Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on the Novel’s ‘Highest Merit’)

“The highest merit which a novel can have consists in perfect delineation of character.” ― English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), An Autobiography (1882)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on an Annoying, Loathsome Politician)

“That evening, — the evening of Mr. Bott’s return to Matching, that gentleman found a place near to Alice [Vavasor] in the drawing-room. He had often come up to her, rubbing his hands together, and saying little words, as though there was some reason from their positions that they two should be friends. Alice had perceived this, and had endeavoured with all her force to shake him off; but he was a man, who if he understood a hint, never took it. A cold shoulder was nothing to him, if he wanted to gain the person who showed it him. His code of perseverance taught him that it was a virtue to overcome cold shoulders. The man or woman who received his first overtures with grace would probably be one on whom it would be better that he should look down and waste no further time; whereas he or she who could afford to treat him with disdain would no doubt be worth gaining. Such men as Mr. Bott are ever gracious to cold shoulders. The colder the shoulders, the more gracious are the Mr. Botts.”—English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), Can You Forgive Her? (1864)

About two weeks ago, with a short window of time to get in and out of an area library during this pandemic, I came across a box DVD set of the mid-1970s British miniseries The Pallisers, an adaptation of six novels by Anthony Trollope.

College reading lists of Victorian literature are far more likely to accommodate Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, and William Makepeace Thackeray than this novelist who surpassed them all in productivity, and by a long shot. (Even Dickens, with 15 novels, lagged far behind Trollope, with 40.)

But I was enthralled by The Way We Live Now, in which Trollope tracked the fortunes of a financial pirate who would have found himself just as much at home in the Age of Enron, and had also enjoyed a couple of novels in the Barsetshire sequence. So I pulled down from the library shelves, rented—and so far, have been enjoying—The Pallisers series.

Even so, I suspected that the original print material represented a rich source that the adaptation could not match. The passage above demonstrates why.

In certain ways, that paragraph flagrantly violates, with its ever-present narrator, that cliché of grad school writing programs, “Show, not tell.” But I don’t mind in the least. The tone of the passage is ironic (oh, those deflating "little words"!) without crossing into cynicism.

What print can convey, in a way that a visual often can’t, is also underscored in the contrast between the image accompanying this post—actor John Stratton, as Bott—and Trollope’s further description of the character:

“He was a tall, wiry, strong man, with a bald head and bristly red beard, which, however, was cut off from his upper and lower lip. This was unfortunate, as had he hidden his mouth he would not have been in so marked a degree an ugly man. His upper lip was long, and his mouth was mean."

Moreover, as a master realist, Trollope is, like Leo Tolstoy, ultimately concerned with human nature—a subject that, I’ve come to believe, changes little, no matter the age, place, or (as in this case) tonsorial style. Mr. Bott might be a Member of Parliament in the Victorian Era, but in his cloying ambition and urge to conquer, whether constituents or women, he has more than a few counterparts in the U.S. Congress of the 21^st century.

“Gracious to cold shoulders”—I’m not sure that I’ve come across such a withering description of politicians. It is very easy to imagine a modern Mr. Bott verging easily into sexual harassment.

Alice isn’t the only female to recoil in his presence: her impulsive cousin and friend, Lady Glencora Palliser, does virtually nothing to hide her distaste for him, despite being warned by her husband, Plantagenet Palliser, that Bott is an ally to be cultivated for his own work and career in Parliament.

Altogether, Trollope produced, for a relatively minor character, a masterly description of a man who is pushy, smarmy, wheedling, odious, and (to use a William F. Buckley Jr.-type word that expresses in sound exactly what it intends) oleaginous—exactly the type, on either side of the Atlantic, meant to stride briskly, like he owned the place, through the corridors of power.

(For an excellent summary of why The Pallisers miniseries, despite a pace decidedly leisurely by today’s standards, remains “a reminder of how satisfying television drama can be when writers, producers and directors concentrate on emotion instead of editing, and don’t underestimate their audience,” I urge you to read Neil Clark’s 2016 post in the “TV and Radio Blog” of the British paper The Guardian.)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on England’s ‘Perils of Winter’)

“The comic almanacs give us dreadful pictures of January and February; but, in truth, the months which should be made to look gloomy in England are March and April. Let no man boast himself that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May.” —English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), Doctor Thorne (1858)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on How ‘Little Misfortunes’ Impede Our Thinking)

“Bad noises, bad air, bad smells, bad light, an inconvenient attitude, ugly surroundings, little misfortunes that have lately been endured, little misfortunes that are soon to come, hunger and thirst, overeating and overdrinking, want of sleep or too much of it, a tight boot, a starched collar, are all inimical to thinking. I do not name bodily ailments. The feeling of heroism which is created by the magnanimity of overcoming great evils will sometimes make thinking easy. It is not the sorrows but the annoyances of life which impede. Were I told that the bank had broken in which my little all was kept for me I could sit down and write my love story with almost a sublimated vision of love; but to discover that I had given half a sovereign instead of sixpence to a cabman would render a great effort necessary before I could find the fitting words for a lover. These little lacerations of the spirit, not the deep wounds, make the difficulty.”—English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), “A Walk in the Woods,” in An Autobiography and Other Writings, edited by Nicholas Shrimpton (2014)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on How a Mind Is Made Up)

"A man's mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency."— British novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), Ayala’s Angel (1880)

Quote of the Day (Anthony Trollope, on Jane Austen)

"Miss [Jane] Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop." — Anthony Trollope, “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement” (1870), in An Autobiography: and Other Writings, edited by Nicholas Shrimpton (2015)

Today marks the 200^th anniversary of the death of English novelist Jane Austen. As I read this short appreciation by Anthony Trollope, it occurred to me that, if you changed “Miss Austen” to “Mr. Trollope” and the female pronouns to male ones, you could just as easily have been talking about the Victorian novelist as the one who wrote of the Napoleonic Era. Indeed, a number of contemporary readers have deemed him “a male Jane Austen.”

