THE OLD ORDER PASSETH

THE DUKE'S CHILDREN
 

Do I identify more with the Duke of Omnium, or with Lord Silverbridge, as the Duke tells Isabelle Boncassen, "My boy's wife shall be my daughter in very deed"? Would I be so close to tears when he gives her his late wife's ring, if I had not known Glencora through the previous five novels of the Palliser series? The Duke's Children stands up very well on its own, but its force is clearly enhanced by its predecessors. While the characters from previous novels may be received as old friends in new stages of their lives, their children may be presented as various mixtures of their parents' personalities. The reader greets the children in the process of making the transition to adulthood with the pleasure of recognition of the character traits of the parents.

Lady Glencora, Duchess of Omnium, has died in the interval between The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children, but her influence persists. She has sanctioned the suit of Francis Tregear, an impoverished commoner, for the hand of her daughter Lady Mary without the Duke's knowledge. So here is a variation on the theme of Glencora's love for the worthless Burgo Fitzgerald, which she never pretended to give up after her arranged marriage to Plantagenet Palliser. We find her daughter Lady Mary perhaps less reckless but even more persistent, and successful, in her chosen love. Tregear has apparently gotten over his previous love for Lady Mabel Grex, whom the Duke favors for his son's wife, and Tregear shows himself to be a more worthy individual than the dissolute Burgo.

Lord Silverbridge sows his wild oats as one would expect of Glencora's son, but like Prince Hal, he grows appropriately into recognition of his responsibilities. The reader sees, before the Duke brings himself to acknowledge it, that Silverbridge makes a wise choice in his selection of the American Isabelle Boncassen as the object of his affections.

Gerald, the younger son, plays a lesser role but manages to repent of some relatively minor offenses: he manages to continue with college studies, and his gambling debts do not compare in magnitude to those of his older and more richly endowed brother.

New blood is brought into the family, new faces appear in the story. The woman who brings a bit of spice is Lady Mabel Grex. She has loved her childhood friend, Francis Tregear, but she decided that since they were both penniless, each had better marry for money. (Shades of Lady Laura Standish!) Tregear goes on to better things, as bees flit from flower to flower, but Lady Mabel never loses her love. She reveals herself when she confides to her older companion Miss Cassewary that Lord Silverbridge would have proposed to her if she had given him any encouragement, but "I spared him;—out of sheer downright Christian charity! I said to myself, 'Love your neighbours.' 'Don't be selfish.' 'Do unto him as you would he should do unto you,'—that is, think of his welfare. Though I had him in my net, I let him go. Shall I go to heaven for doing that?"

Isabel Boncassen, her successor in the Duchess of Omnium sweepstakes, faces different challenges from those that confront Lady Mabel. Frankly in love with Silverbridge, her disadvantage is one not readily appreciated on this side of the Atlantic: she is American. As Lady Mabel is revealed in the above passage, so we see Isabel as she walks with Silverbridge among the old graves at Matching and hears him tell her how Sir Guy ran away with half a dozen heiresses.

"Nobody should have run away with me. I have no idea of going on such a journey except on terms of equality,—just step and step alike." Then she took hold of his arm and put out one foot. "Are you ready?"

The action of the story is all carried out by the young people. They gamble and lose, they fall in love, they run for office, they scheme and dally, they sin and reform. But the story is really about the one person who doesn't do anything: the Duke of Omnium. Grieved by the sudden loss of his wife and forced to deal with issues she would have addressed—basically, the children—he is forced to learn that where the children are concerned, even the Duke is far from omnipotent. One who had stated that he would prefer the House of Commons to the House of Lords, he is found defending the order and telling his children of their obligation to marry within their rank. He instructs Miss Boncassen on the opportunity that the poorest man in England has to rise by merit to the highest office in the land, and he has long conversations with Isabel on the advantages of a decimal coinage system, but it never occurs to him that her wit and beauty should outweigh the rank of Lady Mabel Grex as qualifications for becoming his son's wife.

Lest the reader miss the irony, Trollope spells it out in telling the reader that in his heart of hearts the Duke kept his own family and his own self entirely apart from his grand theories. "That one and the same man should have been in one part of himself so unlike the other part,—that he should have one set of opinions so contrary to another set,—poor Isabel Boncassen did not understand."

The Duke must decide whether to give his blessing to two marriages to which he has been unalterably opposed. And his guide and counselor in these issues is his late wife's best friend, Mrs. Phineas Finn, the former Madame Max Goesler. Stubborn and taciturn, he is not an easy pupil. And she must first overcome his anger when he discovers that she had not come immediately to him when Lady Mary told her of her engagement to Mr. Tregear. Of course his late wife had first sinned in this way, but Marie Goesler Finn is the scapegoat for Glencora just as Alice Vavasor had been when Glencora insisted on walking in the priory ruins on a cold night, despite Alice's objections, and caught cold. Mrs. Finn refuses to be shunned by the Duke, becomes his confidante, and she continues in her role as the only character in the entire Palliser series who is always right. Married to Phineas Finn, who had once refused her own proposal of marriage to him, we see very little of their interaction in married life. But in her role as best friend to Glencora, we saw her as a voice of reason when Glencora was flighty, and later as one who would rouse the phlegmatic Duke to deal appropriately with Silverbridge's and Lady Mary's choices.

This interview occurs near the midway point of the novel, and with this the reader can guess that in the end the Duke will permit the marriage and even ask Mr. Tregear what his Christian name is. But this is a political novel. Back to business. After all, entire chapters are devoted to the maneuvers by which Sir Timothy Beeswax attempts to maintain his power with the Conservative government. Again we see politics as it is. The moves are not too complex for a Trollope novel, but they are too complex for a brief review. Suffice it to say that no government lasts forever, and the Duke is obliged to deal with political adversity. It isn't easy for him; but it is not for nothing that the Duke is one of Trollope's favorite creations.

