Barchester Towers

I finished Barchester Towers, the second book of the Barchester Chronicles, last week.

It was immediately obvious to me that Trollope had much more fun writing this book than any of the previous four novels – or at least he was in a more playful mood. I think this may have been because this novel’s predecessor, The Warden, was his first popular success – in fact, his first novel to receive any notice at all. It was also the first one to earn any money, and this was always of great importance to Trollope, as it is to most of us.

I won’t recount the plot, or extol the wonderful variety of characters. Mrs. Proudie, Signora Vesey Neroni (mother of the last of the Neros), Archdeacon Grantly, Bertie Stanhope – these marvelous characters have been adequately praised by wiser readers and better readers than me. It was pure pleasure to spend time with them again. I’ll just note how well Trollope captures the complexity of his characters – not a one, not even Mrs. Proudie, is a simple black-and-white study or a crude caricature of one idea.

I will note two things that struck me during this reading. One, I regret to say, is Trollope’s crude and unthinking anti-Semitism. Very sad and very bad, but there it is. The second thing that struck me is how much the novel reminded me of modern sitcoms -- in two ways. One is that a great mainstay of modern sitcoms is the situation where people are talking about different things, but without realizing it. The second likeness is Trollope’s continual intrusion into the story with authorial reassurances or information, much the way sitcoms like Modern Family and The Office “break the fourth wall” by having characters address the audience directly. In The Office this was originally explained by the entirely ridiculous idea that some sort of documentary is being made – although no documentary maker in the world could capture the confidences characters make, and the pretense of there being some sort of documentary filming seems to have been abandoned quite early. Modern Family never made an effort to explain why the characters address the audience directly every so often. But it works, and it’s very funny.

Trollope is more ponderous and more Victorian than contemporary sitcom writers, of course, but the convention still works. For example, “But let the gentle-hearted reader by under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope.” Or, he complains about the constraints of novel-writing: “And who can apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, characters, and descriptive morsels, so as to fit them all exactly into 439 pages, without either compressing them unnaturally, or extending them artificially at the end of his labour? Do I not know that I am at this moment in want of a dozen pages, and that I am sick with cudgeling my brains to find them?”

The 1982 BBC series is terrific - particularly Nigel Hawthorne as Archdeacon Grantly and Alan Rickman as Rev. Slope. In fact, I see them quite clearly now when I read the novel.

The Warden

I have just finished The Warden, Trollope's fourth novel and the next on my journey through all the works of Trollope in order.

This is my third or fourth reading of the novel, and I have also watched the excellent dramatization of the book in the BBC's 1982 series, The Barchester Chronicles.

This time I was struck by how unusual the plot is. The Warden is a novel in which almost nothing happens. In fact, a summary of the plot would probably make someone who had never read the book wonder why anyone would read it:

Rev. Septimus Harding lives at Hiram's Hospital, a charity home for twelve elderly men, with his daughter, Eleanor. His daughter's suitor, John Bold, becomes convinced that the charity is being mismanaged, and demands a public accounting.  Eleven of the twelve old pensioners are convinced that if they sue the hospital they will be awarded much more of the annual proceeds of the charity. A  public legal battle ensues.

Rev. Harding (the warden of the book's title) is distressed by the publicity and the imputation of wrongdoing. As he considers the matter, though, he becomes convinced that he is actually in the wrong to take such a large income from the charity. Even though Eleanor persuades John Bold to drop the lawsuit, Rev. Harding resigns as a matter of conscience, though this means that his income is greatly reduced. The upshot for the twelve old men is that their income is reduced also (Rev. Harding had subsidized it out of his own pocket), no new warden is appointed to take his place, and the charity falls into comparative ruin.

Imagine pitching this plot to an editor or producer: "Here's my idea - a lawsuit is threatened, and then dropped!"

And what a change from Trollope's first three novels, filled with swashbuckling action and melodrama.

Yet if he had written only the first three, we would not know his name. If he had written only The Warden he would probably be at least a footnote in Victorian studies. In this novel, the first in the great Barsetshire series, Trollope begins to be at home with his particular genius. 

I wondered what Trollope himself had said about the novel, whether he had realized at the time what a wonderful step forward this was in his writing. I had read The Warden on my Kindle, and I was able to order and download his Autobiography almost the second I had the thought, and for only 99 cents! (This technology still amazes me mightily, and I like to think that Trollope would be equally amazed and gratified if he could know of the ways in which his words are being delivered to new readers so long after their initial publication.)

In his autobiography, Trollope tells us that The Warden was the first of his novels to receive favorable critical attention, and the first one from which he made any kind of money (he is always very honest and unembarrassed about discussing the financial aspects of the production of novels). He says that the characters are good (an understatement), and that the plot is weak (not true, in my opinion).

He notes that the idea for the novel had originated in his being struck by "two opposite evils" - that charitable funds had become income for "idle Church dignitaries" rather than being used to assist the poor, and that the recipients of these incomes were subjected to "undeserved severity." As Trollope notes, "When a man is appointed to a place, it is natural that he should accept the income allotted to that place without much inquiry. It is seldom that he will be the first to find out that his services are overpaid."

Very astute observations. But Trollope goes on to say,  "But I was altogether wrong in supposing that the two things could be combined. Any writer in advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of an advocate . . . or his writing will be ineffective. He should take up one side and cling to that, and then he may be powerful."

On the contrary - the peculiar strength of The Warden comes from the matching up of these two opposing forces. Mr Harding's position is wrong - and at the same time, he is blameless and very lovable. It's a wonderful combination.