Trollope’s openness to her virtues as a writer was by no means a given. In The Way We Live Now, he depicted Lady Carbury, a beginning female writer, with some compassion, but even more irony. Aware that she is not possessed of much ability, Lady Carbury feels compelled to write as a 43-year-old widow who wants to ensure that her grown children are decently provided for. She might not succeed through talent, but she can through still-considerable attractiveness and charm used on male editors and critics who can give her book more attention than it deserves .

Thought of another way: Trollope doesn’t think Mrs. Carbury has earned her way, but Jane Austen most definitely has. Take a look at the half-dozen books she churned out in the last four years of her life—including Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility—and see if he wasn’t right.

This Day in Literary History (Trollope Ices Favorite Reader Character)

Sept. 15, 1866—Anthony Trollope, well into the serialization of his latest novel, overheard two readers carping about one of his most popular characters. Now in her fifth book, Mrs. Proudie, the domineering wife of the Bishop of Barchester, struck this pair of clergymen as tiresome and clichéd. The big, bearded, bellowing author walked across the drawing room of the Atheneum Club to assure the astonished ministers that he would “go home and kill her before the week is over.” And so he did.

One of the most feared mob hit men was nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his lack of emotion in dispatching victims. I’m afraid that many Victorians felt that one of their favorite authors had displayed similar callousness toward a character they looked forward to reading about in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Trollope would not be the last Victorian author to kill off a popular character. When Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes, he sent the detective hurtling off the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, helplessly entangled in a seemingly fatal fall with arch-villain Professor Moriarty.

But the manner of the passing allowed Doyle to revive his creation when readers demanded Holmes’ return: The fall, it was revealed nearly a decade later, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, had all been staged for Dr. Watson’s benefit, to allow his friend to evade Moriarty’s still-at-large, dangerous confederates.

No such plausible way out existed for Trollope: The death of Mrs. Proudie was irrevocable, the result of a heart attack. Her demise robbed readers of coming to grips with the kind of domineering, annoying, but all-too-human character they were likely to encounter in real life. 

Trollope had enjoyed a highly popular run with his series about the imaginary county of Barset (which previously had included The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington). But Mrs. Proudie possesses such intrinsic power—a moral busybody still utterly convinced that her actions will benefit her more restrained husband, Dr. Proudie—that her end can lead to only one logical conclusion: the last installment of this novel sequence.

What made Mrs. Proudie so compelling? It strikes me that certain aspects of Trollope’s gift for characterization are shared by Leo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the Russian sets the stage for the title character's infidelity by contrasting her warmth and spontaneity with the cold-blooded intelligence and ironic speech of her husband Alexei, then tops it off with a detail that captures perfectly why she now finds him tiresome: he cracks his knuckles.  Yet, when she appears to be on her deathbed, Tolstoy allows Alexei an unexpected dimension: the cuckold forgives Anna for her adultery.

With Mrs. Proudie, Trollope employed similar details. In church, she wears a “dark brown silk dress of awful stiffness and terrible dimensions.” But at the moment when her husband turns on her with the most awful words he has ever expressed in their marriage—“You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head”—Trollope plumbs her psyche to allow a moment of sympathy:

“At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife! She had meant to be a good Christian; but she had so exercised her Christianity that not a soul in the world loved her, or would endure her presence if it could be avoided! She had sufficient insight to the minds and feelings of those around her to be aware of this. And now her husband had told her that her tyranny to him was so overbearing that he must throw up his great position, and retire to an obscurity that would be exceptionally disgraceful to them both, because he could no longer endure the public disgrace which her conduct brought upon him in his high place before the world! Her heart was too full for speech; and she left him, very quietly closing the door behind her.”

How hasty and impulsive exactly was Trollope’s decision to knock off Mrs. Proudie? Perhaps the seeds of his decision had been planted for awhile: The Saturday Review, for instance, had made a complaint similar to the two clergymen’s when Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington appeared. 

But the novelist could certainly have set the stage for his nasty surprise a bit better. Readers did not even know, for instance, that Mrs. Proudie even had a heart condition before her fatal attack. Moreover, the bishop has already endured so much at the hands of his wife that this breaking point here seems anti-climactic.

In a prior appreciation of Trollope on his 200th birthday, I discussed how the novelist hurt his critical standing by revealing his working method in his Autobiography (writing three hours each day before breakfast, itemizing how many words and pages he produced each hour as well as how much he was paid for his various works). I’m afraid that his discussion in the same memoir of how he came to dispatch Mrs. Proudie reinforced this critical disdain. What careful artist could be so thoughtless as to kill off a character on the mere say-so of two people he overheard in a London men’s club? 

Even the author came to feel pangs of regret over his decision: “I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie,” he wrote a decade later, “and still live much in company with her ghost.”

No matter how much he rued that decision, however, Trollope was prepared for similar ruthlessness toward a major female character—one a good deal more beloved than Mrs. Proudie—in his next series of books. At the start of the sixth novel in his “Palliser” series, The Duke’s Children, readers learn that Lady Glencora Palliser, the vivacious wife of the reticent politician the Duke of Omnium, has died. 

While the decision to eliminate her from the series allowed Trollope to explore different dramatic possibilities—i.e., how the Duke would cope alone with the coming of age of their three children without her mediation and sympathy—it came at a cost that his most devoted readers could hardly bear.