A pleasant book. England moves on. A segment of the Liberal Party finds itself obliged to become more liberal than had been anticipated. The Palliser series comes to an end, and the readers (especially those of us who have developed a sentimental attachment to this seemingly aloof family) are entertained.

RUINS, RUIN, AND RUINED

THE MACDERMOTS OF BALLYCLORAN
 

I've never cared very much for junkyard photography. By this I mean rusty plows, abandoned automobiles, houses falling in, storefronts with broken glass. Of course ruins always have a certain appeal; the remains of an old well can be seen beside a trail leading down toward the river from my house. Who knows what happened around that old site? But rust and ruin have a limited appeal. Anthony Trollope encountered the ruins of an old country house on a visit to Drumsna, Ireland, in 1843, while working for the Post Office. As recorded in his autobiography, "It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited … and while I was still among the ruined walls and decayed beams I fabricated the plot of The Macdermots of Ballycloran." The story that resulted from this visit might do very well to pass away a dull afternoon riding through the country; but I found the leisurely pace of the six hundred page novel tedious. Ruins, ruin, and ruined.

This was Trollope's first novel. He was twenty-eight years old, and he had been in Ireland five years, traveling through the countryside as a clerk to a postal surveyor. One of the primary rules for writers is to write about what one knows about, and he did that. But he would have never survived as an author on forty-six more such novels. Over the next decade he was to write two more rather indifferent novels and then begin The Warden, the first of the Barsetshire novels and predecessor to Barchester Towers, his best known work. It's one thing for a writer to have the requisite skills; it's another thing—whether by chance or design—to hit upon a subject or a character that will "take off." Writers are sometimes surprised by what the public likes and what it doesn't. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle looked upon Sherlock Holmes as a distraction from his higher calling as a writer of historical novels, until he realized that Holmes was his meal ticket. Few readers know anything about his historical novels. And for Trollope, the worlds of Barchester Towers and the Pallisers secured his place in English literature.

But back to the dreary world of the Macdermots. First, be warned that their story, which doesn't start very well, doesn't end well, either, as a visitor to the ruins of their country house might suspect. Larry Macdermot, reigning patriarch, is on the verge of losing his house, his property and his mind. His daughter Feemy is seduced by the English revenue agent. Larry's son Thady, the central focus of the story, has a violent encounter with Feemy's lover when she is reluctant to elope with him. It's an unhappy time for the clan.

It wasn't a happy time for Ireland, either, and the great potato famine hadn't even started yet. The English of that day were not very interested in reading about the details of daily life of the people whom they were oppressing. Trollope, on the other hand, was a young man just beginning to achieve some success and self-confidence in his voluntary exile to serve among these impoverished people. He used his skills to portray them with accuracy and even with sympathy, even though he was a loyal son of England and man of his times and felt no obligation to accord them any more than token respect. Describing Father Cullen, he writes, "He felt towards Keegan all the abhorrence which a very bigoted and ignorant Roman Catholic could feel towards a Protestant convert." An accurate account, perhaps, but could such a frank sentence be written today?

The plot is well laid out, and the story is well told, but the reader is required to plow through the Irish dialect—"'Yer honer won't be afther taking an innocent boy like me,' began Tim, 'that knows nothing at all at all about it.'" This is fair enough—the reader knows he's reading about a different country in a different century—but it does take a bit of adjustment.

Trollope loved sporting scenes, usually fox hunting, and in this one we have a horse race scene, described in the words of the spectators much like the scene at Ascot Opening Day in My Fair Lady: "There they go—Hurroo! They're off. Faix, there's Playful at her tricks already—by dad she'll be over the ropes!"

The pace of the book is leisurely, a common feature of Victorian novels. On the morning after a wedding, the reader is wondering whether any mischief came to Captain Ussher, and whether he survived the night after "the boys" had threatened to put him under the sod. But such concerns must be suspended for an account of how several of the characters felt about things. After four and a half pages of Thady's reflections, he happens to meet Ussher in the road, and the reader surmises that Ussher was not killed. We can see where minimalist fiction came from.

Another source of tedium is that the three Macdermots have hardly any redeeming features—a sleazy lot, with whom it is difficult to sympathize.

But one does find evidence of Trollope's facility to entertain. He excels in introductory summaries of his characters. About Feemy, whose mother and grandmother had died early, we are told:

Whatever her feelings were,—and for her mother they were strong,—the real effect of this was, that she was freed from the restraint and constant scolding of two stupid women at a very early age; consequently she was left alone with her father and her brother, neither of whom were at all fitting guides for so wayward a pupil. … Her father had become almost like the tables and chairs in the parlour, only much less useful and more difficult to move.

The trial scene near the end of the book is well done; Trollope excelled in trial scenes, particularly in Orley Farm and Phineas Redux. When he introduces Mr. Allewinde, he shows us his frustration in attempting to examine Pat Brady, a reluctant witness whose literal responses remind today's reader of "Who's on First?"

The most successful comic interlude is that of the duel between Jonas Brown and Counsellor Webb, two of the three magistrates who hear the case of Thady Macdermot and differ on the question of his guilt. When he receives a response to his challenge, Mr. Brown's two sons comfort him by telling him not to worry about his legs because Webb will fire high. "The shoulder's the spot," unless he takes him on the head—"which wouldn't be so pleasant," and he'd rather take his chances with a chap that fired low. The other brother disagrees.

"The low shot's the death-shot. Why, man, if you did catch a ball in the head, you'd get over it—if it was in the mouth, or cheek, or neck, or anywhere but the temple; but your body's all over tender bits. May heaven always keep lead out of my bowels—I'd sooner have it in my brains."

As luck would have it, Brown catches a ball in the seat of his pants, causing a bloody and inconvenient wound about an eighth of an inch deep.

This is the closest thing to a happy ending in the book. This reviewer's recommendation: Read the review. Skip the book.

