilection for the woman who has but one heart to give and never looks back, and though Lady Anna is stated to be one of this sorority—"She had given her heart to Daniel Thwaite, and she had but one heart to give"—it is at least granted to Lady Anna to have some daydreams: "She already began to have feelings about the family to which she had been a stranger before she had come among the Lovels. And if it really would make him happy, this Phoebus, how glorious would that be!"

Trollope was never one to use the blue pencil over passages that spelled out how his characters felt. Not for him the implications and brevity of a later day. We see Daniel Thwaite not as a pure young idealist, but as one with a flip side:

Sir William Patterson had given him credit for some honesty, but even he had not perceived,—had no opportunity of perceiving,—the staunch uprightness which was, as it were, a backbone to the man in all his doings. He was ambitious, discontented, sullen, and tyrannical. … Gentlemen, so called, were to him as savages, which had to be cleared away in order that that perfection might come at last which the course of nature was to produce in obedience to the ordinances of the Creator.

Development of this story provides no reassurance that Anna will escape from her troubles; after all, a significant mortality risk does accompany certain Victorian novels. As it turns out, her rescue does require a bit of stage business with the desperate countess attempting to use a pistol properly. But the story does evolve with credible development of character: Anna is indeed tempted to throw over her original lover and opt for the life of ease among the nobility. And the author does tell us, in one of his authorial asides, that if the countess and the lawyers had played their cards more skillfully, they might have persuaded Anna to give up Daniel Thwaite if they had given him his due for integrity and virtue instead of trying to persuade Anna of his greed for her money. However, their efforts to blacken him in her eyes only increased her determination to stick by the humble tailor no matter what.

Thwaite is shown to be corrupted to the extent that he will listen to Sir William Patterson, the Solicitor General, the lawyer for the Lovel family, when he explains things to him at the end. Sir William is shown to be thedeus ex machinawho had also persuaded the Lovel family that there should be some accommodation with the Countess and her daughter Lady Anna. It is true that he had advocated a marriage of convenience, but as this became less likely, he still arranged a compromise between the Lovels and the Countess in court, conceding that the widowed countess's marriage was a legal and binding one. And he did this over the objections of members of the family—chiefly "Uncle Charles," the rector of Yoxham.

And so the "great decider of all things" comes to Daniel in the end and congratulates him on his success, and we find that Daniel likes and respects Sir William, though he attempts to maintain his total opposition to nobility in general and the Lovels in particular. This conversation is presented with skill and humor as the author takes the reader into his confidence, revealing what the story is all about. Here are Sir William's comments on the great theory of equality: "The energetic, the talented, the honest, and the unselfish will always be moving towards an aristocratic side of society, because their virtues will beget esteem, and esteem will beget wealth,—and wealth gives power for good offices."

The eloquence of the urbane lawyer is not lost on Daniel Thwaite. The reader comes to believe that Anna and Daniel have responded to circumstances and modified their views of the world somewhat. Not so the Countess. Determined to do anything to make a wealthy and respectable Lady of her daughter, the Countess disgraces herself and disappears.

One of the byproducts of the story is another of Trollope's portraits of the warts and all of the clergy, in the person of the rector of Yoxham, who never wavers in his opposition to the legitimacy of Lady Anna. This results in an entertaining example of how certain words could and could not be used in Victorian print:

"—— Sir William!" muttered the rector between his teeth, as he turned away in his disgust. What had been the first word of that minatory speech Lord Lovel did not clearly hear. He had been brought up as a boy by his uncle, and had never known his uncle to offend by swearing. No one in Yoxham would have believed it possible that the parson of the parish should have done so. … But his nephew in his heart of hearts believed that the rector of Yoxham had damned the Solicitor-General.

Lady Annais a fairy tale, as are many of the best stories. One can hardly do much better than to use a good fairy tale as a framework for entertainment, if the elements of originality are grafted onto the framework. In this case genial humor in the face of looming tragedy, and credible character development, allow the appreciative reader to go along for the ride, and the moments of pleasure justify the occasional tedium along the way.

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be reading Trollope's only Christmas novel—Harry Heathcote of Gangoil—on Christmas day. A Christmas story had been requested for theGraphic, and the resulting novel, which was Trollope's shortest, appeared in the 1873 Christmas issue of the magazine. To mark it as a Christmas story, it duly began, "Just a fortnight before Christmas, 1871, a young man, twenty-four years of age, returned home to his dinner about eight o'clock in the evening."

The author had just returned from a year's visit to his son, who was a sheep herder in Australia, and the character of Harry Heathcote was acknowledged to be based on his son. Australia was England's Wild West, and this story is a Western, with its issues resolved by a no-holds-barred fight between the good guys and the bad guys.

"Territory folks should stick together,/Territory folks should all be pals," is the teaching of the square dancers in Rodgers and Hammerstein'sOklahoma, but Harry Heathcote has not learned this bit of wisdom when he becomes suspicious that his neighbor Mr. Medlicot might even be involved in starting the fires that threaten his sheep, their pastures, and the fences that enclose the paddocks where they graze. Mr. Medlicot is a free-selector, one who purchases a relatively small piece of land and farms it, in this case raising sugar cane on 200 acres. Harry Heathcote, on the other hand, runs his sheep over a vast area, some 120,000 acres—"almost an English county"—but he doesn't own the land. He rents it from the English Crown, at so much per sheep, and he fears the encroachment on his acreage by the free-selectors.

Arson was a capital offense in Australia at this time, and Harry Heathcote pushes himself to exhaustion in the summer heat, riding out at night to look for mischief. His brusque manners have not won him many friends, and some disgruntled ranch workers are indeed setting fires. In the heat of the struggle he does finally learn that it helps to have a friend or two. Mr. Medlicot provides assistance, incurring a broken collar bone in the ensuing melee, and the alliance of English aristocrats is cemented by the betrothal of Mr. Medlicot to Harry Heathcote's sister-in-law.

The bad guys are sent packing, Harry learns a lesson, and the lovers join hands. "'That's what I call a happy Christmas,' said Harry, as the party finally parted for the night." Zane Grey could hardly have scripted it better.

Trollope appeared to relish his versatility as a story teller, and though he is often identified with the English settings of the Barsetshire and Palliser series, his travels and his novels ranged all over the world. He used his first hand knowledge of Australia to good advantage inHarry Heathcote, his only novel to be set entirely in this English colony. It's a short, well-constructed story, and after working through the introductory chapters, the reader is rewarded with a quickly told romance, a rousing bush fight, and a happy ending, all wrapped up as a Christmas story.

It seemed that there was but one virtue in the world, commercial enterprise—and that Melmotte was its prophet.

Sometimes a fictional character can take on a life of his own during the writing of a story, and even after publication, capturing the imagination of the author and thereafter of the public. Sherlock Holmes, Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Hamlet, and Uncle Tom have all become iconic in our popular culture.[2]I doubt that any of Trollope's characters make any of the "Top 100" lists; that's part of the Trollope problem: he's just not that well known. But if he were, who would make the list? Mrs. Proudie, Obadiah Slope, Lady Glencora, Mr. Crawley, Plantagenet Palliser perhaps—all these are from the Palliser and Barsetshire collections. And from the other novels—the "singletons"—Augustus Melmotte would certainly take his place. In this century he would be assisted by the strong portrayal by David Suchet in the 2003 BBC production, in which he is described as "this huge monster, Melmotte, sitting like a fat spider, drawing all the other characters into his great scheme."

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