Can You Forgive Her? (119 page)

‘I hope you’ll like it,’ he said to Grey.

‘I shall never like it as you do,’ Grey answered.

‘And why not; – why not?’

‘In the first place, I have not begun it so young.’

‘Any time before thirty-five
is young enough.’

‘For useful work, yes, – but hardly for enjoyment in the thing.

And then I don’t believe in all as you do. To you the British House of Commons is everything.’

‘Yes; – everything,’ said Mr Palliser with unwonted enthusiasm; – ‘everything, everything. That and the Constitution are everything.’

‘It is not so to me.’

‘Ah, but it will be. If you really take to the work, and put
yourself into harness, it will be so. You’ll get to feel it as I do. The man who is counted by his colleagues as number one on the Treasury Bench in the English House of Commons, is the first of living men. That’s my opinion. I don’t know that I ever said it before; but that’s my opinion.’

‘And who is the second; – the purse-bearer to this great man?’

‘I say nothing about the second. I don’t
know that there is any second. I wonder how we shall find Lady Glencora and the boy.’ They had then arrived at the side entrance to the Castle, and Mr Grey ran upstairs to his wife’s room to receive her congratulations.

‘And you are a Member of Parliament?’ she asked.

‘They tell me so, but I don’t know whether I actually am one till I’ve taken the oaths.’

‘I am so happy. There’s no position
in the world so glorious!’

‘It’s a pity you are not Mr Palliser’s wife. That’s just what he has been saying.’

‘Oh, John, I am so happy. It is so much more than I have deserved. I hope, – that is, I sometimes think – ’

‘Think what, dearest?’

‘I hope nothing that I have ever said has driven you to it.’

‘I’d do more than that, dear, to make you happy,’ he said, as he put his arm round her and
kissed her; ‘more than that, at least if it were in my power.’

Probably my readers may agree with Alice, that in the final adjustment of her affairs she had received more than she had deserved. All her friends, except her husband, thought so. But as they have all forgiven her, including even Lady Midlothian herself, I hope that they who have followed her story to its close will not be less generous.

I am grateful for the help of Mrs Anabel Donald in compiling some of the following notes.

S. W.

1
. (p. 39)
Upper Ten Thousand
: the phrase seems to have been originated by the American writer N. P. Willis (1806-67). To judge by an article in
Punch
, 2 May 1863, it was in current use.

2
. (p. 41)
Lord Chancellor
: the highest judicial authority.

3
. (p. 41)
Westminster Hall, and
Lincoln’s Inn
: the high courts of justice were held in the Hall until 1820; Lincoln’s Inn was one of the four Inns of Court.

1
. (p. 47)
Queen Anne Street
was built about 1760. It is west of Portland Place and north of Oxford Street.

1
. (p. 62)
The flies are worse
: a fly is a light, one-horse covered carriage. The distinction between flies and cabs is that the latter plied
for hire in the streets while the former had to be hired from a livery stable.

1
. (p. 70)
Creroorne
: pleasure gardens in Chelsea, closed in 1877.

2
. (p. 72)
Metropolitan borough of Chelsea
: in fact, Chelsea did not become a separate parliamentary constituency until 1868, following the second Reform Bill. At this time it formed part of the county constituency of Middlesex, which returned
one Liberal member at the 1857 general election. Chelsea itself was a largely working-class district with a Radical reputation.

3
. (p. 76)
the proper witching hour of night
: ‘Tis now the very witching hour of night’:
Hamlet
, III, ii.

4
. (p. 76)
Volunteers
: the volunteer movement was begun in 1859, and was intended to strengthen home defences against French aggression under Napoleon III. It was
encouraged by the Queen, the Prince Consort, and Tennyson. Shooting-matches were held at Wimbledon.

