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Authors: Anthony Trollope

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While one contemporary reviewer from the
Spectator
wrote ‘we must say we think better of Mr Trollope as an artist for making Lily Dale turn out a spinster',
13
many readers then and now have clamoured for the union of John Eames and Lily. The novelist Margaret Oliphant, writing in 1867, was comically facetious in her review of
The Last Chronicle
, but her views nevertheless spoke for many readers of the time when she proclaimed:

It is a wilful abandonment of all her natural responsibilities when such a girl writes Old Maid after her name. She has no business to do it; and what is the good of being an author, we should like to know, if a man cannot provide more satisfactorily for his favourite characters? Lily will not like it when she has tried it a little longer. She will find the small house dull, and will miss her natural career; and if she should take to social science or philosophy, whose fault will it be but Mr Trollope's?
14

Her ‘natural career' is of course that of wife and mother, roles which many Victorians regarded as having been determined by God,
biology, or both. One of the intriguing aspects of Trollope's novels is that while he seems to adhere to those dearly held Victorian truths concerning morality and ‘natural' laws, he often writes against the grain of these truths. Of the prospect of Grace Crawley's marriage to Major Grantly he writes ‘by the stern laws of the world, the son and the daughter must pay for the offence of the father and the mother' (Ch.
7
). But those ‘stern laws' are despised by Major Grantly, and are eventually dismissed by the plot as unnecessary as Mr Crawley is finally proven innocent. In the case of Lily Dale's ‘natural career' as mother, it is odd that Trollope has Lily confide to Grace (albeit with much regret) that ‘the very [village] children have an awful respect for me, and give over playing directly they see me' (Ch.
16
), and also avoids any scene in which Lily can play the adoring aunt to her sister Bell's children. Indeed, in the only scenes involving children in the novel, it is men who are caring for them: Major Grantly comes home to take ‘the perambulator under his own charge for half-an-hour, to the satisfaction of the nurse, of the child, and of himself ' (Ch.
7
), and the scenes showing the love of old Mr Harding for his little granddaughter Posy, and their long games of cat's cradle, are among the most moving in the novel. Mr Harding is probably the most loved of all the Barsetshire characters, and he is loved partly because he has ‘the tenderness of a woman' – a phrase that Trollope uses surprisingly often, and with approbation, to describe a number of his male characters.

For all their classical training in the Aristotelian virtues of temperance and fortitude, men cry a great deal in Trollope's work, copiously at times, and far more than women do. Before and during Grace Crawley's interview with Archdeacon Grantly, who means to frighten her with all the power of his ecclesiastical wrath, she exhibits the classical virtues of prudence and fortitude: ‘I am no coward, and I will go to him,' she declares in Chapter
57
, repelling her friend's ‘feminine' efforts to tidy her dress and hair. Grace has been carefully trained in the classics at her father's knee, and is probably better read in Aristotle than the Archdeacon, despite his Oxford education. She remains calm throughout the interview, but he does not: ‘As he looked down upon her face two tears formed themselves in his eyes, and
gradually trickled down his old nose.' Upon hearing of his meeting with Grace, the Archdeacon's wife feels that if she had been there, ‘a more serene mode of business would have been adopted' (ch.
58
). chapter
74
is full of the tears of two men of the world – Major Grantly and the lawyer Mr Toogood – as they inform Mr Crawley and his family that the origin of the cheque has been discovered and that he is completely cleared of blame. At first Mr Crawley is repulsed by the vulgar, familiar tone of the lawyer, but is stopped in his tracks by ‘looking full into Mr Toogood's face, and seeing that his cousin's eyes were streaming with tears [he] began to get some insight into the man's character, and also some very dim insight into the facts which the man intended to communicate to himself '. Tears, which are usually a sign of feminine sensibility in this period, are here an indication of a man's character. By the end of this chapter, Mr Toogood has been ‘wiping his eyes with a large red bandana handkerchief ', the Major has ‘turned his face away, and he also was weeping', and Mrs Crawley has been sobbing uncontrollably:

She had been very strong through all her husband's troubles – very strong in bearing for him what he could not bear for himself, and in fighting on his behalf battles in which he was altogether unable to couch a lance…

but the good news overpowers her. Mrs Crawley has engaged in the heroic and traditionally male pursuits of ‘fighting battles' and ‘couching lances'. In this novel many of the ‘stern laws of the world', including those which dictate what are the ‘natural' and separate roles of men and women, are evaded, bent, or dismissed: men can be irrational while women remain calm; men and women are both tender and loving with little children, but it is the men we see caring for them; a man can show ‘the tenderness of a woman' and be somehow the more manly for it. This is most certainly not to imply that Trollope is revolutionary in his approach to those Victorian truths concerning the division of the sexes; when addressing himself to the matter outside his novels he seems to follow the line of Mr Crawley when he famously tells Mrs Proudie, ‘the distaff were more fitting for you' (ch.
18
), as is quite evident in a lecture he gave across Britain
called ‘The Higher Education of Women' at about the same time that he wrote and published
The Last Chronicle of Barset
.

