Palliser Novels Research Articles

“Avenging the Nation”. Freedom of the Press and Constitutional Deliverance in Trollope’s Palliser Novels

Abstract This essay examines the notion of constitutional deliverance within the Victorian settlement. The expression points to the way constitutional arrangements react to threats that may disrupt the politico-legal order. Rooted in constitutional morality, it entails executing justice, restoring order, and protecting individuals’ rights and freedoms. To this end, it analyses Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, i.e. three of the six Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels, and explores whether the freedom of the press executed constitutional deliverance in the Victorian era. The essay will focus on Mr Quintus Slide, the editor of the People’s Banner, whose acts of moralisation seem to fit into the (political and biblical) notion of deliverance. The article argues that Slide used the press not to deliver the Nation, but to avenge his own interests. In so doing, he contradicted the idea of constitutional deliverance as embedded in Parliament, where the anointed Monarch summons His body politic to execute justice and protect it.

Anthony Trollope: Novelist of the “Democratic Revolution”

AbstractAnthony Trollope uses the characters and drama of his “semi-political” Palliser novels to pursue the ends of Alexis de Tocqueville's political science in a lighthearted yet serious way. Describing himself as an “advanced conservative Liberal,” Trollope claims that his “political theory” is expressed most fully in the Palliser novels. Preoccupied with the phenomenon Tocqueville designates the “democratic revolution,” the novels emphasize the historical “tendency towards equality,” consider its social and political implications, and intimate how traditionally aristocratic England might respond to it. While he endorses the justice of the democratic revolution, Trollope shows that it is accompanied by such disadvantages as a decline in human excellence and greatness. Realistic depictions of character arouse sympathy for his view that by adopting a posture of prudent liberalism toward the advance of equality, the English could both reform their aristocratic institutions and rely on those institutions to mitigate the excesses of democracy.

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

Two Separate Persons: Ethnicity and Identity in Trollope's Phineas Finn

This essay explores Anthony Trollope’s decision to identify Phineas Finn, of his various “Palliser Novels,” as Irish. Many Victorian readers questioned Phineas’s ethnicity and lack of stereotypically Irish characteristics, and Trollope himself renounced this decision in his autobiography. The character’s Irishness, however, seems to be more than a gimm ick to differentiate the novel from similar tales of aspiring members of Parliament; in Phineas Finn, the author uses ethnicity to invert the national marriage trope. Trollope employs gendered ethnic stereotypes, casting his title character as feminine in his romantic entanglements and even his political behavior, while the English ladies he meets are described as masculine. But the character of Phineas emerges as more complicated than a feminine or emasculated one; in his tenuous loyalty to his docile Irish sweetheart, Phineas becomes a conventional male lead. His Irishness, then, lends a duality to his character that encompasses more than merely two national identities; it embodies two entirely different kinds of men: one masculine and the other feminine, one a philanderer and the other loyal, one English and the other Irish.

“she sins while she remains away”: Marital Consent, “Restitution of Conjugal Rights, and Anthony Trollope’s phineas Novels