1
. (p. 78)
the literary world at present
: there were many travel articles in the periodicals at this time. Trollope presumably felt that the market had been saturated by such pieces as ‘In Switzerland and Italy’ (Blackwood’s, June 1861), ‘the Art of Alpine Travel’ (
Cornhill Magazine
,
August 1862), ‘How We Slept at the Chalet des Chèvres’ (
Cornhill
, September 1863), ‘My First Glacier Pass’ (
Macmillans
, September 1863). Trollope himself had published ‘My Tour in Holland’ in the
Cornhill
in November 1862. His ‘Travelling Sketches’ appeared in the
Pall Mall Gazette
in 1865, and in book form in 1866.

2
. (p. 78)
Retro age, Satanos
: ‘get thee behind me, Satan.’ The Grimsell 1863
refers to Trollope’s imminent departure for Switzerland.
Can You Forgive Her?
was begun on 16 August.

3
. (p. 78)
Retro age, Satanas
: ‘get thee behind me, Satan.’
The Grimsell and the Gemmi
: mountain passes to the east and south-west, respectively, of the villages of Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald in the Bernese Alps.

4
. (p. 78)
Alpine club
: founded in 1857 to encourage the exploration
and climbing of the Alps. In an after-dinner speech at the club, Trollope regretted that one of his age and physique was hardly equal to the climbs that qualified a person for membership.

5
. (p. 80)
the big hotel
: probably the Hotel Trois Rois, ‘an immense building, well situated on the Rhine’, according to Murray’s
Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland
, 10th edition, 1863, which agrees with
Trollope that ‘a large proportion of travellers entering Switzerland pass through Basle’.

1
. (p. 87)
the little inn at Handck
: near the Grimsell. The inn there ‘can furnish a bed upon an emergency, and tolerable provisions, coffee, milk, etc. It stands at a distance of a few yards from the Falls
of the Aar, perhaps the finest cataract in Switzerland’ (Murray, op. cit).

2
. (p. 91)
the bridge:
near the Trois Rois hotel; ‘a very favourite resort in summer evenings; the views up and down the river are good’ (Cook’s
Tourist handbook for Switzerland
, 1876).

3
. (p. 97)
Hyperion to a Satyr
: ‘So excellent a king; that was, to this,/Hyperion to a Satyr’:
Hamlet, I,
ii. Hamlet is comparing his dead father with his uncle Claudius, to the latter’s disadvantage.

1
. (p. 100)
Yarmouth
: Trollope was appointed Surveyor of the Eastern District of the Post Office in December 1859. The counties for which he was responsible included Norfolk, and he would therefore have had recent knowledge of the development described in this paragraph.

2
. (p. 101) Shoreditch: London station of the Great Eastern Railway.

3
. (p. 101)
beyond the stones
: presumably, when the streets were
no longer paved, i.e. outside the metropolitan area.

4
. (p. 103)
manes:
Latin, and therefore a dissyllable: the shade of a departed person.

5
. (p. 110)
he has sold out:
Le. disposed of his commission in the army by sale.

1
. (p. 109)
’Dance on the sand’…:

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,

Or like a fairy trip upon the green,

Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair,

Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.

Shakespeare,
Venus and Adonis
, lines 145-8

2
. (p. 117) Lord Nelson: born-at Burnham-Thorpe in Norfolk, of an old Norfolk family, and educated at Norwich and elsewhere in the county.

1
. (p. 125)
Sir Roger de Coverlcy:
an old-fashioned country dance like the quadrille, and unlike the more recent and more energetic waltzes, polkas, and galops
(p. 129).

2
.
(p. 127)
paper:
Mr Cheesacre means the kind of promissory notes to which George Vavasor has to have recourse in later chapters.

1
. (p. 132)
prebendal stall:
the incomes from certain ecclesiastical offices in rich sees were reduced after reforms in the late 1830s.

2
. (p. 136)
steeple:
the steeple of Strasbourg cathedral is, at 465 feet one of the highest in Europe.

1
. (p. 140)
a flock of learned ladies:
Alice lived near one of the centres of the Victorian feminist movement. The
Englishwomen’s Journal
was published from Langham Place, near Queen Anne Street; the ‘Association for the Promotion of the Employment of Women’ was connected with it. This had been founded in 1857; women’s rights and their relation to the institution of marriage began to
be a prominent issue in the 1850s. Trollope had recently discussed the question of women’s work in his book on North America (1862). He had also become fond of the independently minded Kate Field, American lecturer and writer, whom he first met in 1860. Some of his novel sportray feminists unfavourably – Is
He Popenjoy?,
for example. See Patricia Thomson,
The Victorian Heroine
, A
Changing Ideal
, 1837-1873, (1956).

