The sentiment of the familiar couplet was exactly applicable to Thomas Anthony Trollope. Except in the possession of the most capable and unselfish wife in the world, and of children all intellectually above the average, and in two instances destined to achieve fame as well as fortune, fate and luck had an undying grudge against him. Part of his little house property had become commercially useless because the title-deeds were lost. At the same time something went wrong with money which, at her marriage, had been settled on Mrs. Trollope.

Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer and Bloomerism did not become household words till 1849. Almost fifty years Mrs. Bloomer’s senior, Robert Owen had acquired in the State of Indiana twenty thousand acres of land for establishing a communistic colony near the Wabash River, known as New Harmony. Miss Frances Wright constituted herself in England at once the missionary of Owen’s socialistic gospel and, by her habit, the anticipatory pioneer of the Bloomer dress. In the Bloomer costume, afterwards a standing subject of pictorial jokes in Punch, she delivered a series of enthusiastic lectures throughout the south of England. By her various proofs of disinterested zeal for the movement, she secured first the interest, then the admiration and friendship, of the lady who presided over the Trollope ménage successively in London and at Harrow, and whose natural sympathies always impelled her towards whatever novelty might excite popular laughter and opposition. The short tunic, the wide sash round the waist, the full trousers gathered in at the ankles, and the broad-brimmed straw hat, generally held in the hand, all proclaiming the presence of the earliest lady lecturer from the new world, were soon familiar beneath the Trollope roof. They imprinted themselves indelibly on the young Anthony’s mind. About the same time he made some other useful or interesting acquaintances of a cosmopolitan sort. Chief amongst these was the French republican soldier, General Lafayette, who had fought in the United States army against the English. The Trollope family’s experiences, whenever and wherever gathered, formed a common stock on which all might and did draw as they chose for conversational or literary use. In his parents’ earlier continental trips Henry was the son usually taken, Anthony being left behind to the tender mercies of his brother Tom, and his school work at Winchester. Afterwards, however, Anthony found himself compensated for missing his share in these earlier excursions by a quick succession, in a few years, of more pleasure trips abroad than a lifetime brings to most English boys.

For the moment, however, the effect of Miss Wright’s visits to Julians or to the other Harrow abodes was to fill Thomas Anthony Trollope with dreams of regaining in the new world what he had lost in the old; and the rest of that clever but self-deluded good man’s record really suggests an exaggerated version, from which Dickens’s genius shrank, of the money-making experiments resorted to by Wilkins Micawber. America was a young country, just acquiring a taste for the prettinesses and elegancies of life. A bazaar or store for fancy goods, not of course in New York, but at some provincial capital like Cincinnati, might prove a success. The premises might also include a room to be used for lectures or fine art exhibitions; if the latter, the French artist, Auguste Hervieu, had long been an intimate of the Trollope household, and might render valuable service. As a fact, the accomplished and amiable Gaul had already been induced by Miss Wright to establish himself on American soil. Nashoba, however, whither he had been directed, disappointed him; he was now free to place himself entirely at the disposition of Mrs. Trollope and the son, Henry, who had accompanied her. Commercially, the transatlantic trip miscarried not less signally than everything else to which Anthony Trollope’s father put his hand. At the same time it turned his wife into a highly popular author, and created in her third son, then a lad of seventeen, a determination to imitate the maternal performance. The United States experience also provided a theme for her earliest essay at recovering with her pen the prosperity that had been blighted by her husband’s evil star. Even in some of the later fiction that proved the chief gold-mine, Frances Trollope brought in her American experiences. These, however, long before that, had formed the exclusive subject of the book on which alone her earliest reputation rested. Domestic Manners of the Americans had been roughed out in a first draft before her return voyage to England was at an end.

By this time, her husband’s embarrassments had reached the desperate stage. In 1834 came the final crash. Mrs. Trollope now divided her time between the direction of her home and the preparation of the book which was to support it. Her husband occupied himself with his pen to less profitable account. Even the pretence of farming had been well-nigh given up. Early one morning in the March of 1834, young Anthony, then a Harrow boy of nineteen in his last half, was told to drive his father to London in the gig, which up to that time had been retained. To the boy’s surprise, the point to be made for was not the more or less familiar legal quarter, but St. Katherine’s Docks. Here the father disappeared into a vessel bound for Antwerp; the lad regained the cottage at Harrow, to find it in the bailiffs’ hands. The landlord, Lord Northwick, had in fact put in an execution. The Trollopes, however, had made substantial and loyal friends in the Harrow district. To know Mrs. Trollope was to admire her courageous activity under calamities, crushing or paralysing in their character and degree. When her own roof-tree had been rooted up, offers of hospitality poured in from every side. Still the eventual necessity of securing a home remained. The father of the family had found the conventional ambulatory solution of the difficulty, and, giving his creditors the security of “leg-bail,” had fled, as we have seen, across the Channel. For the present their settlement was Bruges, a house called the Château D’Hondt, just outside St. Catharine Gate. Here the father recedes into the background. The central figure of the whole Belgian episode is his wife, who during these years left the impress of her own personality, moral and intellectual, in characters so distinct upon her son that her example decided for him what was to be his life’s business. Her pen formed the staff on which the whole family leaned, and alone supported the roof which sheltered them. Her husband’s days were visibly numbered. Lung disease of a hopeless kind had set in with her son Henry and her daughter Emily. Always nursing her invalids, she never failed to produce her daily tale of “copy” for the printer.

