The Last Chronicle of Barset (2 page)

William Thackeray's daughter Anny woke in the early hours of ‘a bitter cold dark morning' to hear Barney, Anthony Trollope's Irish groom, bringing him a cup of coffee and rousing him for his morning's writing.
¹
She was staying with the Trollopes in the snowy mid-winter of 1865, and Trollope rose on this occasion at four – an hour and a half earlier than usual – because of some pressing deadlines. Trollope was especially busy in the 1860s, and the formidable volume of work he got through was accomplished in part by these early hours, and by sheer discipline and his consuming need to keep writing. By 1866, when Trollope was writing
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, his habits of composition were well established; rising at half past five in the morning, he would spend half an hour reading the work of the previous day, and then would write almost without pause for two and a half hours, before dressing and preparing himself for his day's work as Postal Surveyor of the Eastern District of England.

To be ‘fit for a man's work', as the Reverend Crawley says in
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, is an important issue in this novel and in Victorian society. Trollope was very, even overweeningly, proud of his ability to work, and likened his application and habit of everyday industry to those of more manual trades: the shoemaker, the tallow chandler, the cloth seller. These statements about work from Trollope's autobiography have been widely misunderstood so as to lead to accusations that he had a merely hack-like, unliterary attitude to writing. In fact his comparisons indicate rather the belief that ‘a man's work', whether that of cobbler, brickmaker or poet, should be done well and with dignity; an attitude which is resonant of the thinking
of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. In the 1860s Trollope wrote nineteen novels, as well as journalism and short stories. He put himself through an intensive study of the Latin classics, to make up for his neglected education, and translated Caesar's
Commentaries
. He inaugurated, with other eminent men of his day, one of the most respected and influential of nineteenth-century periodicals, the
Fortnightly Review
, and (from 1867) edited his own periodical, the
St Paul's Magazine
. He travelled to the USA twice, wrote a travel and social documentary,
North America
, and began a history of English fiction. For most of this decade he was employed in demanding work for the General Post Office. In 1866, while writing
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, he was asked to undertake a feasibility study for the reorganization of the London postal districts – an enormous job.

Many contemporary accounts describe Trollope as tumultuous and quite daunting in his energy. Some who knew him may have worried that he was almost full to bursting with ideas and the will to work; in 1866, during the time that he was writing
The Last Chronicle of Barset
, a beleaguered and rather aghast postal clerk records, ‘I have seen him slogging away at papers at a stand-up desk, with his handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, and his hair on end, as though he could barely contain himself.'
²
In photographs and popular caricatures, Trollope's buttons strain and creases are accordioned on his ill-fitting waistcoats and trousers. These images render him larger than life, the stereotype of an amiable, overweight man with a loud laugh, thoroughly John Bull. Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to have transposed this caricature to Trollope's novels, as he wrote in a letter in 1860:

Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste, – solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as a beefsteak.
³

Anthony Trollope rather liked this John Bull image and he reproduced Hawthorne's comments in his autobiography (published post
humously). For better or worse it is an image which has endured, but it frequently belies the subtle and complex qualities of Trollope's novels.

The following discussion of the novel will reveal some plot details, which readers may not wish to learn so soon. If this is the case, they may wish to postpone reading this essay until they have finished the novel
.

The Last Chronicle of Barset
is the last in a series of six books, collectively known as the Barsetshire novels. The action is centred in the fictional cathedral city of Barchester and the surrounding county, Barsetshire, with occasional forays to London. Most of the characters appear in more than one novel, some in several, with minor characters in one story taking a major role in the next. For example, Mr Crawley, a focal figure of
The Last Chronicle
, had featured previously as a minor character in
Framley Parsonage
, while Lily Dale, another important figure in this final Barsetshire novel, was also the centre of attention in
The Small House at Allington
.

Trollope's reputation was consolidated by the publication of the first three Barsetshire novels, so that upon his return to England from Ireland in 1859, he was respected, financially secure, and really accepted in the society of his native country for the first time in his life. It is interesting that at the height of his powers and popularity he should write
The Last Chronicle of Barset
which centres upon an impoverished clergyman who is a social outsider, almost an outcast, and who has been publicly shamed by an accusation of theft; a man so desperate as to question his own sanity and to consider suicide. Another character, Adolphus Crosbie, also contemplates suicide; yet another shoots himself in a fit of delirium tremens. Suicide, the approach of madness, a crime: these seem to belong to French fiction of the period, commonly regarded as more risqué than English, or in the sensation fiction of the 1860s, rather than in the work of a safe and hearty ‘beef and ale' author. But the more astute of Trollope's critics recognized that the simplicity, almost transparency, of his prose style, and the ‘safety' of the fictional worlds that he created consistently and reassuringly over many volumes, lulled many readers into
underrating the complexity and the occasional darkness of his work. As a contemporary assessment of
The Last Chronicle
in the
London Review
argued, the ‘wonderful ease with which Mr Trollope writes, and the simplicity of the means with which he generally produces his effects, have induced some of his critics to underrate his powers, and to speak of him at times as if he were capable of doing little more than write excellent chit-chat, or analyse the mental vagaries of a young lady oscillating between two attachments'.
⁴

