The Way We Live Now has been described as a work of bitterness and disillusionment, but the tone of the book is not one of bitterness. It is certainly satirical; but one could believe that the character of Melmotte stepped in and ran away with the story, just as he swept through London society in 1873 (the year it was written—remember "Now" in the title). One would be hard pressed to say that The Way We Live Now heralded a precipitous darkening of Trollope's view of the world. He did continue to explore the folly of mankind in the novels that followed—The Prime Minister, with the appearance of Ferdinand Lopez, an ambitious, unscrupulous foreigner like Melmotte; Is He Popenjoy? featuring the arch villain the Marquis of Brotherton; The American Senator; The Duke's Children; and John Caldigate. The more Trollope experienced the world, the more targets for his satirical pen appeared.
The Way We Live Now is replete with such targets. Likeable characters are lacking. Two exceptions are Mr. Brehgert, the Jew who tolerates the frank anti-Semitism of Victorian England with saintly perseverance; and John Crumb, "the dealer in meal and pollard at Bungay," who loves Ruby Ruggles and thrashes the useless young Sir Felix Carbury when he assaults her. (Pollard is a fine protein-rich feed supplement for farm animals; it is a byproduct from the milling of wheat for flour.)
Melmotte is introduced as a foreign element that intrudes on English society in the fourth chapter, in which we learn that he is the giver of a great ball. Having just arrived in London from Paris about two years earlier, he admitted that his wife was a foreigner—"an admission that was necessary as she spoke very little English." Though Augustus Melmotte, Esq., spoke his "native" language fluently, he had "an accent which betrayed at least a long expatriation." His daughter Marie "spoke English well, but as a foreigner," and had been born "out of England"—perhaps in New York or Paris.
Only a foreigner could have done what Melmotte did. It is likely that Trollope, who amused himself and us with his observations of the English "as they lived then," did not think that a native-born Englishman could have disrupted society in such a way. This foreigner came in with an ambivalent attitude toward the English. He thought they were gullible enough to buy his schemes, but an essential part of his ambition was his desire to obtain a position of great prominence in English society. He would buy a country place, Pickering, from Adolphus Longstaffe, the squire of Caversham in Suffolk, and he would remodel it so that he could be a country gentleman. He would get himself elected to the House of Commons. He would obtain a noble title—perhaps a baronetcy. His daughter would marry Lord Nidderdale. His wealth and his connections would bring all these things.
The traditional English life that Trollope so revered was crumbling. Adolphus Longstaffe cannot afford to maintain the social schedule that his wife and children enjoy, and the sale of family property offers an expedient solution. Sir Roger Carbury strives to maintain his country place, but he finds himself powerless to marry and carry on his family line. He has set his heart on marrying his cousin Hetta Carbury when she comes of age, but the young girl has little interest in marrying an older man. Hetta's mother, Lady Carbury, attempts to charm editors and other writers into praising and publishing her books so that she can save herself and her worthless son, Sir Felix Carbury, from financial ruin.
Which of these can the reader like? None of the above. And there are more. Paul Montague is a young man who has had to leave Oxford because of some unfortunate rows, and he has spent three years in California, losing his fortune in unsuccessful business ventures and becoming engaged to a woman who may or may not have shot her husband in Oregon. He thinks he can escape her by returning to England, but she pursues him. Like Pinocchio, he falls into bad company (the Beargarden Club in London). Hetta Carbury (to whom Sir Roger has unsuccessfully proposed marriage) falls in love with the young man, little more than a hobbledehoy who consistently gets in over his head, whatever the venture. Yet it is Paul who is the only one to attempt to ask questions at the board meetings of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, and he is the first to discover that Melmotte had been diverting its funds to such personal uses as rebuilding the Longstaffe house in the country.
Such is The Way We Live Now. The country is going to the dogs, led by a foreign Pied Piper with a strange accent. Here is his introductory description:
Mr. Melmotte was a big man with large whiskers, rough hair, and with an expression of mental power on a harsh vulgar face. He was certainly a man to repel you by his presence unless attracted to him by some internal consideration. He was magnificent in his expenditure, powerful in his doings, successful in his business, and the world around him therefore was not repelled.
It appears that had not Melmotte appeared, someone in London would have invented him. As it happened, his great project was actually invented by Hamilton K. Fisker, the young American who had met Paul Montague in California and made a partnership with him. It was Fisker who concocted the idea of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway and sold the idea to Melmotte. The presentation was brief. Melmotte and Fisker understood each other. The documents referred not at all to future profits to the railway or to its benefit to society; they emphasized rather the appeal of such stock to the "speculating world."
Melmotte undertook the chairmanship of the Board of Directors in England, and he very quickly found willing buyers of shares, hopes, and dreams. Like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, "When he dances, the piper pays him." But when he makes his speech to his directors, it is one that would not do for BBC. In its production, David Suchet is Melmotte larger than life, full of vitality, projecting himself with a powerful personality. Trollope's text would not have been such good theater; in it we see a man who is not eloquent, mostly looking at his plate. His eager audience, however, cheers him "to the echo."
The way we live now is portrayed not as a society that is sold a bill of goods by a huckster, but as one that carried the huckster out over his head even further than he might have ventured on his own. "It can hardly be said of him that he had intended to play so high a game, but the game that he had intended to play had become thus high of its own accord. A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned for them."
Fisker is the little tugboat that nudges the mighty Melmotte out into the deep. "He had sprung out of some Californian gully, was perhaps ignorant of his own father and mother, and had tumbled up in the world on the strength of his own audacity. But, such as he was, he had sufficed to give the necessary impetus for rolling Augustus Melmotte onwards into almost unprecedented commercial greatness."
What Melmotte does understand is "credit." In attempting to browbeat Paul Montague, Melmotte rages, "Gentlemen who don't know the nature of credit, how strong it is—as the air—to buoy you up; how slight it is—as a mere vapour—when roughly touched, can do an amount of mischief of which they themselves don't in the least understand the extent!"