Finally, I found this observation about Trollope, which I just want to include here as it beautifully summarizes the heartbreaking story that was the man's childhood and youth, from PD James' tribute to Trollope, "The Finest Natural Psychologist":

"If it is true, as one psychiatrist has told us, that ideally a creative writer should have as much trauma in childhood that he can take without breaking, then Anthony Trollope's early life was an ideal preparation for the profession of letters. He was a child in desperate need of love and encouragement who received very little of either. His proud and sensitive spirit suffered the humiliations and agonies of genteel poverty. He was bullied, beaten and despised at school and undervalued by his family."

Well, I hope the psychiatrist was wrong. But his early life really was terrible - more so than Dickens', to my mind, although Dickens' early traumas are much more famous. Of course, there is not point in arguing that one child suffered more than another, when all suffering is bad.

Trollope project, part three

Today I finished Anthony Trollope's third novel, La Vendee. This one is difficult to find in print. Hard copies on amazon.com were expensive. I requested a copy from my local library, and received a little book printed before 1900, with brittle yellow pages and tiny, tiny print. Impossible.

So I asked my husband to download the novel on his Kindle. Only 99 cents and - like magic! - within minutes there it was, with print adjustable to any size. At times like this I am humbled by the age of miracles in which we live.

This was a hard novel to like. It took me quite a while to sort out the various characters, and much of the writing seemed cliched and turgid. Trollope's own assessment of this work, from his autobiography:

"The story is certainly inferior to those that had gone before - chiefly because I knew ... in truth, nothing of life in the La Vendée country, and also because the facts of the present time came more within the limits of my powers of storytelling than those of past years. ... The conception as to the feeling of the people is, I think, true; the characters are distinct; and the tale is not dull. As far as I remember, this morsel of criticism is the only one that was ever written on the book."

It's the story of a group of French people loyal to their king and church who resist the efforts of the revolutionary republicans. I was amused by one scene, in which the hero rescues his fiancee when her home is invaded by the evil revolutionary forces. She has no time to dress, and so he throws a blanket over her thin nightdress. She faints, and a lecherous republican soldier grabs the blanket, but our hero manages to carry the nearly naked, unconscious damsel to safety. Talk about your stereotypical romance novel!

What struck me as good about the novel is the realistic depiction of the terrors of war for ordinary people, noncombatants. All are ruined, starved, and murdered - women, children, and old people, not just soldiers. Although there are plenty of patriotic, brave speeches, the old blacksmith who scorns both sides and finally concludes that all the fighting was worthless and served no purpose at all seems to me to have the most realistic, albeit nihilistic, view of events. I am reminded that Tolstoy considered Trollope one of the greatest of English novelists. I wonder if Tolstoy read La Vendee.

Also, now a big fan of e-readers.

The silent solemnity of his inertia

Finally, another update on the Trollope project. I finished his second novel, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, a couple months ago.

It's difficult to believe that this is only his second novel. His first novel, The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, is okay, but seems much more obviously the work of a beginner. If that were all he had written, we would never had heard of him. (Actually, if he had only written these two, he would also be forgotten, no doubt, but anyone reading the second novel might think that it's a shame such a good Victorian writer hadn't written more.)

The Kellys uses the double plot technique, and is full of the great characters I associate with Trollope. That great Victorian topic, the puzzling relationship between economic and romantic interests in marriage, is explored explicitly and fully.

This description of Lord Cashel reminded me of the depiction of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Dicken's Bleak House: 

As my lord went from breakfast-room to book-room, from book-room to dressing-room, and from dressing-room to book-room, his footsteps creaked with a sound more deadly than that of a death-watch. The book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books seemd to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the silent solemnity of his inertia.

Lord Cashel is dull, but the novel is not. Now, on to La Vendee.

Update on my Trollope project

Well, this has been slow.

Several months ago I assigned myself the (pleasant) task of reading through all of Anthony Trollope’s novels, in order. It took me much longer than I expected to read through Trollope’s first novel, The McDermots of Ballycloran.

Some of the delay was caused by other events going on in my life, and some was just procrastination. In fact, I finished a quite a few other books while slowly reading this novel.

One reason for the slowness is simply the fact that much of the novel is written in dialect, which is interesting but somewhat taxing. Here's an example:

"But any how, Father John, if you'd come back, and yer riverence wouldn't mind for the onst jist sitting it out -- jist dhrinking a dhrop at an odd time, or colloguing a bit with owld Mr. Tierney, till we get the Captain out of that, shure they'd never be doing anything out of the way as long as yer riverence is in it."

You can see how that sort of thing slows you down.

Upon finishing the book, I did a little research on the nets, and discovered lots of interesting stuff.

For one thing, the folks who live in Drumsna, Ireland, have a website that includes “The Trollope Trail.” You can actually go see Headford House, the ruins that inspired Trollope to write his first novel. The village has just begun an annual Anthony Trollope Summer School, and that sounds like a good thing to put on my wish list.

My takeaway from this rereading of Trollope's first novel (I first read it about ten years ago) is that if it were all he had written he would be quite justly forgotten, although historians, both literary and non-literary, might be quite interested in the work. I can also see that all the themes that Trollope explores so well in his major works are here - class, money, sanity and insanity, the vagaries of romantic love, family, and particularly the one I find so compelling - the way great kindness manifests itself in unexpected and expected places, and makes life, which would otherwise be so very unbearable and tragic, worth living.