A celebrated passage in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson describes a 1778 exchange between the Doctor and his famous friends as to whether experience of the world reveals human beings to be better or worse than one might have assumed when young. Edward Gibbon, not known for sunny assessments of mankind, encapsulates the position of Edmund Burke and Johnson with the phrase, “Less just and more beneficent.” In other words, the man across from me might be slow to pay what he owes but will be quick enough to proffer aid or comfort to a person in distress. Johnson confirms the summary, saying, “And really it is wonderful, considering how much attention is necessary for men to take care of themselves, and ward off immediate evils which press upon them—it is wonderful how much they do for others.” Johnson’s appraisal of everyman, in which realism regarding baseness is set against a prevailing warmth toward the hard-won kindliness, comes near to distilling the animating ethos of nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–1882).
Trollope’s perch within the canon is assured, although it is not especially lofty. Much of his prodigious output—almost fifty novels, to say nothing of travel writing, short fiction, and articles—is still read today, but not as a matter of course, in the fashion of work by authors such as Charles Dickens or the Brontë sisters. He is not, like his friend George Eliot, regarded as a sage. And he has not accrued a tithe of the reverence the English-speaking world offers daily to Jane Austen, the major novelist whom he most closely resembles. He is the novelist as craftsman, not as artiste or guru. He takes his time, lingering over episodes that other writers would treat glancingly. And he is squarely, cheerfully Victorian. Canonical authors are often commended to us because they seem “relevant.” Their work, it is suggested, is in tune with our proclivities and mores; it anticipates our sense of what is right. This is not true of Trollope. The case for him begins by recognizing he should be read because he is not of our time.
This is not to say that, by nineteenth-century standards, Trollope’s prose is archaic or his views unenlightened. His untimeliness, rather, appears in his genial, charitable attitude to the world and its inhabitants. Ours is a lonelier, more atomized society than Trollope would have thought possible, and while this loneliness has any number of causes, one of them might be that we inhabit a culture that prioritizes hard, fast opinions. It rewards partisanship and goads us into silos. Each of us is incited to be a hanging judge, observing behavior and forthrightly pronouncing indictments of character.
Character, in several senses of the word, is Trollope’s abiding concern. “I have never troubled myself much about the construction of plots,” he admits in An Autobiography with no false modesty, going on to assert, “I have lived with my characters, and thence has come whatever success I have obtained…. I know the tone of the voice, and the color of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear.” The obsession must have come naturally to this man who spent his adult life swimming deeper than most in the great sea of humanity: the countless rail journeys undertaken as a postal administrator, the fox-hunts, the literary salons. Amid it all, he pieced together a strategy for social harmony: Don’t expect too much from others; be grateful for what good there is; strive to understand them; laugh at them and then laugh at yourself.
The Second-Class of Good People
Small wonder that such a man had to invent his own county—Barsetshire—to accommodate his creations. He affords those creations no reverence, and yet handles them tenderly. With the habitual interposing of his distinctive narrative voice on the action—the biographer N. John Hall writes, “If a reader is to like Trollope, he must like the narrator, always present”—Trollope exerts whatever control he can on our judgment, always supplying briefs for the defense counsel. A staunch admirer of Jane Austen, Trollope notes, with awe, that Emma “is treated almost mercilessly in every passage of the book,” going on to explain that “nowadays we dare not make our heroines so little.” This has more to do with writerly habitus than the mood of the day. So often Austen uses her tremendous psychological insight to mock and expose a character, male or female. Trollope wants to provoke but then attenuate our censure. Throughout his corpus, we find a lightly worn but thoroughgoing love of people, not as an agglomeration to be perfected by heaven or utopia but as individuals prized for their divergent eccentricities and commonplace decencies. If Trollope’s plots often—not invariably—end with conventionally romantic happiness, the emphasis throughout is on the everyday: not just everyday life or manners but everyday morality. He savors the struggle involved in acting rightly and the ham-fisted but sincere efforts of people to patch up their blunders, to forgive and be forgiven.