Melmotte does of course come to grief, from having forged the signature of Dolly Longstaffe, feckless son of Adolphus Longstaffe, authorizing transfer of the title deed for the house to Melmotte. He also forged his daughter's signature and his secretary Croll's signature to a document giving him access to his daughter Marie's money. Elected to Parliament at about this time, the rumors of the forgery cause his stock prices to collapse. Melmotte's final performance is to go drunk to the House, attempt a speech, fall to the floor, go home and commit suicide with prussic acid.
Set against these affairs of such great pith and moment, the story of Winifred Hurtle is a welcome relief. She was the American woman (another foreigner in England) who pursued Paul Montague to England, where she asserts her rights as an engaged woman, threatening legal action if Paul should break their engagement, and presumably spending several nights with him, according to a narrative a bit skimpy in such details.
The memorable climax of the story is the suicide of Melmotte; but Trollope lets the dark side die with the great financier. There are a few marriages. And the share prices of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway begin to rise again as Fisker gets back to work on selling shares in America. What went up came down; and it came back up a little.
We follow the fates of a large cast of characters. Perhaps we don't see that much into the soul of Melmotte. His actions and words speak for him. For once, Trollope doesn't take us into the head of a character who plays such a pivotal role. But we follow the meditations of Paul Montague, Hetta Carbury, and others in the usual detail. Not such a likeable lot, but their stories hang together and justify claims that this is among Trollope's greatest novels, if not the greatest. It was Trollope's longest novel, and perhaps its greatest accomplishment is that the reader is entertained by the light touch that keeps such a dreary story of human stupidity from being abandoned after a few chapters.
Elias Gotobed is the American senator in Trollope's novel of the same name. And in the last chapter the author reveals that Larry Twentyman, a rising young yeoman farmer, "has in truth been our hero." But more memorable than either of these is Arabella Trefoil, the husband hunter. Life was not easy for ambitious Victorian women. Success might have been achieved, with great difficulty, in several different endeavors, but the only path that really led a woman to a high place in society was through birth or marriage. And to this end Arabella aspired.
She herself did not care much for pleasure. But she did care to be a great lady—one who would be allowed to swim out of rooms before others, one who could snub others, one who could show real diamonds when others wore paste, one who might be sure to be asked everywhere, even by the people who hated her. She rather liked being hated by women and did not want any man to be in love with her—except as far as might be sufficient for the purpose of marriage.
Her great sin is that she pursues Lord Rufford, a more eligible catch, while still engaged to John Morton, squire of Bragton. And in introducing her, the author does tell us, "She had had many lovers, and had been engaged to not a few." No one pretends that Trollope was an advocate of feminism. And she hardly emerges as a heroine. And yet a sympathetic reader of the present day can see her as a victim of her times. What, indeed, was a poor girl to do?
Poor, yes, but not without some family connections—enough to put her on the bubble of society—enough, perhaps, to make her feel obliged to reach for success. Her father was the younger brother of a duke. Her other assets were strength and determination, beauty, wit, and enough freedom from scruples to lead her into trouble. "As for caring about him, Mamma," she had once said of a suitor, "of course I don't. He is nasty and odious in every way. But I have got to do the best I can, and what is the use of talking about such trash as that?"
If Arabella is the memorable character, her memorable scene is the one in the postchaise after a hunt when she succeeds in drawing from Lord Rufford a positive response that he loves her—but nothing more. At this point she knows that he will go no further, but she resolves to use what she has gained to try to bring him to the altar, fainting helplessly upon his shoulder. As it happens, Lord Ruffton calls her bluff and escapes. Can you blame a girl for trying?
What of the American senator? In Elias Gotobed we find the prototype of the Ugly American, described in the novel that gave the phrase to our political vocabulary, as pretentious, loud, and ostentatious—changed, in some way, when they leave their native land. Senator Gotobed's sins in England are a bit different. Loud, yes. Lacking in tact, yes. Convinced of the superiority of American ways, yes. But unlike the Ugly American in Vietnam, Mr. Gotobed was not required to expose his bad manners to a third world country; his opportunity was to go to the mother country and demonstrate how a rebellious child behaved toward the parent.
We are introduced to Mr. Gotobed as he meets his host John Morton, the absentee squire, and views Bragton Hall—"quite a pile," he declares.
Mr. Gotobed is diligent in his research and amasses enough data to prepare a lecture for the edification of the English public. He accurately identifies some English ways, such as primogeniture, voting restrictions, and inappropriate clerical wealth, which would not much longer survive the scrutiny of the masses. One suspects that Trollope was using this as another means of exposing these little ways for the entertainment of his readers, and he was able to use a broader brush for this purpose than he used in his own depictions of these same institutions. As an American, I find Mr. Gotobed a rather tiresome caricature of the nineteenth century American. But his likeness resembles a number of others so closely that I fear I might have found some of the real Americans of the time rather tiresome.
The virtues of the English way of life are not lost on Mr. Gotobed. He concedes in his letters to his friend in the USA that the English gentleman is indeed charming, even though idle; pleasant and able to discuss almost any subject, even though he may know very little about it; and hospitable. In addition to these gratuitous observations, he does insert himself into the activities of the community by supporting the cause of Mr. Dan Goarly, accused of poisoning Lord Rufford's foxes.
And here we have the mystery of the red herrings. In an earlier incarnation of the battle between fox hunters and those who considered it a barbaric sport, the animal rights advocates sometimes left red herrings in a fox's path, obscuring the scent so that the hounds were unable to stay on the right trail. Hence our term that applies to a diversion that takes one off the correct pathway to solving a problem. And in this case it was worse. It was suspected that the herrings were laced with strychnine to poison the hounds. Mr. Gotobed, ardent in his opposition to the absurd sport of hunting and killing foxes, defies the conventional wisdom of the village that knows Goarly to be a scoundrel, because he thinks any sabotage of a fox hunt is worthy of support. In this effort he fails.