THE IRISH AS OTHERS SEE THEM

THE KELLYS AND THE O'KELLYS
 

If you live in an age of political incorrectness, you may as well take advantage of it. So Anthony Trollope might have told himself, had he enjoyed the advantage of looking into the future to our present age of political correctness. The Kellys and the O'Kellys would not survive the scrutiny of present standards. "Faix, I b'lieve his chief failing at present's fur sthrong dhrink!" Transcription of the Irish forms of speech warns the present day reader to be wary; this is something that may be unfair to the Irish. Uncle Remus fell victim to such concerns and disappeared from view in 1986 when Disney removed Song of the South from circulation, and the glimpses of the subservient blacks that we have in older films indicate that those who use language in a distinctive way can be vulnerable to being presented in a demeaning fashion.

Of course these were not the concerns of a fledgling nineteenth century English writer who had spent five years in Ireland with the postal service. One would suspect that the intended target audience resided in England, not in Ireland. (This, his second novel, did not sell well anywhere.) Features of Irish life are described to inform the reading public in England, and those who did read it were surely entertained as well. The description of an Irish kitchen is accompanied, in the Folio Edition, by a full-page pen-and-ink drawing which features a pig, two chickens, and two ragged old men sitting on the floor, all of whom are described in detail.

Here we see Trollope discovering his comic gift. The tone of the story is that of a cartoon comedy, Looney Tunes perhaps, with rascally villains and seemingly inept heroes who seem destined to be taken in by dastardly schemers. Lord Cashel, for instance, is shown in the role of the wicked lord of the manor who only dimly suspects how unlikely it is that any of his plots and plans will succeed. He seizes an opportunity to refuse to allow one of the heroes of the story, Lord Ballindine (Frank O'Kelly), to see Fanny Wyndham, the object of his affection, who happens to be Lord Cashel's ward. Lord Cashel has other plans for Fanny, who has come into an inheritance that would wipe out the debts incurred by Lord Cashel's prodigal son Lord Kilcullen. Fanny must marry his son! He is only slightly bothered by Fanny's spirited vow to see her lover Frank O'Kelly anyway, but despite his concern about her determination, he remains confident in his own powers. As his plot unravels, one expects the standard melodramatic line, "Curses! Foiled again!"

The most evil villain, though, is Barry Lynch, limited by his sister's existence to only half of his late father's estate. He daydreams about how his worries would all be washed away if his sister should only be in some way detached from her worldly cares. The English reader might view with detached amusement the schemes of a profligate drunken young Irish lord who is staggered to learn that his sister's acute illness might not be fatal, after all, and that she might rise again to displace him.

There can be no sympathy for the dehumanized arch villain of this dark comedy, described as having no residual feelings of human kindness. Surely he can bribe the doctor to see to it that she succumbs. And the reader can only smile as he calculates further what payment he must offer, and then how he can get out of paying it.

On the other side of the moral ledger, the two heroes of the story—Martin Kelly and Frank O'Kelly—are shown as young men with good hearts. Martin is a young farmer who rents from several landlords, including Lord Ballindine (Frank O'Kelly). At one point in the story Lord Ballindine, a recovering prodigal in his own right, is in need of three hundred pounds and thinks that his renter Martin Kelly would be able to lend it to him. Martin hesitates, saying that he has the money but had been thinking of using it in another way, which would clear the way for him to marry Anty Lynch, sister of the infamous Barry. Frank backs off, saying that he had forgotten about Martin's "matrimonial speculation," and he advises him that though he needs the cash, Martin had better keep it. But Martin says that his mother could let him have the money on the security of the house, in order that his Lordship should not be short of cash.

Thank goodness these two young Irishmen have good hearts; they need them for redemption. Both of them make no bones about their plans to marry for money. Though each maintains that he really loves the lady of his choice, they both freely admit that it was the money that first attracted them. Would Trollope have granted such a blot on the escutcheon of one of his young English heroes?

Trollope's previous work, which was also his debut novel, told of the fall of an old Irish family, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, with little levity to relieve it. The Kellys and the O'Kellys, on the other hand, is a comic novel. One may wonder whether Trollope is laughing with the Irish or at them. The general impression is one of affection, with a sharp eye for entertaining foibles. We must follow a knotty skein of debts and obligations in a discussion of how Jerry Blake got a pair of breeches to wear for Lord Ballindine's hunt. The leather had to be purchased in Tuam, and an assistant tailor had to leave his mother's wake and stay up all night sewing. The tailor, however, had a long-standing debt for his garden, and the landlord was a distant relation of Jerry Blake. So the long and tangled circle is closed, and Jerry gets his breeches.

Lord Cashel appears as an earl whose cardinal virtues were negative ones. He had learned that silence is sometimes mistaken for wisdom; he had avoided intemperance, and he had not done too many stupid things. He had avoided adultery, and since his marriage, he had not seduced any of his neighbors' daughters. He was therefore "considered a moral man."

Lady Selina is the first of Trollope's high-born old maids, too proud to marry—unless someone asks her. Other examples were to include Miss Sarah Marrable in The Vicar of Bullhampton and Lady Amelia De Courcy in Dr. Thorne. The rest of the family at Grey Abbey was "dull, solemn, slow, and respectable," but Lady Selina, daughter of the earl, exceeded them all. The "specific gravity of Lady Selina could not be calculated. It was beyond the power of figures, even in algebraic denominations, to describe her moral weight."

Cares can be put aside when one comes upon one of Trollope's fox-hunting episodes. All is given up to the pleasure of the chase, and of its anticipation, and of its recollection. Indeed one of the markers of the successful huntsman is that his experience and his horsemanship allow him to be a witness to the end of the fox so that he can recount the details afterward. Character is revealed in the field. In this case, the Protestant clergyman Reverend Armstrong (whose only parishioner is Mrs. O'Kelly) is one of those who knows every road and which way the wind is blowing, and how unlikely it is that the fox would run against it. He shows himself to be a master huntsman. Like experienced golfers who "putt for dough" while the young men "drive for show," Mr. Armstrong spares his horse, takes short-cuts, and is always at the scene of the kill before the hard-riding gallants come galloping up a minute or two late.

