Dr Thorne (2 page)

Frank found the task before him by no means an easy one. He had to
make Miss Dunstable understand that he had never had the slightest idea of marrying her, and that he had made love
*
to her merely with the object of keeping his hand in for the work as it were; with that object, and the other equally laudable one of interfering with his cousin George…

‘Miss Dunstable, I never for a moment thought of doing what you accuse me of; on my honour, I never did. I have been very foolish – very wrong – idiotic, I believe; but I have never intended that.'

‘Then, Mr Gresham, what did you intend?'

This was rather a difficult question to answer; and Frank was not very quick in attempting it. ‘I know you will not forgive me,' he said at last; ‘and, indeed, I do not see how you can. I don't know how it came about; but this is certain, Miss Dunstable; I have never for a moment thought about your fortune; that is, thought about it in the way of coveting it.'

‘You never thought of making me your wife, then?'

‘Never,' said Frank, looking boldly into her face.

‘You never intended really to propose to go with me to the altar, and then make yourself rich by one great perjury?'

‘Never for a moment,' said he.

Still less has he thought about any fortune that may be coming the way of Mary Thorne. Her poverty dismays his bankrupt father and infuriates his greedy pathetic mother, but he is undeterred by it. His father must not trouble himself about the Greshamsbury estate for his sake. ‘I do not care for it. I can be just as happy without it. Let the girls have what is left, and I will make my own way in the world somehow. I will go to Australia; yes, sir, that will be best. I and Mary will both go…'

Falling in love was to Trollope what A. O. J. Cockshut calls ‘a virtuous art' and adds that it ‘becomes more virtuous still if it outlasts rejection and loss of hope'.
³
All his most attractive heroines have this art. For the best of them there can be no changes of heart, no second thoughts, and Mary Thorne is one of the very best. If one's belief in her is ever shaken, it is only by wonder that the ‘little chit of a girl' who comes home from school to be the mistress of Dr Thorne's establishment at the age of twelve can grow so apparently effortlessly into the beautiful, gracious and astonishingly self-possessed young woman who loves Frank and is loved by him.

Much of Mary's charm lies in her ability to endear herself to us
in spite of her unshakeable poise. Very self-possessed people are often repellent; they provoke shyness in others and a sense of inferiority. But it must be Mary's modesty – a quality highly valued by Trollope in women – her ready wit and her affection for her uncle, touching to behold, that, far from keeping us in awe of her, make us feel as easy and companionable a liking for her as we have for the doctor himself. Mary and her uncle love each other, but it is an equal and entirely reciprocal love unusual in Victorian fiction. Certainly Mary is respectful. She is respectful to all her elders, even to Lady Arabella who has treated her cruelly. Asking Lady Scatcherd to call her by her first name, she kneels at the old woman's feet and takes her hand. But with the doctor she is an equal. Their relationship is nearer that of a close brother and sister than an avuncular one. It is as if Trollope has taken a leap forward into the next century, fifty years and more.

‘We are in the same boat,' [says Mary] ‘and you shan't turn me overboard.'

‘But if I were to the, what would you do then?'

‘And if I were to the, what would you do? People must be bound together. They must depend on each other. Of course, misfortunes may come; but it is cowardly to be afraid of them beforehand. You and I are bound together, uncle; and though you say these things to tease me, I know you do not wish to get rid of me.'

Perhaps she owes her self-confidence and good manners to the education she has received in the Gresham schoolroom – and her pride. It is unlikely that her modesty and generosity of spirit derive from the same source. Beatrice Gresham, it is true, the second daughter and Mary's best friend, is a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, but Augusta, the eldest, has all the hauteur and slavish devotion of her cousins, the de Courcys, to rank and blood. Indeed, Lady Amelia de Courcy is her mentor as well as her cousin, a treacherous adviser who finally grabs for herself the suitor she has bidden Augusta reject on grounds of disparity of class. Lady Amelia, Trollope tells us, would have rejected heaven itself unless she could have had prior assurance of a seat in the Upper House. All the de Courcy women, with Lady Arabella Gresham and Augusta, are in alliance against Mary Thorne. She is (apparently) poor. No one knows where she comes from, and therefore they believe the worst. They are the sort of people who
generally do believe the worst and do not balk at expressing it aloud. Trollope brought this aristocratic family back again in
The Small House at Allington
and
The Last Chronicle
. Like many authors, he was captivated by his own minor portraits and unable to resist re-encountering them, their conversation and their manners.

