Figuring the State: Representative Government and Paralipsis in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels

Abstract

116 Victorians Journal Figuring th& §tate: Rgpr^sznl&tive: Government and paralipai® in •Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels by Michael Martel Then there was a speedy descent from the galleries, and the ladies trooped out of their cage, and the grey-headed old peers went back to their own chamber, and the members themselves quickly jostled out through the doors, and Mr. Monk was left to explain his proposed alteration in the dog tax to a thin House of seventy or eighty members.—Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister Like the House ofCommons emptying before an explanation of tax reform, Trollope’s political fiction seems vacated ofthe state Mr. Monk serves as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Repeatedly, parliamentarians like Monk and Plantagenet Palliser rise to elucidate some aspect of the British state, and their colleagues either make for their clubs or fall asleep. What Lauren Goodlad argues about the imperial government in The Eustace Diamonds extends to the state itself: it is “the great parliamentary bore” of Trollope’s political fiction. Scenes like Monk’s tax speech seemingly justify Trollope’s insistence that, for his political novels to interest readers, he “must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport” (Autobiography 317). Across the Palliser novels, Parliament fixates on personal intrigue—Lizzie Eustace’s diamonds, Phineas Finn’s murder trial, Daubeny and Gresham’s quarrelling, Lady Glencora Palliser’s election tampering—all of which trump the politics of the state. The Palliser novels suggest that, in an increasingly representative political system, politics and the state become divided from each other, the latter seeming to fall out of public interest in much the same way as Monk’s dog tax empties the House. Victorians Journal 117 One can say the same about current criticism on Trollope, which tends to keep the state and politics apart. While scholars have elucidated at length Trollope’s engagements with liberal governance in its state form and with representative politics, his articulation between these domains remains largely unexplored. Lauren Goodlad, Frederik Van Dam, and Sara L. Maurer have addressed the intersection between Trollope and the state by following Michel Foucault’s suggestion that liberal governance in its state form proceeds through “govemmentalization”—the process whereby the state expands itself into purportedly off-limit domains (economy, culture, domesticity) by allying with non-state actors {Literature 14). This line of scholarship not only expands the range ofwhat counts as the Victorian state: it also deepens our understanding of how Trollope’s fiction engages with transformations in the civil service.1 And yet it tends to preclude attention to the links between such an expansive state and official politics, a topic of perennial interest to such Trollope critics as David M. Craig, Lynette Felber, and Elaine Hadley. This second line of criticism narrows in on the practices of political culture: discussion and debate in elections and the creation of legislature. As Hadley notes, this attention to the political public sphere distinguishes such scholarship from that interested in governance (25), thereby enabling scholars to counter the oncecommonplace assumptions that Trollope avoided addressing political beliefs and that he possessed a divided political mind (Craig 355). We now see Trollope’s fiction as developing a comprehensive political platform built on the oscillation between conservative and liberal principles. While these branches of Trollope studies thoroughly elucidate the state and politics, they nevertheless tend to keep separate what were for mid-Victorian political culture two sides of the same coin. For writers like Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill, the state and politics were fused together as representative government, a then-expanding formation of England’s unwritten constitution. 1 See Shuman, Goodlad (2003), Ruth, and Coldn for discussions of Trollope’s civil service fiction. 118 Victorians Journal By addressing Trollope’s engagement with contemporary debates about representative government, this article places these two branches of Trollope studies into conversation with each other. Trollope’s participation in representative government debates perhaps eludes critics for two reasons: his distrust ofelectoral politics and the seeming non-depiction ofthe state within his political novels. This article contends that such opaqueness serves to shield the state from what Trollope and contemporaries like Walter Bagehot saw as a dangerous...