A Study of Anthony Trollope with Special Reference to Selected Novels 1847
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CONSISTENCY AND CONTINUITY; A STUDY OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO SELECTED NOVELS 1847 - 1883 Reginald Charles Terry ProQuest Number: 10098182 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10098182 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT Trollope's literary career over thirty five years shows remarkable consistency of aims and achievement. The object of this dissertation is to trace the continuity of Trollope's in terests in major areas of human fulfilment such as love, marriage and problems o f moral conduct. The first two chapters deal with his life, reputation and attitudes towards the novel, Chester Three raises the theme of most of his novels - the young person in love, and Chapter Four shows the maturing of love in marriage and family life. Chapter Five completes this central section by studying the conditions of Single Life, Chuter Six is devoted to Trollope and Ireland, relating personal fulfilment with the responsibilities and pressures of the outside world, %e novels about Ireland span Trollope's writing life and therefore provide useful illustration of his consistency. My final chapter considers the obligations of the individual in the social environment, with particular emphasis on political life, and the quality of society as a whole. Throughout the thesis my concern has been to move from the sociological orientation of much Trollope criticism to questions of literary merit. The principle of continuity has been illustrated by an exmmination of themes from a range of novels outside the Barsetshire and Palliser series which have been usually in the forefront of discussion. The principle of consistency has been demonstrated by fuller illustration from The Three Clerks. Ayala* s Angel. The Bertrams and The Claverings (Chapter Three); Orley Farm and He Knew He Was Right (Chapter Four); The Eustace Diamonds (Chapter Five); The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Kellys and the 0'K ellys,' Castle Richmond, The Landleaguers (Chapter Six); The Way We Live Now (Chapter Seven). CONTENTS page T itle 1 A b stra ct 2 P reface 5 Chapter One; Trollope's Life and Work 9 C hapter Two: Trollope's Reputation 53 Chapter Three; The Rocks and Valleys 85 Chapter Four; The Bread and Cheese 148 Chapter Five; Lonely Hearts 189 Chapter Six; Trollope and Ireland 228 Chapter Seven: The Outside World 279 Appendix: Twenty Authors in Mudie's S e le c t Library, 1857-1935 .. 321 A Selected Bibliography 322 5 PREFACE Today in Trollope studies one is aware of more serious attention to his qualities as a novelist. The odium attaching to his self-revelation in the Autohiography, mis-read and ex aggerated by his immediate posterity, has diminished, and al though no full edition of his work has so far been undertaken at least an eloquent appeal for one has been voiced.^ Yet in some ways the most recent Trollope revival has pointed in the wrong direction by emphasising once more those qualities of sociological observation - the "photographic" realism of his novels - for which he was so much praised in his lifetim e and patronised after his death. Reading the most recent study on this well-trodden path it is apparent that Trollope continues 2 "to elude precise definition." Yet there are encouraging signs certainly. More intensive analysis of single works is being attempted. More articles are getting to grips with Trollope's artistry, the structure and style of his novels, markedly different from the general impressions of "Mr. Trollope's Young Badies" and similar essays of a generation ^Gordon N, Ray, "Trollope at Pull Length", The Huntington Library Quarterly. XXXI. 4 (August, 1968). ^Donald Smalley, "Anthony Trollope", in Victorian Fiction. A Guide to Research, ed. Lionel Stevenson (Harvard, 1964), p.196. Robert H. Polhemus, The"Changing World of Anthony Trollope (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968). ago. Some of the criticism , indeed, perhaps s trains too hard to rescue Trollope from the ranks of middlebrow entertainment, finding in each "newly discovered" novel some sterling qualities which fit a particular line of enquiry relevant to modem thought; it is absurd, for example, to speak of such a slight novel as Cousin Henry as a Kad^esqueK aÀ study of a little man crushed by a hostile society. 