Dr Thorne

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    CLASSICS

DOCTOR THORNE

ANTHONY TROLLOPE
was born in london in 1815 and died in 1882. his father was a barrister who went bankrupt, and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have been an unhappy one.

Trollope enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime, publishing over forty novels and many short stories, at the same time following a notable career as a senior civil servant in the Post Office.
The Warden
(1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was succeeded by the sequence of 'Barsetshire' novels,
Barchester Towers
(1857),
Doctor Thorne
(1858),
Framley Parsonage
(1861),
The Small House at Allington
(1864) and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(1867). This series, regarded by some as Trollope's masterpiece, demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century English novels – property – and features a gallery of recurring characters, including, among others, Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising
Can You Forgive Her?
(1864),
Phineas Finn
(1869),
The Eustace Diamonds
(1873),
Phineas Redux
(1874),
The Prime Minister
(1876) and
The Duke's Children
(1880).

Trollope has been acclaimed as a supreme portraitist of the professional and landed classes of mid-Victorian England. His early novels depict, with irony and wit, the comfortable world of the English gentry, contrasting the apparent stability of rural life with the harsh, disturbing rhythms of London. In his later work Trollope's rural order has given way to the values of industrial society, and his tone is generally gloomier and more pessimistic.

RUTH RENDELL
, novelist and crime writer, has written more than forty books both in her own name and under her pseudonym, barbara Vine. Apart from fiction, she is the author of
Ruth Rendell's Suffolk
and
has edited and introduced a selection of the short stories of the Victorian ghost-story writer and antiquarian M. R. James under the tide
A Warning to the Curious
. She regularly reviews books for the
Daily Telegraph
. Ruth Rendell holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Essex. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

with an Introduction and Notes by

RUTH RENDELL

PENGUIN BOOK

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First published 1858
This edition published in Penguin Classics 1991
Reprinted with a Chronology 2004
14

Introduction and notes copyright © Kingsmarkham Enterprises Limited, 1991 All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

EISBN: 978–0–141–90496–2

Introduction

Chronology

DOCTOR THORNE

Notes

WHILE
writing
Doctor Thorne
Trollope was sent abroad. His destination was Egypt, where as a Post Office surveyor he was to make a treaty with the Pasha for the transport of the mails through that country by railway. The sea voyage from Marseilles to Alexandria was rough. More than once nausea overcame him and he had to leave his paper on the cabin table and rush to his stateroom. ‘It was February,' he wrote in
An Autobiography
, ‘and the weather was miserable; but still I did my work.'

He was in the habit of writing in trains. If it had been possible, he would no doubt have written while riding his horse. He was hardly ever without a pen in his hand, though he put his work as a civil servant first. The man who was responsible for putting pillarboxes on our streets, he had first been in Ireland but in 1851 was sent home on a special job concerned with the rural delivery of letters. On horseback he rode about the West of England and Wales and ‘had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain, with a minuteness which few have enjoyed'. Novelist that he already was, he was to use the knowledge of human nature and the rural scene thus gained in his fiction and to discover his potential.

By this time he had published three books, none of which had brought him success or any money. But in the course of this new job, while visiting Salisbury and walking about near the cathedral, he was struck by an idea for a story of clerical life. ‘From whence,' he wrote, ‘came that series of novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans and archdeacons, was the central site.' The public liked
The Warden
and it liked
Barchester Towers
, and for years to come these two novels brought him a small annual income. But before returning to Barchester it was of his own experiences as a
junior clerk that he wrote in a piece of semi-autobiographical fiction called
The Three Clerks
. This completed, he was on holiday in Florence with his brother when for some reason not disclosed he asked him to suggest a plot. It was the only occasion on which he had recourse to another's imagination for the thread of a story. The plot that Thomas Trollope offered him was that of
Doctor Thorne
.

Trollope himself had little to say about this novel, though more than twenty years later he noted that he believed it to be the most popular book that he had ever written. He finished it in Egypt and began work on
The Bertrams
on the following day. Of the two books, ‘I myself think that they are of about equal merit,' he said, ‘but that neither of them is good… The plot of
Doctor Thorne
is good, and I am led therefore to suppose that a good plot – which, to my own feeling, is the most insignificant part of a tale – is mat which will most raise it or most condemn it in the public judgement… That of
The Bertrams
was more than ordinarily bad; and as the book was relieved by no special character, it failed. Its failure never surprised me; – but I have been surprised by the success of
Doctor Thorne.'