‘A great deal of Mr Trollope's popularity is perhaps attributable to the care he has generally taken to fill his stories with nice people,' wrote one reviewer in 1865. The de Courcys are not nice. Some of the utterances of the Countess probably shock us today more than they shocked contemporary readers. ‘Is it not a waste of time?' she says briskly of Frank's proposal to complete his education at Cambridge, and, of his matrimonial prospects, ‘Frank must marry money. I hope he will understand this early… When a man thoroughly understands this, when he knows what his circumstances require, why, the matter becomes easy to him.' To be fair to the Countess, she has had a terrible time of it at home. She ‘thought over in her mind injuries of a much graver description than her sister-in-law had ever suffered'. Later on, in
The Small House at Allington
, her eldest son describes the likelihood of her husband's murdering her.

It is another son who, when his cousin Frank says of his own parent, ‘His father, you know, died when he was very young,' replies, ‘Yes; I know he had a stroke of luck that doesn't fall to everyone…', thus incurring Frank's disgust. By contrast Squire Gresham is one of the nice people of the novel, a man who married in youthful haste and repented during a long, increasingly penurious leisure. Having the hounds at Greshamsbury – ‘those nasty dogs!' – has impoverished him, along with political aspirations and keeping up the Gresham town house in Portman Square. His weaknesses, his enfeeblement under the cold winds that have blown upon him from the Courcy Castle quarter, are for Trollope a contrast to Dr Thorne's strength, the iron will and stubborn pride that have so influenced and affected Mary, forming her own character. The great difference between a balanced, generous and imaginative nature and de Courcy' shallowness is never more admirably shown than in the relative attitudes towards Mary Thorne of Squire Gresham and his daughter Beatrice on the one hand and those of Lady Arabella and her relatives on the other. The Squire and Beatrice are equally fixed in their belief that
Frank cannot marry a poor woman, but, while holding these views as to the impossibility of the proposed marriage, they never waver in their love and admiration of Mary. But those lesser minds, corrupted by a vapid idolization of blood and by greed for other people's money, from another de Courcy daughter's early encomium, ‘… what little I have seen of her I highly approve', rapidly come to loathe her for no greater fault than that of falling in love with the heir. An earlier toleration is subsumed in a hatred born of fear that youth, beauty and character may invade their ranks without comprehending the inflated price of an entrance ticket.

Martha Dunstable makes her first appearance in
Doctor Thorne
. She will reappear again and again. For his models Trollope looked to the new prosperous manufacturing class, the captains of industry whose sons and daughters were getting themselves an education and assuming the manners and graces of the gentry, with funds to back up their pretensions. Miss Dunstable is the heiress to a pharmaceutical king, the now deceased purveyor of a panacea called the Ointment of Lebanon. We are told that he has left his huge fortune of two hundred thousand pounds – millions today – to his daughter.

Another such parvenu is Mr Moffat, the tailor's son who crudely breaks his engagement to Augusta Gresham, thus giving Frank the opportunity to horsewhip him as he leaves his club. It is a thorough trouncing that Frank gives the man who has jilted his sister in a far more successful attack than that made by Johnny Eames on Adolphus Crosbie in a similar situation. Mr Moffat is a self-seeking, callous opportunist, and if we feel scant sympathy for Augusta, this is Only because she has cared for him no more than he cared for her. We suffer with her eventually, but not until we see her duped by her deceitful cousin. Miss Dunstable is a very different example of the second-generation
nouveaux riches
. If presumptuous in the reader, it is none the less natural to see her as one of those characters whom Trollope (the least constructive and calculating of writers) invented primarily as a distraction for Frank and a foil to Mary Thorne but who got out of hand and assumed a status among the principals, just as Mrs Proudie did.