At the time of her husband’s death in 1835 she was busy at, and soon after published, her work on Paris and the French. The vivacity and truth of this volume made it a success within a few weeks of its coming out. It was not till some years later, when her son Anthony, preparing at the time for authorship, directed attention to it, that its chapter devoted to George Sand was discovered to be the best thing of its kind that had yet come from an English pen. Mrs. Trollope’s books, beginning with Domestic Manners of the Americans in 1832 and, twenty-four years later, ending with Fashionable Life, were mostly written in the intervals of nursing, feeding, and in all ways caring for husband and children smitten with a mortal disease. So far as they influenced her third son, they will be reverted to in these pages. Mrs. Trollope was a well-born, well-bred, well-connected, delicately nurtured as well as exemplary woman. Her father, William Milton, the Heckfield clergyman, had gone to the ancient and honourable stock of Gresleys for his bride. The daughter of this marriage, Frances, had from her childhood lived in the best society, metropolitan or provincial, during its most exclusive periods. Her wealthier relatives and acquaintances never allowed their connection with her to drop. Hence the opportunities which, quite as much as those given by his paternal relationships, introduced Anthony Trollope himself, as a young man, to the most desirable houses of his day.

Meanwhile the elder Trollope’s death had been preceded by a crisis in the life of his third son. Thirteen years before the date now reached, his parents’ settlement at Harrow had naturally caused him to be sent as a day-boy to the great school, then in the ground-swell left by domestic disturbances which, though they had occurred so long since as almost to be forgotten, projected some demoralising influence upon a generation yet to come. In 1805, Joseph Drury retired from the headmastership. George Butler was elected his successor by Archbishop Manners-Sutton’s casting-vote, against Mark Drury, the local favourite. The poet Byron, then a boy at the school and a monitor, led a rebellion against the new Head. Other disturbances and barrings-out followed. Twelve years before Anthony’s entrance there had happened events not favourable to the position of day-boys at the school. The Harrow parishioners in 1810 petitioned Chancery for the restriction of the school to local residents, chiefly, of course, shopkeepers. The counsel employed by the school bore a name, Fladgate, which, in connection with the Garrick Club, was to be well known by Anthony Trollope in later years. The whole episode, being much talked about at the time, had the effect of familiarising Trollope, while a boy, with the old school of lawyers, figuring so frequently in his novels. Sir William Grant, as Master of the Rolls, thought the boarders so essential to the school’s prestige and prosperity, that he would not sanction any limitation of their number. He risked, however, offending the masters by insisting on fresh guarantees as regards day-boys for the rights of residence. “The controversy,” said Trollope to the present writer, “had the effect of adding a fresh sting to my position as a day-boy. The masters snubbed me more than ever because I was one of the class which had brought about legal interference with their vested interests. The young aristocrats, who lived sumptuously in the masters’ houses, treated me like a pariah.”

At the same time the tenant of Julians Farm supplemented the supervision of the boy’s home-lessons with Spartan severity of physical discipline, at least one box on the ear for every false quantity in a Latin line. Nor was there any gilding of the pill with pocket-money, books, or even proper clothes. Harrow had then a larger percentage of exceedingly rich men’s sons among its boys than either Eton or Winchester. Anthony’s appearance may often have been against him; but the public opinion of the place, if not at first, would in the long run have declared itself against persecuting a boy who was not a fool, who knew the use of his fists, and against whom the worst that could be said was that he came from a poor home. He was, however, as throughout life he remained, morbidly sensitive. “My mother,” he said to me in the year of his death, “was much from home or too busy to be bothered. My father was not exactly the man to invite confidence. I tried to relieve myself by confiding my boyish sorrows to a diary that I have kept since the age of twelve, which I have just destroyed, and which, on referring to it for my autobiography some time since, I found full of a heart-sick, friendless little chap’s exaggerations of his woes.”

In all great schools sets are inevitable, and disappointments, heartburnings, and jealousies at real or imaginary exclusions are rife. Trollope, however, showed himself capable of holding his own, both in the schoolroom and in the playground. Judge Baylis, his contemporary, admits that home boarders were often bullied and pursued with stones, but emphatically testifies that Trollope, being big and powerful, got off easily; he once, it seems, fought a boy named Lewis for nearly an hour, punishing his adversary so heavily that he had to go home. Of course it was, as at every big English school of the time, a rough and occasionally a brutal life, enlivened with such customs as “rolling-in,” “tossing,” and “jack-o’-lantern”; this last was put down by Longley, who followed Butler as headmaster during Trollope’s time. The education was exclusively Latin and Greek, as it was everywhere else. But at home Anthony Trollope received a thorough grounding in modern languages, especially French and Italian, from his accomplished mother, and was noticed by his contemporary Sydney Herbert as a boy full of general knowledge. At a private school kept by one of the Harrow Drurys near Sunbury, some of the time coming between his two Harrow periods was sandwiched in with really good results. Among his Harrow friends other than Herbert were the three Merivales: John, afterwards Registrar in the Court of Chancery, Herman, the permanent Colonial Under-Secretary, and Charles, the Roman historian, who, as Archdeacon of Ely, remained Trollope’s friend through life, and whom I have met at dinner at his house in Montagu Square.

His father’s ambition to get Anthony, like his brothers Thomas and Henry, into Winchester was fulfilled in 1827, when Anthony had for his fellow-Wykehamists, amongst others, Roundell Palmer, Robert Lowe, and Cardwell. The three years of St. Mary Winton were followed in 1830 by another Harrow spell of three or four. After that Anthony Trollope, like the rest of his family, remained a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and homeless until his parents gained a resting-place at Bruges. Disraeli’s Young Englanders in Coningsby, despairing of a career in England, are about to join the Austrian service. Young Anthony Trollope, if not from any Disraelian motive, seriously determined to do the same thing. Subject to an examination in European languages, he contrived to secure the promise of a cavalry commission in the Austrian army. To place himself in the way of picking up the necessary acquaintance with continental tongues, he became for a few weeks an usher in a Belgian school. From that slavery he was delivered by the unexpected opening of the employment that was to make him first a useful member of society, and then a distinguished and a successful man.

