Introduction to Local Habitations

George Eliot (1819-1880) and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) were almost exact contemporaries, in life and in print. Trollope’s first novel appeared in 1847 (that year will be familiar to students of the Brontës); but his success began in 1855 with the publication of The Warden, the first of what would become The Chronicles of Barsetshire.

While Trollope was learning his craft with the early novels he wrote in Ireland, Mary Ann Evans was writing essays and reviews, editing The Westminster Review, and doing translations. From the German she translated David Strauss’ Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, both examples of the “higher criticism,” and she rendered some of Spinoza’s theological tracts into English. Eliot knew English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek, and she learned Hebrew while working on Daniel Deronda. Her first attempt at fiction, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,” was accepted for publication in 1856, a year after The Warden.

In 1860, George Smith began publishing the Cornhill Magazine, a new periodical designed to compete with Dickens' All the Year Round. To edit the Cornhill, Smith hired Dickens' great rival, Thackeray. The premier issue in January 1860 featured the first installment of a new work by Trollope: Framley Parsonage, the fourth of the Barsetshire series and one of Trollope’s best novels.

In connection with the magazine, Smith hosted what came to be known as "Cornhill dinners" where were assembled many of the literary lions of London. It was at one of these dinners that Trollope met G.H. Lewes, George Eliot's companion and a distinguished writer in his own right. Under Thackeray's editorship, the Cornhill displayed some of the finest writing of the age and Smith's dinners brought its authors together. This is one of the reasons that Trollope knew Thackeray but not Dickens.

The friendship between Eliot and Trollope began when Lewes asked for Trollope’s help in getting his son into the Post Office where Trollope had a distinguished career (the most visible of his accomplishments was the introduction of the pillar box to England). (The son aced the entry exam and did indeed begin a career in civil service at the Post Office.) Despite his unprepossessing early years, Trollope grew into a sophisticated man of the world who was unfazed by Eliot’s unconventional living arrangements, and the two great novelists of the century became friends long before Eliot was generally accepted by society. It was Eliot who introduced Trollope to Turgenev.

The Last Chronicle of Barset and Middlemarch are their respective authors’ masterpieces and the greatest studies of provincial life that the nineteenth century produced. Eliot is usually considered the greatest moralist of the age as well as its greatest realist. But no one is more astute about the morality of everyday life than Trollope. And of his realism, Virginia Woolf observed that “we believe in Barchester as we believe in the reality of our weekly bills.”

Because Middlemarch looks back to a time before the Reform Bill of 1832, it’s easy to forget that it was written and published some forty years after the time of which it writes (1872). Chronicle, which appeared in the year of the Reform Bill of 1867, precedes Eliot’s novel by some five years. And because Middlemarch is the great Victorian novel, it’s easy to forget how much trouble Eliot had in getting it written. What we experience as a cohesive whole began as two distinct tales: as late as November 1870, Eliot had despaired of the “Middlemarch” story and had begun a new one called “Miss Brooke.” Not until the following year did she combine the two. Eliot is reported to have said, "I am not at all sure that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should ever have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all of its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.”

The question this course poses is simple: what can we learn about these great novels by looking at each in the light shed upon it by the other?

A personal note:

This course began as a way of offering a course in Trollope. George Eliot needs no introduction. Anthony Trollope might be less familiar to members.

Though immensely popular in his day, Trollope was not much read in the first half of the twentieth century. He was thought to lack the gravitas of George Eliot and the brilliance of Dickens, and he undoubtedly harmed his brand in the popular literary marketplace by the candor with which the Autobiography described his writing habits and gave an accounting of his financial successes. And then there's the sheer size of the output: novels, travel books, essays -- the standard biography counts seventy books. Could anyone who wrote that much really be writing well?

