Barsetshire in Pictures

Barsetshire in Pictures By Ellen Moody   What I hope to suggest is how an attentive gazing at the original illustrations to Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, as well as the scenes in the two more or less faithful adaptations of Barsetshire that still exist (1) make visible elements that unify the Barsetshire series. That these elements were intended by Trollope is suggested by the evidence in his letters that Trollope chose the subjects for illustration whenever he could and when he didn’t like an illustration or illustrator he let others know about this (2) Many of us are familiar with Trollope's concluding resonant peroration to the Last Chronicle of Barset where he tells us Barsetshire was a single real world to him:   [I]n this county, he and I together have wandered often through the country lanes, and have ridden together over the too-well wooded fields, or have stood together in the cathedral nave listening to the peals of the organ, or have together sat at good men's tables, or have confronted together the angry pride of men who were not good. I may not boast that any beside myself have so realized the place and the people, and the facts, as to make such reminiscences possible as those I should attempt to evoke …  But to me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers, have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are known to my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps ... (LCB, Ch 84, p 728)  It’s a place real and imaginary peopled by characters known to Trollope and us. Trollope himself mapped it (Geroulds 2) [We are looking at Trollope’s own mapping] Screen Illustration 1: Trollope’s Own Map    The problem with staying with this is The Pallisers also manifest this minimum of a linked and real imaginary place and recurring people. So we must go further and ask, What if anything distinguishes the Barsetshire books from The Pallisers? Trollope again tells in this coda: in these books his “object” has been “to paint” “the social and not the professional lives of clergymen” (LCB, 727). Some have understood this statement to mean Trollope separates off religious life and doctrine from a churchman’s social life and politics; other say no, and that religious attitudes coming out of social class and characters’ psyches are included. But after a while most concede a distinguishing feature of Barsetshire is a dramatization of how in England a clerical vocation and career and set of values works out (Hennedy, 126-29; see also Durey).  But wait. Doctor Thorne, which we read here, and is the 4th Barset book, does not tell any story of clerical lives, even though it's the first book which allows us to map East and West Barsetshire. So too The Small House at Allington. Mr Harding turns up only once in The Small House, and his character and story as then revealed to Adolphus Crosbie, have, ironically to be sure, no discernible effect on Crosbie, except to prompt the competitive thought, “the Allington turf was better than that of the hospital” (SHA, Ch 16, pp 141-44). Yet the vignette for this encounter is among Millais's most striking for the book. [Let’s look at No 2] Screen Illustration No 2: Mr Crosbie Meets an old Clergyman on his way to Courcy Castle,” or “Barchester Cathedral” (from Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators, 59, Pl 32)  One hundred and sixteen years later in the BBC Barchester Chronicles, there are four shots remarkably close to this, of which we will look a one [Let’s see No 3]:  we see Donald Pleasance seen from a high zoom shot looking like a tourist wandering about the cathedral Screen Illustration No 3: Source Barchester Chronicles, Ep 2, Pt 6, “Evading the Grantleys (from; 1984 Oxford The Warden, Chapter 16, “A Long Day in London”, 218-19) This is one of my favorite shots of the series It’s common to think the incident and vignette are there in The Small House to link it to previous Barsetshire books. There is, however, another anomaly. Allington is not inside Barsetshire (Gerould 5). Granted, Courcy castle where Crosbie is headed is first mentioned in Dr Thorne and repeatedly in Framley Parsonage as a corrupt place, which Lady Lufton abhors.  There are also no original sets of illustrations for The Warden, Barchester Towers, or Dr Thorne (4) to help us out in a quest to find unity, and Millais’s famous six for Framley Parsonage are all indoors or allegorical (Beyond Decoration 199-202, 204, 206). Four do anticipate many illustrations for the Last Chronicle by George Housman Thomas by showing us characters in moments of intense hurt or anxiety with people and furniture that are of very ordinary middling or lower status. Just one example [let’s look at No 4] We see Mark and Fanny Robarts just as the bailiff and his men are coming in to make an inventory of the furniture prior to removing it to pay for his debts Screen Illustration 4: “’Mark,’ she said, “’The men are here.’” (from Framley Parsonage, Chapter 44 “The Philistines at the Parsonage,” facing p 512 (1984 Penguin FP, the image from Beyond Decoration, 206) The heroine shows a patient strength seen in other Barsetshire heroines. Again fast forward , this time 155 years, to 2015, and we find a Doctor Thorne movie shot far more outside than indoors (5). We have continual green and pleasant lawns, maybe too many establishment shots of Courcy Castle, Boxall Hill, and the Thorne residence at the end of Greshamsbury street. Frequently too we see Tom Hollander as Dr Thorne walking home through what seems a main village thoroughfare; so too Stephanie Martini as Mary Thorne (with a basket of things she is giving away) [let’s look at No 