FRAMLEY PARSONAGE TROLLOPE'S FIRST SERIAL

Abstract

Framley Parsonage is the only Trollope novel of which the manuscript remains in this country. It is held by the Vaughan Library, Harrow School, which received it in I93I from the daughters, Mrs. Reginald Smith and Mrs. Yates Thompson, of George Smith, Trollope's publisher. I am indebted to the former Librarian, Mr. Shaw, for access to the manuscript and to the Governors of Harrow School for permission to publish this account. A considerable portion of the novel, chapters i-xviii, is missing; what remains is rather more than half, chapters xix-xlviii. The manuscript is bound in black. The chapters are marked off in groups of three, to indicate the numbers in which the work was to be published in Cornhill Magazine: Numbers i to 6 are missing and the remaining fragment represents Numbers 7 to I6. Each number is forty-eight pages long and each, after Number io, is prefaced by a sheet bearing its name, with the numbers and titles of its constituent chapters. Although the manuscript is incomplete even the surviving portion is extraordinarily interesting. All such material, in which the writer's erasures, emendations, and transpositions chart his progress as he moves towards identifying what he wants to say, offers the possibility of new insights into the obscure dynamics of the creative act. The writer's final choice, studied in the context of earlier rejected versions, must bring his local meaning, and even his wider preoccupations in the novel, into sharper focus. Scrutinizing the Framley Parsonage manuscript, the reader is doubly curious, knowing that in this novel, for the first time, Trollope was composing a work for the magazines, and was constructing a novel to come out not in volumes, but in numbers. He had clearly disposed his material with reference to his volume form in the past. How would the fact that his new novel would appear in serial form, a few chapters at a time, affect his method? There were two forms of serial publication available in the mid nineteenth century, related but distinct: a novel might come out in parts, bound separately, usually at intervals of a month; or in instalments in a magazine. Dickens had been a pioneer of monthly part-issue. Attempting, in his first novel, Pickwick Papers, to reach a larger readership by spreading and lowering the cost, he published in 'what was then a very unusual form, at less than one-third of the price of the whole of an ordinary novel, and in