Perhaps, then, it is no accident that these two women later become friends (or are described as friends by Miss Dunstable
with her tongue in her cheek). In a later chronicle she is mentioned as referring to the Bishop's wife ‘with almost unmeasured ridicule', for Miss Dunstable's humour is of the wry kind, ironic, not a little bitter. In her Trollope shows us the ugly and painful aspect of being a very rich young woman before the Married Women's Property Acts. By the standards of the time Miss Dunstable was not even very young: she was thirty, and fussy young Frank, ‘no very great judge in such matters', puts her down as forty. Trollope never tells us she is plain, but her high colour, large mouth and broad nose make a less than attractive picture. One of her instructors in fashion has told her that the crisp black curls she combs close around her face are ‘not the thing', but she replies drily and with coarse but endearing wit, ‘They'll always pass muster when they are done up with bank-notes.'

From the first we are aware that Miss Dunstable is very unlikely to marry anyone in
Doctor Thorne
. She is too clever to be caught by Honourable Georges or entrapped by their mothers. In fact, she will find a husband in the next Barsetshire novel. Trollope himself, scorning a mystery, would probably have revealed her future destiny at, say, Mary's wedding, had he then thought of it. The reader is driven to conclude that he paired these two off because he needed a mate for each and could find no other incorruptible husband for Miss Dunstable nor a sufficiently clever, generous and jolly wife for his middle-aged hero. For it is Dr Thorne himself that she marries in
Framley Parsonage
.

Another family has climbed from rags to riches, and Sir Louis, the Scatcherds' son, is the third in that trio of heirs to the self-made. Brash and vulgar, incapable of opening his mouth without uttering solecisms, he is a brilliantly convincing creation. As each appearance of his is heralded, the reader reacts with exactly that embarrassed recoil experienced in life when we are about to encounter someone known for his gross behaviour and tactless speech. It is as if the diminudve, drink-sodden Sir Louis were an actual acquaintance and our identification with the doctor or Mary or the donnish, delicate-minded Mr Oriel absolute:

‘A very nice girl, Miss Beatrice; very nice.'

Now Mr Oriel was a modest man, and when thus addressed as to his future wife, found it difficult to make any reply.

‘You parsons always have your own luck,' said Sir Louis. ‘You get all the beauty, and generally all the money, too. Not much of the latter in this case, though – eh?'

Writing in the happiest period of his career, Trollope was a long way from the darker time of the late sixties and seventies that saw the novels in which even he could be cynical and pessimistic. But since he attempted always to paint a true picture of life as it was, since he was a serious novelist, he could not leave out those facts and events which were the ugly underside of his age. Hateful as Sir Louis is, we are not allowed to forget the example he has had before him during his youth and adolescence; nor does Trollope gloss over the young man's unfortunate infancy. One is driven to wonder what the psychiatrists of later ages would have had to say about the prospects of a child deprived of his own mother's milk so that she, in desperate want, could serve as wet-nurse to the Greshamsbury heir.

It is no surprise that Sir Louis grows up with a chip on his shoulder, a determination to be taken for as good a gentleman as any of them, with as good a right to a ladylike wife, and a predilection for steering the conversation along the lines of his own abundant wealth and the impecuniosity of others. Sir Roger, his father, has ruined his health with brandy, but the son's tipple, curiously – or perhaps not curiously – for the times, seems to be liqueurs. Though destined to the young and unmarried and to make way for Mary's inheritance, Sir Louis has his own heirs in his creator's subsequent fiction. Lucius Mason of
Orley Farm
has much in common with him, and Felix Carbury of
The Way We Live Now
is another parallel, corrupt, self-indulgent, indifferent to the anxiety of an affectionate mother, incurably idle. But of all of them only Louis Scatcherd is pathetic; only he succeeds in winning the reader's sympathy by the waif-like quality he retains until the very end, so that in the midst of his brutish degradation it is ultimately the neglected baby, driven from his mother's breast, that we see. ‘I do wish to do what's right – I do, indeed,' he tells the doctor. ‘Only, you see, I'm so lonely. As to those fellows up in London, I don't think that one of them cares a straw about me.'