5]; her strength, like Fanny Robarts, is seen in her ability to endure and yet carry on seeing to the needs of others while she is being ostracized. Screen Illustration 5: Stefanie Martini as Mary Thorne with her basket in Greshambury seeing to the needs of others (Doctor Thorne, from early in Episode 3 of the 3 Episode DVD version) Harry Richardson as Frank Gresham joins her and the very walls romantically sprout red flowers among the ivy. Twice, with a kind of comic bravura we are with Ian McShane as Sir Roger Scatcherd, walking down these streets too. In one tracking shot [let’s look at No 6] he’s at first buoyant in the morning light; then he grimaces in a pursed face expression as he canvases the place where he is about to give a campaign speech Screen Illustration 6: We see Ian McShane as Sir Roger (Doctor Thorne, during Episode 2 of the 3 Episode DVD version) And very picturesque streets they are too – the use of stone bridges repeats the townscape of the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. But no scenes inside and around churches in this Doctor Thorne and no major clergymen.   In addition, four of the books (from Doctor Thorne to the Last Chronicle) feature as major characters very non-clerical lives and worldly themes (including elections, sleazy artists, and London crooks). Undeterred, writers have turned to subjectively perceived parallels and underlying perspectives.  Casebooks and essays on individual books tease out evidence for this feeling many readers have had, there is unity here. For this talk, I’m building on a 1971 book, Hugh Hennedy's lucid and enjoyable Unity in Barsetshire.  One parallel event he thinks important repeatedly and centrally occurs when a male career is at stake: a hero resigns a post over a principle, not just Mr Harding (three times), but Mark Robarts, and Mr Crawley too. Those male protagonists who cannot get themselves to refuse status or money, are often punished, especially when the case involves bribery, cheating or debt. Two examples, from Framley Parsonage, Mr Sowerby and (as we’ve seen), from The Small House, Adolphus Crosbie. I add that Trollope’s favored moral heroes who help create contented endings, do not have as their most actuating motive in life the accumulation of money and high rank: Francis Arabin and Dr Thorne (explicitly), and Johnny Eames, all take pleasure in and are proud of jobs well done for the sake of the work and their self-esteem. Henry Grantley is rightly angry because, tempted by his father, he gave up his career on the understanding he would always by supported by his father, and finds himself blackmailed by a threatened loss of allowance if he should marry Grace Crawley. Lily yields Crosbie to Lady Alexandrina without a venomous act, word or even wish.   My argument is the Barcester books constitute an English-inflected fractured pastoral idyll (6). To me they are patently not faery tale because they hold to probability and verisimilitude. In telling of the original inspiration for The Warden, Trollope stressed an idyllic inspiration, a walk that became a creative reverie, because maybe it did matter to him more than the literal church corruption case The Warden is based upon:  he had been setting up postal routes in Ireland, where conditions were so dire, that the assignment in Salisbury seems to have triggered intense relief: “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 archbishops, was the central site” (An Autobiography, Ch 5, p 62) (6). So for the rest of this talk I’ll show that the pictures drawn by Millais for The Small House, by Thomas for The Last Chronicle, and the characteristic mise-en-scenes of the BBC Barchester Chronicles help sustain and reinforce the parallel thematic patterns while providing pastoral surroundings. Paul Goldman and David Skilton have invented the term “bimedial text” to indicate the full meaning or experience of Trollope’s novels as printed at the time were ideally meant to be an interaction in the reader’s imagination prompted by texts and pictures across a book (7). In these two sets of pictures and one movie, we’ll observe an interlace between vignette or letter and full-page illustrations can create for the readers a richer, more interesting and unexpected experiences than the texts alone. First, I found it a surprise to discover that out of the eighteen full page illustrations and nineteen vignettes (or letters), in The Small House at Allington, there are only two of Lily close enough for us to see her face; in the other seven she is either at a distance, facing away, or somewhat obscured. Hall suggests that Millais was not good at heroine’s faces, but this is manifestly untrue (just browse Beyond Decoration). We can look at one interlace. [Let’s look at No 7] The vignette I showed last time of packed trunks, suitcases, other stuff actually (10) prefaces Chapter 49, “Preparations for Going: (8) Screen Illustration No 7: from Beyond Decoration , 234; 2015 SMA, 438-47 This melancholy vignette is not of Crosbie’s things at Courcy castle, but shows three women’s stuff, a lifetime of activities, gathered over many years. The match is Lily handing down a found inkstand [No 8] Screen illustration No 8, “’Oh, Bell, here’s the inkstand for which you have been moaning for six years’.” (Dialogue p 441, 2015 Oxford SHA; Beyond Decoration 233) The concept is just so believable, even if, if that’s Bell, her hands are not going to catch the inkstand. We see an unnamed servant, one of the countless invisible people of these novels, holding Lily’s dress down to make sure she doesn’t fall. The text says the Squire comes in, but the man is too young and thin-faced. In The Small House