Trollope Looks Back

Abstract

Trollope is often read as exemplary novelist of evocation, summoning up a golden age whose roots lie deep in version of eighteenth century that is summed up in phrase the peace of Augustans. He is also read as bearing witness to Victorian quiet and disquiet. The second is correct way to read him, though it is true that he is still regarded even by some of his admirers as embodying, long after end of such peacefulness as eighteenth century enjoyed, sense of order, harmony, and acceptance which was once supposed to have characterized that era. But to take Trollope in this spirit is to misconceive his intention and to underestimate his achievement; and it would be gratuitous to recall such misreadings now were it not for a further complication, suggested by Simon Raven adaptation of Palliser novels for BBC in 1974, produced by Martin Lisemore, elaborately mounted, and acted with much style by Roland Culver as old Duke of Omnium, Susan Hampshire as Lady Glencora, Barry Justice as Burgo Fitzgerald, Philip Latham as Plantagenet Palliser, Donal McCann as Phineas Finn, Barbara Murray as Madame Max Goesler, and Sarah Badel as Lizzie Eustace. The cause for distortion cannot be assigned to Mr. Raven or Mr. Lisemore or BBC so much, perhaps, as to altered circumstances of England in 1970s. Nor has television series been alone in inviting misconstruction. There is also Angela Thirkell, whose modest contribution to gaiety of nations commencing more than a generation ago consists in unabashedly nostalgic recreations of Barsetshire that she herself insisted to be departures from Trollope. To read Trollope in spirit of Angela Thirkell is to be guilty of an anachronism which she herself scorned. In other words, present-day readers of Trollope, even if they do not make mistake of transposing him into eighteenth century, are liable to be charmed into viewing stuff of his novels in narrow retrospect, simply because they deal with a past that is never to be recaptured. This is antiquarian way of reading Trollope, and it has a certain appeal; but it does him an injustice analogous to that of reading Pride and Prejudice and Emma as achievements of gentle Jane. For no other major Victorian novelist can be said to have been so centered in contemporaneity. From first to last Trollope took materials out of lives he led-in Ireland, in west country of England, in London, in transit-and fashioned of them fictions which a century later grant opportunity for looking back because they deal with an era now so definitively bygone. Yet for most part Trollope wrote not of past but of present: early and late