An ardent devotee of fox hunting, Trollope often used the hunt as a piece of the plot in his stories, and his descriptions of the sport convey the authenticity of the literate sportsman. Each of my two paperback editions of The American Senator show hunt scenes on the cover. And in this novel the hunt shows us Senator Gotobed in his quixotic defense of sabotaging the sport, and Arabella Trefoil on the hunt for Lord Rufford.
The world of the English gentry of which Trollope wrote was not such a large one that prominent characters from other stories might not sometimes make their appearance; and the faithful Trollope reader will smile to get a glimpse of Lady Chiltern and the Duchess of Omnium, old friends from the world of the Palliser series, as they visit the home of the Duke of Mistletoe, Arabella Trefoil's uncle.
And one last bit of trivia: When Senator Gotobed presents his lecture enumerating the follies of the English, he is shouted down and some cry, "Buncombe!" Also spelled bunkum and sometimes shortened to bunk, this term for nonsense traveled across the Atlantic as the legacy of a congressman from North Carolina, whose district included Buncombe County, after he felt obliged to "make a speech for Buncombe" in Congress.
The main plot is complicated and a bit commonplace, introduced in the first chapters that require the reader to go through with a marking pencil to identify the players, their generations, and their family relationships. The requisite dues having been paid, the reader may then go on with the story, but one is still obliged to return to these chapters for reference. Less patient generations of readers have limited tolerance of such introductions, even though some of the author's capsule comments can be quite quotable, as in this observation in describing Lawrence Twentyman: "And his farming was well done; for though he was, out-and-out, a gentleman-farmer, he knew how to get the full worth in work done for the fourteen shillings a week that he paid to his labourers—a deficiency in which knowledge is the cause why gentlemen in general find farming so very expensive an amusement."
If Lawrence Twentyman is the real hero of the story, he is a frustrated hero, unsuccessful from start to end in his courtship of Mary Masters, threatening to sell his farm and emigrate to New Zealand when he fails to win her. He loses Mary, daughter of the lawyer whose family has handled the Morton family business for generations, to Reginald Morton, some fifteen years their senior and heir to the property. Reginald's cousin, John Morton, is the squire of Bragton until his untimely death of "gastric fever." (What was "gastric fever?" Did he have typhoid fever? Or just a convenient diagnosis in the "chapter of accidents" that a novelist must resort to?) John is a victim of Arabella's scheming, introduced as her fiancé in a match with no outward signs of affection. He is employed in the foreign office, is assigned to the United States, is known by his colleagues as "The Paragon," and is later assigned to Patagonia, a remote outpost of the foreign service. John's grandmother dreams up schemes that require closer attention to family feuds than the casual reader will be willing to undertake; Reginald's great-aunt Lady Ushant is the good gentlewoman who is Reginald's champion, and she also befriends Mary Masters. Mary is constantly harassed by her wicked stepmother who urges her to accept Larry Twentyman and avoid the temptation to associate with the gentry. In particular, Mary is urged not to go "Ushanting" by visiting kind Lady Ushant.
This is all well and good, and it's enough to keep the story going; but it's pretty predictable Trollope fare. Arabella, the American Senator, and the poisoned red herrings are the spice to the story.
Is He Popenjoy? puts us in familiar Trollope territory: the cathedral and close, and the manor house. We have a lord of the manor, the Marquis of Brotherton, who exercises his rights with such persistent rudeness that one is hard pressed to think of any redeeming virtues; and from there the cast of characters is a familiar one: his younger brother, Lord George, a lesser Plantagenet Palliser, a dull fellow who marries a true heroine, Mary Lovelace, and proves that he hardly deserves her when he allows himself to get his fingers burned by his first lover, Adelaide Houghton, because he can't figure out how to avoid it. Mary's father, the Dean of Brotherton, is a lesser Archdeacon Grantly, rich enough to provide money for his impoverished son-in-law, and too ambitious and proud to keep from offending Lord George with his largesse. Lord George has four ugly sisters, close to a straight copy from Cinderella's stepsisters, who intimidate poor Mary with their family position and their good works for the poor. One of them, Lady Susanna, is worse than the others and at one time visits Mary as an unwelcome duenna. The eldest, Lady Sarah, is better than the others and sometimes sees the light.
Essentially a comic novel, it is almost a farce. The curious interrogatory title (a bit clumsy, like Can You Forgive Her?) is finally elucidated after about a hundred pages when it is learned that the hated Marquis, who has left England to live in Italy, has (perhaps) married an Italian countess and has had a son, Lord Popenjoy. But no Englishman can trust the Italian institutions. Is he really married? Is the child legitimate? "Lord Popenjoy" is the title of the heir to the Marquis. Is he really Popenjoy?
The Dean doubts it, for if the Marquis has no legitimate son, the title will pass to his brother Lord George at his death; and then the Dean's grandson, should he have one, will be next in line. The Marquis's sibs are all skeptical, but they are hesitant to offend their brother. The Dean does not hesitate.
The story proceeds as the Marquis advances from villainy to villainy; he writes to announce the birth of his son and that he will return home. His mother, four sisters, and brother are all to be turned out and obliged to move far away from the family estate. He finally makes his appearance, one third of the way into the book, and insults them all, saving his most cutting sarcasm for the dean, whom he refers to as "that stable boy."
Mary is a credible heroine. She likes to have fun, and she is a bit indiscreet with her friend Jack de Baron, whom she unwittingly encourages to the point that he falls in love with her after she has become Lady George. And the author, who tells us a lot, never tells us so in so many words, but she surely loves him. But the author does tell us that she succeeds in her effort to come to love her husband. Halfway through the book, "She was ever trying to be in love with him, but had never yet succeeded in telling even herself that she had succeeded." But in the process of fighting off a rival—Adelaide Houghton, whom she never forgives—she becomes pregnant, and enduring a separation related to her husband's resentment of his father-in-law's interference in family affairs, she finally convinces herself that she has succeeded in learning to love her husband.