In A Publisher and His Friends, the second John Murray, at Mrs. Trollope’s request, is said to have obtained for her third son the Post Office clerkship which took him back in 1834 from Bruges to London. Other influences, however, co-operated in the same direction as those of Albemarle Street. Among Mrs. Trollope’s wide, varied, and influential acquaintance was Mrs. Clayton Freeling, daughter-in-law of the then chief secretary at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Sir Francis Freeling. That lady overflowed with admiration of the splendid struggle made by her friend to keep her home together and secure a future for her boys. Sir Henry Holland, the great physician of the time, a man whose word on any subject went for much in official and political circles, had already helped the future Sir Henry Taylor to a career in the Colonial Office; he had also, as one gathers from his autobiography, been looking out for a chance of doing the Trollopes a good turn. Any one of these agencies would have been enough in young Anthony Trollope’s case. Their combination in his favour gave him the additional advantage of reminding the heads of the department he entered that he possessed powerful friends in high places. His family connections stood him also in good stead. So, said Mrs. Freeling, they ought to do, especially with the Postmaster-General; for had not young Anthony’s kinsman, Admiral Sir Henry Trollope, Sir Thomas Trollope’s grand-nephew, not only rendered his country heroic service at sea in the French wars, but also won special fame and promotion as a sort of amateur postman by carrying despatches from the chief commander of the fleet abroad to the Government in London—particularly in 1781, during the whole episode of Gibraltar’s release by Admiral Rodney. Sixteen years later he secured fresh distinction in suppressing the mutiny at the Nore. For reward a peerage and the capital to support it would not have been excessive. As it was, he only received such a pension as enabled him to lead a country gentleman’s life in Herefordshire. The utmost therefore, urged Mrs. Freeling, that the Whigs then in power could do for her friend’s boy would be only an instalment towards paying the arrears of the public debt due for Admiral Trollope’s tact, presence of mind, and naval eminence. Finally, protested this indefatigable lady, the Whigs owed some reparation for their breach of faith towards her protégé’s father.

Thomas Anthony Trollope had indeed been actually promised a London police-magistrateship by Lord Melbourne, who wriggled out of his engagement under some backstairs pressure. Their reverses therefore had not robbed the Trollope family of “friends at Court.” Young Anthony, in fact, belonged by birth and connection to the governing classes. He might well have aspired to a higher branch in the Civil Service. During the Victorian era another man of letters, more brilliant perhaps but less famous afterwards than Trollope became, Grenville Murray, was given a position in the Foreign Office without satisfying any severer test of fitness than was done by Trollope when he began work at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. From one point of view what he had picked up at Harrow and Winchester formed the least remunerative part of his equipment. As a public school boy he had learned to look after himself, let people see he was a gentleman, intended to be treated as one, and to adapt himself to circumstances. As much classics as either school gave him he might have acquired in his father’s study, if the teacher and the scholar had not come to open war before the course was over. As it was, Thomas Anthony Trollope, almost as soon as his son could hold a pen, taught him the points to be aimed at in letter-writing—clearness, conciseness, abstinence from the repetition of words or ideas, and the non-introduction of any unnecessary or irrelevant matter. At the same time he instructed him by example in the theory and practice of précis writing. This formed the morning’s educational routine in the Harrow home. After tea came the mother’s turn. Mrs. Trollope was a far more cultivated woman than might be supposed from her books. Proud, as well as fond, of all her boys, she taught them of an evening enough French, German, and Italian to speak and write these languages correctly, as well as understand them when spoken, without difficulty, and converse in them with ease.

“As for my father,” once said Trollope, “while the soul of honour and unselfishness, after he gave up the Bar he showed a want of ballast, a fickleness, and an inability to make both ends meet, really reminding one of Micawber in David Copperfield.” Trollope’s own apprenticeship to work for his livelihood came some years later than it had done to Dickens. Years after the establishment of his literary fame, Trollope adopted the habit of interspersing his stories with touches as really autobiographical as anything in David Copperfield. He had not long exchanged the Harrow home for continental wandering, when his efforts to support himself began. These took an educational direction. His eldest brother eventually became, under Dr. Jeune, a master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. To that height Anthony did not aspire, and was satisfied, till some other employment came, if he could cease to be a burden to his mother, by giving English lessons to small boys in a Belgian school.

CHAPTER II

THE NOVELIST AND THE OFFICIAL IN THE MAKING

WITH his junior clerkship at the Post Office in 1834, Anthony Trollope’s working life begins; now also commences his conscious preparation for the literary labours that, seriously entered on a few years later, were only to cease when death took the pen from his hand. The atmosphere of the department which he was to serve for thirty years had in it much calculated to stimulate the energies and even excite the imagination of the new-comer. Till 1829 the postal headquarters had been, amongst other places, at a house once belonging to Sir Robert Vyner in Lombard Street. The St. Martin’s-le-Grand building had therefore been occupied just five years when Anthony Trollope entered upon his Post Office experiences. The early thirties were a season of great activity, of novel and awakening enterprise at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Sir Francis Freeling, supported, as chief secretary, by the Postmaster-General, the Duke of Richmond, aimed at nothing less than reorganising the entire service. Within a short time there were introduced thirty-nine specific reforms. These dealt with the conveyance of letters by sea as well as land. The whole system of mail-packets, when thus entirely recast, gradually made deliveries from foreign parts as safe as those within the United Kingdom. The steam-locomotive had just opened a rivalry with the horse-drawn car which few people believed would at an early day achieve complete success. As a fact, it was not till 1854 that Anthony Trollope saw the Mail-Coach Office department become obsolete in the vocabulary of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.

