Lady Mason Research Articles

“I Wrote Them All”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm

“I Wrote Them All”: Forgery and Forms of Classification in Trollope’s Orley Farm Katherine Gilbert (bio) Anthony trollope’s Orley Farm (1862) depicts the consequences of a forgery undertaken in the dead of night by Lady Mason, the second wife and widow of Sir Joseph Mason. In the opening pages, we learn that immediately after Sir Joseph’s death twenty years before, his first-born son by an earlier marriage, also named Joseph, unsuccessfully contested his father’s will. He did so because an unexpected codicil, one secretly forged by Lady Mason, left Orley Farm to Sir Joseph’s younger son with Lady Mason, Lucius. Orley Farm opens just as Lady Mason’s two-decade cover-up is beginning to receive renewed scrutiny. With the emergence of new evidence that undermines the legitimacy of her original testimony, Lady Mason is eventually to be put on trial for perjury. What underlies this charge is the suspicion that Lady Mason forged the codicil and then maintained her deceit for twenty years. In the end she is cleared of all charges, but Lady Mason is, in fact, guilty of both forgery and perjury. A transgressive woman, a forged will and codicil, perjury, and an old secret on the verge of exposure: Orley Farm has all the makings of a sensational plot. Published in the same moment as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and No Name (1862), Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), Orley Farm shares many of the features of sensation fiction, and we might expect reviewers of Orley Farm to have expressed surprise at Trollope’s foray into the popular 1860s genre. Yet early reviewers of Orley Farm refused to deviate from descriptions of Trollope’s work as consummately realist; instead, the reviews discuss Orley Farm as another novel that carefully portrays the quotidian in the lives of characters whom readers might recognize as neighbours. These early reviews draw distinct borders around Trollope as a realist and allude to sensation fiction only to insist that Orley Farm does not belong in that category. The Spectator claims that Trollope writes “with the manner of a distinct witness who wishes to give the most perspicuous evidence.” The characters feel so familiar that readers may have to remind themselves that they “are the creatures of Mr. Trollope’s imagination and not the mere objects of his observing eye” (147). An essay in the London Review makes similar claims. [End Page 307] Referencing the supposed effects of sensation fiction, the reviewer writes that when reading Orley Farm, “no one” will be “wrought up to any high pitch of feeling; no enthusiastic young lady will sit up shivering through the livelong night over Mr. Trollope’s pages.” Instead, Orley Farm “derives its main attractiveness from its close and studied similarity to the domestic life of the nineteenth century” (153). Finally, a review in the National Magazine suggests that while Orley Farm had the potential to cross genres into sensation fiction, it does not: Lady Mason, “a lady forger, and a perjurer to boot, is a character which might well become a ‘sensational’ feature in other hands; but the author, who disdains all clap-trap or stage trickery” avoids such pitfalls (164). Such reviews remind us of the stakes in literary classification. Sensation fiction was often written by and for women. It was considered dangerous because of its depictions of women characters who, like Lady Mason, reject legal authority, challenge social traditions, and often do so while pretending to be someone they are not. In opposition to realism, sensation fiction was decried as “clap-trap,” a lesser genre that employs “trickery” and corrupts easily excited readers. Reviewers drew a firm border between sensation novelists and Trollope, and rejected the possibility of genre crossing in Orley Farm. While reviewers policed genre boundaries to claim Orley Farm as realist, critics of sensation fiction were also unsettled by the genre because of its tendency to challenge classifications altogether. Patrick Brantlinger notes that “[s]ensation fiction emerged in the midst of controversies about gender, class, and race” and that early critics identified novels as sensational in part...