The young lady in this novel is Lily Dale, whose story is continued three years after
The Small House at Allington
(1864) in both fictional and real time. Readers' expectations were high, and curiosity as to Lily's fate rife, as the weekly numbers of
The Last Chronicle
were published between December 1866 and July 1867: would she return to the man who had jilted her or, as so many hoped, would she reward the faithful and determined love of John Eames? Later in the novel Lily tells her engaged friend Emily Dunstable that ‘things have gone wrong' with her (ch.
52
), and that she cannot progress from her past with Crosbie to a future love with Eames. The fact that ‘things have gone wrong' bespeaks a brokenness in Lily, an internal stoppage of time which prevents her from moving on after being jilted by the man in whom she had invested her future. But this does not mean that she stops all the clocks at twenty-to-nine to live in rooms of cobwebs and candlelight as does that other jilted woman, Dickens's Miss Havisham. Instead Lily Dale will patiently pursue her ‘small house' duties in Allington, decorating the church for festivals, bossing and being bossed by the gardener, and opening the post-bag at breakfast. Herein lies an important distinction between the melodramatic or sensational novelist of the period and Trollope: it is not that there are never life-changing moments or crises in Trollope's work, but that he shows how people have to live beyond those moments, in the everyday grind which is no longer sustained by the original inspiration of either epiphanic grief or joy. While Dickens does show this brilliantly in
Great Expectations
(serialized 1860–61) through the eyes of Pip – Miss Havisham's determination to live a life of vengeful suffering has become absurdly repetitive and empty of its initial inspiration – Trollope reveals the tough, patient work of
the uninspired life in the often monotonous days of Lily Dale. In a novel which professes to be the ‘last chronicle' of a series which readers had almost come to rely upon as continuing with life itself, there is certainly a sombre and determined finality in Trollope's words at the end of chapter
77
after she decisively rejects John Eames: ‘I can only ask the reader to believe that she was in earnest, and express my own opinion, in this last word that I shall ever write respecting her, that she will live and die as Lily Dale.'

Trollope's early life taught him the persistent and soul-destroying humiliations of impoverished gentility, and the real tragedy that can rest in the mundane repetitions of a disappointed life. Writing of his father in his autobiography he echoed Lily Dale's assessment of herself that something had ‘gone wrong' with her: ‘But everything went wrong with him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure… His life as I knew it was one long tragedy.'
⁵
Trollope's father was an educated, intelligent and in many ways able man who failed as a barrister, invested in a farm which financially crippled his family, and battled with headaches, depression and despair through much of his life. Many critics have seen shades of Trollope's father in the intelligent, principled but self-destructive central figure of
The Last Chronicle
, Reverend Josiah Crawley. Trollope would probably have denied that he derived Crawley from his father, or at least have insisted that any similarities were unintentional. Such direct correlations were ‘distasteful' to him as he admitted in a letter to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in which he criticized Dickens's revelations that he had based incidents in the Marshalsea debtors' prison and the character of Mr Micawber upon the life and character of his father.
⁶
Nevertheless, the degrading exposures of early life work their way into the novels of both these very different, contemporary writers. It is the experience of debt and its consequences which turned them into particularly driven exemplars of the Victorian obsession with work, within the literary sphere.
Labor omnia vincit improbus
(Persistent work overcomes everything), a phrase frequently intoned by Anthony Trollope, was a way to gain the ‘top brick of the chimney' in a society enamoured of the self-made man. For Trollope as well as for Dickens, work fought the battle against
shame. Just as Dickens's experiences of his father's imprisonment for debt and his own labour as a child in Warren's blacking warehouse are seminal to his tales of childhood suffering and neglect, so the cringing humiliation under ‘the angry eyes of tradesmen' that Mr Crawley experiences, and the pain of bankruptcy, bailiffs in the house and flight from debt are extremely significant in Trollope's writing, and very much so in
The Last Chronicle of Barset
.

In an imaginative but rather desperate move to save the family from destitution, Trollope's mother Frances left England for America in 1827 with three of his younger brothers and sisters. She went to the New World with an investment plan to establish a bazaar in a western US city (Cincinnati was chosen) that would provide small British goods to needy Westerners. It was a sort of civilizing plan on a domestic scale; the goods to be sold were, as Trollope writes, ‘little goods such as pincushions, pepper-boxes, and pocket-knives'.
⁷
After some time, Trollope's father and remaining brother joined the rest of the family in Cincinnati, leaving Anthony the only family member in England. He was at school at Winchester, but his father had left without paying his fees. At the age of twelve he was left alone in England with no money or family, and was only kept at the school on sufferance, a social pariah. Eventually his father returned, but the following years were marked by further humiliations as he lived with his ill and depressed parent in a tumble-down farmhouse, walking miles to Harrow as a day-boarder at the school, sitting in muddy, disordered clothes with the wealthy sons of the aristocracy and trade. In America, the Cincinnatians were unimpressed by the civilizing effects of English pincushions, and the bazaar failed. But Trollope's mother returned from the USA in 1831 with an immediate bestseller,
Domestic Manners of the Americans
, and with this saved her family from poverty and inaugurated her career as a successful and prolific writer.

While the early hours of writing that were so important to Trollope may have reassured him that he was ‘fit for a man's work', it was his mother who gave him the model for this regime. Through the disturbances of bankruptcy and a flight to Belgium to avoid debtors, while moving from home to home, and while nursing several dying children and a dying husband, Frances Trollope kept writing before
the household was awake so that her family could live. Trollope's writing is dogged by these experiences, and when he is able to divide the Crawleys' annual income with such meticulous accounting as ‘three pounds of meat a day, at ninepence a pound, will cost over forty pounds a year' (Ch.
4
) he reveals the fear of poverty which is at the foundation of his lists of profits in his autobiography. These accounts of publishing profits have amazed and distressed readers who expect a more romantic account of a writer's life, but for Trollope they were magical figures which kept fear and shame at bay.