Among the Victorian customs that jar the current reader, that of the wife's duty to obedience is a note that clangs: "The husband would of course be indignant at his wife's disobedience in not having left London when ordered by him to do so."
The author indulges in some sideswipes at the movement for the rights of women. The German advocate is shown to be a money-grubber, and the American expert with the nasal twang, Dr. Olivia Q. Fleabody, "made a rapid fortune out of the proceeds of the hall." Women came twice a week to hear her preach that "a glorious era was at hand in which women would be chosen by constituencies, would wag their heads in courts of law, would buy and sell in Capel Court, and have balances at their bankers."
A woman's duty was to find a husband, and the man's duty was to make it difficult for her. All this sounds as though P. G. Wodehouse had read Trollope and had taken it a bit farther.
He did not mean to marry Guss Mildmay. He did not suppose that she thought he meant to marry her. He did not love her, and he did not believe very much in her love for him. But … [he] had run his bark on to the rock, which it had been the whole study of his navigation to avoid. He had committed the one sin which he had always declared to himself that he never would commit. This made him unhappy.
Mr. Groschut, the dean's secretary, plays Mr. Slope to the bishop. His letter to the rude Marquis is the only flattering or kind letter the Marquis receives. (The family tries to be nice to the Marquis, but they don't flatter like Mr. Groschut does.) And in the end Mr. Groschut is banished, honored only by being the subject of the book's last paragraph: "Of Mr. Groschut it is only necessary to say that he is still at Pugsty, vexing the souls of his parishioners by sabbatical denunciations."
This book could be legitimately recommended in a paraphrase of the familiar line: "If you loved Barchester Towers, you'll like Is He Popenjoy?" No, that's not strong enough. If you loved Barchester Towers, you'll really like Is He Popenjoy?.
The Cliffs of Moher, now among the sites being considered for an upcoming list of the Seven Wonders of the World, have become the most visited tourist attraction in Ireland. However, there were only a few other visitors when our own little family of five, mist swirling in our faces, paid our respects in 1974. These sheer precipices, facing the Atlantic from the western coast of Ireland, had shed their cloud cover; and our primary concern was to keep the children away from the edge.
Young Frederick Neville, the new Earl of Scroope after his uncle's death, gave no thought to how close he was to the brink as he stood there with Mrs. O'Hara while her daughter Kate, pregnant with the young Earl's child, waited in the cottage. That was the problem, of course: the young Earl paid little heed as to how near he might come to any precipice—hence the liaison with Kate O'Hara, a beautiful Irish lass whose cottage was not so far from his regimental quarters as to prevent his frequent visits. This connection, so offensive to his family at Scroope Manor in Dorsetshire, is the story of An Eye for an Eye, written by Anthony Trollope in 1870.
This short novel is set both in Ireland and in England. After setting his first two novels in Ireland, Trollope later returned to the Irish countryside for Castle Richmond and, some ten years later, An Eye for an Eye, which he wrote shortly after a return visit to Ireland. The towering physical feature of the story is the collection of cliffs. The towering social institution is the order of the nobility of England. Like other institutions, practices, and ideas that appear to be threatened by common sense, this one required vigilant defense and faithful observance of its demands. In this story we find young Frederick Neville called, somewhat to his surprise, by his uncle the Earl of Scroope to be his heir. It would be inconvenient for Frederick to become the Earl. A handsome young man in the process of sowing his wild oats, he had a few more to sow.
And so he does. Frederick returns to his regiment in Ireland and pursues his infatuation with Kate O'Hara of the lonely Ardkill cottage, knowing as he does so that whatever her personal attractions and gifts, he lacks the courage to present her in Dorsetshire as Countess of Scroope. The Earl, before his unexpected death, insists that Fred abandon his Irish conquest and marry the fair and well-born Sophie Mellerby.
The women weigh in pretty heavily on the issue. Kate's mother, we learn, has been married to a Captain O'Hara, presumed to have died after misadventures. We see her walking beneath the cliffs, where she would remain for hours, "with her hat in her hand and her hair drenched."
In this she anticipated the memorable Sarah Woodruff, played by Meryl Streep in the film adaptation of John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, hooded and patient, looking out at the storm from the end of the Cobb in Lyme Regis. In each case, the impression is the same: don't trifle with this woman.
But the drumbeat of the story has begun. Mrs. O'Hara reflects as she observes the development of love between Frederick Neville and her daughter: "Men are wolves to women, and utterly merciless when feeding high on their lust."
After the Earl dies, Frederick must decide. Although his brother Jack advises him to marry the Irish lass and bring her home and be done with it, Frederick is swayed by the advice of his aunt, the late Earl's widow. Lady Scroope, in turn, relies on information from her friend Lady Mary Quin, who sends her regular letters with the gossip from Ireland. Lady Mary entertained no qualms as to the young Earl's duty: he must marry Sophie Wellerby. "There are women, who in regard to such troubles as now existed at Ardkill cottage, always think that the woman should be punished as the sinner and that the man should be assisted to escape."
The die is cast. Although Frederick, as the new Earl, attempts to have it both ways and pull a Duke of Windsor (in a century before Wally Simpson's disruption of the monarchy), his proposal to leave the property to his brother and take Kate to Europe and marry her there is scorned by his brother and by the priest who advises Kate and her mother.
And so the young Earl finds himself on the cliffs of Moher, near the edge and confronted by the mother of the woman he has deflowered and deceived.
Trollope framed his story by introducing us to a madwoman in a private asylum in western England, who cornered everyone she met with her mantra, "An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." The narrator then reassures the reader that there will be no more of the asylum story, but there will be the story of how the woman happened to come there; and the reader thus knows in advance that this will be a story with a violent ending.
It's a relatively short (160 pages) novel with a single thread that leads the players to their fate. They are not presented as bad people. The reader can have some sympathy for each of them as they make their way along, overmatched and overshadowed by the overwhelming Cliffs of Moher and the binding institutions of the time.