Barry Lynch, on the other hand, cuts his horse in front of the hounds as they approach a small stone wall, fatally injuring one of them. Frank O'Kelly is obliged to send him home in disgrace.

(The bloody end to the fox hunt is no longer to be seen within the restriction of English laws. The sport was banned in England in 2004. Hunting enthusiasts, however, claim that the number of foxes killed each year has actually increased since the ban.)

Lessons in the conduct of human affairs are to be found in Trollope's work, another feature that The Kellys and the O'Kellys shares with some of his later and better-known works. For instance, doctors, lawyers, and others who are paid to give advice learn sooner or later that one can only advise; one cannot coerce. Professionals will sometimes tell the recipient that they have given their best advice; and it is up to them to decide whether to take it. We find the young lawyer Mr. Daly resorting to this ploy as he finds that Barry Lynch is disappointed not to have prospects for a more lucrative settlement in a deal with Martin Kelly: "I've now given you my best advice; if your mind's not yet made up, perhaps you'll have the goodness to let me hear from you when it is?"

The story is a symmetrical one in which each of the two young heroes finds his reward, virtue emerges triumphant, and the wicked are vanquished. It's a warm-hearted romp in which young Anthony Trollope showed that he had the tools to keep readers entertained for years. My guess is that an Irishman can enjoy it as much as an Englishman.

A TALE OF NO CITY

LA VENDÉE
 

False starts are usually forgotten in the early phases of an athlete's development. Young boys and girls may try their hand at several different sports and then gravitate toward the best opportunities for "showcasing their talents." Writers presumably conduct their own trials and errors, too, with the misbegotten products left buried in desk drawers, if not destroyed. Anthony Trollope's false start, La Vendée, a historical romance, was published, but it's fair to say that it has not been remembered. It was his third novel, following two Irish novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and it was followed four years later by the first of his Barsetshire novels, The Warden, which was a great success. By then Trollope knew where his strength lay; he followed with Barchester Towers and thereafter he stuck to the world (mostly England) of his own day. He did not attempt any more historical novels.

The worst thing about La Vendée is the dialogue. Here's a conversation between husband and wife as he prepares to leave for war:

"I know, Victorine," said he, when they were alone together in the evening, when not even his own dear sister Marie was there to mar the sacred sweetness of their conference, "I know that I am doing right, and that gives me strength to leave you, and our darling child."

He goes on for another paragraph or two.

Except for the stilted, wordy dialogue, the story is not so bad. It follows a lost cause, that of the citizens of La Vendée, an agricultural region in the west of France that my wife and I drove through on our way from Normandy to Bordeaux several years ago. These faithful servants of the king opposed the republican forces of the French Revolution, and they were annihilated. We follow the men and women of the doomed faction: Jacques Cathelineau, the humble postilion who is elected first military leader of the royalists, and who is loved by the noble and lovely Agatha Larochejaquelin; Agatha's brother Henri, who succeeds Cathelineau as general of the royalist forces, and who loves Marie de Lescure; and Marie's brother Charles and his wife Victorine. That makes three couples. There is also a little comic relief of sorts with Jacques Chapeau, Henri Larochejacquelin's servant, who woos Annot Stein, daughter of the blacksmith Michael Stein. A saucy wench, Annot teases Jacques by praising Cathelineau the general.

There is also Adolphe Denot, Henri's proud friend who loves Adolphe's sister Agatha and is rejected in a dramatic proposal scene, so prolonged that "Agatha began to fear that at this rate the interview would have no end. If Adolphe remained with his arm on the marble slab, and his head on one side, making sentimental speeches till she should give him encouragement to fall at her feet, it certainly would not be ended by bedtime." Adolphe is a strange case. Stung by Agatha's refusal, he goes forth to battle determined to die, but he disgraces himself by failing to support M. de Lescure in storming a breach in the wall. He then disappears, switches sides, and leads the republican forces into battle. Finally he reappears as the "Mad Captain," leading the royalist forces in suicidal charges.

The battle scenes are well described, detained only by a few lengthy speeches by the heroes as they swing their swords.

Fictional characters mingle with the historical ones, and even Robespierre appears in two consecutive chapters unto himself. The upper classes of England were horrified by the French Revolution, and the author's judgment of Robespierre is an example:

Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; … Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a byword, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed. He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness.

We see Robespierre directly only in these two chapters toward the end of the book. Trollope was not above passing judgment on his characters, but I don't recall another exclamation like, "Because he wanted faith!" These two didactic chapters are not necessary to the story line, but the horrors of the French Revolution are hardly amenable to understatement. Though they would be the first to go in any abridgement, they do help put the whole story into historical perspective.

Trollope never visited La Vendée. His story is based primarily on the memoirs of Madame de la Rochejacquelin, who appears in the book with the name of her first husband, M. de Lescure. She subsequently married the younger brother of Henri de Larochejacquelin and bore him eight children before he was killed in a second Vendean revolt in 1815. Among the fictional characters were Marie Larochejacquelin and Adolphe Denot. How would Trollope end his story of this disaster? He created a happy interlude, and he made the best of it.

Dickens was more comfortable with the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, written ten years later when he was at the peak of his powers. Its dialogue was almost as stilted, and Dickens was no stranger to a bit of purple prose. But his energy and passion allowed him to carry it off. (And it is reported to be the all-time best seller of books written originally in English.) Such a story was not Anthony Trollope's cup of tea, particularly when he was a novice still searching for his métier. Perhaps this clumsy attempt at historical fiction helps us appreciate the facility with which he later portrayed contemporary English folk. If there is a rule that allows us to discard one of an author's efforts before passing judgment on his work, let this be it for Trollope. Let us pass on to Barsetshire.