The youth of nineteen, who after the fashion already described now became a Government servant, with his boyish readiness for rebellion against any constraints on his liberty, of course fretted at times against his occupation. From his mother, however, he had inherited the imaginative faculty which was to do more than make him a novelist. It had indeed already given him some feeling of the national and imperial services that might be rendered by the department to whose staff he belonged. “Why,” he asked himself, “should not that great achievement be sensibly promoted by my individual efforts?” The new ambition, however, did not at once save him from trouble for unpunctuality and for scamping his work. Still, he gradually became conscious of associations with the national life and movement which ennobled even a junior clerk’s daily drudgery. A romantic instinct had already invested the whole system which gave him employment with a poetry of its own. Looking back, he saw the opportunities for letter communication first considered and long remaining an exclusively royal privilege. The lads with whom he was thrown counted for lost every odd half-hour not spent in drinking, smoking, and card-playing. Like them, he saw only his natural enemies in blue-books and official documents of every kind. But one day, when there were no high-jinks with his brother clerks, he lighted upon, and out of curiosity dipped into a heap of musty records, which told him how, throughout the Tudor period, the Master of the Posts was as entirely a Court official as the king’s fool. The maintenance of post-horses out of public taxes only gave loyal subjects the satisfaction of knowing that they effectually contributed to their sovereign lord’s conveniences and comforts. “As I pieced these fragments together into a continuous story, I found myself,” Anthony Trollope would say, “not for the first time, but more unmistakably than I had ever felt before, realising that a Post Office servant’s career might be one of profit to himself as well as of usefulness to his fellow-creatures in all their concerns and interests, whether as citizens or as family breadwinners. From what I saw had been done in the past, I mentally constructed a scheme of possibilities for the future.” Not till the seventeenth century, as Anthony Trollope saw, did the Post Office even attempt to secure, for all the king’s tax-paying subjects, speed and certainty in their communications with each other, both inland and overseas. Every step forward covered a very little distance; without painfully sustained caution and vigilance, there was the risk or rather certainty of relapse. As a fact, after that no inch advanced ever had to be retraced.

For half a dozen years young Trollope had to be at St. Martin’s-le-Grand daily from ten to six. During that time, the irregularities of postal deliveries throughout the United Kingdom steadily diminished, and the Post Office clerk in whom we are interested recognised that there was good and even great work to be done in his branch of the public service. He decided that all the snubs and reprimands with which, justly or unjustly, he might be visited, should not cow him into incapacity for doing his part. Not that the Anthony Trollope of fact, as distinguished from him of fiction, can ever have been in more danger of finding his energies trampled out by autocratic or plain-spoken officialism in London than at an earlier period by schoolmasters or schoolfellows at Harrow. At St. Martin’s-le-Grand, however, during the years which preceded his Irish appointment in 1841, he was unquestionably, by all who were set over him, looked upon as one of the State’s bad bargains. Sir Francis Freeling’s successor in the chief secretaryship was Colonel Maberly. Maberly in due course was followed by Rowland Hill, not in the order of official promotion, but under the urgent pressure of public opinion. Who, from all sides came the question, but the master-mind that had invented penny postage was equal to supervising and directing the official arrangements by which his own great reforms were to be carried out? With both Maberly and Hill, Trollope at different periods was on terms not merely of disaffection, or even of veiled rebellion, but of open war. Between 1834 and 1841, after Freeling’s retirement, he seemed to his new chief, Maberly, an ill-conditioned youth, always in scrapes. From 1854-64 it was one long duel between the outsider, Secretary Hill, and Trollope as champion of the department’s old exclusive officialism.

Throughout the Maberly period, Trollope lacked the two conditions for doing himself justice—a reasonably sympathetic superior, and anything like home comforts. The privations of lodging-house life, and the snubs of those in authority over him at the Post Office, produced in him a chronic, brooding discontent, which left him without wish or power to show what he had it in him to become. Naturally ambitious, and with a nervous longing for the good opinion of his fellow-creatures, he no sooner found himself balked in gratifying these two master passions than, hopeless of any change for the better, he sank into a lethargy of disgust, not more with his position than with himself. As a boy he began to keep a diary in the hope of relieving a constitutional melancholy, almost paralysing his moral and mental power. The daily entries, however, yielded him none of the consolation he had expected. The continual introspection incidental to the task only produced depressing and unwholesome effects. His one real solace was the habit of private study that he never lost through life. The Harrow and Winchester school-books had not been dispersed in the wreck of his home, but were carried about with him wherever he went. His Latin rudiments at least he had learned thoroughly at school or at home. Great was his happiness one day during 1840 in discovering that he could read Horace and Cicero in the original, not as task work, but with pleasure as literature.