pictures, Eames does not wear a top hat, but a round one, so it could be Dr Crofts: the face faintly resembles the one vignette of Dr Crofts seen troubled sitting on a chair (see Beyond Decoration 222) According to the illustrations, Johnny Eames is book’s central character; he is the most often pictured. There are 15 of him alone and with others, full-page, vignettes, letters, through metonymy, e.g., the bull. We follow his story’s crucial incidents step-by-step (9). There are but eight of Crosbie altogether, and in some he is pictured in ways parallel to Eames, e.g, standing hesitant before a door or entrance, wandering in a street. I’ve mentioned the one vignette of Dr Crofts. There is one full-page for Mr Lupex with Joseph Cradell and Mrs Lupex: the three look very uncomfortable but, doing their best to be courteous, they are depicted in a dignified attractive way (Beyond Decoration 214). The pictures in The Small House at Allington seem to me a continuum on which are depicted the problems of men confronted with conflicting social demands of normative heterosexual masculinity, including choice of wife and when, how and if the male should resort to violence (10). Again, just one example out of so many: the idyllic last full page illustration for The Small House: [We look at No 9 to see] Johnny with Lady Julia Screen Illustration No 9: [read this aloud] “ a gentle step came close to him, and turning round, he saw that Lady Julia is on the bridge …. “ (Dialogue p 492, Chapter 55, “The Second Visit to Guestwick Bridge.” 2015 SHA; Beyond Decoration 235) If we needed confirmation, this single study of Lady Julia confirms how favorably the novel regards her. Lily has again refused Johnny’s proposal of marriage, and Lady Julia encourages him with the idea he has asked too soon. Her face is too youthful as is that of Mrs Dale in the depictions of her: it’s not uncommon in film adaptations today to cast actors and actresses far more attractive and younger than a book calls for. In the two full-page illustrations of Crosbie close up enough to look at his face, he occurs with Lady Alexandrina, once buying carpets (Beyond Decoration, 229, a full page for Chapter 40, facing a dialogue on p 361 in 2015 SHA). Since this is one of the more frequently reprinted of the Small House set, we look instead at first vignette to Chapter 48, “Nemesis ” [No 10] Screen Illustration No 10: [Read aloud] We see an elegant London street (Beyond Decoration, 231, 2015 SHA, 429-38) But when we go inside the lovely façade, we find an uncomfortable, half-quarreling, and bored couple who do not even make eye-contact [Let’s look at No 11] Screen Illustration No 11: [Say aloud: The caption is] “Why, on earth, on Sunday” (Dialogue on p 431-32, 2015 SHA) (from Beyond Decoration, p 232) The marriage, such as it has been, lasts ten weeks. The pictures also reveal that what we might regard as a secondary or backdrop story, the near break-up of the relationship between the two houses, is primary. There are three full-page illustrations which include either or both Mrs Dale and the Squire. The first illustration within the book (frontispiece to the Trollope Society edition of The Small House; also see Beyond Decoration 209), we see her at home with her maid, her face hooded, a glum expression; the facing text (Chapter 3, “The Widow Dale of Allington,” dialogue, 24-25, 2015 SHA) is Mrs Dale’s inward thoughts and they suggest she is aware she has given up having a life of her own to give her daughters the comfort and dignity of living genteel lives. Here and later we find her pressured by the Squire to please him on the implicit basis not only should she be grateful but somehow he should have more say over what her daughters do than she or they do. The second is of Squire Dale, Lord de Guest and Johnny in London after Crosbie has abandoned Lily, where the Squire (in the juxtaposed text) is feeling guilty when faced with Guest’s generosity because he has worked out that it was after his refusal to help Crosbie and Lily in any way, that Crosbie headed for Courcy Castle (Beyond Decoration 224). Let’s look at the third [No 12]: Screen Illustration 12: [Read aloud] “Let me beg you to think over the matter” (Dialogue from Chapter 38, “Dr Crofts is Called in,” 2015 SHA p. 343; image from Beyond Decoration 227) Her gesture is one of deprecation and his is one of genuinely trying to listen to her and persuade her. I feel this image favors his point of view; so too the next chapter title: “Mrs Dale is thankful for a Good Thing”). To conclude this survey: Lord and Lady de Courcy’s real misery with one another is caught strongly, just once (Beyond Decoration 221). Palliser and Lady Dumbello are shown, she distanced and strained, he open-faced, again just once (Beyond Decoration p 220); by contrast, Lord de Guest is twice depicted and appealingly, here he is early in the novel, with Eames in another pastoral setting [Let’s look at No 13] Screen Illustration No 13: [Read aloud] “’Why it’s young Eames’” (dialogue on 126, Chapter 14, “Johnny Eames Takes a Walk, 2015 SHA; Beyond Decoration 215) This moment of togetherness is fulfilled when in Chapter 58 (“The Fate of the Small House”) Lord de Guest tells Johnny he can understand grief, but not “any outward expression of it” (2015 SHA, dialogue 526), a reinforcement of his sister’s advice to Johnny. The parallel here is the book’s implicit criticism of Lily: it’s acceptable to have been shattered, bereft, profoundly shocked (her shaming involves the allowed sexual intimacy of an engagement), but not to continue to show it, and not to refuse to forget. The most often printed depiction of Lily is a rather poor one