The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE RHETORIC OF EMPIRE AND THE FICTION OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE A Dissertation in English by Lisa Eutsey © 2009 Lisa Eutsey Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2009 The dissertation of Lisa Eutsey was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robert Lougy Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Christopher Clausen Professor of English, Emeritus Lisa Sternlieb Associate Professor of English Mrinalini Sinha Professor of History Robert R. Edwards Graduate Director *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii Abstract This dissertation addresses the lack of postcolonial criticism concerning the fiction of Anthony Trollope, himself an avid traveler in and writer about the British Empire. Chapter One provides background about the critical reception of Trollope’s writings about the Empire and traces his attitudes about foreign cultures and the superiority of English culture. I offer a textual reading of Trollope’s short story “A Ride across Palestine” to demonstrate how anxiety about the empire surfaces when Trollope relinquishes his usual narrative voice and uses a more risky first person narrator. Chapter Two compares and contrasts what were in Trollope’s opinion his best and worst writings. Through an analysis of his travel narrative The West Indies and the Spanish Main and his novel He Knew He Was Right I make an argument that He Knew He Was Right was written as a response to the Governor Eyre controversy as it contrasts marital relationships with colonial ones. Chapter Three contextualizes the Cain/Hopkins paradigm of gentlemanly capitalism and argues that Trollope’s The Way We Live Now and The Prime Minister, using the figure of Trollope’s bête noir Disraeli, both warn of the dangers of speculation and imperial expansion into foreign markets. Chapter Four situates Is He Popenjoy? and John Caldigate as reactions to the case of the notorious Tichborne Claimant and examines how Trollope’s fiction “unrealistically” eliminates the danger that those returning from the colonies bring with them. Finally, Chapter Five argues against the common contention that Trollope’s final novels demonstrate growing pessimism and out-of-character imperial zeal as I examine An Old Man’s Love, The Fixed Period, and The Landleaguers. My conclusion is that Trollope’s fiction is ripe with material for people interested in the postcolonial project. iii Table of Contents Chapter One: “Could there Be An 1-54 Escape from Such Dirt”: Anthony Trollope’s Imperialism and the Fear of Cultural Contamination Chapter Two: Performing Othello in 55-108 Nineteenth Century Dress: Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right Chapter Three: (Un)Gentlemanly 109-162 Capitalism and Foreign Speculation in The Way We Live Now and The Prime Minister Chapter Four: The Tichborne Claimant, 163-214 Colonial Return and the Threat of Foreignness in Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? and John Caldigate Chapter Five: The Empire’s Past, 215-257 Present and Future: Images of the Empire in Trollope’s Final Novels Bibliography 258-265 iv Acknowledgements As this project draws to a close I am truly appreciative of the encouragement and support I’ve received from colleagues, friends, and family who have helped me bring this dissertation to fruition. My mother and father have always been supportive of my goals as was my grandmother who taught me to love to read. I’d like to thank Bob Lougy for his patience during the early stages and for his promptness in getting me concise and insightful feedback. Christopher Clausen was tremendously helpful especially when he disagreed with my arguments. Mrinalini Sinha modeled the kind of intellectual rigor that I aspire to even as I could never quite convince her that Trollope is worth reading. Lisa Sternlieb was an excellent fresh pair of eyes who has helped me think about the direction I’d like to go with this project in the future. Vincent Lankewish and Linda Woodbridge were helpful in the early stages. April Kent, Brandon Kempner, Holly Flint, Kem Crimmins, and Robert Bleil have my thanks for long conversations and productive procrastination sessions. I know that Richard Page, who has passed away, would have been quite happy to see me finish. Eric Bowman has been consistently supportive and an amazing friend. Finally, I know that I would not have finished this project without the support, encouragement and affection of Jonathan Torn who finished his own dissertation last year. Take that team! You know you love it! v Chapter One: “Could There Be An Escape from Such Dirt”: Anthony Trollope’s Imperialism and the Fear of Cultural Contamination “’MAD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN,’ so Noel Coward’s song tells us, ‘go out in the midday sun’; and wherever the midday sun shone on Englishmen, there, like as not, would be Anthony Trollope. At the foot