THE OFFICE

THE THREE CLERKS
 

The Three Clerks is an inside book, written about the Civil Service by one who had himself begun his Postal Service career as a clerk. It holds up to gentle fun its little ways, its principles of management, and the ingrained habits of thought held by its faithful servants. (The present day reader may conclude that bureaucracies don't change much.) Office politics, infighting, and intrigues provide grist for the author's mill, and he makes good use of it. The story deals with three young Postal Service clerks and the family of a widow with three fair young daughters. Here, too, the author has something to work on: Will they pair off? If so, how? And how will the pairings turn out? And what of the young men and their careers in the Service? Who will advance, who will waste his talents? How will they deal with Temptation?

Henry Norman appears first, the second son of a gentleman of small property, one who plods through his duties and his courtship. Alaric Tudor was raised in Brussels, became an orphan, and finds himself at a desk adjacent to Henry Norman, with whom he subsequently shares lodgings. Alaric is street smart, knows how to advance himself, and opts for expediency over principle. Charley Tudor, son of a clergyman and a young cousin of Alaric, proves himself susceptible to the temptations offered by street life in London.

And the widow in the cottage near Hampton Court? Her late husband was a cousin of Harry Norman's father, so naturally Mrs. Woodward invites young Harry and his friends to visit on weekends.

Although the reader is entertained by the portrayal of the Departments of Internal Navigation and Weights and Measures, the book hangs mainly on the plot, and the story is basically that of the six young people. Harry falls in love with the eldest sister Gertrude, but Alaric wins her away from him and earns his sustained hatred. Harry subsequently settles for the second sister Linda, who initially thought she was in love with Alaric, who was false with her as well as with Harry. In the course of the story the youngest sister Katie grows up from thirteen to seventeen and falls in love with Charley, who saves her life by pulling her from the water.

Three brides for three friends: perhaps this wasn't so unusual in Victorian times when meetings, much less friendships, among eligible young people weren't always so easy to obtain. But then the results: the first two couplings are plausible enough, but Katie, the youngest, becomes chronically ill with unrequited love, and although the reader is reassured that the doctors who listen to her chest through wooden tubes find no evidence of consumption, the anxious reader fears that the author will let her die. Trollope became known as a skeptic of Shakespeare's dictum: "Men will die and worms will eat them, but not of love."

We are reminded how Australia was populated as Alaric takes his family there for a fresh start after serving six months in jail for betraying the trust of a young woman for whom he was named trustee. And we see how Victorians did their insider trading, as Alaric is persuaded by the villain of the story, Undy Scott, to buy shares in mines that he is evaluating for the Department of Weights and Measures.

And Trollope indulges in certain liberties. He satirizes the publishing world with Charley Tudor's writing serial novels, and here we find Mrs. Woodward reading Crinoline and Macassar aloud to the young people: "The lovely Crinoline was sitting alone at a lattice window on a summer morning, and as she sat she sang with melancholy cadence the first part of the now celebrated song which had then lately appeared. …"

Thirteen pages of Chapter XXVIII are devoted entirely to an impassioned defense of the Civil Service, particularly of the young men who work there. This chapter is absent from my small leather-bound edition published in 1878 but is restored in the Trollope Society edition of 1992, which follows the text of the first edition, published in 1858. The chapter is irrelevant to the story; it does, however, reveal where the author is coming from. He is coming from the Civil Service, which was his ticket to self-respect and financial independence.

Finally, the first three pages of Chapter XLV, "The Criminal Population is Disposed of," are given to a comparison of this novel's villain, Undecimus Scott, with Bill Sikes. Was Charles Dickens flattered that his villain of Oliver Twist was so honored by his colleague Anthony Trollope, who apologized in the text that he could not give Undy Scott so "decent an end" as that given to Bill Sikes?

It must be added that Trollope considered The Three Clerks to be his best work yet, better than The Warden and Barchester Towers. Contemporary critics agreed with him, including Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. What were they thinking? Perhaps Trollope overestimated his portrayal of Charley Tudor, who may well have been a self-portrait of the hobbledehoy who aspired to write novels but found female companionship in a social class beneath his own—indeed, having to withstand an attack in his office by the mother of a young woman who considered herself to be ill used.

Today's reader may well wonder why The Three Clerks was ever rated higher than The Warden and Barchester Towers. Posterity has certainly not concurred. In the case of Trollope's novels, religion, like politics, has trumped bureaucracy.

The book, however, primarily tells the story of six young people. I must confess that I found myself tiring of them before the author did.

THE PROUD YOUNG LOVERS

THE BERTRAMS
 

"For the first fortnight she did not leave the house." This sentence, in Chapter XXXVII of The Bertrams by Anthony Trollope, epitomizes the difficulty for the present day reader in understanding a Victorian novel. Things have changed a great deal since then, but surely the place of women is fundamental. Did not leave her house!

Lady Harcourt was in great distress. She had left her husband (she had virtually fled), and he had the legal right to apprehend her and force her to return to his home. Divorce was not an option for her. The action of the book takes place in 1845-1848. Only in 1857 (a year before the book was written) did the Matrimonial Causes Act give women limited access to divorce. Under this act the husband only had to prove his wife's adultery to obtain a divorce, but a woman had not only to prove her husband's having committed adultery; she also had to prove incest, bigamy, cruelty, or desertion. And so she was legally and permanently bound to a husband who owned their home. The law regarded a married couple as one person; the husband had a legal obligation to protect his wife; she was bound to obey him. Personal property brought to the marriage by the wife then belonged to the husband, even after a divorce if one could be obtained. Her income belonged completely to her husband. A man's home was his castle, and the wife was part of the deal.