of her first refusal of Johnny Eames where her face is a blur and her arm all wrong (see Beyond Decoration 218 and from The Last Chronicle, Lily walking side-by-side with Eames, Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators 68). The reverse parallel by Millais shows us Eames confronted by Amelia where she demands that he accept her love: her face is turned away from us and his the focus of the picture (Beyond Decoration 209) again, curiously, the woman’s body is not quite right. And what of Bell, the other sister? She only occurs in the pictures with Lily. Their story might be seen as just another variation on the book’s interlace of stories of love and a lack of it, except for the striking beauty of two vignettes of Lily and Bell together often reprinted (see Beyond Decoration 210, 213) in a garden landscape. Lily also gets a penultimate final vignette where we see her from afar. [Let’s look at No 14] staring sadly at a vase of flowers used to symbolize matrimony in an earlier vignette Screen Illustration No 14: [Read aloud] “The Last of Lily:” vignette for “Lily Dale vanquishes her mother?” (Chapter 57, 2015 SHA, 512; Beyond Decoration 236) It is a very sad picture. Sometimes readings of pictures are Rorshadt tests. I see drawn over her face a stiff veil. For my part I agree with the Earl: I go further and suggest the reason Lily is so inveighed against by readers today is from the beginning to the end of the book she persists in breaking an ultimate taboo, she will not be guarded, she will be openly vulnerable, she will not behave performatively. She disquiets people, her attitude of mind inveighed against is analogous to that of the Rev Josiah Crawley’s psychological state throughout most of The Last Chronicle. Hennedy singles out disgrace and humiliation as two repeating phenomena throughout the Barsetshire series. The parallel between Lily and Crawley allow us to segue into the original illustrations for The Last Chronicle of Barset and the way the Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni, as played by Susan Hampshire, the female character in Barchester Towers who also breaks taboos and has been punished hard is featured. For The Last Chronicle of Barset George Housman Thomas drew an astonishing 32 full page illustrations and 32 vignettes and/or letters for 84 chapters, which sustains a continuity of presentation of characters and places verbally and visually. Trollope had tried to persuade Millais to do the work (“a story in thirty-two numbers, which is to come out weekly”) saying these pictures “won’t take you above an half an hour each.” Millais knew better, and refused (11). Very unfortunately, the whole series is not in print anywhere in any form: you must betake yourself to rare book rooms in research libraries to see them. Housman does not have the genius for pictorial depiction found in Millais, and publishers are persuaded (probably rightly) these images would not have much appeal except for a specialist and true Trollope lover. And there are so many of them. As with the illustrations we saw in Orley Farm, and I mentioned are in The Vicar of Bullhampton, and we have seen now in The Small House of Allington, these illustrations tell the several stories with different emphasis from the book than you might expect. We don’t begin to have enough time to look at such details, but, since there is unity in Barsetshire, we can look a one underlying vantage point and over-riding mood: the vignettes and larger illustrations in the first editions of The Last Chronicle of Barset repeatedly picture people who belong to the lower or middling orders in Barsetshire and about daily tasks not necessarily mentioned in the text or in a troubled mood. Sometimes they set a peaceful mood, as in this mood-setting letter, a favorite with me: Lily and Grace sewing and talking together by candlelight, the vignette for Chapter 9, “Grace Crawley goes to Allington” Screen Illustration 15: [Read aloud] Lily does fine sewing, while Grace mends a cloth, Lily is much more luxuriously dressed, we see a plain deal table, candle with dialogue just below (1867 LCB, 43) Let this stand in for these others I’ll describe (12): the very first vignette is a butcher with a knife (perhaps he is owed money); the next whispering school children, with Mr Crawley hovering nearby, presumably teaching them. Then skipping some: we see the males from the parish where Crawley’s church stands; the people who crowd into a court room where Crawley is indited; shacks people actually live in; post people (one elderly); a farmer; Henry Grantley’s earnest gamekeeper; for sale signs; the countryside several times, women at ordinary tasks in the Small House, breakfast scenes, reading, writing letters, sewing scenes, bidding adieu – these visualize and reinforce the friendship of Lily Dale and Grace Crawley in the book. Two inside-a-room illustrations: a full page of Henry Grantley in what looks like a deathbed scene but is simply him visiting Mr Harding in his bedroom; a vignette of Mrs Proudie in a posture and dress uncannily anticipating a scene in Barchester Chronicles we watch Geraldine McEwan as Mrs Proudie stalk through a corridor on her determined way to bully the Bishop. More citified vignettes: a worn down tavern in a run-down street in Barsetshire with Mr Toogood glimpsed going inside; people loading luggage on a train; a torn canvas, a London alleyway where a man kills himself (Hook Court). Four interesting full-page London ones, not bad: Conway Dalrymple trying to sell one of his pictures; a domestic drawing room in which an old woman (Mrs Van Siever) tells a younger one (Clara) “you don’t know what starving is;” one of Mrs Dobbs-Broughton’s dinner party where a number of the London characters appear, all strained in expression – along with Johnny Eames. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Millais’s depiction of Lady Lufton at Miss Dunstable’s party, also in London (Framley Parsonage, Chapter 29, “Miss Dunstable at Home”; cf Mizener, LCB 5-6, and Beyond Decoration 202); the figures just as striking. The one oft-reprinted full page where Giles Hoggett, a brickmaker urges Crawley, “It’s Dogged as Does it,” which I showed last time as drawn by Francis Arthur Fraser, is utterly in character with the whole Last Chronicle set (13) And here is just one consonant full-page illustration, one I’ve never come across reprinted, for Chapter 12, “Mr Crawley seeks for sympathy” [No 16]: Screen Illustration 16: [Read aloud] The caption is “Speak out, Dan” (from Chapter 12, 1857 LCB, 58) We see Mr Crawley sitting by the fire, warming himself, looking up to a working man whom he regards as a friend; Dan scratches his head. Crawley is not behaving proudly, is not stiff-necked here. The wife is faintly outlined in the shadows by the threshold. On the floor we see a woven basket, papers, perhaps household stuff. There are probably not enough tables or cupboards in this house. A teapot on a table to the side. Its vignette is a depiction of a Hogglestock workyard. Very unprepossessing and yet picturesque. I’ll describe another similar typical pair from this book: a full-page illustration of Dr Grantly as a large well-fed gentleman on a horse confronted by a gamekeeper with his dogs; the gamekeeper is angry that the foxes are not being take care of properly because Mr Henry (Grantly’s son) is distracted; then not far off a vignette of Mr Grantly come upon a sale sign of his son’s property; Mr Grantly ever so lightly lifts the sign with his cane -- (Ch 56, 248; Ch 58, 259, 1867 LCB). It’s due to this plethora of pictures that George Housman Thomas’s pictorial work for Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset can succeed in affecting a reader. This is a matter of taste, but in well over 2/3s of the chapters you come these pairs. If the 1959 BBC film adaptation of Last Chronicle was still extant (it’s one of those early Trollope adaptations wiped out), I assume these images would not hold a candle to that lost production (1). Nonetheless, since in four of the extant videos, there is a close similarity between one or more of the original pictures and a mise-en-scène, it’s possible there could have been uncanny closeness here too (14). Sometimes the video scene seems to be a copy of the illustration; more often there is somehow more than a family resemblance. Take this one from The Last Chronicle of Barset. [Let’s look at “Mr Toogood and the old waiter,”No 17] Scene illustration No 17: A full page illustration for Chapter 62, “Mr Toogood travels professionally” (1857 LCB 182) A thin elderly and deferential waiter is serving Mr Toogood: their faces are well realized. Mr Toogood is well-dressed, but with slippers on. He seems to be comfortably situated with a hot drink, and a carafe nearby. There’s a picture of a horse galloping on the wall. On the juxtaposed page he is ferreting out information about the people in the Dragon of Wantly, which information will help to solve the mystery of the £20 and exonerate Crawley. Now let’s look again at Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding that 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles, where he is also questioning a waiter [Let’s see No 18]: Scene illustrations No 18: [Read aloud] Mr Harding questions the waiter (from 1984 The Warden, Ch 16, “A Long Day in London,” 215-16; aka “Evading the Grantlys” (BC, Ep 2, Pt 6)  We are in London in a hotel catering to clerical people. Here it is a question of the train schedule. How long has Mr Harding until the Grantlys arrive? Notice the similarity of scene design, atmosphere, the angle, the ambience. In this case the vital information that the well-informed waiter offers comes from his having in effect memorized Bradshaw. He is much better dressed, has better pressed clothes than the 1867 Dragon of Wantly man. He informs Mr Harding that Mr Harding’s “good friends,” the Grantlys, could arrive at any moment now. One of Alan Plater’s additions to The Warden and Barchester Towers as Barchester Chronicles, is to recognize explicitly that Mr Harding’s goodness is a function of his nature imbued by ideas of Christian empathy. Donald Pleasence as Mr Harding repeatedly exasperates Nigel Hawthorne as Dr Grantly by persisting in seeing other people’s point of view. Religious and moral feeling play an important role in this BBC film adaptation. It opens and closes with lovely drawing of a cathedral; this still shows superimposed on the cathedral the window of a room where we also see someone’s cello. [Let’s look at No 19] Scene illustration 19: Introductory paratext 1 (Paratexts are the colored drawings which introduce and conclude the episodes of Barchester Chronicles) No one here needs reminding how much Mr Harding’s cello means to him. An 1855 illustration by F. C. Tilney shows Mr Harding playing his cello with his pensioners listening, one seemingly in a state of pleasure (Mr Bunce), the others a bit impatiently. Within seconds the scene widens out to reveal a cathedral close up, then we see it in the distance, so it has shrunk back into part of a picturesque landscape [Show No 20] with the requisite forest, greenery and bridge with train, which, however lightly, is reminiscent of the early 19th century watercolors of say Samuel Palmer (15). Scene illustration No 20: (Introductory paratext 2) We have