At the publication of Barchester Towers in 1857, a critic in The Saturday Review noted Trollope’s “talent for drawing what may be called the second-class of good people—characters not noble, superior, or perfect…but still good and honest.” In The Eustace Diamonds, he makes the point himself: “It is very easy to depict a hero,—a man absolutely stainless, perfect as an Arthur…. At any rate, it is as easy to do that as to tell of the man who is one hour good and the next bad, who aspires greatly, but fails in practice, who sees the higher, but too often follows the lower course.” Trollope’s heroes are seldom heroic: They are men and women who do the best they can to cope with ethical dilemmas, divided loyalties, and sometimes their own divided hearts.
Jane Austen’s drama comes from delaying the recognition of mutual love until almost the last page, creating an emotional crescendo; Trollope lets the lovers find each other early and then puts obstacles in their way so that the young lady must possess her soul in patience and the young man muddle along until he half deserves her. Neither his heart nor his successes are of unspotted purity, and that word “hero” is always tinged with irony. But the irony conveys nothing more caustic than mellow amusement. The Trollopian protagonist is a mixed bag of folly and decency, of good feelings and bad habits. Trollope warns us not to expect too much from any prospective hero in The Small House at Allington, explaining how “that part in the drama will be cut up, as it were, into fragments. Whatever of the magnificent may be produced will be diluted and apportioned out in very moderate quantities among two or more, probably among three or four, young gentlemen—to none of whom will be vouchsafed the privilege of much heroic action.” In The Duke’s Children, a female character opines: “Young men are pretty much the same everywhere, I guess. They never have their wits about them. They never mean what they say, because they don’t understand the use of words. They are generally half impudent and half timid. When in love they do not at all understand what has befallen them.” Like Othello, Trollope’s young men love unwisely; unlike Othello, they don’t love especially well, at least at first.
A Gray and Charmless Life
If Trollope is happiest ranging up no higher than the penultimate level of virtue, he likewise prefers to avoid the lowest depths of wickedness. His antagonists can do ugly things, and the author has a gift for tracing the life cycle of betrayal, fraud, or domestic tyranny from its germination in the mind through to its noxious flourishing in the outer world. Trollope holds, quite unembarrassed, to the old conviction that wickedness is its own worst punishment. But he is alive to how terrible such retribution can be. Could Adolphus Crosbie, in The Small House at Allington, “have been…put into prison, with hard labor, for twelve months, the punishment would not have been heavier” than what he suffers in lost love and a guilty conscience. Crosbie has earned the reader’s profound antipathy at this point. A rising member of London society, he jilted his fiancée, the spriteliest and most endearing of Trollope’s heroines, and broke her heart. Lily Dale, for all her merits, had no money to bring to the marriage and, though Crosbie was initially smitten with her and proposed marriage, his ardor cooled during a week at the house of the Earl de Courcy. There, he contemplates the straitened circumstances he will face in London with his undowered wife and decides to throw Lily over in favor of the Earl’s vain and self-pitying daughter, Lady Alexandrina.
The marriage is miserable for both of them: “After dinner, he drank one glass of wine in company with his wife, and one other by himself, during which latter ceremony he would stare at the hot coals, and think of the thing he had done…. [T]here was no love, no sympathy, no warmth. The very atmosphere was cold;—so cold that no fire could remove the chill.” Eventually, she decamps with her mother to a German spa, with no intention of returning. It is a relief to both of them, and Crosbie is pleased to exchange the froideur of the conjugal dining room for club dinners in his old style. But though Alexandrina may leave him, knowledge of “the thing he had done” never will. He knows the life to come will be gray and charmless, and that he will be haunted by the thought of what might have been had he been a better man. The narrator reiterates: “I myself am inclined to think that his punishment was sufficiently severe.”
Regret is not repentance. But if it is sincere, it can provoke sympathy, and sympathy is always what Trollope wants from us, for our sake as much as the characters’. There are no Svidrigailovs or Mr. Murdstones in his pages, and Jane Eyre’s Aunt Reed would freeze the blood of a Trollopian villain with two or three sentences. His great sinners are rarely cruel, and their callousness tends to be thoughtless rather than calculated. They are shown to be weak; but then so are we, in one way or another, and would do well to step carefully in the light of that weakness.