98 Victorians Journal “she sins while she remains away”: Marital Consent, “Restitution of Conjugal Rights, and ‘(Inthony Trollope’s phineas Novels by Heather Nelson For a Victorian wife, Lady Laura Kennedy, nee Standish, speaks with surprising forthrightness to her husband Robert Kennedy in Anthony Trollope’s second and fourth Palliser novels, Phineas Finn: The Irish Member (1^69) and Phineas Redux (1873).’ The couple’s dialogue indicates Kennedy’s disapproval ofLady Laura’s frankness about gender equality in marriage: “There are moments, Robert, when even a married woman must be herself rather than her husband’s wife. It is so, though you cannot understand it.” “I certainly do not understand it.” “You cannot make a woman subject to you as a dog is so.” (PF 300) Yet, while Lady Laura’s essentially irrevocable wedding-day consent anticipates a lifetime ofmarriage with Kennedy, she attempts to retract that promise through desertion, provoking Kennedy to contemplate filing for restitution of conjugal rights. A successful restitution suit did not compel sexual relations per se but more broadly forced a deserting spouse to return to the home, regardless of extenuating circumstances. Only a handful of historians—Olive Anderson, John M. Biggs, Maeve E. Doggett, and Mary Lyndon Shanley1 2—have studied restitution, but with little attention to the Phineas novels. Trollope regrets that Lady Laura must “re-consent” to her 1 Trollope considers Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux "one novel" (Autobiography 164). 2 Anderson presents a thorough history ofrestitution. Biggs reports most importantly on legal cruelty as a female defense against restitution suits. Doggett looks at restitution in the context of physical marital abuse. Shanley assesses how proto-feminists ended restitution, enabling wives to control their own bodies. Victorians Journal 99 unhappy marriage; in Phineas Redux, she grieves: “it can’t be right that a woman should pretend to love a man whom she loathes. I couldn’t live with him” (PR 139). Through Lady Laura, Trollope shows that rights— specifically conjugal rights—are a primary problem vexing miserable yet “consenting” wives in nineteenth-century England. Restitution of Conjugal Rights Eighteenth-century precedent enabled nineteenth-century restitution suits. In A New Abridgment of the Law (1736), lawyer Matthew Bacon reports'. “The Husband hath by Law Power and Dominion over his Wife, and may keep her by Force within the Bounds of Duty ... he has by Law a Right to the Custody of her, and may, if he think fit, confine her” (285). Professor, lawyer, and judge William Blackstone addresses this power in Commentaries on the Laws ofEngland (1765): “the courts oflaw will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour” (433). In practice, husbands did not necessarily need to wait for or prove wives’ misbehavior before filing for restitution, masculine prerogatives (honor, obedience, ownership) clearly outweighing concerns about female morality. Scores ofBritish spouses filed for restitution throughout the nineteenth century. Wives filed the most restitution suits for financial support, usually after the husband had deserted the home, leaving the family without a viable breadwinner.3 Yet, in the smaller number of cases when husbands filed for restitution, the situation could be tragic in a different way. If a husband abused his wife physically, emotionally, and / or sexually, prompting her to escape the situation, he could turn to the courts to sue for restitution. Although restitution ofconjugal rights did not signify sexual services, it did require a spouse’s permanent presence in the home; and, since an abusive husband owned his wife’s body via coverture, such suits would almost certainly indicate his determination to continue the abuse. Also, in restitution cases throughout most ofthe century, courts did not accept claims of abuse as a defense for desertion. If a restitution suit were granted, an abused wife had two options: obey the decree to return to her husband’s 3 British wives filed about 70% of restitution cases throughout the early- and middlenineteenth century; by the end ofthe Victorian period, the number increased to over 85%. 100 Victorians Journal home or sit in jail indefinitely, a situation termed “attachment.”4 Just as wives “consented” to abuse in the first place—through wedding vows, marital custom, and...

The Good Man and the Good Citizen: Political Philosophy in Trollope's Palliser Novels

The Good Man and the Good Citizen: Political Philosophy in Trollope's Palliser Novels

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

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...

