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Authors: DAVID SKILTON
THE PRIME MINISTER (4 page)
The Prime Minister
is a novel that will be greatly enjoyed by people who can take an interest in its public personages, and who appreciate clever studies of political character; but we doubt whether it will ever be numbered among the favourites of those who delight in Mr Trollope for his love stories.
The
Athenaeum
on the other hand could scarcely maintain an interest in
the politicians, while the
Illustrated London News
found the political parts of the novel the weakest.
18
On one thing they almost all agreed: it was one of Trollope’s less readable novels – in Edward Fitzgerald’s words, ‘the only dull Novel I have read of Trollope’s’.
19
The
Saturday Review
thought it showed that Trollope lacked ‘an independent invention’. Worst of all, Trollope believed an attack
in the
Spectator
to be the work of the literary editor, Richard Holt Hutton, who had long been, in Trollope’s words, ‘inclined to be more than fair to me’. The critic in this case-was in fact not Hutton, but his colleague Meredith Townsend, who came down heavily against the novel’s ‘artistic vulgarity’, and accused the author of an ‘entire failure to perceive what relations are and are not possible
among English political men’. This review, made worse by his misattribution, was deeply hurtful, and was one of those which ‘seemed to tell me that my work as a novelist should
be brought to a close’.
20
What a shame that Trollope should never have known of Tolstoy’s judgement that
The Prime Minister was
‘Excellent’!
21
Later critics generally prefer the politics to the love story. Yet when H.
Oldfield Box came to serialize part of the novel for the BBC Home Service in the 1950s, he chose to omit most of Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser, Phineas Finn and the political action, and entitled his serial ‘Ferdinand Lopez’. It is a characteristic of major works that they are complex and can generate different meanings in different circumstances. Judged by this criterion,
The Prime Minister
is a major work, and is worthy of many readings.
Trollope wrote
The Prime Minister
from 2 April to 15 September 1874, spending eight weeks of this time in Switzerland with his wife, Rose. Under an agreement of 1 April 1874, Chapman & Hall acquired absolute copyright for £2,500, and Trollope was to deliver the manuscript within twelve months.
1
In fact we find him sending
the final sheets on 26 February 1875, and reminding Frederic Chapman of the understanding between them: ‘The work is to come out in 8 parts, and each part is to contain 10 chapters. The whole novel comprises 80 chapters. The first part is to appear in October.’
2
The first book edition was due out in May 1876. As so often Trollope was well ahead of his schedule, but for their part the publishers
were a month late in both the part issue, which ran from November 1875 to June 1876 at five shillings a part, and book publication in four volumes, which seems to have been in the June and not the May. Neither issue was illustrated. The text was not reset for the first book edition,
3
and the novel was never reprinted in its original four-volume form. The first American edition was published by
Harper in 1876 in one volume, and in the same year there was a four-volume edition from Tauchnitz, the original agreement having prevented Chapman & Hall from ‘selling the right of republication in Germany to any other firm than diat of Baron Tauchnitz of Leipzig’.
4
The present edition follows the first-edition text, with obsolete spellings retained except where they may confuse the modern reader.
Wherever possible problems in the first-edition text have been solved with reference to the manuscript, which is in the
Arents Collection in the New York Public Library. I am grateful to the New York Public Library for access to the manuscript. A number of textual matters are mentioned in the Notes. A few minor changes – mainly of punctuation – have been made silently, and the following larger
conjectural emendations carried out to passages in which the first edition accurately follows the manuscript:
p. 11
‘considered’ has been inserted in ‘apt for work, but considered hardly trustworthy by employers’.
p. 76
‘oldest’ has been substituted for ‘old’ in ‘The oldest Mr Roby of all’.
p. 585
Following the Oxford Trollope, edited by Michael Sadleir
and Frederick Page (1952),
the second ‘left’ has been changed to ‘right’ in the sentence: ‘His left hand was clenched, and from time to time with his left he rubbed the thin hairs on his brow.’