Anthony Trollope sailed to Australia in 1871 to visit his son Fred. (He wrote one novel, Lady Anna, during eight weeks of the voyage out.) While visiting a goldfield in Currajong, New South Wales, he met one of his son's school mates who had visited in the Trollope home. As he described it in Australia and New Zealand (1876):
I saw him in front of his little tent, which he occupied in partnership with an experienced working miner, eating a beefsteak out of his frying-pan with his claspknife. … He had no friend near him but his mining friend,—or mate, as he called him. … He had been softly nurtured, well educated, and was a handsome fellow to boot; and there he was eating a nauseous lump of beef out of a greasy frying-pan with his pocketknife, just in front of the contiguous blankets stretched on the ground, which constituted the beds of himself and his companion. It may be that he will strike gold, and make a fortune.
And so John Caldigate was born. It is the story of a young man who amasses more gambling debts than he can pay while a student at Cambridge and subsequently forsakes his inheritance of the family estate and strikes out for Australia. He falls in love with a local girl, Hester Bolton, after only seeing her once before he leaves, but on the ship he has an encounter with "Mrs. Smith," also in the second class section, and they talk about marriage. We then follow John Caldigate to the goldfields, where his experiences are basically those described above. And then we fast forward some four or five years and see him returning home a wealthy man. But what about the woman from the ship—who became known in Australia as Mademoiselle Cettini, singer and dancer? The text is silent.
Armed with maturity and money, John patches up his relationship with his strict father and becomes reinstated as the heir of the family estate in the fens near Cambridge. Despite misgivings by her family, Hester, the young girl of his dreams, agrees to marry him, and the young hero appears to be triumphant in all. But the reader is less than halfway through the book, and it's too early for a happy ending.
And now we begin to learn more about the woman from the ship. After John and Hester are married and have a child, he receives a telegram from his mining partner in Australia, asking for a large sum of money. He then receives a letter from the woman, signed, "Euphemia Caldigate," in which she says she will return their marriage certificate to him if he pays the money to Tom Crinkett, his former partner; and then she will marry Crinkett and make no further claim on him. Otherwise "the law must take its course."
So what did happen in Australia? Caldigate immediately goes to Hester's brother, a lawyer in Cambridge, and shows him the letter. In response to hostile questioning from Robert Bolton, he states that it is all true except that he was never married to her. He concedes that he was "very intimate with her," and that she lived with him as his wife. When a Wesleyan minister called on her to upbraid her, she said that John had promised to marry her, and John did not deny it. When Bolton asks him if she used his name there, he replies, "It was a wild kind of life up there, Robert, and this was apparent in nothing more than in the names people used. I daresay some of the people did call her Mrs. Caldigate. But they knew she was not my wife."
Oh, these Victorians! "It was a wild kind of life up there." How does this play in England? Answer: Not well. Caldigate is believed by his father, his priest, and, most importantly, by his wife. It soon becomes apparent that Hester has developed from a quiet maiden lass sitting in the corner, into an assertive wife and mother, willing to defy her mother, father, and brothers in defense of her husband and herself. And here we meet one of the blackest villains Trollope has given us: Mrs. Bolton, mother of Hester and second wife of her husband. Mrs. Bolton was a zealot of the low church (which provided Trollope with several of his villains), and her daughter's suitor never convinced her by his attendance at Sunday services that he was anything other than a "lost sinner." His father did not attend church, and despite John's efforts to keep up appearances, he did not have a history of perfect attendance at divine services. And there were even rumors of a relationship with a Mademoiselle Cettini in Australia. John made an explanation to Hester, which she accepted. But Mrs. Bolton never gave her blessing to the match, and although her daughter finally persuaded her to attend the wedding, she only did so as a heavily veiled spectator from a back pew.
And then it becomes known that he has been accused of having had a wife in Australia! With the consent of her stepsons and the grudging consent of her husband, Mrs. Bolton lures her daughter to Puritan Grange, the Bolton home. In a great scene of conflict, she makes her a prisoner there. We have come to learn by this time that Hester is endowed with all her mother's determination and stubbornness. When Hester finds the doors locked against her, she seats herself in the hall with her baby in her arms, opposite her mother, seated in another chair. Hester spends the night stretched out on the floor. Although Mr. Bolton pleads with his wife to let her go, she is more concerned with the salvation of her daughter's soul than with such earthly consequences as murder. "Oh, He knows! He knows! And if He knows, what matters what men say that I have done to her." (Mrs. Bolton shares this concern for the welfare of the soul, at the expense of the body, with another of Trollope's zealous villains, Aunt Charlotte in Linda Tressel.)
In the end Hester's half brothers decide that she must be allowed to leave, and after a three-day standoff the gates are unlocked, and she bids goodbye to her parents and leaves.
In this scene Mrs. Bolton had outdone even the wife of Bishop Proudie in the Barsetshire novels. Mrs. Proudie stands as a comic figure in comic novels, but there is little comedy about Mrs. Bolton. Her sin is the same as Mrs. Proudie's—an excess of zeal in the cause of religion—but here there is little to laugh at.
After this climax, the story plays itself out, but it is clear that Hester will not be defeated. John Caldigate is tried and convicted of bigamy. Prior to the trial he even finds himself conscience-bound to pay twenty thousand pounds (he had received from his Australia ventures some sixty thousand pounds) to Tom Clinkett, Mrs. Smith-Cettini, and their two conspirators, who had not been so fortunate as he with their market timing. (Trollope's visit to the gold mines had convinced him that the gold seeking was all a gamble.) At this point this reader lost patience with John Caldigate, and it is said that his editor did, too, but Trollope refused to change the story, saying that it was essential to the plot.
While John Caldigate is languishing in prison, further evidence in the case is uncovered. Ever the postal service man, Trollope gives us a detailed look at how close inspection of postmarks and stamps helps determine whether an important envelope addressed to "Mrs. John Caldigate" in John's hand was stamped before or after it was alleged to have been sent.