Then there were the English writers, a taste for whom his mother had not so much encouraged in her son as created. Of the old Elizabethan classics, Spenser had become his favourite. From Fielding onwards, he spent long evenings in his lodgings over the makers of English prose fiction, making notes while he read as if he had been taking them up for an examination. Jane Austen, however, gave him more pleasure than all her predecessors put together. Very early in his Post Office days, he came to the conclusion that Pride and Prejudice pleased him better than any other fiction he had ever read, was not perhaps so great a work as Ivanhoe, but was immeasurably above Tom Jones. Considered therefore as an intellectual and literary seed-time, quite apart from the business habits they helped to form, Trollope’s early Post Office years were very far from being misspent. Throughout life it was Trollope’s tendency to ponder a petty vexation or trivial crossing of his own will till it became a grievance. Of harsh experiences his youth had a full share. The embittering official relations with Maberly first, with Rowland Hill afterwards, and the hardship of an ill-kept and cheerless Marylebone lodging, were the sequel to a stern preparatory training, whether at school or home. Yet no one more indignantly than Trollope himself would have resented the suggestion of his spirit having been in any way broken by the paternal boxes on the ear over his Latin syntax, by his Winchester flagellations, or afterwards by his daily Post Office reprimands and rows.

Dwelling on the bright rather than the dark places of his early retrospect, he had, at the age of nineteen, entered the Civil Service, not unprepared to do the work expected of him, but also bent upon tasting all those enjoyments which his school friends had found in London life, and to which domestic poverty or severity had so far made him almost a stranger. Some reminiscences of the London Trollope knew in the thirties, though qualified by many modernising touches, may be found in the pictures of City life given in The Three Clerks. The life as a Post Office clerk he was free to lead was never better described than by Aytoun and Martin:

The existence which thus had the authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads for its laureates found its prose historian in Albert Smith, who, from the doings of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen in Pickwick, drew the inspiration which produced the Medical Student, the Gent, and various other treatises on the fast life of the shabby-genteel. These were once accepted as manuals of fashion; they still serve to illustrate the difference between then and now. The side streets of the West End were throughout the thirties honeycombed with gambling-houses. The larger thoroughfares were ablaze with “free-and-easys” or dancing saloons. It was the dull, heavy, coarse, debauched London, which had not then at any point given place to the bright and amusing London, that Trollope lived to see. Of this chiefly pre-Victorian, gin-and-bitters-drinking capital, the most characteristic features are sketched from life in The Three Clerks. Touches of it are not wanting to his other stories, and may be seen at one or two points in the passages between John Eames and his landlady’s daughter in The Small House at Allington.

Anthony Trollope, during his early Post Office years, might excuse himself for falling into his own Charlie Tudor’s Bohemian ways on the plea of isolation from the domestic life of his social equals, and the coldness of his own kith and kin. For that solitude no one was to blame but himself. He was shy, proud, rather awkward after the fashion of callow youths, and in his out-of-office hours apt to show an irritable impatience of all conventional restraints. In after years he deplored that as a youth he had avoided the humanising influence of intercourse with refined women. The drawing-rooms and tea-tables of his lady relatives belonging to the Lincolnshire baronet’s branch were open to him; he shunned them all, some for one reason, some for another. Mrs. Clayton Freeling, his earliest benefactress, would have always welcomed him beneath her roof; he seldom or never came. She wrote letters to him of entreaty that, for his brave and clever mother’s sake, he would make the best of the opening she had helped to secure him. Her social circle was agreeable and wide; within its circumference he had only to choose eligible acquaintances. His early Belgian experiences had gained him some lifelong friends; one or two tours with his parents in Germany, as well as the many good wishers, won by his father and mother when Lafayette’s guests at La Grange, might, had he cared for it, have opened for him a wide, varied, and genuinely agreeable visiting-list. As a fact, not till he had reached middle age and fame did he really care for society. Had this taste come earlier, the kinsfolk of his own name were a host in themselves.

The whole Trollope clan, with their innumerable outlying connections—Gresleys, Hellicars, and Meetkerkes—had all in 1809 welcomed the Trollope-Milton marriage, to which he owed his existence. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s wife had no sooner achieved success with her pen than her countless kinsfolk rallied round her, while John Forster’s and Sir Henry Taylor’s ever helpful interest survived the long series of her husband’s reverses.[2] Before the settlement of Anthony Trollope’s parents in Keppel Street, Sir John and Lady Trollope had been at great pains to find out a suitable and really useful present for the occasion. They were only consoled for their absence from the wedding by an early prospect of making their new cousin’s (the bride’s) acquaintance, and in seeing a very great deal of them both, perhaps in due time of others, in town. Afterwards, when the tide had turned against him, even in the darkest hour of his misfortunes, his relatives of the titled branch had stood by Anthony Trollope’s father. The family seat in Lincolnshire, Casewick, was still open to him during his worst troubles, and his wife describes their visits there as the bright spots in their lives. Many others of the Trollope family were scattered through the Midlands. The laymen of the family had in some cases risen to consideration during the Middle Ages, and contracted alliances with countless stocks at least as good as themselves. Amongst those connections were some Dutch immigrants named Meetkerke. A Miss Penelope Meetkerke, by her marriage with the Rector of Cottery St. Mary, Herts, had become Anthony Trollope’s grandmother, and had left posterity which, if soon becoming extinct, in Anthony Trollope’s youth flourished sufficiently to provide him with a welcome beneath many comfortable roofs.