Trollope’s interest in human frailty manifests in the portraits of many wastrels—men who throw away their advantages and stand confused at the result. Nathaniel Sowerby, in Framley Parsonage, comes to see and deplore the way he frittered away his fortune and cheated other men only after his money and their credit have been exhausted: “One hundred thousand pounds gone, must remain as gone,” the narrator intones. “Unfortunate Mr. Sowerby!” Trollope writes as he ushers the character offstage.
I cannot take leave of him here without some feeling of regret, knowing that there was that within him which might, under better guidance, have produced better things. There are men, even of high birth, who seem as though they were born to be rogues; but Mr. Sowerby was, to my thinking, born to be a gentleman. That he had not been a gentleman…let us all acknowledge…. But, nevertheless, I claim a tear for Mr. Sowerby, and lament that he has failed to run his race discreetly, in accordance with the rules of the Jockey Club.
The horse-racing metaphor ensures we cannot miss the irony permeating Trollope’s lament—gambling losses account for a fair proportion of that vanished hundred thousand. But a degree of compassion for the broken man offsets it. Trollope’s use of “gentleman” here includes the word’s original denotation of a certain class of man, but it is also replete with that sense of honorable conduct it had, by his era, come to attain. Sowerby was born to uphold the dignity of an old family, and also to work to deserve that distinction. He ends having failed twice over, but beneath the mawkishness of the farewell is a clear-eyed assessment of the man, which makes his downfall a matter of grief as well as condemnation.
Characters with Interior Lives
Trollope has a knack for making one love characters who are cantankerous, stiff, or highhanded. The Warden ends by asking us to see Archdeacon Grantly in full: “On the whole, the Archdeacon of Barchester is a man doing more good than harm,—a man to be furthered and supported, though perhaps also to be controlled; and it is matter of regret to us that the course of our narrative has required that we should see more of his weakness than his strength.” “Thoroughly odious” is how George Orwell describes Grantly, going on to express his frustration that Trollope “is well aware of his odiousness” and yet favors him throughout. A masterful man who suffers no fools, Grantly is the lion of the High Church faction in his diocese, domineering over lesser clerical brethren and waging a perpetual war against po-faced evangelicals and crusading modernizers. To him, both types threaten the settled, harmonious order that he most prizes in his church, and which is manifest in those lingering feudal inequities the forces of progress were steadily uprooting. We may find the idea of standardizing clerical salaries both socially and theologically commendable; for Grantly, it carries the whiff of brimstone: “The archdeacon…loved the temporalities of the Church as temporalities. The Church was beautiful to him because one man by interest might have a thousand a year, while another man equally good, but without interest, could only have a hundred.” Orwell could never love such a man, but Trollope, though not sharing Grantly’s politics, can express in his autobiography “a parent’s fond affection” for the stiff-necked clergyman, allowing him, over the course of several books, to be just enough surprised by life to soften a little, while remaining the man we have come to know.
In Trollope’s hands, we can, at any moment, find ourselves transported from the intimacies of private life to the realm of politics—whether the hustings, the benches of the House of Commons, or even cabinet meetings. Politics engrossed Trollope, who stood solidly in the Liberal mainstream, at the side of William Gladstone, Lord Russell, and Lord Palmerston (about whom he wrote a short biography, figuring him as the Trollopian ideal of the practical statesman). In 1868, Trollope himself mounted a quixotic campaign for a seat in the Commons under the banner of the Liberal Party and was disgusted by the corruption and special pleading of electioneering. Such cynicism is felt from time to time in his fiction, but it is kept fenced within the broad respect he feels for the Westminster system. In Can You Forgive Her? he writes about how often he has fantasized about passing between the two lamps that flank the members’ private entrance to the House of Commons, admitting in a purple paragraph, “I have told myself, in anger and in grief, that to die and not to have won that right of way, though but for a session…is to die and not to have done that which it most becomes an Englishman to have achieved.”