Greetings from the Editors

Victorians Journal 5 Gratings from thg editors As Adam Gopnik has recently told us in The New Yorker (May 4), “Trollope is Trending.” For that high-profile attention in an iconic cultural and literary magazine, we who have been reading Trollope and writing about his work for decades are grateful—but not surprised. The argument for Trollope’s art as sophisticated and modern as well as deeply engaging is one Trollope scholars have been making for quite some time now. Trollopians such as Robert Polhemus {The Changing World of Anthony Trollope), Juliet McMaster {Trollope’s Palliser Novels), and Robert Tracy {Trollope’s Later Novels) have long pointed out his characters’ psychological complexity, the “depth ofportraiture” that David Skilton—one of Trollope’s great editors—focuses on in a recent essay. The intricacies of Trollope’s deceptively “transparent” prose have been remarked upon at least since Irish short story writer Frank O’Connor claimed that Trollope’s narrator likes “to lead his reader very gently up the garden path of his own conventions and prejudices and then to point out that the reader is wrong. This is not very like the behavior of a typical mid-Victorian gentleman” (168). It is now generally accepted among Trollope scholars that his fiction engages the intricacies not only of the individual psyche—in layered, complicated prose—but that Trollope also immerses himself in the most complex issues of the Victorian society in which he wrote his books. His work addresses the discourses of gender and nationhood in particular, but also responds to social class tensions and racial history, issues that still intensely occupy us today (see Morse, Reforming Trollope). These essays on Trollope build on past scholarship to read his novels in fascinating new ways. In the long wake of germinal scholarship by James Kincaid {The Novels ofAnthony Trollope) and Christopher Herbert {Trollope and Comic Pleasure), a group of essays focus on the marriage plot, discovering in Trollope’s fiction adaptations and critiques of that narrative convention. In “Why You Can’t Forgive Her: Vocational Women and the Suppressive Hypothesis,” Talia Schaffer examines the economic background of the Langham Place movement, which from the mid-1850s onwards sought to expand the 6 Victorians Journal opportunities for work for women, when activists like Emily Faithful, Bessie Raynor Parkes, and Barbara Leigh Smith pragmatically realized that creating access to work would lead to more equality more quickly than fighting for legislative reform. The first half of the essay, which focuses on their work and their achievements, is scrupulously delineatedbefore Schafferproceeds to examine Can You Forgive Her?, the first novel of the Palliser series, in this light. Schaffer proposes that this marriage novel is a critique of the convention oferotic marriage, and one that advances the concept ofthe vocational marriage, where a woman’s choice of spouse is predicated on a life with a career for her too, alongside her husband. This reading leads to some telling ironies, many of them uncomfortable. In a subtle re-working of Sharon Marcus’s thesis in Between Women, she sees the happiest “marriage” as being between Plantagenet Palliser and John Grey, as Palliser convinces Grey of the fulfilment of a life in politics. John Grey and Alice each achieve the other’s ideal ending, as Grey gets the exciting career and Alice ends up with the peaceful estate in Cambridge. Lauren Cameron also creates a new perspective on Can You Forgive Her? when she examines Darwin’s influence on Trollope’s novel. Cameron too links her analysis to the story of Alice Vavasor, rather than focusing on sparkling Glencora McCluskie—Palliser’s courtship, unhappy early marriage, and flirtation with her rakish former suitor Burgo Fitzgerald—as many Trollope scholars have done: Alice’s plotline is the heart of the book, which begins with her past and closes with her future. Trollope views Alice as a worthwhile subject of study and one of the reasons—I argue in this article—is that her experience provides a test case for Darwinian narratives that were gripping public attention and intellectual imaginations in the years following the publication of On the Origin of Species. . . . Alice’s plot shows us that Darwinian evolutionary principles function...