But all this time Anthony Trollope’s mother was not only, as she had always been, his wisest counsellor and best friend, but the one influence that, continuing to form and furnish his mind, necessarily shaped his career. Returning to England after her husband’s death at Bruges in 1835, she had created a new mode of industry for herself and domestic centre for those she loved at Hadley, near Barnet. Anthony Trollope had the satisfaction of seeing a favourite sister, Cecilia, become the wife of a Civil Service official, afterwards Sir John Tilley, and comfortably settled in Cumberland, whence she lavished invitations on her brother. Frances Trollope, too, at her various settlements, abroad even more than at home, had it within her reach to bring many little pleasures into his existence. At Hadley he passed some nights every week in the bedroom always kept in readiness for him, and on several occasions there were for him excursions to Paris, where his mother long pitched her tent. In the home surroundings, Anthony’s intellectual promise had shown itself neither so brightly nor so soon as had been the case with his eldest brother Tom, or his sister Cecilia. His mother, however, at no time doubted in her heart that he would eventually become the household’s bright particular star. She had noticed the daily entries in his childish journal, regularly kept but carefully guarded because at Winchester some of its records had brought down upon the writer the furious application of a cricket-stump by Tom. Again, almost so soon as he could hold a pen, Anthony took to describing imaginary situations in which he placed himself, explaining and justifying his conduct in those fictitious circumstances. Frances Trollope not only thought this good practice for an infant novelist; she gradually led on her boy to discuss the details he depicted in their effect upon characters other than his own. This, if the most useful and instructive, formed the least stimulating part of her son’s training for that literary walk she had made her own. In the Harrow days The Magpie formed the manuscript exhibition of the family talent, supplemented by a few outsiders, Drurys and Grants. Here Anthony at first had seemed to lag behind the other contributors. He soon picked up, and had the satisfaction of finding his little contributions in prose and verse generally given a place. It was not, however, these boyish essays, but the regular appearance at short intervals of his mother’s publications, which sealed young Anthony’s resolution to make authorship the chief business of his life.

It will not be difficult, when the proper place for doing so is reached, to find in Frances Trollope’s volumes the germs from which grew some of Anthony Trollope’s novels. Especially in the case of the clerical novels that first brought him fame, the son’s fidelity to the maternal example stands revealed. As a clergyman’s daughter, Frances Trollope in her earliest days had seen more of parsonage life than, at a corresponding period, was the experience of her son. None of her books created such a stir as The Vicar of Wrexhill, which fluttered the dovecots of evangelicalism in 1837, just eighteen years before her son made his earliest hit with The Warden. That story presented no occasion for its display; but those which came after showed pretty clearly that their author had inherited some at least of his clever parent’s antipathy to evangelical modes of conversation and temper. Not that Frances Trollope, in the other schools of religious or moral thought then more or less active, found her ideas better represented than by the evangelicals themselves. She regarded as worthless for any practical influence upon daily conduct the godless ethics incorporated into the educational systems of Richard Edgeworth and of Thomas Day. On the other hand, she never found the slightest spiritual attraction in the High Anglican novelists with a purpose, represented at first by Elizabeth Sewell, and afterwards by Charlotte Yonge.

The personages and incidents described in The Vicar of Wrexhill may or may not have included the Harrow clergyman, J. W. Cunningham. The more carefully wrought accounts of mental distress, aggravated by Calvinistic treatment, were a transcript of the ordeal through which her friend Henrietta Skerrett had passed. Subsequently she had misgivings lest her caricature might have gone too far, and showed some anxiety in admonishing her children to remember that, while in matters of religion, as of daily life, all excess must have its dangers, some good might surely be found in every form of faith honestly held. She had, she said, been brought up a Church of England woman. On the same lines she honestly tried to train her children, putting them through their Church catechism, collect, epistle, and gospel every Sunday, and seriously begging them to remember that once they began by being unbelievers, they would probably end with becoming Whigs or even Radicals. Meanwhile it was one of the detested Whigs, Sydney Smith himself, who was advertising the novelist and delighting all those for whom she laboured by quoting The Vicar of Wrexhill in his letter to Lord John Russell.

The evangelicals at that time were notorious for an officious and pushing activity which made them interfere the more energetically where they were the least welcome, and which secured for them, it was said, far more than their due share of the good things in the Church. Hence the great and immediate success of Mrs. Trollope’s satire upon Low Churchmanship, more particularly in its social or secular aspects. It at once had the effect of deepening popular interest in the author, and gave her a place among the celebrities of the season. Incidentally this novel produced two other results. In the first place, so far as he ever gave such matters a thought, it imbued Anthony Trollope with his earliest prejudices against evangelicalism. Secondly, it reflected attention on its writer’s earlier works. Thus the critics were set upon discovering merits they had at first missed in Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, issued a twelvemonth earlier. This was altogether a stronger composition than others of the series, which had by this time given their author a high place among the literary favourites of the period. Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw appeared about half a generation in advance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; to that book it is without any resemblance in spirit or treatment. It had, however, the undoubted effect of recruiting fresh popular forces to the side of the movement already started against slavery.

His mother’s dauntless industry furnished Anthony Trollope with an inspiration which was to last throughout his life. With it there also came shrewd and sensible advice. The boy had an idea that, after the manner of one of his own Three Clerks, he might have increased his pocket-money without any fresh draft on the family exchequer by newspaper scribbling. Frances Trollope would not hear of it. “You left school,” she said, “sooner than you ought to have done, or than we once expected there would be any need for you to do. Make good the dropped stitches of your own education before you take upon yourself to teach or to amuse others in print. Remember the time for reading is now. Reading you must have, not so much because of what it will tell you as because it will teach you how to observe, and supply you with mental pegs on which to hang what you pick up about traits and motives of your fellow-creatures.” “We Trollopes,” was the burden of this lady’s wise counsels, “are far too much given to pen and ink as it is without your turning scribbler when you might do something better. Harrow and Winchester will stand you in good stead at the Post Office; make St. Martin’s-le-Grand the instrument that will open the oyster of the world. Imitate my particular industry as much as you like, only do not let the publishers break your heart by treating its products as their playthings.” Anthony may have seen the wisdom of the advice; never for a moment did he abandon his deeply formed and silently cherished designs of literary fame. His brother Henry had been preferred before him by the home circle to conduct the already mentioned Magpie. Very good. The race of life should no sooner begin in earnest than he would run that relative off his legs, and make all who bore the Trollope name proud of it for his sake. In 1840, too, his brother Tom had made so successful a dash into print with A Summer in Western France, that even his cautious mother thought he might look forward to giving up his Birmingham mastership. About this time, too, Charles Dickens, then at the height of his Pickwick fame, and long Mrs. Trollope’s friend, introduced himself to the household. This, of course, had the effect of deepening Anthony’s self-dedication to the novelist’s calling. From the very first, whether at home, school, or at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the attempt by entreaty or argument to shake a purpose or conviction once formed aroused his instinct of pugnacity, as well as of contradiction.

