Dr Thorne (3 page)

If
The Warden
and
Barchester Towers
, in their different ways, have promotion and disappointed hopes as their theme, the third
novel in the sequence is about marriage and money. The cast of characters is not large, but among them are three married couples and three who are engaged. Trollope, himself a happily married man, looked on marriage as a state to which all right-thinking people should aspire, but at the same time he seems to have seen it as more a duty than a pleasurable or even idyllic style of life. He calls marriage the ‘bread and cheese' of love. It is almost as if he saw it as a job of work, to be entered into as a career.' Trollope habitually treats the period of engagement as happier than that which follows it and one that the girl at least would wish to be indefinitely prolonged. ‘Yes, very pleasant; very happy,' says Beatrice Gresham to Mary. ‘But, Mary, I am not at all in such a hurry as he is.' Men feel sexual desire; women apparently do not; and marriage has the curious property of transmuting the male nature into something transcendently spiritual.

Of the three engagements here described that of Caleb Oriel and Beatrice best conforms to the Trollopian ideal. Frank and Mary, after all, though privately regarding themselves as bound to each other, scarcely have their engagement sanctioned by society before finding themselves married. As to Augusta's projected alliance with Mr Moffat, her brother – with his robust ideas of demonstrative love – is disappointed by the insipid manner of the lovers' greeting. He expects them to rush into each other's arms. But Beatrice and Caleb are a characteristic Trollopian ‘good' couple. They do everything with quiet simplicity, for ‘Mr Oriel became engaged demurely, nay, almost silently.' The lovers' meetings have hitherto been no more than ‘saying a few words to Beatrice' during what sound like parochial visits to Greshamsbury. Though unstated, it is implicit that passion is lacking – and their relationship is all the better for that. We understand that Beatrice's future life will not be typical of a poor parson's household, for Mr Oriel has unspecified private means, but we are left with little doubt that it will be quiet, self-denying and dutiful – in other words, what in Trollope's eyes constitutes ideal marriage.

His older couples have not attained it. Fate and chance play little part in Trollope's fiction. People design their own futures, laying the foundations early in life by self-indulgence, excesses of all kinds, by impetuosity and violent acts or, conversely, by prudence, moderation and selflessness. The Oriel marriage is an
example of how it should be done. Trollope believed it his duty to teach morality, particularly to his young women readers, and doubdess he introduced the Beatrice—Oriel scenes with this aim partly in mind. Today we see them rather as lessons held up too late to the Earl and Countess, the ill-assorted Greshams and Sir Roger and Lady Scatcherd, whose marriage has become, tiirough drink and brutality, a relationship of master and slave.

Reading Trollope constantly reminds us, perhaps more than the work of any mid-nineteenth-century novelist, of the then indissolubility of matrimony. A hundred years later it is unlikely that any of these marriages would have lasted more than a few years, the Greshams' perhaps no longer than the months it would have taken Frank senior to tire of the dubious beauty and undisputed snob-bism of Lady Arabella. Only poor Lady Scatcherd retains love for a spouse, and indeed keeps it to the very bitter end. Her devotion is a precursor of the more refined and elevated devotion Mrs Crawley shows to her persecuted husband three books later. ‘“Oh, my man – my own, own man!” exclaimed the widow, remembering in the paroxysm of her grief nothing but the loves of their early days; “the best, the brightest, the cleverest of them all!”' Wealth misused and misunderstood has helped put a distance between them, for Lady Scatcherd, in her husband's words, ‘would have been better for a poor man than a rich one' and is bewildered by the virtually unlimited money that has come her way.

