Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction David Skilton Published in Great Britain by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world First edition (Longman) 1972 Reissued with alterations (Macmillan) 1996 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-62887-4 ISBN 978-1-349-24693-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24693-9 First published in the United States of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-15879-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skilton, David. Anthony Trollope and his contemporaries : a study in the theory and conventions of mid-Victorian fiction I David Skilton p. em. Originally published: London : Longman, 1972. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-15879-8 I. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Aesthetics. 2. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Contemporaries. 4. Great Britain­ -History-Victoria, 1837-1901. 5. Aesthetics, British--19th century. I. Title. PR5687.S5 1996 823' .8-dc20 96-7527 CIP © David Skilton 1972, 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction David Skilton Published in Great Britain by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world First edition (Longman) 1972 Reissued with alterations (Macmillan) 1996 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-62887-4 ISBN 978-1-349-24693-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24693-9 First published in the United States of America 1996 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-15879-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Skilton, David. Anthony Trollope and his contemporaries : a study in the theory and conventions of mid-Victorian fiction I David Skilton p. em. Originally published: London : Longman, 1972. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-15879-8 I. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Aesthetics. 2. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 3. Trollope, Anthony, 1815-1882-Contemporaries. 4. Great Britain­ -History-Victoria, 1837-1901. 5. Aesthetics, British--19th century. I. Title. PR5687.S5 1996 823' .8-dc20 96-7527 CIP © David Skilton 1972, 1996 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96 CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Notes on References viii Preface to the 1996 Reprint ix Introduction xvii Chapter One THE ESTABLISHMENT OF TROLLOPE'S REPUTATION I The earliest novels I Trollope discovered 5 The despot of the lending-libraries 17 The slow decline 30 Chapter Two CRITICAL CONCERNS OF THE 'SIXTIES: TRAGEDY AND IMAGINATION 37 Omnes omnia bona dicere 37 The borders of tragedy 40 Lack of imagination 45 The Saturday Revsew and mechanical art 53 Chapter Three THE MORALITY OF FICTION AND THE DEPICTION OF VICE sB Charges of moral irresponsibility ss The depiction of vice 61 Moral proportion 6s The Eustace Diamonds 70 Grandeur and idealization 73 vi CONTENTS Chapter Four MORAL AND SOCIAL ACCEPT ABILITY 79 The critical tight-rope 79 The apotheosis of Colonel Newcome Bs Principal and secondary characters 88 A conventional ending 94 Chapter Five RICHARD HOLT HUTTON AND TROLLOPE'S CHARACTERIZATION 100 Superficiality and depth 103 Trollope as society-novelist: imagina- tion versus observation 109 Social strategy and the language of manners II3 The individual and society II6 Masculine and feminine characteriza- tion II8 The imitation of character 122 Chapter Six TROLLOPE'S THEORY AND PRACTICE OF NOVEL-WRITING 126 The Autobiography 128 Trollope on the creative process 131 Conception 131 The inner world 133 The 'telling' of the tale 134 Trollopian realism 137 Appendix I NOTES ON SOME USES OF THE WORD 'REALISM' IN MID-VICTORIAN CRITICISM OF THE NOVEL 149 Appendix II BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CONTEMPORARY BRITISH ARTICLES ON TROLLOPE 153 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the present editor and librarian of the Spectator for access to their editorial records; the editor and proprietors of the New Statesman for permission to consult the marked file of the Athenaeum in their possession; and Mr J. Gordon Phillips, Archivist of The Times, for his kind work on my behalf in finding the authorship of numerous articles in that newspaper from its Editorial Diaries. I also wish to thank Dr Tony Tanner, Mr Hugh Sykes Davies and Dr Raymond Williams for their advice and encouragement at various stages in the preparation of this work. D. J. S. 1972 NOTES ON REFERENCES Abbreviations Autobiography Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. F. Page, Oxford University Press, I950 Letters The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. B. A. Booth, Oxford University Press, I95I Bibliography M. Sadleir, Trollope: a Bibliography, Dawsons of Pall Mall, I928; repr. Ig64 Commentary M. Sadleir, Trollope: a Commentary, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, I945; repr. Ig6I Critical Heritage Trollope: the Critical Heritage, ed. D. Smalley, Routledge, Ig6g The Palliser novels are quoted in the Oxford Trollope edition, ed. M. Sadleir and F. Page, I948-54; other novels in the World's Classics series where available. All references to Trollope's novels are also given by chapters, numbered cumulatively, regardless of volume divisions, so that (for example) chapter I of volume 2 is called chapter 19, where volume I has I8 chapters. In chapters I and 2 of this work, where chronology is important, each review quoted is detailed by date, volume and page numbers on each appearance. In chapters 3 to 6, each review is only cited in full on its first appearance in each chapter. PREFACE TO THE 1996 REPRINT When I started this book in the mid-1960s, I intended to address two problems. The first was that Anthony Trollope was ill served in terms of the amount of critical writing devoted to his work, and even worse served by its quality. Indeed prospects were not good for Trollope studies at the time, when few novels as widely read as his (by the general public, at least) were so little understood. Literary criticism was limited to A. 0. J. Cockshut'sAnthony Trollope (1955) and Bradford A. Booth's Trollope: Aspects of His life and Work (1959), while for biography we had to rely on T.H.S. Escott's book from 1913 and Michael Sadleir's influential but dated Trollope: A Commentary from 1928, supplemented by The Trollopes: The Chronicle of A Writing Family of 1948 by L.P. and R.P. Stebbins. Sadleir's Trollope: A Bibliography (1928) was, of course, a model of description and an incomparable tool for the collector, but the Oxford Trollope, which was launched in 1948 as a serious attempt to bring the novels before the public in reasonable editions, had only published seven novels and An Autobiography when it ran out of steam in 1954. In fact, of the fourteen volumes which constituted these eight titles, only An Autobiography was provided with editorial apparatus to a standard to satisfy a scholar. In contrast, the Clarendon Dickens, which started publication in 1966, was promising vastly improved material for the serious study of one of Trollope's great contemporaries. A striking feature of much of the critical discussion of Trollope's works was the extent to which it centred on his success or otherwise in meeting the criteria accepted by Henry James and his followers as to what constituted a novel, without there being any historical sense that mid-Victorian fiction might be excellent in its own terms. Indeed there was a lack of perception of what these terms might be. X PREFACE TO THE 1996 REPRINT Bradford A. Booth announced a return to what he supposed were pre-Jamesian criteria, but the result of his attempt was no better than the rather feeble concepts of 'plot' and 'character' which he employed. Meanwhile George Eliot had achieved complete critical respectability, raising a problem about what aspects of her work were after all being approved. If her novels were exempted from the strictures applied to other fiction of the period, was this because they were different in kind, or because there were other things to say about them which distracted the critical mind from the qualities they so obviously had in common with the novels of other novelists such as Trollope? Were the characteristics they shared with these other novels invisible, or were they simply being forgotten or forgiven because of some supposed seriousness detected in her fiction, but found lacking in that of others? It seemed to me that it would be of at least historical interest to pay attention to what authors, their publishers, their publics and their contemporary critics regarded as the qualities which made a book a novel, and a novel a good novel.