Reading Trollope Today

1 Steve Nichols, 11/15/2020 Reading Trollope Today “For all the permanent, practical questions of the politics of existence, Trollope remains the man.” Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 4, 2015. In 2020, Americans know a thing or two about the lashing winds of politics. Every day we witness clashes between partisans and opponents of reform. Proposals of change and resistance to it fill columns of newsprint and drive the daily fare of cable news. It plays out on the national level, but just as spiritedly on local school boards, town meetings, neighborhood projects, and Little League sports teams. It’s a fact of life. If you think all that has nothing to do with the ecclesiastical world of Anthony Trollope’s imaginary cathedral town of Barchester in the rural southwestern region of England, you’d be missing the point of his Chronicles of Barsetshire. Unlike Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or George Eliot who set their novels some twenty to forty years in the past, Trollope not only situates his stories at the time of writing, but he also builds them around current political disputes. In the mid-1850s, when he began writing the Chronicles of Barset—The Warden, (1855) being the first novel—Trollope pits the reform of wealth inequality in the Anglican Church against conservative forces seeking to preserve age-old emoluments. To put the inequality in perspective: parish curates made as little as £40 a year while Bishops could realize £5,000 to £10,000 or more per annum. Ecclesiastical charities, another source of abuse, were originally intended to alleviate poverty; but over time their funds came instead to benefit the clergy administering them. Trollope constructs The Warden around just such an abuse, the case of Hiram’s Hospital, an almshouse whose Warden—Septimus Hardy, the unworldly and upright father of Eleanor Bold— receives a salary far in excess of the sum allotted to the resident pensioners. Trollope composed The Warden during a period when a number of cases alleging abuse of ecclesiastical charities 2 really were making their way through the law courts. As Trollope shows in his novel, these suits stemmed in large part from investigative reporting by The Times (of London), which plays a major role in many of Trollope’s novels as The Jupiter, edited by the invidious, self-serving, and altogether unforgettable journalist, Tom Towers. Contemporary politics and fiction also figure in Barchester Towers (1857), The Warden’s sequel. A change of government from Conservative to Whig (Liberal) factions occurred in 1854 shortly after Trollope embarked on his series. Faithful to the new government’s push for social and ecclesiastical reforms, Barchester Towers opens as the current Tory (conservative) ministry falls, and Queen Victoria appoints a Whig prime minister. In a key bit of symbolic choreography, Bishop Grantly—the embodiment of the old ecclesiastical order —dies at the same time the Tory government topples. And with the fall of the conservative ministry collapses also Archdeacon Grantly’s chance to succeed his father as Bishop of Barchester. More galling still to the archdeacon, the new prime minister names the evangelical Dr. Proudie to this most traditional see. Inevitably, sparks fly when the low church bishop descends with his middle-class entourage on the aristocratic high church enclave of Barchester. Why does Trollope care about ecclesiastical politics? And why does he think it matters to his readers? In fact, Trollope had no special interest in the Anglican Church itself nor did he know much about it when, in 1852—as he tells us in his posthumously published Autobiography —he found himself in the cathedral city of Salisbury. He was there on a mission to set up a rural postal network in the southwest of England. In the course of the job, I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering there one mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of The Warden,—from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon, was the principal site. (Autobiography, p. 62) 3 He goes on to say, “I may as well declare at once that no one at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to presume himself to be able to write about clergymen.” Ironically, he continues, I have been often asked in what period of my early life I had so long lived in a cathedral city so as to become intimate with the ways of a Close. I never lived in any cathedral city, —except London, never knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no particular intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon, who has been said to be lifelike, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent’s fond affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral consciousness. It was such as that, in my opinion, that an archdeacon should be, —or, at any rate, would be with such advantages as an archdeacon might have, and lo! an archdeacon was produced, who has been declared by competent authorities to be a very real archdeacon…The archdeacon came whole from my brain after this fashion;—but in writing about clergymen generally, I had to pick up as I went whatever I might know or pretend to know about them. (Autobiography, pp. 62-63) In short, cathedral city and church politics provide a canvas, a setting. But to what purpose? As though anticipating the question, Trollope relates how he envisioned a story of morally justified reform, on the one hand, while simultaneously revealing its dark side: the distressing social and human costs that follow in its wake. By making us care for characters on both sides of the struggle, Trollope shows how one can understand and even sympathize with the targets of reform without in any way losing faith in its goals. His sensitivity lends the novel its moral complexity. But my first idea had no reference to clergymen in general. I had been struck by two opposite evils,—or what to me seemed to be evils,—and with an absence of all art- 4 judgment in such matters, I thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe them, both in one and the same tale. The first evil was the possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers toward the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered to be