The attitudes toward John Caldigate's wild oats are interesting. His wife's family is horrified, as are some others who feel personally involved. But the consensus of (male) public opinion in Cambridge was that what happens in Australia stays in Australia. "It was a wild kind of life up there." From what we know of the double standards in Victorian morality, it's of interest that a popular novel dared to present a hero with a history of such indiscretion.
This is a good Trollope novel. The plot is an ingenious one. The long paragraphs in which the details of the characters' thoughts are teased out and dissected can be scanned or simply skipped by the modern reader. Some people really are as earnest and naive as John Caldigate. I doubt that very many readers have swallowed the twenty thousand pound gift as a plausible one, but given Caldigate's character it's at least possible—though, in my estimation, unlikely. I had to set the book aside a couple of times when I thought the author was sailing into rougher seas than I cared to navigate. (Trollope could not be relied upon to avoid maudlin unhappy endings at times.) But in the end the reader has had a visit to the Australian gold fields, has gone through a trial for bigamy, and has been well entertained.
Gifted children are a blessing to society, but they can pose their little challenges along the way. Such a gifted child is Ayala Dormer. Quick and witty, and pretty when she smiles, Ayala receives offers of marriage in rather quick succession from a number of men, eligible and ineligible, and she refuses them all, more than once, for a reason she cannot disclose: she is waiting for the appearance of the Angel of Light, the perfect knight: "How could she make her aunt understand that there could be no place in her heart for Tom Tringle seeing that it was to be kept in reserve for some angel of light who would surely make his appearance in due season,—but who must still be there, present to her as her angel of light, even should he never show himself in the flesh."
In her adherence to this belief she shows herself to be one of Trollope's Constant Heroines, though surely an outlier among the lot. Others remained constant to better men, some being rewarded in this life, some not. But Ayala's adherence is to her own ideal, thus causing a great deal of trouble to those around her, and, I fear, to a number of readers.
This sometimes tedious story is made palatable by Ayala herself, who is as capable of charming the reader as she is of winning the love and loyalty of many of those around her. Her sister's lover Isadore Hamel captures with a vivid simile her bursts of energy, recalling to the reader of Tolstoy the similar sudden rays of sunshine that charmed those who knew Natasha, the heroine of War and Peace:
"I remember her almost as a child, when she would remain perfectly still for a quarter of an hour, and then would be up and about the house everywhere, glancing about like a ray of the sun reflected from a mirror as you move it in your hand."
Ayala and her sister Lucy have been left as senior orphans (a young Victorian woman could not live alone or move about in society unaccompanied) who are taken in by their late mother's brother and sister: one sister to each. Although this becomes a bit complicated when Ayala becomes unsuitable to the aunt who has chosen her and the girls change places, Ayala wins the love of the uncle in each of the two households. In doing so she presents a bit of a problem to each of the aunts—to one because she is a bit poky in assuming the household duties required of a woman in an impecunious household, and to the other because she outshines her aunt's own two daughters.
Providing some relief from Ayala's quest for her angel are the subplots that constitute the comedy of manners in which Trollope excels. These little subplots are so entertaining, why bother with a serious major plot? It takes an uncommonly skillful genius to satisfy the reader with nothing but pies and cakes. Barchester Towers, one of the earlier Trollope novels, came close; it contains only enough serious plot to serve as a scaffolding for the satire of the clerical community of Barchester. And Thackeray's Vanity Fair comes to mind as a long novel of the same period designed to demonstrate what fools mortals be. In Ayala's case, fools disport themselves around her while she is waiting patiently for her knight.
First among these is Tom Tringle, even though the author's sympathy for him tells us that his foolishness is temporary, and he is destined to grow up, though not necessarily within the confines of the present novel. Tom is a hobbledehoy, and one suspects that the author may be recalling his own youth when he reminds us that though a young man and woman may be about the same age, the young woman is often more advanced in her knowledge and understanding of the world and of how to comport herself. Tom suffers from this truth, showing himself to be one who may yet prove himself to be a late bloomer, but too late to be a successful suitor for such a prize as Ayala.
But though women often outshine and outperform the men in their lives, they suffer the restrictions of Victorian society. Living in a later age in which women have won the right to assert themselves more successfully, the differences between men and women still provide the basis for novels, short stories, and drama. Today a woman may knock on the door of a man who does not return her text messages, but men may still be boys while the girls in their lives are women. No Victorian woman novelist knew this better than Anthony Trollope, who described the world as he found it; and the circumstances spoke for themselves.
And here lies the comedy of manners, presented on the stage of the household of Sir Thomas Tringle, a wealthy man of business. Sir Thomas is vexed by his son-in-law Septimus Traffick, a man of birth and a Member of Parliament, but also devoid of fortune or income and sufficiently thick of skin to ignore all Sir Thomas's efforts to dislodge him and his wife Augusta from the Tringle home, whether in town or country.
Augusta, the elder of the two Tringle daughters, is sufficiently haughty to provoke Ayala, in one of the pivotal moments in the story, to ask Augusta to run upstairs and fetch a scrapbook for her. Such effrontery cannot be forgiven. Now more than ever, Augusta often finds it necessary to remind both her family and the poor Ayala that she is married to one of the most important men in the country.
The younger sister pushes herself into the comedy by asserting that she too must be blessed with dowry and husband, and in her sequential pursuit of two ineligible young men, she invites each in his turn to elope with her to Ostend.
The unfortunate Tom Tringle, son and heir to Sir Thomas Tringle, may be the biggest fool of all, betraying himself by his dress as he adorns himself with gaudy jewels and ornate finery when he comes to see Ayala. His offer to fight a duel with his rival Colonel Jonathan Stubbs provides the same mockery of the code of honor as does a similar offer in The Macdermotts of Ballycloran. However, the author finally confesses to the reader that Tom Tringle is the real hero of the novel. His folly is that of youth, and his devotion to his ideal is his redeeming quality. Tom and Ayala share a determination to adhere to the highest standard in pursuit of a mate, and it may be that this youthful idealism and perseverance cause them to be the author's declared hero and heroine.