time to think about how just one of the groups of characters in Barchester Chronicles are pictured: the Stanhopes, who are a clerical family, though until the coming of the Proudies, the father has lived off his clerical income in Italy, initially on the basis of a sore throat. The younger daughter, the Signora Neroni has paid a high price for her unconventional behavior: she is crippled for life, she cannot walk. I have three last images to share.. [Let’s look at No 21] Scene illustration No 21: [Read aloud] Susan Hampshire as Signora Neroni makes her entrance (from Chapter 11, “Mrs Proudie’s Reception – concluded, 2015 Barchester Towers, 75-76; BC Ep 3, Pt 8, “The Bishop’s Reception”) This first we cannot overlook, Susan Edmonstone as Charlotte, the non-binary (my view) caretaking sister (at one side) and Peter Blythe as Bertie a witty gay male (at the other) are stage-managing Madeline’s entrance to Mrs Proudie’s reception where, as we all instantly recall, the couch itself is weaponized to expose Mrs Proudie’s seething prudery. Numerous scenes in this adaptation take place in Barsetshire drawing rooms, among these the Stanhopes where Madeline like a dea ex machina deals out poetic justice, insight and good fates for all but her brother, Bertie, whom once he refuses to lie to the rich Widow Bold and cannot marry her, she cannot help. Alan Rickman as Mr Slope, the dignified Malvolio of this drama, is supposedly justifiably hurt by the Signora, but she does lack the power to kick him out of this ambiguous Arcadia it’s Mrs Proudie who can kick him out. I want to call attention to how Susan Hampshire is dressed, very Barsetshire I’d call it. [Let’s look at No 22]: Scene Illustration No 22: Susan Hampshire as Madeline, Stanhope drawing room (from Chapter 15, “The Widow’s Suitors,” 2015, BT, 111; BC, Ep 4, Ep 5, “A Rich Widow”) Also listen to what she is saying: in the tradition of illustrations dropped into a book, this still would be juxtaposed to the dialogue in the novel which Alan Plater (scriptwriter) has directly transposed into Hampshire’s speech: Obstacles to the siblings’ plan of marrying Bertie to Mrs Bold include the heavy mourning Mrs Bold still wears. About which the Signora has just said: “I hate such shallow pretenses. I'd let the world say what it pleased and show no grief [for a dead husband] if I felt none – perhaps not show it if I did.” When her sister and brother remain silent, she continues: “You both know in what way husbands and wives generally live together. You know what freedom a man claims for himself and what slavery he would exact from a wife and you know how wives generally obey. Marriage means tyranny on one side, and deceit on the other, and a man is a fool to sacrifice his interests to such a bargain. The tragedy is a woman generally has no other way of living.” Does such a speech belong in Trollope’s Arcadia? Evidently yes, and I for one can only wish Lily had had the strength of Madeline, explicitly to cast off the cant of love and marriage. Like Madeline, she doesn’t want the choices on offer and Squire Dale has supplied income enough (2015 SHA, Ch 58, 522). When Janet Maw as the expected Eleanor comes for her evening visit, the pastoral idyll reasserts itself. [Let’s look at No 23]: Scene Illustration No 23: [Read aloud] “Barchester at Moonlight” (BC, Ep 4, Pt 9, “An Evening with the Stanhopes) As Bertie sits drawing Eleanor, he seems by his words not to describe the image he is making, but to anticipate the coming talking and walking under the spell of the moon just outside in the night sky: he calls it “a landscape … a lyrical scene of great beauty, a magical land where only the pure and innocent on this sad planet of ours are permitted to enter, an enchanted kingdom that bewitches the eyes of mankind.” Mr Slope has come in and Charlotte remarks “there is the most wonderful full moon this evening. Do you believe there are beings on the stars, Mrs Bold.” Eleanor replies: “I feel sure there is at least one man on the moon.” Bertie: “But you reject the latest theory from Oxford about green cheese? I agree. My theory is there are fish on Venus, salamanders on Jupiter and a highly intelligent form of rocking horse on Mars,” and he proposes they “all take a closer look” (this is Alan Plater’s script, taken from my notes). We see our four principals wandering around a bridge for 15 minutes in the moonlight so as not to leave Madeline alone for too long. I hope I’ve managed to persuade everyone to consider the idea that the Barsetshire books project a unified imaginary country and characters, which is seen in its many pictures, both in the book illustrations and in the scenes in the movies.   Notes: 1 Five early film adaptations or serials from Trollope’s novels have been wiped out. See a filmography, at https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/filmography-of-adaptations-of-anthony-trollopes-novels/ To wit, 1951 The Warden, 1958 The Eustace Diamonds, 1959 The Last Chronicle, 1960 The Small House, and 1969 The Way We Live Now. 2 See Robbins and Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators, p 56. Famously Trollope could not bear Millais’s illustration for Lucy Robarts (Beyond Decoration, p 200), and he wrote George Smith no one could be worse for his books than Hablot Browne, and half-way through had the respected and liked illustrator replaced by one Miss E Taylor about whom even today little is known (Hall, Trollope & Illustrators), pp 96-101. 3 The Barchester Chronicles, DVD set, Disk 1, Episode 2, Part 6. There are four shots: one of Mr Harding looking down and seeing others as very tiny figures in a vast cathedral looking tourist like; two of Mr Harding himself in the same place, and a third of him examining close up a sarcophagus, not unlike the one in Millais's drawing. 