“But the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel

Victorians Journal 55 “©at the baby of course is the first object”: The Superfluous Infant in Trollope’s Comic Marriage Novel by Tamara Wagner Trollope’s uncompromising realism imbues the everyday of highlife with a wry sense of comedy. He excels in detailing the familiar, laying bare the mundane private lives of the elite and ofthe middling classes that attempt to emulate or marry into these higher ranks of a rapidly changing society. Examples include the famous bedroom conversations of the Archdeacon and his wife in the Barchester Chronicles, the domestic lives of politicians in the Palliser series, and altogether his critical insight into marriage at a time when its significance as an alliance and a contract underwent crucial changes. Throughout his representations of married life, Trollope eschews sentimentality and sensationalism alike. In his autobiography, he might have asserted an ambiguity about “sensationalist and anti-sensationalist” writers and readers, claiming that a “good novel should be both [realistic and sensational], and both in the highest degree” (2.41-42); but his rejection of sentimentalism remained fervent. It arguably formed the most defining characteristic of his realism and was in pointed opposition to the style of Dickens, whom he dubbed “Mr. Popular Sentiment” in a particularly biting passage in The Warden. 1 In Trollope’s comic explorations of marriage and family life there is, however, a revealing doublesidedness in the way he places babies, an aspect of Victorian culture that, I further contend, has altogether been curiously sidelined in critical discussions. A close analysis of how Trollope engages with what he terms “Baby Worship” (ch. 16) in Barchester Towers helps us to re-evaluate the surprisingly neglected figure of the baby in Victorian literature. The comic marriage novel Is He Popenjoy? pits Trollope’s satirical evocation of “baby worship” against the larger 1 Compare Meckier (ch. 2) on what he has termed “the realism wars.” 56 Victorians Journal structural function of the expected heir as the pivot on which an outwardly conventional narrative ofinheritance can turn and thereby be turned into something else. “to impress her with the solemnity of married life”: expectations of Modem Marriage in Is fiePopenjoy? Is He Popenjoy? is Trollope’s most bizarrely comic marriage novel. It traces the coming of age of a young woman after her marriage, providing painstakingly detailed insight into married life in the Victorian upper and middle classes. The novel describes the transformation that “a little girl... not pretending to any self-action” (IHP 202) undergoes when she becomes a married woman, and how marriage makes her “learn to be a woman” (48). Yet the double­ standards inherent in her husband’s appreciation ofhow she “had lost her childish little timidities, and had bloomed forth a beautiful woman”—although, “as to the childish timidity, perhaps he would have preferred that it should not have been so quickly or so entirely banished” (315)—is presented tongue-in-cheek, as is his plan to “impress her with the solemnity of married life” (178). The lightheartedness ofone ofTrollope’s most refreshingly lively female characters is in pointed contrast to the ridiculed solemnity of her serious but “not very clever” husband (327). In detailing their contrasting expectations, shifting hopes, and ideas ofmarried life, the novel maps out diverging concepts of marriage, domestic realities, and a married woman’s rights and duties at the time. Although conventional approaches to Trollope’s fiction often take his provocatively blunt pronouncements—such as his notorious suggestion in North America that “[t]he best right a woman has is the right to a husband” (2.72)—at face value, Deborah Denenholz Morse’s seminal Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels has instigated an important revaluation of his much more nuanced and often self­ consciously ambiguous representation of gender. More recently, in an essay entitled “Trollope the Feminist,” Morse adds that, in “his dissection of masculine privilege in Victorian culture and society,” Trollope’s “critique of the lassitude and misogyny of aristocratic Englishmen [is] coupled with his loving depiction of vibrant women,” such as a stablekeeper’s granddaughter in Is He Popenjoy?', Victorians Journal 57 thus “Trollope’s critique of gender is imbricated with a critique of social class and nationhood” (np...

The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer (review)

Reviewed by: The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer Sarah McNeely (bio) The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer; pp. 235. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. $59.00 cloth. It seems appropriate that Sara L. Maurer’s first book, The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, would be published in a year when Downton Abbey, a pbs television show whose plot revolves around a dilemma of ownership, has skyrocketed to fame. Downton Abbey is, of course, far from the first popular work to portray the complex ins and outs of British property ownership, a recurring feature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, from Jane Austen to Anthony Trollope. More important than its unlikely pop-culture relevance, though, is the model of scholarship Maurer presents in this original, insightful work, which bridges a gap between British and Irish studies. In The Dispossessed State, Maurer traces the revolution in attitudes about property rights in nineteenth-century English and Anglo-Irish narratives of ownership. In her examination of a range of nineteenth-century texts and authors who engage questions of ownership, Maurer brings together the two cultures, each holding radically different views on property and the state. In addition to examining literature and journalism, Maurer incisively draws on the political, economic, and legal theories that compelled changes in thought about the individual, property, and the state. In her discussion of the formation of Victorian ideas about property, Maurer argues that Ireland wielded a major influence on how the British conceived of their own national identity in terms of property. Though we tend to think of the Victorian British Isles in exclusively British terms, Maurer reminds us that in terms of property, inhabitants of the British Isles understood themselves not separately but as part of a complex relationship, “in terms that linked Irish and British culture” (4). This framing of the English and Irish relationship as deeply intertwined is strongly supported in the various texts Maurer surveys in her study of property, the state, and national identity. In her analysis of discourses of property and state emergent in literature of the nineteenth century, Maurer draws primarily on the fiction and non-fiction writings of Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith. In her chapter on Maria Edgeworth’s Irish fiction, Maurer begins by discussing Edgeworth’s own lack of ownership over her intellectual property. Her reading of Edgeworth’s novels is especially compelling when she explains Edgeworth’s dispossession of her own work. That Anglo-Irish and Irish right to property takes such a central position in her novels Castle Rackrent (1801), Ennui (1809), and Ormond (1817) is a fascinating connection Maurer mines, finding ultimately that Edgeworth’s literature unifies Anglo-Irish and Irish in a shared sense of dispossession. That is, Edgeworth’s view on property, apparent from her novels, is that those who own the land should rule Ireland. [End Page 211] Edgeworth’s particular view of property as a right pre-existing the state is almost directly opposed to the views articulated in John Stuart Mill’s journalism on the same question. As Maurer explains in her second chapter, Mill believed the state should create rights in property and exercise that power in Ireland. In chapter 3, Maurer discusses the appeal of indigenous property rights to Irish nationalists and others caught between the two prevailing discourses of property rights and the state in the Victorian years, represented by the previously discussed works of Edgeworth and Mill. Maurer’s succinct overview and explanation of competing narratives of property ownership in this chapter are extremely helpful to readers unfamiliar with Victorian ideas of property. Chapter 4 turns again to fiction, reading Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels in terms of property and the role of a wife, a relationship that, according to Maurer, presents a metaphor for “vicarious ownership” and enjoyment of the state by non-owners. The final chapter argues in favour of reading George Moore’s Drama in Muslin and George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways as responses to the proposal of the...