Another variant of the relation between the sexes appears in the on-again, off-again romance between Frank Houston and Imogene Docimer. Lacking the means to support themselves in the manner to which Frank has become accustomed, they have already broken off an engagement when the reader meets them. Frank, who declares frankly that he has no intention of working for a living, becomes the first of two suitors for the hand of Gertrude Tringle and the handsome dowry she is expected to bring with her. In this suit he finds Gertrude more than willing to accept him and assume the same elevated status of a married lady that her sister has already attained.
Already vexed by the reluctance of his newly acquired son-in-law Septimus Traffick to vacate the premises and establish a home of his own, Sir Thomas refuses to promise any dowry at all to Gertrude if she marries another potential parasite upon his resources. Frank wavers between one young woman (Imogene) who would accept him in spite of his poverty because she loves him, and another young woman (Gertrude) who would accompany him, or almost any Tom, Dick, or Harry, to Ostend, the favored destination of eloping English couples.
Sir Thomas follows the foolishness of the Tringle family with despair. His trenchant observations provide the voice of reason in assessing the motives and machinations of the members of his household who concern themselves with how best to capitalize on the wealth his business affairs have brought them.
The problems of the poor are less farcical. Imogene waits to see what the fates will have in store for her as her true and less than worthy lover pursues the Tringle prize. Ayala's sister Lucy and her poor but proud lover Isadore Hamel push themselves along by fits and starts to their goal of matrimony.
And in the midst of this beehive of activity sits Ayala, stuck on high center in her reluctance to commit herself to any suitor who does not meet her impossible standards. Time after time she refuses a perfectly suitable lover, Colonel Jonathan Stubbs. Here the author repeats for the long-suffering reader her reason:
He was not the Angel of Light,—could never be the Angel of Light. There was nothing there of the azure wing upon which should soar the all but celestial being to whom she could condescend to give herself and her love. He was pleasant, good, friendly, kind-hearted,—all that a friend or a brother should be; but he was not the Angel of Light. She was sure of that.
Friends and family make certain allowances for gifted children, and Ayala's friends and family entertain the reader with scheme after scheme for leading her to the light, if not to her own preconception of her Angel of Light. Angels are in Heaven; men of flesh and blood walk the earth, and it takes Ayala a long time to figure this out. And as she does so, the patient reader is diverted by the folly of those on this earth who are far less than angels.
And finally, another compensation for the reader is the author's indulgence in presenting old favorites from a previous novel, The American Senator, written three years before Ayala's Angel. (Both were products of his later years—The American Senator in 1875 and Ayala's Angel in 1878. Trollope's stroke and his death were in late 1882.) He named Larry Twentyman as the hero of The American Senator in its last pages, but Larry did not win the hand of Mary Masters, who married Reginald Morton. Hopes for a match between Larry and Mary's younger sister Kate are mentioned in the conclusion of that novel, but "Kate is still too young and childish to justify any prediction in that quarter." Larry's modest reward at the end of The American Senator is that Mary gets him to swear that he will be her friend.
But in one of the fox hunting scenes in Ayala's Angel, who should appear as one of the popular habitués of the hunt but Larry Twentyman, married less than a year to Mary's sister Kate. Lord Rufford, "now the happy father of half-a-dozen babies," can no longer jump a fence. Her ladyship is always telling him not to jump over anything he can avoid, and he acknowledges that he does "pretty much what her ladyship tells me." And we are told further, "No doubt she generally was right in any assertion she made as to her husband's affairs."
Trollope took care of his heroes. Had he lived long enough, surely Tom Tringle would have reappeared at a later stage in his life with some of the success that the author predicted for him.
"Cousin Henry is an original novel," Anthony Trollope wrote his publisher, "but it is not for me to say so." I think Trollope's pride in his accomplishment is justified. It's a short novel (280 pages), and it follows with few distractions the thought processes of a weak and indecisive young man who is summoned to his uncle's large estate in Wales and told that since he is the only male descendent, he will inherit it, "unless you show yourself to be unworthy." Henry's cousin Isabel Brodrick has been living with her uncle, and he would prefer to leave it to her, since it is not entailed and he has the right to do so. The uncle soon deems Henry to be unworthy, but the uncle soon dies, and the will leaves the property to Henry. But Henry knows there was a later will changed to leave it all to Isabel. Only he knows where it is. What is he to do? This is what Trollope considered to be his original contribution: he follows the nephew's vacillating attempts to resolve his dilemma so that not only does the author consider his portrayal of these mental agonies to be plausible, he arranges for the family lawyer, Mr. Apjohn, to guess exactly what the young man has thought and what he plans to do.
Does he convince the reader? Yes, I'll accept it. The author holds all the cards, of course, but I find it believable that a young man could be this indecisive. He wants the farm, but he doesn't want to commit a crime to get it and keep it. Everyone knows that Henry is concealing something, and this is perceived through nonverbal communication. The housekeeper and Isabel notice how pale, wan, and spiritless he has become.
Isabel has a suitor, the Reverend William Owen, and they both show themselves to be proud and stubborn lovers similar to such other Trollope couples as Caroline Waddington and George Bertram in The Bertrams. Mr. Owen withdraws his suit when he learns that Isabel is to be an heiress (by an even earlier will) because he considers himself too poor to press his suit on a wealthy woman. Then when Isabel appears to be disinherited, he makes his proposal, but Isabel refuses him because she considers herself so poor that she would drag him into poverty. However, the author has mercy on them. After Henry is found out by the wily Mr. Apjohn, Isabel boldly goes to her lover's house, steps close to him and urges him to kiss her. (Here the reticent Victorian novelist indulges in a bit of sensuality.) Then she tells him that he could never hold his head up again if he should refuse to marry her after "that."