the chief sinners in the matter. (Autobiography, p. 63) Interestingly, in a self-effacing admission on the next page of the Autobiography, Trollope asserts that “the two objects should not have been combined,” or, at least, he was not the person to carry it off. His admission could not be more misplaced. Surely, he must have known that what set him apart from Dickens’s grim polemics in Bleak House, Nicholas Nickelby, or Oliver Twist, for example, is the ironic humor, the comic incongruity that his humane ability to see the human face of reform brings into play so successfully in the Barsetshire Chronicles. Trollope sees reform’s contradictions not only as charged with pathos, but also with humor. Whereas Dickens focuses his reforming zeal on London where the slums are, Trollope relishes the comic potential of lobbing London’s brutal reform politics smack into the midst of the rural bastion of high-church Tory privilege he calls Barchester. Incongruity is a precondition for humor, and one would be hard put to find a more incongruous match than the placid cloisters of Barchester buffeted by the perfervid fulminations of Tom Tower’s Jupiter launched from the hurly-burly of Fleet Street. Polemic is not the only aspect differentiating Dickens and Trollope. Whereas plot drives Dickens’s novels, Trollope moves his narrative through characters riven with comic incongruity 5 seasoned with pathos. He carefully creates scenes in keeping with the quiet tradition of Barchester into which he then introduces a memorable cast of creepy, grotesque, lively, ne’er-dowell, hapless, clueless, scheming, domineering, feckless and altogether unforgettable characters. Think, for example, of Obediah Slope, Mrs Proudie, Charlotte and Bertie Stanhope, old Miss Thorne of Ullathorne Hall and her doomed attempt to revive medieval sports like jousting at the quintain, Lady De Courcy who deflects attention from her foundering family fortunes by perpetual rudeness, or Mr. Quiverful whose fourteen children prove his pious adherence to Psalm 127: “Children are a heritage from the Lord…Like arrows in the hands of a warrior…Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. And who but a master of the mock-epic, with a consummate appreciation for the absurd, could create a hybrid character like the Signora Neroni—a beautiful, wickedly flirtatious siren from the waist up, but crippled from the waist down like a mutant mermaid; a character capable of describing her daughter rapturously as a child “in whose veins flows the blood of Tiberius. She is the last of the Neros”; a character who, despite being confined to a couch, manages to dominate important scenes—often as the apparently innocent cause of comic antics on the part of others, while casting her erotic spell over an impressive collection of important male figures like Dr. Proudie, Squire Thorne, Mr. Arabin, and Obediah Slope. And only a master of mock-epic incongruity would think to make such an ambiguous character as Signora Neroni the decisive force in bringing about the novel’s dénouement. Understanding how and why Signora Neroni plays such a key role in Barchester Towers is to realize just how deftly Trollope draws upon everyday life. Unlike other the incessant movement—walking, riding horseback, being driven in vehicles, pacing a zoom or a garden—of most characters in the novel, Signora Neroni remains immobile. To be sure, Trollope orchestrates stagey entrances for her when she’s borne on a couch by footmen into Mrs. Proudie’s reception at the Bishop’s palace, or similarly into the drawing room at Ullathorne Hall where she commands a sweeping view of the proceedings. Once installed in these settings, she becomes the 6 center of attention, attracting especially male figues of note to her side. Similarly, in the drawing room of the Vesey-Stanhope mansion in the Close at Barchester, visitors attend her afternoon “at homes.” Not just any visitors, but important figures in the political world of the Church. It’s important that her devotees be male figures, because—with the crucially incongruous exception of Mrs, Proudie—only males do politics in ecclesiastical Barchester. And once gathered around the Signora’s couch, what do they do? They talk, they exchange gossip skillfully extracted from them by the Signora’s charms. In the everyday world— if not the high-flown world of serious literature—gossip is not idle chatter; gossip conveys information, and information is power: the power to make or break careers. Trollope reveals this in the opening pages of the novel to explain how Archdeacon. Grantly could be so sure that the Tory prime minister would recommend him to the Queen as the appropriate successor to his father’s see if only the ministry would last until after his father’s death. A trying time was this (his father’s lingering death) for the archdeacon, for whom was designed the reversion of his father’s see by those who then had the giving away of episcopal thrones. I would not be understood to say that the prime minister had in so many words promised the bishopric to Dr. Grantly. He was too discreet a man for that. … but those who know anything either of high or low government places, will be well aware that an expectant may be put into the highest state of encouragement, though the great man on whose breath he hangs may have done no more than whisper that ‘Mr. So-and-so is certainly a rising man’. Such a whisper had been made, and was known by those who heard it to signify that the cures of the diocese of Barchester should not be taken out of the hands of the archdeacon. (Barchester Towers, p. 2) Signora Neroni knows a great deal about high and low government places, and even more about the role that “chatter”—as it’s now called in Washington—can play in conferring or 7 withholding appointments to them. In this respect, hers is the single most important voice in Barchester Tower inspiring Adam Gopnik to say: “Trollope is right here where we are. His subject is always politics and his material is always gossip. Politics (the competition for status and power) and gossip (the shared information about who has it) remain the mostly benign stuff of human existence. Societies that have eliminated politics and gossip usually run instead on blood and betrayal, as Shakespeare reminds us.”