One has to understand these givens in order to follow the implications of the story. The wedding of Caroline Waddington to Sir Henry Harcourt created a significant problem for the central lovers of the story, Miss Waddington and George Bertram. As the enormity of her mistake became apparent to her, Caroline (now Lady Harcourt) realized that there was no good way out. These days, she would do as a senior friend of mine, a professed atheist, said he would do if, to his surprise, he should find himself standing at the Pearly Gates after his death. "I would say, 'Gentlemen, it appears that I have made a horrible mistake.'" And then she would get a divorce and marry her true love with no questions asked. But her options were few and unattractive: She could flee abroad, as Lady Laura Standish did with her father, to escape her crazed husband, in Trollope's Phineas Finn. She could (if the husband would permit it) live openly with her lover, as did George Eliot. But just as Hollywood movies follow an apparently tacit code of audience acceptability, so Trollope was unwilling to send his central figures to Europe to live together, as Glencora Palliser had contemplated doing with her lover Burgo Fitzgerald in Can You Forgive Her? (Glencora couldn't bring herself to do this, and she learned to love her husband Plantagenet Palliser, after a certain acceptable fashion.) Lady Harcourt's husband could die of illness or injury, or someone could murder him, or he could commit suicide. Trollope was not scrupulous about revealing the outcome in advance. The reader is warned, and suicide is chosen. (This was also the means of exit and retribution for Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister and of Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now.)

Trollope did not consider himself a feminist; he professed a conservative view of society. But he was a realist who described the world as he found it. And his findings speak for themselves. The constraints placed upon women turn up again and again, in almost every novel he wrote.

Some of the action takes place in the Middle East, and this glimpse of the experience of touring there a century and a half ago provides a virtual visit to Jerusalem as it was then: a walled city with no suburbs, appearing as "a fortress of cards built craftily on a table," where one enters and suddenly realizes "that you are beyond the region of passports."

And the description of the environs provides an uncensored and not necessarily tactful view of "all the absurdity" of the "dark unfurnished gloomy cave in which the Syrian Christians worship, so dark that the eye cannot at first discover its only ornament—a small ill-made figure of the crucified Redeemer."

The author would probably be the object of a fatwah today for his description of the Moslem washerwomen as "ape-like" and the Jewish washerwomen as "glorious specimens of feminine creation."

Alexandria—"that most detestable of cities"—does not fare well. Nor do the pyramids, though they must be visited. "But let no man, and, above all, no woman, assume that the excursion will be in any way pleasurable. … And let this also be remembered, that nothing is to be gained by entering the pyramid except dirt, noise, stench, vermin, abuse, and want of air."

A twenty-first century editor might cringe at Trollope's assertion that "as a rule, a Mahomedan hates a Christian. … But in Egypt we have caused ourselves to be better respected: we thrash the Arabs and pay them, and therefore they are very glad to see us anywhere."

And yet in the next four pages Trollope gives us as vivid a picture of the performance of whirling dervishes as we are likely to find.

But the lowly place of women in society was an obvious part of the landscape, and the travelers' observations were only window dressing; the business of the novel has to do primarily with the relationship between George Herbert and Caroline Waddington, and secondarily, between Arthur Wilkinson and Adela Gauntlet. George Herbert is a proud young man, and Miss Waddington is a proud young woman. David Skilton's pen-and-ink drawing opposite page 110 in the Folio Society edition of 1993 tells it all: With the walled city of Jerusalem represented in the background, George sits on the barren ground looking away, unhappily, to his right. Miss Waddington, parasol over her head to protect her from the sun, stands looking away in the opposite direction. He has just told her of his newly formed resolution to become a clergyman, and she has poured cold water on his enthusiasm, reminding him that he is eligible for a noble position that would be preferable to a country parsonage.

When he protests that a vicar's career can be noble, she replies, "I judge by what I see. They are generally fond of eating, very cautious about their money, untidy in their own houses, and apt to go to sleep after dinner."

These two young people, both with strong personalities, are clearly in love with each other. He gives up his idea of being a clergyman; he decides to study law. He proposes, and she accepts. He presses for an early wedding date; she demurs, saying that they must wait until he has been called to the bar, which will take two or three years. She is afraid that a small income would fray their love for each other. Neither will compromise. The engagement is broken, and she marries his friend, a rising star in the legal and political world.

Behind all this is the possible legacy of his rich uncle. George, however, refuses to humor his uncle for the sake of becoming his heir.

Such lovers' stories occur all the time. Family relationships still matter, and they still require cultivation. But as the inner thinking of each of the lovers was revealed in great detail throughout the story, I found myself protesting that these weren't real people like any the author had known. They were characters set up in a plot, and the turns of the story were just that: turns for the sake of the story, not turns that a real person would make.

Trollope summarizes the story of the progressively colder nature of their engagement with this retrospective view: "Each was too proud to make the first concession to the other, and therefore no concession was made by either."

No one can read this sentence and wonder what the book is about. But the reader may feel that it's all a fable. This is where the story starts, and the details are just filled in.

Perhaps the author's style accounted for my reaction: Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway might have presented the same story in a more convincing fashion, leaving out all the details of the thinking and giving us only a few scraps of dialogue to explain the action. In this instance, I failed to overcome being accustomed to the fast pace of "the way we live now," and I could not immerse myself in the more leisurely pace of the nineteenth century world. As I followed their thoughts through each turn of the story, I became so impatient with the stubbornness of George Herbert and Caroline Waddington that I lost my sympathy for them. It's hard to be a good fan when your team is losing.

Little bright spots appear throughout the book. The dialogue between Caroline, as Lady Harcourt, and her husband strikes a note of detachment reminiscent of the dialogue in Noel Coward's Private Lives. One can almost hear Carol Lawrence saying Lady Harcourt's lines in response to her husband's question:

"I hope you are happy, Caroline?" said Sir Henry, as he gently squeezed the hand that was so gently laid upon his arm.

"Happy! Oh yes—I am happy. I don't believe, you know, in a great deal of very ecstatic happiness. I never did."

Trollope shamelessly introduces some welcome comic relief in the form of a deaf lady and her ear trumpet when Miss Todd, an outspoken woman who travels in society, takes her young charge Adela Gauntlet on a social call to one of the grand dames of Littlebath (obviously a pseudonym for Bath). Miss Todd proposes that they take turns of five minutes each in talking to her and then leave after three turns.