It is hard to find a Trollope novel in which money, the seeking it, the keeping it, the lack of it, or some other involvement with it, does not play a significant part. In
Doctor Thorne
it is integral to the plot. This is Victorian rural England. The father has dissipated his wealth and mortgaged his estate; the son must redeem it. Love is recognized as a long way down the scale of motives for marriage, the acquisition of money as unashamedly high up that scale. In our society we shy away somewhat from frank and open talk about money, but Trollope's true-to-life contemporaneous characters had no such inhibitions. Everyone, the young woman herself included, takes it for granted that no suitor will approach Miss Dunstable for any reason other than her fortune. There is a blatant disregard of whatever personality, wit, looks, charm and accomplishments she may possess. As to compatibility of temperament with a putative husband, Trollope in all his fiction scarcely
approaches this criterion of matrimonial choice. We are never told what interests, if any, Mary and Frank have in common, or what tastes, apart from that for tranquillity, Beatrice and Caleb share.

It is physical appearance that attracts his young men and women to each other – that and comparable age. Class is important too, but to be readily dismissed if the money is there. Mr Moffat's father was a tailor but this does not prevent Squire Gresham from giving his consent to the match, and we suspect that Louis Scatcherd's father's having been a stonemason militates against his eligibility far less than his vulgar manners and dissolute life. In both cases the money is there. Money is to make all things smooth in
Doctor Thorne
. But it would be a mistake to see Trollope as in any way approving this Mammon worship or rushing merrily towards an unmitigated happy ending, so facilely ensured.

From another point of view, as A. O. J. Cockshut points out, the ending is a gloomy one.
⁴
The de Courcys and Lady Arabella have their philosophy of life vindicated by Frank's marriage, for Mary
is
base-born and Mary
is
rich. They always said that Frank must marry money and he has done so, proving them right and their hateful, mercenary and callous attitude viable. We are tempted to ask why Trollope did not allow Sir Roger's will to be declared invalid, the estate to be lost and Frank and Mary to live the much vaunted quiet life as Barsetshire (or Australian) farmers.

The answer, does not lie only in his personal wish to make his novel a comedy, fulfil his brother's plot outline and please his public. He was a deep-thinking, self-questioning man, and if the darker outlook he was to develop was still in the future, shadows of it cast themselves on the years before. There is no doubt of his profound inner condemnation of such as the de Courcys and, along with it, his inescapable observation that their
mores
did prevail in the society he saw around him. Their ways were the ways of the world, and it was realism and approximation to contemporary life that he sought.

His exhaustive analysis of the brutish effects an excess of wealth can have on men and women was yet to come.
The Way We Live Now
was not to be written for another seventeen years. But Lady Arabella's fawning adulation of Mary once she has been assured that Sir Roger's fortune is to be hers ('My daughter! my child! my
Frank's own bride!'), an odious and chilling display, rivals any scene in that novel, the masterpiece of his later years.

Just as a recollection of George Eliot brings to mind that deep, prc-Frcudian intense examination of human motive, and thinking of Thomas Hardy recalls glorious evocations of a lost rural beauty, so with Trollope it is ‘scenes' we remember; such set-pieces as Mrs Proudie's first encounter with the Archdeacon, the breaking of the news to Lily Dale that her lover has jilted her, Johnny Eamcs, the Earl and the bull, and, in
Doctor Thorne
, Frank with his aunt, Augusta with Lady Amelia and the magnificent Scatcherd deathbed. Though he knew it so well, Trollope had no interest in descriptions of the countryside, unless it was to be bought, sold or hunted over. He scarcely ever describes what his people wear or has much to say about the interiors of their homes. Like some other writers of prose fiction, he was unsuccessful when he tried to write for the stage. Yet his ear for dialogue was so fine that we know, by some kind of natural perception, that this is precisely the way our Victorian forebears spoke, not a word too many or too few, not a wrong emphasis or grating phrase.

No great gift of visual imagination is needed to ‘see' his people as they encounter each other in their drawing rooms and stable-yards, country lanes or cathedral closes. Trollope brings them before us, less by description than through their own intensely individual utterance. Across a hundred and thirty years they live for us still, vibrant with life, charged with their creator's own formidable energy. This is one of the reasons why he is not only read so constantly and is so many readers' favourite author but is re-read, along with Jane Austen and Dickens, perhaps more than any other. He was almost the only Victorian to bring to modern readers people with whom they can effortlessly identify today.