Trollope referred to himself, with a touch of self-mockery, as “an advanced, but still a Conservative-Liberal.” He was generally supportive of reform—better treatment for Irish Catholics, better education for the poor—but suspicious of reforming zeal; he felt little reverence for the titled nobility but equally little inclination to abolish their privileges. Some of Trollope’s politicians are idealistic, and some are ambitious; some are mere chancers, while others sit daydreaming on the House of Commons benches simply because they were born to be MPs. There is seldom outright opprobrium. A bad man may have good qualities or do a good thing at a crucial moment; a good man may be unfallen only because a blade has never yet been thrust at what we come to see as a weak spot in his armor.
In “A Letter to a Young Clergyman,” Jonathan Swift declares, on the subject of whether it is profitable to argue with skeptics, that “reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired.” The dean’s admonition remains a sound one 300 years later. I act and think on the basis of deep-laid assumptions that my reason presupposes. I did not come to hold them through a course of syllogistic logic or long study, but because they were delivered to me as axioms before I knew what an axiom was, or because they made sense of facts that seemed at one time to be paramount, or because I have a half-understood sense that they are acknowledged by others I admire. They can and should be subject to rational scrutiny but only by a long, delicate process, full of fear and trembling. There is no use arguing with me about them; their displacement, if it is possible, will not occur at the level of argument. If you want to displace them, you had better get to know me and be prepared to work hard.
Trollope understands that people have reasons for the way they see the world, deep-rooted and pre-political, and suggests that we might do well to understand them. The simple but salutary platitude that party lines and ideological purity are no sure guide to human decency almost seems a piece of bemusing arcana when we reflect on the network of interlinked, circular firing squads that make up American democracy today. Trollope does not value all of his politicos at the same rate, nor all political methods or outlooks. On the whole, though, he demonstrates remarkable affection for those of all political stripes, including the most reactionary of Tories. Those old squires who deplored the reforms that undercut their ancient privileges—Catholic emancipation, the expansion of the franchise, the repeal of the Corn Laws—are often figured as endearing and even noble in upholding principles the author himself opposed. In The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope writes, “He who said that all Conservatives are stupid did not know them. Stupid Conservatives there may be,—and there certainly are very stupid Radicals. The well-educated, widely-read Conservative, who is well assured that all good things are gradually being brought to an end by the voice of the people, is generally the pleasantest man to be met.”
An inveterate experimenter with free-indirect discourse, Trollope will let his narrator slip into the voice of such men. It is as though we were transplanted to the dining room of some ancient country pile, listening to a handful of grizzled but well-fed casualties of history complain while the port and cigars orbit the table. Consider Trollope’s staunchest enemy of progress, Mr. Wilfred Thorne. Though acknowledging him to be “a man possessed of quite a sufficient number of foibles to lay him open to much ridicule,” the narrator seems to take delight in Thorne’s heroic devotion to his ancient pedigree. In Barchester Towers, the narrator channels Mr. Thorne’s thoughts on the subject of “men whose families were of recent date”:
They might doubtless be good sort of people, entitled to much praise for virtue, very admirable for talent, highly respectable in every way; but they were without the one great good gift. Such was Mr. Thorne’s way of thinking on this matter; nothing could atone for the loss of good blood; nothing could neutralize its good effects. Few indeed were now possessed of it, but the possession was on that account the more precious. It was very pleasant to hear Mr. Thorne descant on this matter.
The tone is ironic but not sardonic. We are made to feel that Thorne’s is a venial, not a mortal, sin and that England is none the worse if a few of its gentlemen devote themselves to hematology. When David Copperfield wanders into a conversation on the same subject, the contrast between Trollope and Charles Dickens is palpable: “The dinner was very long, and the conversation was about the Aristocracy—and Blood. Mrs. Waterbrook repeatedly told us, that if she had a weakness, it was Blood.” David’s companions gloat over the theme for several paragraphs (“Other things are all very well in their way, but give me Blood!”). We can believe that Trollope’s narrator finds Thorne’s grand theme “very pleasant” because it is presented as a decent man’s pet eccentricity. Dickens, on the other hand, uses the episode as a foil for the higher values David is happily embracing, and so the Waterbrooks (whose name suggests that the contents of their own veins may be more dilute than they would prefer to have known) are held up as figures of contempt.