p. 601
Again following Sadleir and Page, the first ‘not’ has been omitted from ‘As a woman not utterly disgraced it could not become her again to laugh…’
General works on Trollope, many of them now rather
dated, include Bradford A. Booth,
Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art
(London, 1958), A. O. J. Cockshut,
Anthony Trollope
(London, 1955), Robert M. Polhemus,
The Changing World of Anthony Trollope
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), P. D. Edwards,
Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope
(St Lucia, Queensland, 1977); Geoffrey Harvey,
The Art of Anthony Trollope
(London, 1980), Arthur Pollard,
Anthony Trollope
(London, 1978), Michael Sadleir,
Trollope: A Commentary
(London, 1927), L P. and R. P. Stebbins,
The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family
(London, 1946), R C. Terry,
Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding
(London, 1977), Robert Tracy,
Trollope’s Later Novels
(Berkeley, 1978), and Stephen Wall,
Trollope and Character
(London, 1988).
Despite a number of serious bibliographical
errors, Donald Smalley (ed.),
Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1969), contains a useful collection of Victorian criticism of Trollope’s fiction. Trollope’s contemporary reception is analysed in David Skilton,
Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction
(London, 1972,1996). An annotated bibliography of later criticism is
found in J. C. Olmsted and J. E. Welch,
The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–1975
(New York, 1978), and a fuller listing of Trollope editions as well as selected secondary works is found in
Anthony Trollope: A Collector’s Catalogue 1847–1990
(London: the Trollope Society, 1992). The standard descriptive bibliography of Trollope’s works in their original editions is Michael
Sadleir,
Trollope: A Bibliography
(London, 1928).
The best reference work on Trollope, his life and work is the
Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope,
edited by R. C. Terry (Oxford, 1999), while the most scholarly biographies are N. John Hall,
Trollope: A Biography
(Oxford, 1991), and R. H. Super,
The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope
(Ann Arbor, 1988). Richard Mullen,
Anthony
Trollope: A Victorian in His World
(London, 1990) gives a more opinionated account, and Victoria Glendinning’s
Anthony Trollope
(London,
1992) is fascinating and exceptionally readable, containing very plausible speculations about unknown aspects of the author’s life, including his marriage. Trollope’s letters are admirably collected in N.John Hall (ed.),
The Letters of Anthony Trollope
(Stanford,
CA, 1983). Also useful in the study of Trollope as a public and private figure is R. C. Terry (ed.),
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
(London, 1987).
Volume I
5
‘No one knows anything about him’
6
An Old Friend Goes to Windsor
8
The Beginning of a New Career
9
Mrs Dick’s Dinner Party–No. 1
10
Mrs Dick’s Dinner Party–No. 2
18
The Duke of Omnium Thinks of Himself
25
The Beginning of the Honeymoon
28
The Duchess Is Much Troubled
29
The Two Candidates for Silverbridge
31
‘Yes; – with a horsewhip in my band’
32
‘What business is it of yours?’
33
Showing that a Man Should Not Howl
44
Mr Wharton Thinks of a New Will
46
He wants to get rich too quick’
52
‘I can sleep here to-night, I suppose?
56
What the Duchess Thought of her Husband
62
Phineas Finn Has a Book to Read
68
The Prime Minister’s Political Creed
71
The Ladies at Long barns Doubt
72
‘He thinks that our days are numbered’
77
The Duchess in Manchester Square
80
The Last Meeting at Matching
Ferdinand Lopez
It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service
to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than
for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. After the goal has been absolutely reached, and the honour and the titles and the wealth actually won, a man may talk with some humour,
even with some affection, of the maternal tub; – but while the struggle is going on, with the conviction strong upon the straggler that he cannot be altogether successful unless he be esteemed a gentleman, not to be ashamed, not to conceal the old family circumstances, not at any rate to be silent, is difficult And the difficulty is certainly not less if fortunate circumstances rather than hard work
and intrinsic merit have raised above his natural place an aspirant to high social position. Can it be expected that such a one when dining with a duchess shall speak of his father’s small shop, or bring into the light of day his grandfather’s cobbler’s awl? And yet it is so difficult to be altogether silent! It may not be necessary for any of us to be always talking of our own parentage. We may
be generally reticent as to our uncles and aunts, and may drop even our brothers and sisters in our ordinary conversation. But if a man never mentions his belongings among those with whom he lives, he becomes mysterious, and almost open to suspicion. It begins to be known that nobody knows anything of such a man, and even friends become afraid. It is
certainly convenient to be able to allude,
if it be but once in a year, to some blood relation.