“Whoever Explains A ‘But’”: Tact and Friction in Trollope’s Reparative Fiction

138 Victorians Journal “Whoever explains f? 'Sat’”: Tact and friction in Trollope’s Reparative fiction by Jonathan farina In July 1849, as a Surveyor’s deputy for the Post Office in Ireland, Trollope stood witness against local postmistress Mary O’Reilly, whom he had caught stealing a marked coin from the mail (Hall 106-08; Mullen 229-32; Terry). Trollope’s testimony was rebutted by the prominent Irish barrister, Isaac Butt, an eventual MP and founder of the Home Rule League, who was nicknamed “The Rebutter” for his infamously aggressive cross-examinations. 1 According to the newspapers, Trollope adeptly parried Butt’s rebuttal with crowd-pleasing repartee, yet Butt’s acerbic manner vexed him. To discredit Trollope’s testimony, Butt questioned his character by broaching his unsavory portrayal of Mr. Allewinde of The Macdermots ofBallycloran, one of several lawyers who viciously rebut witnesses for professional necessity rather than the pursuit of truth. Thus, Trollope later parodied Butt with browbeating barristers like Mr. Chaffanbrass of The Three Clerks, Orley Farm, and Phineas Redux. Butt seems to have personified for Trollope how rebuttal formally instantiated and institutionalized the indecorous presumption that witnesses were duplicitous and partial. Rebuttal moreover routinized a narrative practice that adjudicated a matter by doubting all of its witnesses—its narrators—although they obliged the court with testimony and were not charged with malfeasance. And yet few things resemble rebuttal so much as Trollope’s fictional practice; not only does he explicitly and consistently subordinate plot to character, but many of his novels might be summarized as sustained rebuttals ofcharacter testimony: The Eustace Diamonds, to be sure, centers on the rebuttal—or the many indirect, would-be 1 May Laffan Hartley negatively portrays Butt as “Mr. Rebutter” in Christy Carew (255-80, passim). Alas, the novel does not inflect Mr. Rebutter’s idiolect with a Trollopian abundance of adversatives. Victorians Journal 139 rebuttals—of Lizzie Eustace. The Last Chronicle ofBarset assails Josiah Crawley until the trial is avoided by Mrs. Arabin; Orley Farm crosses Lady Mason; and in The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale is subject to the crossexaminations of her mother, uncle, and friends, all of whom doubt her decision to decline Johnny Eames’s proposals. Butt’s surname is even more wonderfully apposite than his nickname: as an adverb, coordinating conjunction, and preposition, but occurs frequently in English prose and most frequently in Trollope’s novels.2 In Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Eustace Diamonds, in particular, Trollope uses but about thirty percent more frequently than other nineteenth-century novelists do—almost once every one hundred words and often in succession. In a 1960 article, Hugh Sykes Davies aspires to affirm a “hunch” that Trollope’s prose has a distinct “cadence” against prevailing assertions to the contrary, yet he also nicely catalogs some ways but functions. It can “introduce a qualification or exception” (78); it can “lay bare the perplexities of motives in conflict,” imply “the presence of motives not quite conscious” in characters, and “reveal indecision,” and in this sense it facilitates Trollope’s representation of processes of decision making (78-79). Further, it periodically discriminates the difference between a character’s “own estimate of himself, and the real estimate” (79); and, finally, it can “point the discrepancybetween theory and practice in moral conduct, the almost universal failure to practice what we agree ought to be preached” (80). Adversatives, including but, then, and yet, are the signature ligatures of Trollope’s style. As such, they evidence a specific and concurrently aesthetic and social form; they grammatically instantiate a manner of ordering the world. I refer to this form as 2 In Doctor Thome, but comprises 2,159 out of 220,553 words, a frequency of 0.009789; in Framley Parsonage, 2,097 out of 211,290 words, a frequency of 0.009924; in The Small House at Allington, 2,569 out of263,246 words, a frequency of0.009758; and in The Eustace Diamonds, 2,331 out of274,376 words, a frequency of 0.008495. The standard frequency of but in a sample collection of 150 canonical and popular nineteenth-century British novels is...

Lady Mason's third husband

Lady Mason's third husband