NOTES

1
From
Trollope: A Commentary
by Michael Sadleir, 1927.

2
From
Partial Portraits
by Henry James, first published in the
New York Century Magazine
, 1883.

3
From
Anthony Trollope
by A. O.J. Cockshut, 1955.

4
Ibid.

1815 Battle of Waterloo

Lord George Gordon Byron,
Hebrew Melodies

Anthony Trollope born 24 April at 16 Keppel Street, Blooms-bury, the fourth son of Thomas and Frances Trollope. Family moves shortly after to Harrow-on-the-Hill

1823 Attends Harrow as a day-boy (–1825)

1825 First public steam railway opened

Sir Walter Scott,
The Betrothed aaà The Talisman

Sent as a boarder to a private school in Sunbury, Middlesex

1827 Greek War of Independence won in the battle of Navarino

Sent to school at Winchester College. His mother sets sail for the USA on 4 November with three of her children

1830 George IV dies; his brother ascends the throne as William IV

William Cobbett,
Rural Rides

Removed from Winchester. Sent again to Harrow until 1834

1832 Controversial First Reform Act extends the right to vote to approximately one man in five

Frances Trollope,
Domestic Manners of the Americans

1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Poor Law Act intro duces workhouses to England

Edward Bulwer-Lytton,
The Last Days of Pompeii

Trollope family migrates to Bruges to escape creditors. Anthony returns to London to take up a junior clerkship in the General Post Office

1835 Halley's Comet appears. ‘Railway mania' in Britain

Robert Browning,
Paracelsus

His famer dies in Bruges

1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Penny Post introduced

Charles Dickens,
The Old Curiosity Shop
(–1841)

Dangerously ill in May and June

1841 Thomas Carlyle,
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Appointed Postal Surveyor's Clerk for Central District Of Ireland. Moves to Banagher, King's County (now Co. Offaly)

1843 John Ruskin,
Modem Painters
(vol.
I
)

Begins to write his first novel,
The Macdermots of Ballycloran

1844 Daniel O'Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancipation, imprisoned for conspiracy; later released

William Thackeray,
The Luck of Barry Lyndon

Marries Rose Heseltine in June. Transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary

1846 Famine rages in Ireland. Repeal of the Corn Laws

Dickens,
Dombey and Son
(–1848)

First son, Henry Merivale, born in March

1847 Charlotte Brontë,
Jane Eyre
; Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights
A second son, Frederic James Andiony, born in September
The Macdermots of Ballycloran

1848 Revolution in France; re-establishment of the Republic. The ‘Cabbage Patch Rebellion' in Tipperary fails

Trollopes move to Mallow, Co. Cork

The Kellys and the O'Kellys

1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
In Memoriam

La Vendée
. Writes
The Noble Jilt
, a play and the source of his later novel
Can You Forgive Her?

1851 The Great Exhibition

Herman Melville,
Moby Dick

Sent to survey and reorganize postal system in southwest England and Wales (–1852)

1852 First pillar box in the British Isles introduced in St Helier, Jersey, on Trollope's recommendation

1853 Thackeray,
The Newcomes
(–1855)

Moves to Belfast to take post as Acting Surveyor for the Post Office

1854 Britain becomes involved in the Crimean War (–1856)

Appointed Surveyor of the Northern District of Ireland

1855 David Livingstone discovers Victoria Falls, Zambia (Zimbabwe)

Dickens,
Little Dorrit
(–1857)

Moves to Donnybrook, Co. Dublin

The Warden
. Writes
The New Zealamder
(published 1972)