2
. (p. 142)
the Roman Senate:
Augustus had tried to purge and reform it, but was continually opposed.
The Girondists:
The Girondins accused Robespierre of being a dictator and obstructed his policies, although he had been elected to represent the people of Paris in the National Convention during the French Revolution.

3
. (p. 142)
Manchester and its cares:
Trollope may be
taking Manchester as symbolizing the problems facing modern industrial society, in the way made familiar by Carlyle, Disraeli and others. He may, however, be alluding to the electoral defeat of prominent ‘Manchester’ politicians, such as Bright and Cobden, in the general election of 1857.

4
. (p. 150)
Charles Kemble:: one of ‘those actors’ mentioned on p. 67. Kemble (1775-1854) played leading
parts at Covent Garden, which he managed between 1815 and 1840, and was thought remarkable for his histrionic range
.

1
. (p. 157)
birds’-eye fogle
; spotted neckerchief, probably of silk.

1
. (p. 159)
to my own cheek:
i.e. for myself.

2
. (p. 161)
in the vale of Taunton
: like Mr Vholes, in Dickens’s Bleak
House
(1852-3). The allusion seems lost on Mr Grimes.

3
. (p. 164)
You
can’t do it cheap:
metropolitan constituencies were costly to fight. E. L. Woodward, in
The Age of Reform
, puts the cost of a seat of this kind as at least £2,000. In the 1857 election the
authorized
expenses in Lambeth came to £5,300. Electoral abuses, bribery, treating and so on had by no means been stamped out by the Reform Bill of 1832.

1
. (p. 173)
Capel Court
; in Bartholomew Lane,
in the City of London; housed the Stock Exchange.

2
. (p. 177)
Tibur
: town sixteen miles north-east of ancient Rome; Alice’s feelings are those of the poet Horace in his first Epistle.

1
. (p. 192)
my friend
: Thackeray, who died in December 1863, when part of
Can You Forgive Her
? was already in proof. Trollope felt his death keenly; he wrote an obituary in the
Cornhill
, February 1864.
His novel
Framley Parsonage
had begun to be serialized in the first number of the Cornhill, which was edited by Thackeray. Trollope later wrote the English Men of Letters volume on him (1879).
Cinquebars:
actually ‘Cinqbars’, a dissolute character who appears in Thackeray’s ‘A Shabby-Genteel Story’,
Philip
, and elsewhere in Thackeray’s works.

2
. (p. 194)
Tattersall’s
: the London horse-auction
mart.

1
. (p. 200) Pollock: his name suggests Trollope’s own, as does his habit of working early hours. Trollope was hunting at least two days a week in the autumn of 1862, partly in Oxfordshire.

2
. (p. 205)
fifteen stones
: like Pollock, Trollope was too heavy for expensive horses, and if not ‘ignorant of hunting’ knew ‘very little about if’ (according to the
Autobiography
). However,
he continued to ride ‘with a boy’s energy’ even when he found difficulty in mounting his horse. When the nature of a novel did not allow him a hunting chapter, he felt ‘deprived of a legitimate joy’. His Hunting Sketches appeared in 1865.

3
. (p. 309)
ten minutes’ law
: ‘law’ here means ‘an allowance in time or distance made to a hunted animal’, hence ‘mercy’ or ‘respite’.

1
. (p. 216)
Gatherum. Castle
: described in Chapter 19 of Doctor Thorne.

1
. (p. 232)
Caffres
: i.e. Kaffirs, natives of South Africa. Captain Bell-field has mistaken Zululand for Zuzuland, in his enthusiasm.

2
. (p. 232)
wild Africans
: slaves deported from Africa to South America.

3
. (p. 232)
the heights of Inkerman
in the Crimea were stormed, with or without Captain Bellfield, in 1854.