Miss Todd is a slightly older Miss Dunstable from Dr. Thorne. Having enough money to speak her mind, she does so with relish, as in her defense of playing cards in a conversation with a clergyman of Littlebath:

"What are old women like us to do? We haven't eyes to read at night, even if we had minds fit for it. We can't always be saying our prayers. We have nothing to talk about except scandal. It's better than drinking; and we should come to that if we hadn't cards."

A carriage ride is one of Trollope's favorite settings for intimate conversation, with the horse sometimes getting the worst of it, as in Chapter XXI of Framley Parsonage, "Why Puck, the Pony, Was Beaten." In this story, it is Dumpling who catches a few impatient words as Arthur Wilkinson, the timid and browbeaten parson, speaks his mind (partially) to Adela Gauntlet, almost but not quite proposing. She patiently waits for him to grow up a bit. Dumpling bears the brunt of Wilkinson's timidity.

George's father, Sir Lionel Bertram, squanders his paternal capital by sponging on his son for money. He fails to insert himself into his brother's will, and he fails in two successive attempts to marry money: "That utterance of the verbiage of love is a disagreeable task for a gentleman of his years. He had tried it, and found it very disagreeable. He would save himself a repetition of the nuisance and write to her."

But back to the central story of Caroline Waddington: Chapter XXXVI, "A Matrimonial Dialogue," closes the marriage between her and Lord Harcourt. It is a classic Trollopian serious interview, in which Lady Harcourt routs her proud husband. She tells him that she did not invite Mr. Herbert to their house because she loved him so much that she was afraid to meet him. "As she said this she still looked into his face fearlessly—we may almost say boldly; so much so that Sir Henry's eyes almost quailed before hers. On this she had at any rate resolved, that she would never quail before him."

When Bertram writes an angry letter to Caroline, Trollope inserts instruction about writing such letters which could be included among the little lessons of life to be gleaned from reading his novels: "Sit down and write your letter; write it with all the venom in your power … and, as a matter of course, burn it before breakfast the next morning." He goes on to extol pleasant letters, concluding his advice for letter writing: "But, above all things, see that it be good-humored."

A modern novel would omit Trollope's last chapter, and he himself issues an apology for it: "Methinks it is almost unnecessary to write this last chapter. The story, as I have had to tell it, is all told. The object has been made plain—or, if not, can certainly not be made plainer in these last six or seven pages. … But, nevertheless, custom, and the desire of making an end of the undertaken work, and in some sort completing it, compel me to this concluding chapter." Things work themselves out within the conventions of the day. A guiltless ending such as might be implied today could not be allowed, and the lovers whose course we have followed with a bit of impatience must accept the scraps of happiness that their world could accept.

I love Trollope's good-humored novels; the grim ones, like He Knew He was Right and parts of this one, are a bit like unpleasant letters. The Bertrams has enough good humor to carry us through. The proud young lovers, however, are hard to love.

COPING WITH STARVATION

CASTLE RICHMOND
 

People of Irish descent, I recently learned, comprise thirteen percent of the population of the county where I live, matched only by those of German descent, also thirteen percent. (Other leading ancestry groups are English, ten percent; black, six percent; and Mexican, five percent.) Irish are also the most numerous ancestry group in the counties where my Arkansas children live; and in the county where I grew up, they are the most numerous white ancestry group. (Irish are six percent, blacks forty-six percent.)

That I was surprised to learn this probably indicates that I haven't been paying attention. My wife's grandfather came directly from County Cavan, in Ireland; and the family of one of my sons-in-law came from Ireland. Perhaps Irish names aren't as obvious as some of the German names. And of course the English got a head start in Virginia and New England. The big reason for the Irish numbers is the Irish potato famine, which began in 1845, when an estimated one and a half million people died and one million emigrated.

Anthony Trollope said that before he decided on "Castle Richmond" as the title for the book, he considered a title which would mention the famine. Such a title would have been more descriptive, though it might perhaps have discouraged a number of readers, including me. This would have been unfortunate, because in stumbling into the unknown territory of one of his lesser known novels, I found myself immersed in the most powerful chapter I have found in Trollope. One would have to survey Holocaust and other war stories for chapters of similar impact. Young Herbert Fitzgerald sets out to ride across the countryside to Desmond Court, the home of his fiancée, to determine whether their marriage is to take place, and in so doing he encounters a rainstorm, forcing him to seek shelter. He enters a cabin without knocking; he even rides his horse inside, which, the author assures us, was customary there. The interior is so dark he at first cannot tell whether anyone is at home. The floor is sod, the walls are bare, and there is only a very little furniture, very plain. As his eyes become accustomed to the dark, he sees a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor with a baby in her arms. He later discovers the body of a four-year-old daughter in the corner.

In those days there was a form of face which came upon the sufferers when their state of misery was far advanced, and which was a sure sign that their last stage of misery was nearly run. The mouth would fall and seem to hang, the lips at the two ends of the mouth would be dragged down, and the lower parts of the cheeks would fall as though they had been dragged and pulled. There were no signs of acute agony when this phasis of countenance was to be seen, none of the horrid symptoms of gnawing hunger by which one generally supposes that famine is accompanied. The look is one of apathy, desolation, and death. When custom had made these signs easily legible, the poor doomed wretch was known with certainty.

Sir William Osler could hardly have written a more informative description of the clinical signs of starvation in The Principles and Practice of Medicine. Trollope knew the signs; he had gone to Ireland in 1841 as a clerk to a postal surveyor, traveling about the country under orders from the surveyors. He was promoted to surveyor fifteen years later, and he did not return to England until 1859, the year he began Castle Richmond.

Mike, the starving woman's husband, had become a cripple through rheumatism and could not do the public work on the roads. This would have qualified him and his family for the poorhouse, but he may not have known this. He had found someone who would hire him to do a little work in return for a little food, and he had stolen from his employer a small amount of "Indian corn-flour"—the yellow meal made from corn sent from America—but it had failed to sustain her and the children.

Although Herbert tried to send help, no one was in a hurry to answer the call. "But had they flown to the spot on the wings of love, it would not have sufficed to prolong her life one day. Her doom had been spoken before Herbert had entered the cabin."