‘There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip' was a favourite maxim of Anthony Trollope's, usually referring to the accidents that can occur between courtship and the legal bond of marriage. The adage can also describe an important aspect of Trollope's novels which is significant for an understanding of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
; that is, the slippage between the ‘cup', or the seemingly solid and sacred chalice of the moral law, and the human consumption of its contents, or, in other words, between the law and the living of it. Writing about Trollope in
The Ethics of Reading
, J. Hillis Miller argues that one of the reasons that Trollope was driven to keep writing novels was that he needed to find a solid ground of moral law, but that this kept slipping away from him:

The secret motivation for this [obsessive writing of novels], it may be, was an attempt to write a novel which would assuage his need for a written ascertained moral law. He too, like his characters, sought secure possession of the grounds of moral decision through an indubitable entry into the law as such. Instead of that, his novels, as he progresses from one to another, enter more and more deeply into an understanding of what it means to define the human condition as separation from secure grounds of moral choice.
15

It is also the case that the more secure and fixed the ‘stern laws of the world' are held to be, the greater the tendency in the human condition to create space around those laws for slippage, accommodation and bending. Trollope's characters, whom he and his contemporary readers spoke of as real, are so believable partly because they accommodate themselves to the world in ways that are not revolutionary, but which subtly, almost imperceptibly, shift the ground of the law to a place which is more comfortable. Like Archdeacon Grantly, Trollope likes those around him to be ‘comfortable' if at all possible. If it does not damage the integrity of his story, the comforts are usually doled out at the end of the novel. A minor incident at the close of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
is paradigmatic of the many great
and small ways in which this novel writes across its own grain, shifting the ground of authority. Several men are called ‘cross-grained' or perverse in the novel, and Reverend Crawley is the most cross-grained of all. In chapter
79
, when all around him are finally trying to make him comfortable and to reintroduce him to society, he refuses to go to stay with the Arabins because of the poor state of his coat and his wife's gown:

‘At such a time such reasons should stand for nothing,' said the dean.

‘And why not now as they always do, and always must till the power of tailors shall have waned, and the daughters of Eve shall toil and spin no more? Like to like is true, and should be held to be true, of all societies and of all compacts for co-operation and mutual living.'

Josiah Crawley's words have a ring of authority – almost a proverbial soundness to them – and the authority rests partly on the echoing of a biblical passage. However, Crawley's words unravel the authority of the passage he echoes from Matthew 6:28–9: ‘And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' Reverend Crawley's worldly law of ‘like to like is true' runs against the grain of biblical authority, and he does give thought to his raiment. Nevertheless, Trollope works at the close of the novel to accommodate this worldly law, and Mr Crawley gets his new coat and is able to stand ‘like to like' with Archdeacon Grantly who proclaims: ‘We stand… on the only perfect level on which such men can meet each other. We are both gentlemen' (ch.
83
).

Biblical law is unravelled by wordly law, which is then manipulated by Trollope; the grounds of authority and law are slippery in the making of ‘compacts for co-operation and mutual living' in the human condition. Not all compacts are fulfilled at the close of
The Last Chronicle
. Lily Dale, for example, is not showered with the ‘natural' comforts of married life and a wedding trousseau. In some ways it is Mr Crawley who gains a ‘trousseau', and his concerns over the hem of his long clerical frock and his other new clothes are part of the
gentle comedy of the last pages of the novel. It is not likely that Trollope would forget to provide Mr Crawley and his wife and daughters with new clothes, considering the humiliations of his own early life. As much as his daughter's trousseau, Mr Crawley's new clothes mark his rite of passage into society, a passage that Trollope himself had sought for many years before his success in the Post Office and as a writer. Mr Crawley's ‘trousseau' is one of the ‘loose strings' that come at the end of
The Last Chronicle
of which Trollope writes that he will tie ‘together in a knot, so that my work will not become untwisted' (Ch.
84
). But his work will always become ‘untwisted', by readers' expectations and desires as they live with the characters beyond the novel, and by the novel's own unravelling of ‘the stern laws of the world' and of the morality which it professes to uphold. These subtle untwistings, evasions and accommodations of Victorian social laws and moral truths fuel the reader's anxiety, but are also the lasting attraction and pleasure of Trollope's novels.

NOTES

1
. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, quoted in
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
, ed. R. C. Terry (London, 1987), pp.
87
–8.

2
. From an article in
St Martin's Le Grand
6 (July 1896). Selections reprinted in
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
, p.
62
.

3
. Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Anthony Trollope,
An Autobiography
, ed. David Skilton (London, 1996), p.
96
.

4
. Unsigned notice,
London Review
15, 20 July 1867, p. 81. Reprinted in
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, ed. Donald Smalley (London, 1969), p.
299
.

5
. Trollope,
An Autobiography
, p.
26
.