4 There are a few contemporary illustrations for Dr Thorne by H. L. Schindler (four), and The Warden by F. C. Tilney. I’ve seen four for each; they are rarely reprinted. A few may be found in Snow (78, 157) and Hennessy (17, 142, 150, 168, 267, 337). One for The Warden anticipates Barchester Chronicles because a central scene early on shows Mr Harding playing his cello to his pensioners; two are of Mr Harding and Eleanor happy together. 5. The streets in Doctor Thorne streets are in Lacock village, a picturesque ex-town owned by the National Trust; it was used in the 1999 A&E, BBC Pride and Prejudice adaptation, scripted by Andrew Davies (and many others) 6 I derive the phrase from Lionel Trilling’s introductory essay on Austen’s Emma. Think of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_in_Arcadia_ego See Trollope’s “A Walk in the Woods, printed on my website: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/nonfiction.WalkWood.html. Also in the recent edition of An Autobiography, Shrimpton reprints an excerpt, 266-73. The best discussions of this genre (pastoral in its originating European form) are today found in the scholarship and criticism about Shakepeare’s later four romances, and the poetry and prose of the Sidney circle (Sir Philip, his sister, Mary, niece, Mary, and brother, Robert). 7 Goldman and Skilton, p 215 especially. In my previous talk on the illustrations for Orley Farm, I suggested Trollope and his illustrators meant the pictures to suggest to us different ways of understanding his stories and characters, to indicate important characters we might have overlooked, or simply sustain and reinforce his meaning. 8  There is a mistake about this vignette of packed trunks in my talk on “Trollope, Millais[’s illustrations], and Orley Farm”. In doing present talk I discovered that Beyond Decoration is sometimes wrong about where an image was originally placed; so too the Trollope Society editions.  Insofar as this is possible with the documents I have, I first put the pictures in the correct order and worked out what place in the narratives they belong to do this talk. At the time after the first edition, printers and publishers moved the pictures around as forms of advertisement so later editions misplace pictures.  This resembles how in serial TV shows once they are finished, various segments are sometimes rearranged to accommodate advertisement and how much time the episode is given. For example, Doctor Thorne exists in two different versions: a four part where some interesting scenes are included, like when Mr Moffatt is not whipped by Frank. The three-part one is blander. 9 The whole set of Millais images for SHA, somewhat disordered, may be found in Beyond Decoration 163, 209-36. 10 See my “Masculinity and Epistolarity in Andrew Davies's Trollope Films” and “Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men.” 11 See Hall, Trollope and His Illustrations, pp 114-115. Polhemus has written an essay arguing that the story of Conway Dalrymple constitutes a thorough-going allusion to Millais. He produces no evidence for this. None. Those characteristics found in Millais’s painting (e.g., using older stories, allegories about sex) and Dalrymple were commonplace. I’ve comes across the assertion that the artistic members of the families in Ayala’s Angel constitute a general allusion to Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites but that is quite different from the idea a specific character is meant to represent a specific person. Nonetheless, along the way Polhemus has some very interesting things to say about the painting Dalrymple works on and the various allusions in a story often ignored by people who write about The Last Chronicle of Barset. Alas, I too will not go into detail specifically with any of these images for lack of time. See below in my bibliography. 12 I don’t have good copies of these as my images mostly come from my copy of 1867 American edition of the Last Chronicle, where Harper and Bros reprint most of the original illustrations, as is proudly claimed on the front page. I assure all that my book is no collector’s item; it’s in sad shape; with two columns on ever page. If I tried to scan in too many, the book would fall apart. So I provide just one 13 See on my website: the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels: commentary and reproductions, The Last Chronicle of Barset, where I describe them all and reproduce a few: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/pictures.LastChronicle.1866.html http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/pictures.LastChronicle.1878.html I viewed the whole set in the order they were first seen and intended at the Library of Congress as bound together separate numbers dated 1867 (PR 5684 L45). The Library has two copies. There are a very few reprinted in Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators. Pp 114-121; 12 reprinted in the 1997 Trollope Society edition, and one printed nowhere else, “I am very glad to have the opportunity of shaking hands with you,” from Chapter 24, “Mrs Dobbs-Broughton’s Dinner-Party,” we see “Adolphus Crosbie stepping across the Dobbs-Broughton drawing-room, to shake hands with Johnny Eames. On Johnny’s right, Madalina Desmolins; next to her is Augustus Musselboro, and next to him, Mrs Van Siever. The two figures in the background are Mrs Broughton and Conway Dalrymple (Mizener’s note. P 5). This is of course one of the depicted London scenes. 14 The four are Barchester Chronicles, The Pallisers, The Way We Live Now, and He Knew He Was Right. 