of a pyramid, in the midst of a jungle, in Tasmania or the Transvaal, in Ceylon, New Zealand, the West Indies, on a mail packet, a camel, a dog cart, a donkey, there would be Anthony Trollope, England’s ‘tireless traveler.’”1 Patrick Brantlinger, in his groundbreaking Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, makes an insightful observation about Anthony Trollope’s reputation as a novelist of Empire, suggesting that Trollope “is interesting in part because he wrote so much about the Empire even while he has seemed, at least to some critics, to have written little about it, and that from an anti- or at least nonimperialist point of view.”2 Frederic Harrison, a contemporary of Trollope, said that Trollope, “though a great traveler, rarely uses his experiences in a novel, whereas Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, and George Eliot fill their pages with foreign adventures and scenes of travel.”3 This perceived lack of Empire-related material, where much actually exists in his fiction, 1 Betty Jane Slemp Breyer, Anthony Trollope: The Complete Short Stories, vol. 3, Tourists and Colonials, (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1981), vii. 2 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988): 4-5. One critic, surprised at the lack of overt political material in Trollope’s fiction remarked, for example, “At the very least, one would think, a writer with major pretensions to political views ought to have something to say about industrialization, urbanization, poverty, and imperialism. Robert Hughes, “Spontaneous Order and the Politics of Anthony Trollope,” Nineteenth- Century Literature 41, no. 1 (1986): 32. 3 Frederic Harrison, Studies in Early Victorian Literature (New York: Edward Arnold, 1895), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18384/18384-8.txt (accessed February 2, 2009). 1 suggests that a new lens is necessary for accessing Trollope’s relationship to and portrayal of the Empire in his fiction. 4 Until recently, Trollope’s treatment of colonial matters in his fiction has been largely ignored, and as Brantlinger suggests, misinterpreted. Why, considering the emphasis on colonial and postcolonial studies in the academy in the last twenty years, has so little attention been paid to Trollope? Since, according to Gayatri Spivak, “it should not be possible to read nineteenth century literature without remembering that … [it] was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English,” Trollope, the “king of the lending-libraries” should, if only in terms of quantity, be a key figure in our understanding of nineteenth century English attitudes about the Empire.5 Both Trollope’s fictional representations of the Empire in his novels and his non-fiction travel writings, bolstered by his authority as a civil servant who actually worked in the Empire, were published consistently throughout his career. Even as our knowledge and access to the Victorian’s empire is largely mediated through the texts that the Victorians left behind, it is crucial to remember that the empire itself was, to some degree, a textual endeavor, and that Trollope certainly was a textual contributor. As Elleke Boehmer reminds us: The empire in its heyday was conceived and maintained in an array of writings – political treatises, diaries, acts of edicts, administrative records 4 Elleke Boehmer makes the important distinction between colonial and colonialist literature – a distinction which I will use, even as I will try to complicate Trollope’s relationship to these terms. To refresh, colonial literature (the more general term) is “writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience”; this mainly metropolitan writing “participated in organizing and reinforcing perceptions of Britain as a dominant world power” as it “made imperialism seem part of the order of things.” Colonialist literature, on the other hand, is writing that is more directly concerned with imperial expansion; this “literature was informed by theories concerning the superiority of European culture and the rightness of empire.” Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14. 5 Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, Ed. Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 798. 2 and gazetteers, missionaries’ reports, notebooks, memoirs, popular verse, government briefs, letters ‘home’ and letters back to settlers. The triple- decker novel and the best-selling adventure tale, both definitive Victorian genres, were infused with imperial ideas of race pride and national prowess.6 In various parts of the Empire as a representative of the British Postal Service, Trollope negotiated treatises, kept detailed administrative records, produced maps of swifter postal routes, and made suggestions about how foreign posts should be managed. He wrote letters to family in Ireland, England, and Australia while traveling and makes frequent reference to the Empire in his novels and travel books.