Authors are often poor judges of their own work. Trollope considered the often tedious
Phineas Finn
and the very nearly unreadable
Nina Balatka
better novels than
The Eustace Diamonds
and
The Small House at Allington
. The kindest adjective applicable to
The Bertrams
is ‘unmemorable', while its immediate predecessor was quickly judged by the public for the fine drama of wealth and wedlock it is, yet he saw no difference in merit between them.

Michael Sadlei, classifying Trollope's novels and stories, gave
Doctor Thorne
three stars, an order of merit awarded to only four more out of all the fifty-one pieces of fiction. Of these he wrote, ‘There is not a loose end, not a patch of drowsiness, not a moment of false proportion.'
¹
*
It is hard to understand why it was disliked by its author. Perhaps the reason lay in the fact that the plot was not his own, or perhaps it was not suffidendy experimental for him. Trollope, not always felicitously, enjoyed writing of new or exotic places, introducing the occasional villainous foreigner, and believed, quite erroneously, that inserting a facetious sub-plot enhanced his fiction.

Happily for us today, there is none of that in
Doctor Thorne
. It
is remarkable, if not unique, among his fiction for the absence in its chapters of convolutions and long-winded digressions. Here are no comic servants, no bibulous commercial travellers, as we find in the political fiction, no taproom wits or well-heeled jolly widows, only a modicum of rustic electioneering and not a single hunt. It is tempting to wonder if these may be among the reasons for what, to its author, was its unaccountable popularity.

There are few clergymen either, for, though in Barsetshire, for the first time in the series we are far from the cathedral city of Barchester. The novel, therefore, stands alone and can be read without a prior knowledge of its two predecessors.
Doctor Thorne
is complete in itself, Victorian in period if not always in spirit, set almost in the centre of the century, in an unspoiled pastoral countryside and, for the most part, among a landowning upper class.

It has been said that few writers have more than two or three characters inside them and that all the personages they create must be variations on one or other of these. If this is so, Trollope had rather more than his share and drew on a source supply of nearer ten. Because
Doctor Thorne
was written quite early in his career as a novelist he was here able to introduce new and fresh prototypes. Character was all-important to him; it was by far the most important constituent of his fiction, of greater significance than construction, theme, plot, the inner life or any possible exposition of the human condition. ‘If he was in any degree a man of genius (and I hold that he was),' wrote Henry James soon after Trollopc's death, ‘it was in virtue of this happy, instinctive perception of human varieties. His knowledge of the stuff we are made of, his observation of the common behaviour of men and women, was not reasoned or acquired, or even particularly studied. All human beings deeply interested him, human life, to his mind, was a perpetual story.'
²
If anything rivalled it, an earnest desire to disseminate moral values would be that rival.

‘A novel should give a picture of common life,' Trollope himself wrote, ‘enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention the canvas should be crowded with real portraits, not of individuals known to the world or the author, but of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the
vehicle for all this; and when you have the vehicle without the passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show.'

Thomas Trollope's plot was a simple one. A rich man makes a will, leaving everything he possesses, if his dissolute son dies before the age of twenty-five, to his sister's eldest child. Neither the sex nor the name of this child is specified. One person only knows it: the guardian and most affectionate uncle of the legatee, who, sworn to secrecy, watches her made an outcast by the society in which she lives. Illegitimate and apparently poor, she must be prevented at all costs from marrying the heir to ‘the first commoner in Barsetshire'. All his family is ranged against her, until, that is, her good fortune is known.

Suspense was not a quality which Trollope valued. In
The Eustace Diamonds
he wrote that ‘the chronicler' scorns to ‘keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself', and at the end of the fifteenth chapter of
Barchester Towers
, ‘Our doctrine is, that the author and reader shall move along in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.'

He said of the art of Wilkie Collins that his was ‘a branch which I have not myself at all cultivated' and thus gives everything away in his early chapters, so that the reader knows from the first the parentage of Mary Thorne. There is never any mystery about the seduction of her mother by the dissolute brother of the doctor. It is a tribute to Trollope's powers as a storyteller that this matters not at all. We know from the start that there is a very good chance of a happy ending, and this radier enhances our enjoyment of the novel, providing a curious smug satisfaction in observing the upright conduct of some characters and the short-sighted folly of others, a pervading I-told-you-so sensation that increases with the continual fulfilment of prophecy. To create this kind of atmosphere was Trollope's special forte, and it is never seen at greater advantage than in the Barsetshire novels.