15 On Samuel Palmer see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Palmer     Select Bibliography & Filmography   Barchester Towers. Dir Giles Forster. Scripted Alan Plater. Perf. Donald Pleasance, Nigel Hawthorne, Alan Rickman, Geraldine McEwan, Susan Hampshire, Clive Swift, Janet Maw, Barbara Flynn, Angela Pleasance (among others). BBC 1983. Bareham, Tony, ed.  Trollope: The Barsetshire Novels: A Casebook. London: Macmillan Press, 1983. Doctor Thorne. Dir. Naill McCormick. Scripted Jerome Fellowes. Perf. Tom Hollander, Stephanie Martini, Ian McShane, Harry Richardson, Richard McCabe, Phoebe Nicholls, Rebecca Front, Edward Franklin, Janine Duvitsky (among others) ITV, 2015 Durey, Jill Felicity. Trollope and the Church of England. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.  Gerould, Winifred Gregory and James Thayer Gerould.  A Guide to Trollope: An Index to the Characters and Places, and Digests of the Plots, in All of Trollope’s Works.  1948; rpt. Princeton UP, 1976.  You can do no better.  Goldman, Paul. Beyond Decoration: The Illustrations of John Everett Millais. London: The British Library; Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 2005. Goldman, Paul and David Skilton, “Trollope and Illustration,” Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. Deborah Morse, Margaret Markwick and Mark Turner. NY: Routledge, 2017. Pp 213-38. I presume this essay would have made Henry James feel ill and think to himself another reason for complaining about Trollope’s novels. Hall, N. John.  Trollope and His Illustrators.  NY: St. Martin's Press, 1980.  -----------------. Anthony Trollope: A Biography. Oxford UP, 1993. Hennedy, Hugh L. Unity in Barsetshire.  The Hague: Mouton, 1971. I recommend this readable, sensible and subtle book. There is a chapter for each of the Barset books.  He lucidly covers a number of theories and critics on the unity (or disunity) of the Barsetshire books. Of course it was an evolving project; Trollope did not begin with a series in mind as he did with the Parliamentary books. Hennessy, James Pope. Anthony Trollope. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Macdonald, Susan Peck. Anthony Trollope. Boston: Twayne, 1987. McMasters, Juliet, “The Small House at Allington: The moth and the Candle,” Trollope’s Palliser Novels. London: Macmillan, 1978. Pp 3-19. Moody, Ellen. “The Original Illustrations for Trollope’s Novels,” Trollope on the Net. London: Hambledon Press, 1999. Pp 127-54. -----------------. “Masculinity and Epistolarity in Andrew Davies's Trollope Films,” Upstairs and Downstairs: British Costume Drama from The Forsythe Saga to Downton Abbey, edd .James Leggott and Julie Anne Taddeo. NY: Rowman and Littlefield,” 79-94. -----------------. “Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Heroism in Trollope’s Work. Tis was a paper I gave at a Trollope conference in Exeter, 2006 Online at: http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/comfortromance.html Miller, D. A. “The novel as usual: Barchester Towers,” The Novel and the Police.  Berkeley: Univ of California, 1988. pp. 107-44.  Polhemus, Robert, “Trollope’s Picturesque chroniclette and John Millais’ Portrait of the artist as a young man,” ,” Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed. Deborah Morse, Margaret Markwick and Mark Turner. NY: Routledge, 2017. Pp 239-60. Robbins, Frank E. “Chronology and History in Trollope's Barset and Parliamentary Novels,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 5:4 (March 1951):303-16.  Skilton, David, “The Relation between Illustration and Text in the Victorian Novel: A New Perspective,’ Word and Visual Imagination Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, edd. Karl Josef Holtgen, Peter Daly, Wolfgang Lottes. Erlanger, 1988. Pp 303-25. Snow, C. P. Trollope: An Illustrated Biography. NY: New Amsterdam, 1975. Trilling, Lionel, “Introduction” to Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Lionel Trilling. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957.  Trollope left an ironic and somewhat hostile take on this book, see his note on my website, http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/nonfiction.Emma.html   Trollope, Anthony.  An Autobiography, and Other Writings, ed. Nicholas Shrimpton. Oxford UP, 2014  ----------------------. Barchester Towers, ed, introd. John Bowen. Oxford UP, 2014. ----------------------. Dr Thorne, ed. Simon Dentith, foreword Julian Fellowes. Oxford UP, 2016. ----------------------. Framley Parsonage, ed. David Skilton and Peter Miles London: Penguin, 1984 This shows the original divisions of the text as they were published in instalments in the Cornhill. ----------------------. The Last Chronicle of Barset, with illustrations by George H. Thomas. NY: Harper & Bros, 1867. This contains almost the complete set of illustrations: letters, vignette and full page as three quarters. ----------------------.  The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed., introd., notes Helen Small.  Oxford UP, 2015  ----------------------. The Last Chronicle of Barset, introd. A.N. Wilson. London: Trollope Society, 1997. ----------------------. The Last Chronicle of Barset, ed. Introd. Arthur Mizener. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1964. ----------------------. The Small House at Allington, introd. Margaret Markwick London: Trollope Society edition, 1997. This contains the 18 full page illustrations by Millais. ----------------------.   The Small House at Allington, ed., Dinah Birch. Oxford UP, 2015.  ----------------------.  The Warden, ed. David Skilton.  Oxford UP, 1980.       PAGE 3