A novelist knows things about his characters that we cannot generally know of one another: the formative disappointments, the uncertainties, the kindly impulses stifled by embarrassment or undone by maladroit expression. Trollope’s fiction constantly presses upon us the fact that there is always something to know about another person. He does not attempt to reverse our judgments, but he does insist on tempering them. The effort is especially strong in the case of his female characters. No male author since Shakespeare, or perhaps Samuel Richardson, showed as much interest in portraying women as complex people. It is not for me to say whether he succeeded in creating plausible portraits of female subjectivity, but he sought to do nothing less, and reviewers in his own day were aware of his efforts. His female characters are various and distinctive, and if they are generally more admirable than the men who surround them, it is not because they are naive Pollyannas. The young and inexperienced among them reveal wisdom and fortitude amid their trials; with the more worldly and battered, we find unexpected tenderness and selflessness.
The Way We Live Now’s Mrs. Hurtle—a beautiful American widow who follows Paul Montague, her one-time fiancé, to London with the hope of winning him back—has a shadowy past and, when she finds he has fallen in love with another, reveals a fearsome temper. She writes Paul a letter promising retribution, if only he is man enough to face her: “I desire you to come to me,—according to your promise,—and you will find me with a horsewhip in my hand. I will whip you till I have not a breath in my body. And then I will see what you will dare to do;—whether you will drag me into a court of law for the assault. Yes; come.” None of Trollope’s men ever express such savagery. Mrs. Hurtle does not send the letter, though she later shows it to Paul at a meeting where her broken heart is made plain. Over the remainder of the story, her fundamental goodness is made equally so. Paul does not repent breaking off the engagement, but he is moved to recognize that she is worth loving: a steely, passionate, noble-hearted woman who deserved better from him.
Even a quite minor character can be portrayed in a moment of depth, with piercing results. Mrs. Roper, in The Small House at Allington, owns a modest London boarding house, and has just learned that her two most respectable boarders are leaving the establishment. Given that those who remain can only hurt the reputation of her house, she faces a future where respectability—and tenants who pay their bills—will be evermore difficult to come by:
Poor woman! Few positions in life could be harder to bear than hers! To be ever tugging at others for money that they could not pay; to be ever tugged at for money which she could not pay; to desire respectability for its own sake, but to be driven to confess that it was a luxury beyond her means; to put up with disreputable belongings for the sake of lucre, and then not to get the lucre, but be driven to feel that she was ruined by the attempt! How many Mrs. Ropers there are who from year to year sink down and fall away, and no one knows whither they betake themselves! One fancies that one sees them from time to time at the corners of the streets in battered bonnets and thin gowns, with the tattered remnants of old shawls upon their shoulders, still looking as though they had within them a faint remembrance of long-distant respectability. With anxious eyes they peer about, as though searching in the streets for other lodgers.
The sheer gratuitousness of the passage says much about the author. It makes no material difference to the plot, and no reader would complain had Mrs. Roper been left in a purely functional role as the proprietress around whose table some of the novel’s comic scenes are enacted. This short sketch of the anxieties such a woman can suffer as she feels her livelihood and standing slipping away from her not only makes a social comment on the precarious state of the lower middle class in Victorian London but an ethical comment as well. A woman like this is not just the occupant of some abstract socioeconomic category; she has an interior life, and even passersby might intuit a little of it if they have eyes to see.
In his autobiography, Trollope confesses to what some would consider an artistic failing. He writes, “I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience…. I have thought it might best be done by representing to my readers characters like themselves,—or to which they might liken themselves.” He preaches on many topics, but the consistent theme is something like neighborly generosity. Trollope’s fiction advocates for a forbearance that is neither blind approbation nor chilly tolerance, and displays a sustained interest in the practical, as opposed to the idealistic, nature of social harmony. Indignation and censure are natural and, often enough, just; however, they must be leavened with compassion, curiosity, and humility regarding our own vices and motives. In The Warden, the narrator says of a severe social critic, “’Tis a pity that he should not have recognized the fact that in this world no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not in it some seed of what is goodly.” The realism of this statement, imbued so characteristically with modesty and joviality, stands as a prescription for the messy, tenuous business of living with others and also with one’s own conscience.