3 My efforts towards definition do not lie in the traditional path, which has tended to put the social issues first, thereby ignoring to some extent the qualities of Trollope as an artist and reading him primarily as an inspired documentary diarist. One immediately thinks of the way historians such as Professor Asa Briggsliave used Trollope as a seismograph of mid-Victorian society. However legitimate this kind of study is it does not in my view lead to a just appraisal of Trollope, the novelist, and it is worth noting that one recent critic has recognized the lim itations of the socio-historical approach to this novelist, stressing that the upper middle class society Trollope chiefly wrote about hardly changed its essential characteristics during his whole literary c a re e r. 4 3 ' Robert M. Polhemus, "Cousin Henry; Trollope's Note from Underground", Nineteenth Century Fiction. XX, 4 (Mar. 1966), pp. 385-9. ^J.A.Banks, "The Way They Lived Then: Anthony Trollope and the 1870s", Victorian Studies.XII. 2 (December, 1968), pp. 177-200. The task, therefore, as I see it, is to try to understand Trollope's position within a fairly stable, well-defined hier archical society, Trollope is not the writer of change and de velopment, but of consistency and continuity, of balance and com promise. He is not deeply interested in "ideas"; he is not a thinker with a distinctive contribution to the great scientific, moral, social debates of the day; he is not an original critic even as to the nature of lis own craft, although a lifelong advocate of the dignity and worth of literature. He is not, either in pri vate life or his novels, an advocate of causes. But he is a professional novelist, touching on a wide spectrum of affairs and concerning himself with human nature in many manifestations. He has opinions and, indeed, prejudices, but he has always in control the novelist's power of neutrality and organization, combined with a tremendous gift which Henry James called his "complete appreciation 5 of the usual". It is indeed a peculiar skill to utilise imaginative power to render the commonplace in human behaviour, but to be able to enhance this vision with such compassion and breadth of view amounts to genius. An approach to Trollope which concentrates there fore on the most significant themes over the range of his novels and the literary, rather than sociological, values they reveal seemP the most useful line of enquiry at this time. ^Henry James, Partial Portraits (London, 1888), pp. 100-1. At once a difficulty suggests itself in the mass of material confronting the scholar. I have attempted to solve this problem by working from a range of novels drawn from the course of Trollope's career and deliberately crossing the bound aries suggested by Sadleir and others. I have also avoided the Barsetshire and Palliser novels on the whole, because they have already received much critical attention. I have still been left with a very large territory indeed, and of necessity my selection has been somewhat arbitrary. Here personal preferences have certainly played a part, and no doubt I have behaved like most Trollopians in advancing the case of particular favourites in the canon. However, my object is to discuss Trollope's achieve ments as a novelist always with the consistency and continuity of his work in the foreground of attention. Michael Sadleir's workscn Trollope, particularly his Commentary, have been constantly at my side, and although I have contested several of his judgements in Chapter Two and Chapter Six, I have been stimulated by his knowledge and love of Anthony Trollope at every stage of mj^research. Chapter One TROLLOPE'S LIES AITD WORK "It's dogged as does it." - The Last Chronicle of B a rse t. Bradford Booth, Trollope's last critical biographer, found that the divergence of opinion surrounding the man and his work amounted to a "chaos of criticism ,"^ Even Michael Sadleir, who admired Trollope so deeply, concluded his study in J227 on a note 2 of bafflement and irresolution. It is fitting irony that a novel ist of such avowedly modest intention and such plain statement of commonplace experience should continue to tantalise and evade-' us. The paradox extends to Trollope's life as well as his work, and an up to date biography is urgently needed. The situation at present is that we have had three major studies in the eighty-eight years since Trollope’s death, of which the total effect has been to increase our bewilderment at the diversity of opinion. Vast ^Bradford Booth, Anthony Trollope. Aspects of His Life and Art (London, 1958), p .229. ^lichael Sadleir, Trollope, A Commentary, Oxford Paperbacks No. 35 (London, 196l). ^Sadleir, Booth and A.O.J.Cockshut, Anthony Trollope, A C ritical Study (London, 1955).