1857 Indian Mutiny (–1858)

Thomas Hughes,
Tom Brown's Schooldays

Barchester Towers

1858 Irish Republican Brotherhood founded in Dublin

George Eliot,
Scenes of Clerical Life

Travels to Egypt, England and the West Indies on postal business

Doctor Thorne

1859 Charles Darwin,
On the Origin of Species

Leaves Ireland to settle in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, after being appointed Surveyor of the Eastern District of England
The Bertrams
and
The West Indies and the Spanish Main

1860 Dickens,
Great Expectations
(–1861)

Framley Parsonage
(–1861, his first serialized fiction) and
Castle Richmond

1861 American Civil War (–1865)

John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism
. Mrs Beeton,
Book of Household Management

Travels to USA to research a travel book

Orley Farm
(–1862)

1862 Elizabedi Barrett Browning,
Last Poems

Elected to the Garrick Club

Small House at Allington
(–1864) and
North America

1863 His mother dies in Florence

Rachel Ray

1864 Elizabeth Gaskell,
Wives and Daughters
(–1866)

Elected to the Athenaeum Club

Can You Forgive Her?
(–1865)

1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated

Lewis Carroll,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Fortnightly Review
founded by Trollope (among others)

Miss Mackenzie, The Belton Estate
(–1866)

1866 Eliot,
Felix Holt the Radical

The Claverings
(–1867),
Nina Balatka
(–1867) and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(–1867)

1867 Second Reform Act extends the franchise further, enlarging the electorate to almost two million

Algernon Charles Swinburne,
A Song of Italy

Resigns from the GPO and assumes editorship of
St Paul's Magazine

Phineas Finn
(–1869)

1868 Last public execution in London

Wilkie Collins,
The Moonstone

Visits the USA on a postal mission; returns to England to stand unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Beverley, Yorkshire

He Knew He Was Bight
(–1869)

1869 Suez Canal opened

Richard Doddridge Blackmore,
Lorna Doone

The Vicar of Bullhampton
(–1870)

1870 Married Women's Property Act passed

Dickens,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Resigns editorship of
St Paul's Magazine

Ralph the Heir
(–1871),
Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite
, and a translation of
The Commentaries of Caesar

1871 Eliot,
Middlemarch
(–1872)

Gives up house at Waldiam Cross and sails to Australia with Rose to visit his son Frederic

The Eustace Diamonds
(–1873)

1872 Thomas Hardy,
Under the Greenwood Tree
and
A Pair of Blue Eyes
(–1873)

Travels in Australia and New Zealand and returns to England via the USA

The Golden Lion of Granpere

1873 Mill,
Autobiography

Settles in Montagu Square, London

Lady Anna
(–1874),
Phineas Redux
(–1874);
Australia and New Zealand
and
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life

1874 The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris

Hardy,
Far From the Madding Crowd

The Way We Live Now
(–1875)

1875 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon

Begins writing
An Autobiography
on his return.
The Prime Minister
(–1876)

1876 Mark Twain,
Tom Sawyer

Finishes writing
An Autobiography. The American Senator
(–1877)

1877 Henry James,
The American

Visits South Africa

Is He Popenjoy?
(–1878)

1878 Hardy,
The Return of the Native

Sails to Iceland

John Caldigate
(–1879),
The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye
(–1879) and
South Africa

1879 George Meredith,
The Egoist

Cousin Henry, The Duke's Children
(–1880) and
Thackeray

1880 Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)

Benjamin Disraeli,
Endymion

Setdes in Soum Harting, W. Sussex

Dr Worth's School
and
The Life of Cicero

1881 In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed

Robert Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island
(–1882)

Ayala's Angel, The Fixed Period
(–1882) and
Marion Fay
(–1882)

1882 Phoenix Park murders in Dublin

Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December

Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough's Family
(–1883) and
The Landleaguers
(–1883, unfinished)

1883.
An Autobiography
is published under the supervision of Trollope's son Henry

1884
An Old Man's Love

1923
The Noble filt

1927
London Tradesmen
(reprinted from the
Pall Mall Gazette
, 1880)

1972
The New Zealander