In the academic world, he was done no favor by F.R. Leavis' having omitted him from what he termed "The Great Tradition." Leavis famously pronounced, "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad" and he relegated Trollope to the status of "minor" novelist along with Charlotte Yonge, Mrs. Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Charles and Henry Kingsley, Marryat, and Shorthouse. A critical sensibility that can lump Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell with the likes of Marryat, and Shorthouse (whoever they are) might be said to lack a certain power of discrimination. Leavis viewed his "great tradition" authors as "count[ing]" in the same way that poets count: by changing the possibilities of art for its practitioners and promoting "awareness of the possibilities of life." I wonder if he actually read Trollope.

Trollope was kept alive in the first part of the twentieth century by American book collectors and bibliophiles (notably Michael Sadleir), and he was rediscovered in England during World War II when, the theory goes, people were drawn, nostalgically, to comforting tales of the England that used to be. Whatever the path, Trollope is now seen -- in happy defiance of Leavis (whom no one reads anymore) -- as one of the greatest novelists of his time, altogether the equal of Eliot and some would say superior even to Dickens.

I discovered Trollope in graduate school when I purchased a gorgeous set of books with leather bindings, especially beautiful marbled endpapers, and pages that displayed a TROLLOPE watermark. I bought the books for their bindings but because I was, after all, doing a Ph.D. in English, I was shamed into actually reading from them. Trollope became my favorite novelist. Hands down. Bar none. It's easy to love Trollope. It's not so easy to explain his greatness. N. John Hall has edited the letters and produced the standard biography. He writes the following in the Introduction and I quote it here because it accords exactly with my own view:

I think that Trollope was more of an intellect than is usually recognized; that his genius, while capable of depicting tragic figures, was essentially a comic one; that he was a writer of care and judgement -- in spite of the fact that he seldom had to rewrite a line. And I think that he himself, for all the satiric self-depreciation he practised, knew he was one of the giants of English fiction.

What makes Trollope such a brilliant realist is the completeness with which he imagines his fictive world. As he says at the end of the volume we're reading for this course, his places and characters are real to him, and when he laments having to say good-bye in this, the last, of the chronicles of Barset, we believe in his sorrow because we feel that he -- actually, and in real life -- inhabited the world he describes. We believe in it because Trollope believes in it; it's real to us because it's real to him. He wrote the Barsetshire books over many years, 1852 through 1866, and much of the power of the world (and of the lament for its loss) comes from living with these people in this place for an extended period of time and from knowing where they came from.

The Last Chronicle is a masterpiece by any measure and does not need a back story to prop it up. Still, it's summer and if you're looking for things to read, the preceding Barsetshire novels are, in order, The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington. Mark Robarts appears in Chronicle and you'll find much of his back story in Framley Parsonage. Lily Dale and John Eames appear in Chronicle and you will find their back story in The Small House at Allington. If you are interested in the clerical back story generally (Septimus Harding, Archdeacon Grantly, Bishop and Mrs. Proudie), then begin at the beginning with The Warden and its continuation in Barchester Towers.

For those who prefer their books on tape, Timothy West has recorded all of these, brilliantly. They are available from Audible, and might be available from your local library.

An important word about the texts for this course.

I have specified the Oxford paperback editions for both of our novels. • Middlemarch is available on Amazon only through third-party sellers but is to be found easily in bookstores. If you don't have access to a book shop over the summer, it can be ordered directly from Oxford here. The cost is $10.95 plus shipping. • The Last Chronicle of Barset is available from Amazon here for $14.89 with two-day delivery if you're a Prime subscriber, is available directly from Oxford here for $15.95 plus shipping, and is to be found easily in book shops. These are the only purchases that you are being asked to make for this course and I would like you to buy these editions even if you have others already on your shelves. The books are long and we will be making frequent references to the text. We will locate textual references by page numbers only. I don't want to waste valuable class time while people find references by chapters in various paperback and electronic versions of the novels.

These editions only, please:

ISBN: 978-0-19-967599-9 ISBN: 978-0-19-953675-7

Anyone with questions about the required texts or the course in general should feel free to email me at [email protected].