As an alternative tide, he tells us in the first chapter, we may if we so desire have
The life and Loves of Francis Newbold Gresham
– that is, if a middle-aged medical man is not acceptable as hero.
That Thomas Thorne – named perhaps for his progenitor, Anthony's brother Thomas? – is far from unacceptable soon emerges; his combination of an advanced liberalism with a secret snobbery is interesting in itself, and he has ‘within him an inner, stubborn, self-admiring pride… a special pride in keeping his pride silently to himself'. Though not himself a parent, he has that quality seen in the best of Trollope's fathers, a peculiar womanly sweetness and tenderness towards their girl children. But he is a strong man. He stands up to everyone. He is just and high-principled. In our day the general practitioner, which is more or less what Dr Thorne was, is one of the most respected members of the community. It was not always so. Were it not for the Thorne of Ullathorne blood, it is doubtful if the doctor would even have dined at Greshamsbury. As it is, he is there on a kind of sufferance, but nevertheless he champions his niece with passion when Frank's mother pronounces a sentence of exile on her.

‘Do you think that I will break bread in a house from whence she has been ignominiously banished? Do you think that I can sit down in friendship with those who have spoken of her as you have now spoken? You have many daughters; what would you say if I accused one of them as you have accused her?'

‘Accused, doctor! No, I don't accuse her. But prudence, you know, does sometimes require us –'

‘Very well; prudence requires you to look after those who belong to you; and prudence also requires me to look after my one lamb. Good morning, Lady Arabella.'

The doctor is brave. He is chivalrous and gallant, generous and shrewd. He would fulfil nearly all the requirements of a hero were Frank Gresham less handsome, less charming and less obviously heroic than he is. But Frank is probably the most attractive young male protagonist Trollope ever created.

If the preceding Barsetshire novels have heroes at all, they must be the priggish John Bold of
The Warden
, marked for an early death, and the maidenly don of
Bereitester Towers
, Francis Arabin, whom Bold's widow will marry. So many of those who may be more accurately called the young male leads in the novels that follow either share what Trollope himself called a ‘hobbledehoy-ness', perhaps best exemplified in Johnny Eames of
The Small
House at Allington
and
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, or have an even less attractive predilection to vacillation in matters of love. Major Grantly in
The Last Chronicle
, though with a plain duty to rescue Grace Crawley and marry her out of hand, is ridiculously dependent on his father's whim for an income. Frank Greystock of
The Eustace Diamonds
abandons Lucy Morris to her fate as a governess and is flagrantly unfaithful to her with his cousin Lizzie. Even Trollope himself said of the hero of
Framley Parsonage
, ‘I know it will be said of Lord Lufton… that, putting aside his peerage and broad acres and handsome, sonsy face, he was not worth a girl's care and love.'

But when he created Frank Gresham he was relatively new to the business of hero-making. He did not And it necessary to ascribe to this young man as a chief fault that ‘he was so young', as he later did to Peregrine Orme in
Orley Farm
, or bestow on him as among ‘frolics of which he had been guilty' the liberating of a bag full of rats into the college hall at dinner time. For this and other like offences young Orme was sent down from his university, but Frank desperately wants to return to Cambridge in October, and this in opposition to the wishes of his mother and aunt who would have him stay at home and sell himself to an heiress.

From the first Frank is not interested in money and not much interested in ‘blood'. What has happened to him is what happens to many young men and must have been even more common in Victorian lives; he falls in love with the first young woman he has ever really known well, his sister's best friend. In Frank's case, though, this is very like a biological imprinting, not an easy-come, easy-go first love but a strong, permanent and surely lifelong attachment. In his devotion to Mary Thorne, the doctor's niece, he never really wavers. True to her and to himself, he gives no more than lip service to his ‘lady-aunt' when set upon to court the ointment ‘ heiress Miss Dunstable. In a series of curious scenes, interesting because they are so un-Victorian, he and Martha Dunstable play a game he knows is false and she, because of her beleaguered situation as a prey to fortune-hunters, only briefly suspects may be sincere.