6
. Letter from Anthony Trollope to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, 27 February 1872, in
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
, ed. N. John Hall, 2 vols. (Stanford, 1983), 2, pp. 557–8. The first volume of John Forster's biography of Dickens was published late in 1871. It contained Dickens's ‘autobiographical fragment' in which he tells of his hard childhood and parental neglect. Forster made it clear that Mr Micawber had been drawn from aspects of Dickens's father's character.

7
. Trollope,
An Autobiography
, p.
11
.

8
. Ibid., p.
61
.

9
. Ibid., p.
181
.

10
. Ibid., p.
179
.

11
.
Authentic Catalogue: Apsley House, Piccadilly, the Town Residence of His Grace, the Duke of Wellington
, London, 1853.

12
. See Marie F. Busco, ‘The ‘‘Achilles'' in Hyde Park',
Burlington Magazine
, January 1990, pp. 920–24.

13
. Unsigned notice,
Spectator
40, 13 July 1867, pp.
778
–80. Reprinted in Smalley,
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, p.
296
.

14
. Margaret Oliphant, ‘Novels' in
Blackwood's Magazine
102, September 1867 pp.
277
–8. Reprinted in Smalley,
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
, p.
303
.

15
. J. Hillis Miller,
The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin
(New York, 1987), pp.
98
–9.

FURTHER READING

Trollope's own assessment of many of his novels, including
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, is given in his fascinating and revealing work
An Autobiography
, which he wrote in 1875–6 and then locked in a box for his son to publish after his death (London, 1883; reprinted by Penguin, 1996). There has been much work on Trollope's life in the late twentieth century, and the best of the critical biographies are N. John Hall's excellent
Trollope: A Biography
(Oxford, 1991), and Victoria Glendinning's
Trollope
(London, 1992) which presents a brilliantly detailed view of Trollope's milieu, and ventures confidently on fairly uncharted territory in its attention to the role and influence of Trollope's wife, Rose. Other scholarly biographies are R. H. Super's
The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope
(Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1988) and Richard Mullen's
Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World
(London, 1990). Michael Sadleir's
Trollope: A Commentary
(London, 1927) remains interesting not only for its biographical material but also because Sadleir's work stands on the threshold between Trollope's age and our own; just before Trollope's son Harry died in 1926, Sadleir was able to meet and correspond with him over his biography. N. John Hall has edited
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
(2 vols., Stanford, 1983), and this is now the standard scholarly edition of the correspondence.

Two works which are very helpful in gaining an understanding of the contemporary critical reception of Trollope's writings are
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1969), edited by Donald Smalley (a collection of the critical responses gleaned from the major periodicals
of the day), and David Skilton's analysis of these and other contemporary responses, and of Victorian perceptions of fiction more generally in his very helpful
Trollope and his Contemporaries : A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction
(London, 1972). Jane Nardin's
Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy
(Athens, Ohio, 1996) places Trollope's work in the context of Victorian intellectual history. The most recent bibliography of later criticism can be found in
The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–1975
(New York, 1978) by John Charles Olmsted.

For a very readable account of contemporary views and memories of Trollope himself, see the collection
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
(London, 1987), edited by R. C. Terry.

Two books by J. Hillis Miller, one early and the other more recent, provide important insights into some of the more theoretical aspects of Trollope's writing, such as his texts' relationship with the reader, with their world and with an abstract sense of ‘the law'; these are
The Form of Victorian Fiction
(Notre Dame and London, 1968), and
The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin
(New York, 1987).

N. John Hall's
Trollope and his Illustrators
(London, 1980) provides an excellent account (with many illustrations) of this important aspect of the Victorian book, and is especially pertinent to
The Last Chronicle
, as Trollope was sorely disappointed when Millais could not provide the illustrations for this novel.

Mary Hamer's
Writing By Numbers: Trollope's Serial Fiction
(Cambridge, 1987) addresses itself to the effects of serial publication on Trollope's novels, and she reproduces and gives an account of Trollope's working diary for
The Last Chronicle of Barset in The Times Literary Supplement
, 24 December 1971, p. 1606. Many more general critical works on Trollope or on Victorian fiction include discussions of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, and some of the best of these are: Ruth ap Roberts,
Trollope: Artist and Moralist
(London, 1971); Robin Gilmour,
The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel
(London, 1981); John Halperin,
Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others
(London, 1977); James R. Kincaid,
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(Oxford, 1977);
Arthur Pollard,
Anthony Trollope
(London, 1978); Stephen Wall,
Trollope and Character
(London, 1988); and Andrew Wright,
Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art
(London, 1983). Three useful collections of essays on Trollope are
The Barsetshire Novels
(London, 1983), edited by Tony Bareham,
Trollope: Centenary Essays
(London, 1982), edited by John Halperin, and
The Penguin Companion to Trollope
compiled by Richard Mullen with James Munson (London, 1996).

BOOK: The Last Chronicle of Barset
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