The scenes and figures with which Frances Trollope filled her countless canvases were so diversified that they could not but include many types of character and place which her son afterwards made his own. To the goodwill of her critics and of the literary rank and file Frances Trollope was indifferent. Such a discipline as she had gone through developed the sterner rather than the gentler qualities of womanhood. Adversity and bereavement had pointed her pen with a sarcastic sharpness, inherited only in a very moderate degree by her son, as much above her in humour as he is below her in satire. Of that Mrs. Trollope showed herself aware, when during the last eight years of her life, having read The Warden, she impressed on her son the wisdom of working the peculiar vein of narrative comedy it disclosed. “Of this,” she said, “you owe nothing to me, and as yet I have observed nothing like it in others of your period.” Mrs. Trollope’s comedy of the sort that best suited the taste of the thirties and early forties is seen at its best in The Widow Barnaby, The Widow Married, The Widow Wedded, Hargrave, the Man of Fashion, The Lottery of Marriage, and in Petticoat Government, to name only a few out of many. Of the group now mentioned, the earliest, The Widow Barnaby, with its sketches of Bath and Cheltenham ball-rooms, and of the conquests which the eminently marriageable aunt set her niece an example of making, gave Anthony Trollope some crude hints on which he greatly improved for Mrs. Greenow’s adventures in Can You Forgive Her? Mrs. Trollope’s novels further resembled her son’s after 1855 in being none of them failures; most of them indeed proved successively, in their way, little goldmines. Family reminiscences, especially of a literary kind, were not in Anthony Trollope’s way. Admiration of his mother’s heroic performances with her pen in the way of bread-winning was unmixed with any admission of having himself profited, either in his work, or in his relations with his readers or with the publishers, from her gifts or from her reputation. “She kept us all,” he would say, “from homelessness and want. As regards myself,” he continued, “my special debt to her was that, but for the ‘open sesame’ which my sonship to her gave me, I should have had to wait much longer than I did for my initiation into life and society upon all those levels which it is part of a novelist’s stock-in-trade to know.”

Throughout the years following her husband’s death, Mrs. Trollope’s literary biography was less of a personal record than a family chronicle. Her industrial prosperity did not entirely exempt her from occasional buffetings with publishers and editors. Such anxieties she talked over with her favourite third son. A good while, therefore, in advance of his turning author on his own account, Anthony Trollope had seen something of the storms and cares which agitate the novelist’s course. He only accompanied his mother once or twice to the great houses which opened their doors for her reception at Paris. But she no sooner returned than she confided to the lad whatever she had seen and heard during his absence. In this way, while still working himself up through junior positions at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Anthony Trollope received animated accounts from his mother of her Paris experiences. Amongst these was her presentation at the Palace of Louis Philippe and his Queen. On that occasion, Mrs. Trollope’s keen speech and ready wit, according to a family tradition not perhaps entirely substantiated, inspired her with an epigram in the same vein as Lady Blessington’s well-known witticism at the expense of Napoleon III.[3] Admiring Domestic Manners of the Americans, the French king, who himself in 1796 had found a refuge beyond the Atlantic, smilingly asked Mrs. Trollope whether she would like to revisit the United States. “I longed,” was her comment, “to return the question to him.” Her son told the present writer she actually did so. The most valuable and interesting result to Anthony himself of his mother’s frequent domicile and great popularity abroad was an insight into all the great salons, with their ornaments, of the time. Madame Récamier and Madame Mohl, as yet only Miss Clarke, were among the most distinguished of these ladies. The connection between the brightest as well as generally the best society of London and Paris was even closer under the Orleanist monarchy than that between the fastness or smartness of the two capitals became under the third Empire or has ever been since then. The future Lord Lytton and his brother, Sir Henry Bulwer, were both noticed by young Trollope in this company, where the most commanding figure was, however, universally recognised in the tall, well-proportioned form with the handsome face, and its bright but grave expression, of Sir Henry Taylor. The cosmopolitan coteries of which his mother’s name sufficed to make her son free were more miscellaneously representative than any other social assemblies of the time.