"And I beg, Mr. Owen, that for the future you will come to me, and not make me come to you." This she said as she was taking her leave. "It was very disagreeable, and very wrong, and will be talked about ever so much. Nothing but my determination to have my own way could have made me do it."
Perhaps it would be going too far to say that all Trollope's women outclassed the men, but the women's victories far outnumbered those of the men.
Mr. Apjohn, the Jones family lawyer, believes that Cousin Henry has cheated Isabel out of her inheritance by concealing or destroying the final will, and he bullies Henry into an effort to clear his name in public by bringing suit for libel against the local newspaper, which has taken great interest in the suspicion of tampering with a will. Mr. Apjohn then deprives us of a courtroom drama when he correctly interprets Henry's body language and solves the mystery. But we do encounter the dreaded Mr. Cheekey of the Old Bailey, perhaps a slightly less unscrupulous and unsavory barrister than the infamous Mr. Chaffanbrass of several earlier novels, but one who still "would make his teeth felt worse than any terrier."
Only a glimpse of a vast English country estate is sufficient to make quite clear the importance of inheritance in the English scheme of things. The oldest male heir gets it all. The other sibs get nothing, unless the father or the firstborn son is gracious enough to make some provision for them. Trollope explored variations on this theme in Is He Popenjoy? and Orley Farm, among others. In Cousin Henry, the entire community plays the role of the Greek chorus and condemns the suspected crime. But the tenants of the estate and the servants are all convinced that Cousin Henry is not the true heir. They don‘t like him, and the servants all give notice of resigning their posts. Trollope allows the victorious Mr. Apjohn to summarize his thoughts about primogeniture. Here is the unabridged sermon:
"A man, if an estate belong to himself personally, can do what he likes with it, as he can with half-crowns in his pocket; but where land is concerned, feelings grow up which should not be treated rudely. In one sense Llanfeare belonged to your uncle to do what he liked with it, but in another sense he shared it only with those around him; and when he was induced by a theory which he did not himself quite understand to bring your cousin down among these people, he outraged their best convictions."
"He meant to do his duty, Mr. Apjohn."
"Certainly; but he mistook it. He did not understand the root of that idea of a male heir. The object has been to keep the old family, and the old adherences, and the old acres together. England owes much to the manner in which this has been done, and the custom as to a male heir has availed much in the doing of it. But in this case, in sticking to the custom, he would have lost the spirit, and as far as he was concerned, would have gone against the practice which he wished to perpetuate. There, my dear, is a sermon for you, of which, I dare say, you do not understand a word."
"I understand every syllable of it, Mr. Apjohn," she answered.
One last detail: The landed estate appeared to confer a personal name with it, which took precedence over a wife's using her husband's surname. The legal maneuvers required by this requirement were quite complicated, but after a detailed explanation by Mr. Apjohn, the result was that when Isabel bore William a son, it is reported that "Llanfeare was entailed upon him and his son, and … he was so christened as to have his somewhat grandiloquent name inscribed as William Apjohn Owen Indefer Jones."
There was always some question as to how Mr. Apjohn should be recompensed for his work as Cousin Henry's "advocate." One would guess that he was rewarded in more ways than one. Among other compensations, he is recognized as the genius who solved the mystery in an early example of the psychological crime study, one that manages to hold the reader's interest through speculative passages about how a man's mind may work under certain circumstances.
Although Anthony Trollope traveled to North America five times and wrote a two-volume travel book, North America, about his second trip, only one of his novels, Dr. Wortle's School, includes any scenes on American soil. It's a relatively short book, 199 pages, and only two of its twenty-four chapters are set in the United States. But it's a robust story, emphasizing action over reflection, certainly in the two American chapters.
Dr. Wortle is a clergyman with a parish that occupies relatively little of his time—time mainly devoted to his boarding school that prepares boys for Eton. To this school comes an "usher" (a subordinate or an assistant teacher at a school) who seems for Dr. Wortle's purposes to be too good to be true. And indeed the mystery that surrounds this overqualified teacher, a fellow of Oxford, and his American wife, who seems equally overqualified for cleaning up after unruly school boys, confirms that they bring with them baggage that threatens the continued existence of the school itself. The author unburdens himself of this mystery at the first opportunity, with a lengthy "O kind-hearted reader" paragraph that explains his intention of putting the "horse of my romance before the cart" by revealing the mystery "in the next paragraph—in the next half-dozen words. Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke were not man and wife."
Mr. Peacocke had gone to St. Louis and become Vice-President of the College at Missouri, where he had met Mrs. Ferdinand Lefroy, whose appearance—dark brown complexion, with hair dark and very glossy, "tall for a woman, but without any of that look of length under which female altitude sometimes suffers"—suggests that she must have been a Creole, even though she was the daughter of a Louisiana planter ruined by the Civil War. Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy had gone to Mexico to seek his fortune, was reported to have been killed there, and Mrs. Lefroy had then married Mr. Peacocke. When her supposedly dead husband reappeared and again disappeared, Mr. Peacocke and Mrs. Lefroy went to England as man and wife.
So here is a secret in an unstable state. The Peacockes' behavior is so guarded—they accept no invitations, say nothing of their history—that a secret is suspected, and when Ferdinand Lefroy's brother suddenly appears and attempts to blackmail the Peacockes, the fat is in the fire. Dr. Wortle remains loyal to his faithful usher, but the hounds of gossip are hot on the scent, and a number of students are withdrawn from the school, threatening its viability.
The unkindest cut of all is a paragraph in a London gossip sheet, "Everybody's Business," alluding to Dr. Wortle's visits to Mrs. Peacocke in the absence of her husband, who has gone to America to seek out the truth about the status, living or dead, of Ferdinand Lefroy.
"It must be admitted," said the writer, "that the Doctor has the best of it. While one gentleman is gouging the other—as cannot but be expected—the Doctor will be at any rate in security, enjoying the smiles of beauty under his own fig-tree at Bowick. After a hot morning with "τυπτω" [3] in the school, there will be "amo" in the cool of the evening."