Trollope indulges in a little Victorian eloquence to conclude his story, which otherwise could be a case history. What would Dickens have done with such a story? The poor woman would have been borne to Heaven in the arms of angels. And if this had been a chapter in a book by Dickens, we might all know this story from the Irish Potato Famine.

The book isn't really about the potato famine. It just took place at the time of the famine. The story is one of those stories of a question of birth, which are so common in the novels from the period. In this case, we find Sir Thomas Fitzgerald of Castle Richmond being blackmailed by Mr. Matthew Mollett, who tells him that he was Lady Fitzgerald's first husband, and that he was not dead, as he had been assumed to be, when she married Sir Thomas. This would mean that her marriage to Sir Thomas is null and void, and that Sir Thomas's children are illegitimate–-and that his son Herbert will not inherit the estate, which would then fall to a cousin, Owen Fitzgerald. All this leaves Sir Thomas in a state of nervous collapse, from which he does not recover.

We also have the story of a young woman, Lady Clara Desmond, who proceeds, in the fullness of time, from one engagement to another. As a young girl she pledged herself to Owen Fitzgerald, but her mother, the Countess of Desmond, reminded her that she must marry money, and she later accepted the proposal of Herbert Fitzgerald. And then, when the news of Lady Fitzgerald's first husband becomes known, young Lady Clara is seen by her mother to be left holding the bag with a second affianced lover, now become poor. Owen is presented as the mercurial Irishman whom women love: romantic and generous, fun-loving and extravagant—qualities we also see in Trollope's most well-known Irish figure, Phineas Finn. Herbert, on the other hand, is slow and methodical, serious and conscientious, reminiscent of Plantagenet Palliser. Owen makes the extravagant and rather naive offer to let Herbert have Castle Richmond and all its property if he will surrender the love of Clara. Herbert, of course, cannot understand this and refuses.

So how will all this be resolved? Very conveniently, as it turns out. A family secret is discovered. What about this and so many other stories of birth secrets, with the resolution of the plot in the revelation of some unknown bit of family history—as when Buttercup announces in the final act of HMS Pinafore that, as a nursemaid, she switched babies years ago? Was this just a convenient plot device, or was it a reflection of reality?

Trollope used variations of this theme in several of his novels. George Roden, in Marion Fay, is found to be the eldest son of an Italian duke. Is He Popenjoy? is all about whether an unprincipled English Marquis, living in Italy, was legitimately married to an Italian duchessa and whether their son was Lord Popenjoy.

Esther Summerson, in Charles Dickens's Bleak House, does not know who her real mother is until late in the story. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest revolves about two babies in large handbags who were unwittingly swapped at a railway station. When this is announced in the last act, Jack throws himself on Miss Prism with a cry of "Mother!"

One actual case involved the "Tichbourne claimant," who in 1875 returned from Australia and claimed to be the rightful heir to a family fortune; the courts ruled against him. Surely this story itself could provide material for a doctoral dissertation; lacking such research, however, one would suppose that such events occurred infrequently and stirred imaginations each time, prompting fictional and comic variations on the theme.

Among the insights into Irish life are the sketches of Protestant and Catholics, preachers and priests. We find Father Bernard being petted by his sister-in-law and niece at Mick O'Dwyer's public house, where the women offer him another cup of tea, a hot muffin, or "a morsel of buttered toast" if he will only say the word.

Protestants and Catholics are obliged to work together in public assistance efforts to aid famine victims, but when it is suggested to the Protestant parson that Father Barney may be right in a certain matter, he categorically denies it. "He's altogether wrong. I never knew one of them right in my life yet in anything. How can they be right?"

On the other hand, the Catholic bias appears when Father Columb is told that men will work anywhere to keep from starving. He only replies, "Some men will," implying that Protestants would work anywhere because of their devotion to the flesh, but that Roman Catholics are under the dominion of the Spirit and would perish first.

The story moves toward its conclusion in London, where Herbert has gone to study law after leaving Castle Richmond. Here we see two lawyers at work. The first is Mr. Prendergast, the family attorney, who receives a letter revealing the family secret. Mr. Prendergast anticipates Sherlock Holmes in his powers of observation as he enters the house and searches for his quarry: "But the armchair was placed idly away from any accommodation for work, and had, as Mr. Prendergast thought, been recently filled by some idle person."

We also encounter the barrister, Mr. Die, still working hard at age seventy. Men who retire at age sixty, the author tells us, are those who have always been idle. "It is my opinion that nothing seasons the mind for endurance like hard work. Port wine should perhaps be added."

But back to the Irish famine: When one learns that during its four worst years, the English landlords in Ireland exported more food, in the form of beef, wheat, and other grains, than the country imported, one begins to understand the reasons for deep and strong feelings about the English in Ireland. From his travels in southwest Ireland from 1841 to 1859, Trollope surely knew and understood the Irish from the ground up. His fictional account bears as much authority as a journalistic one would have, and it is reinforced in the Folio Society edition with a pen-and-ink drawing opposite page 185 showing a woman dressed in rags, on her knees, surrounded by four small children, pulling at someone's cloak as she begs. She is more attractive in the drawing than in the description—"squat, uncouth, and in no way attractive to the eye."

This begging scene is rural, not on a city street. The woman who is begging is not a nameless beggar; she knows Mister Herbert and Clara by face and name. Other accounts in the book—dealing with the deliberations of the ad hoc council to establish policies about distribution of such food as is available to those without food, managing a gang of men given make-work duties leveling a hill for a roadway, and the details of a recipe for making bread from bad flour—all bear witness to a human tragedy that brought thousands of its victims to America.

Castle Richmond is a good story; it starts slowly, but it moves along, and it proceeds with dispatch in the final chapters. Trollope has given us some sobering glimpses of people, ancestors to many Americans, starving in time of famine; otherwise we are diverted by entertaining views and stories. It's unfortunate that a book so well written is doomed to the oblivion of being just one of forty-seven novels by the same author.