Friction against all sorts of odd people in the business of making a livelihood out of her pen had not left Frances Trollope without the pride of order and lineage becoming a daughter of the ancient Gresley stock. That spirit she wished to remain in the family. Not, therefore, without some misgivings did she see the mixed society of the time open its doors to her sons. She was equally ready to satirise the polite systems of Paris and Vienna. She enjoyed, however, both capitals in their way. As for the French metropolis, it ought of course to be under a legitimist sovereign. Failing, however, a Bourbon of the older branch, she could manage to do with the bourgeois Court of Louis Philippe. With respect to her boys, they had, she thanked Providence, enough of the Trollope and Milton pride to keep them proof against contracting any democratic taint of ideas or of demeanour. She had at first intended that they should ripen into Parliament men. Fate had decided against that. She had herself, by holding up to both of them the dark side of the picture, done what she could to cool the literary enthusiasm both of Tom and Tony. The rest she must leave to Heaven. The literary gift, indeed, was much to be thankful for. She had beheld its growth with pride, and done what she could to train it in her children, but only as the intellectual ornament, adding a suitable grace and finish to those whom Providence had above all things intended should be gentlefolk. It was something to be, as Mrs. Trollope had undoubtedly made herself, the most talked of and the most widely read among novelists. If that achievement were not enough on which to rest, Mrs. Trollope, it must be remembered, was a very sensitive and impressionable, as well as clever and energetic woman. From her infancy she had lived among those who always spoke as if the socially levelling movement, inseparable from the Whig and Radical propagandism of the time, must have results ruinous, not only to Church and Throne, but to the privileged classes, whose welfare was as essential to the country as that of the Crown and Altar itself.

To Mrs. Trollope there had seemed something of an indignity in her son being bound over to Government service under an arbitrary taskmaster at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Whoever his chief there may have been, Colonel Maberly or Rowland Hill, the fetters that bound him did not prove very galling. No short-handedness in the department, no vindictive coercion by the head of his room ever prevented young Anthony Trollope from promptly obeying his mother’s invitation when she saw some opportunity socially favourable for her boy. In town or country she rose every morning at half-past four, and, sitting down to work at once, got nearly her day’s task accomplished before breakfast. When she visited her daughter and son-in-law in Cumberland, she made a kind of triumphal progress through the county, crowning her round of visits with a little stay at Lowther Castle, the headquarters of north country Toryism. Her host, Lord Lonsdale, knew she had at least one son a Government clerk; she must have him up there for a little change, to show him the place. And so, throughout Anthony Trollope’s youthful turn at the Post Office, it continued. Money troubles, of course, he had. A young man without private means, however much in luck’s way, could not have rubbed shoulders with the best people in England and France without being sorely put to it at times for ready cash. Naturally he got into debt, and had small transactions with the petty usurers, then as now ready to accommodate youthful civilians on the security of their weekly wage. His recourse to the professional money-lender had the advantage of preserving to him many private friendships which might otherwise have been forfeited. Even as regards his mother, if there were advances to him from that quarter, they generally came at her initiative rather than at his own request. She usually contrived to have enough for her own industry and health. Even when her ventures were most prosperous, she denied herself much that she would have liked. Her son therefore, in all his juvenile straits, seldom, if indeed ever, drew upon her. Others with whom he was more or less closely connected, Meetkerkes or Miltons, were suffered to know nothing whatever about his difficulties.

A well-connected young man like Anthony Trollope, however pressed at any particular time, could always, if prepared to pay the price, have raised ready money enough for existing personal needs. His transactions with money-lenders were not, even in his earliest and most impecunious youth, serious enough to prevent a settlement with the usurers before the debt had swelled to any large amount. Such experiences of this sort as he had find their way, after a rather monotonous fashion, into many of his novels. They first appear in The Three Clerks, declared, both by Robert Browning and, in terms still more enthusiastic, by his wife, the poetess, to be Trollope’s best piece of work up to the year 1858. After an eleven years’ interval the accommodating M‘Ruen of The Three Clerks is reintroduced in the same capacity, as the Clarkson who holds the bill backed by Phineas Finn for Laurence Fitzgibbon. Whatever the name under which he trades, or the period to which he belongs, this dealer in ready cash is a personal reminiscence of Trollope’s boyish out-at-elbows Post Office days. In each of the novels now mentioned the burden of his talk admits only of a slight verbal variation. The form of the reproach to Charley Tudor is, “You are so unpunctual”; the exhortation to Phineas is, “Now, do be punctual.”

Trollope had, however, managed his small money matters on the whole so well that he left no debts behind him when, in 1841, a friendly loan of £200, duly repaid, supplied him with his Irish outfit. That was exactly six years before he made the approach to literature by the road of journalism. Charles Dickens, who admired his mother’s cleverness and courage, had given her his good offices with the man who, as editor of The Examiner in 1847, was to become a power on the weekly press. As a fact Dickens’ introduction of Mrs. Trollope to John Forster was destined to promote her son’s interests by opening to him the columns of The Examiner, after the manner presently to be described, in 1848.

One more famous friend of a very different kind from Forster had been brought by family accident within Anthony Trollope’s reach. This was Lord Ashley, afterwards to become Lord Shaftesbury. Recognising Frances Trollope’s cleverness, and anxious to enlist it on the side of his own philanthropies, he had encouraged her to interest the public in the miseries of industrial life in the Black Country. The representative of the “poor man’s peer” with Mrs. Trollope in this matter had been his secretary, a dweller in Camberwell, the father of no less a son than Benjamin Jowett. The story embodying Mrs. Trollope’s fulfilment of the Shaftesbury suggestion, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, was published in 1840, when, greatly to her disgust, it found more friends among the Chartists than in any other class. Ashley did not succeed to the family title till 1851. By that time Anthony Trollope had left St. Martin’s-le-Grand for ten years. But some time before then the future Lord Shaftesbury’s concern for Irish distress made him open communications with Anthony Trollope, as one who had inherited his mother’s faculty of keen observation, and whose opinion, based on local knowledge of Irish difficulties and wants, promised to be, as it proved, of real value to practical and philanthropic statesmanship. This however, like the various events connected with it, will more fittingly find a place in a new chapter.

CHAPTER III

THE IRELAND THAT TROLLOPE KNEW