The Advanced Conservative Liberal: Victorian Liberalism and the Aesthetics of Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Advanced Conservative Liberal: Victorian Liberalism and the Aesthetics of Anthony Trollope's Palliser NovelsLynette FelberLynette FelberBellingham, Washington Search for more articles by this author Bellingham, WashingtonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 107, Number 3February 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/650357 Views: 26Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Somi Ahn Old Age and Euthanasia in Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period, Neophilologus 104, no.33 (Oct 2019): 439–451.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09626-5

The novelty of newspapers: Victorian fiction after the invention of the news

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ILLUSTRATIONS INTRODUCTION: THE AGE OF NEWSPAPERS Newspapers in Different Voices A Nation of News Readers A Newspaperized World PART I: THE FRONT PAGE 1. THE SHIPPING INTELLIGENCE Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker The Latest Shipping Intelligence Why Victorian Heroines Read the Shipping News Shipwreck Spine Secret Tears for Ships Lost at Sea 2. THE PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENTS Advertisements, the Agony Column, and Sensation Novels of the 1860s The Short History of a Miserable Life A Double State of Existence The Sensation Novel in Embryo PART II: THE INNER PAGES 3. THE LEADING ARTICLE The Whispering Conscience in Trollope's Palliser Novels A Horror of Newspaper Men Thunderbolts from Mount Olympus Trollope's Whispering Conscience The Promise of Big Type in the Morning 4. THE PERSONAL INTERVIEW Wishing to Be Interviewed in Henry James Interviewed! The Rise of the Interview Society James's Overhearing Audience The Age of Interviewing 5. THE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE Conrad's Wild Story of a Journalist Brains Pulsating to the Rhythm of Journalistic Phrases Stanley's Journalism by Warfare Kurtz's Letters from Africa CONCLUSION: THE BACK PAGE NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels and Anti-Irish Prejudice

It is by now taken as axiomatic that representations of Irish characters in Vic torian literature were generally negative,1 However, as Roy Foster shows, they were not universally so; we find one example of a positive treatment of Ireland and the Irish in Victorian writing in Anthony Trollope's of six political novels, which appeared between 1864 and 1880.2 In addition to having an Irishman as the hero of its second and fourth titles, Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1873), the series also anatomizes one of the most important peri ods in Irish political history, stretching roughly from Disestablishment in 1869 to the founding of the Land League in 1879. The most significant aspect of the Palliser series, though, may be its careful analysis of anti-Irish prejudice and stereotyping, carried out as part of the six books' consideration of prejudicial representations of those who do not conform to Victorian norms. The theme of prejudice dominates the Palliser series. Having lived in Ireland from 1841 to 1859?and having published three books on Irish themes before he began the Palliser novels, Trollope was well aware of how the Irish suffered such preju dice.3 The Palliser series can thus be seen as an attempt to challenge Irish stereo types in general, while offering a distinctive treatment of two of the most com mon images of Irishness: the Stage Irishman and the presentation of Ireland as a feminized victim. In 1853, Charles Dickens encapsulated Victorian attitudes to Otherness. I have not the least interest in the Noble Savage, he wrote:

"What's a Woman to Do?": Managing Money and Manipulating Fictions in Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds

"What's a Woman to Do?": Managing Money and Manipulating Fictions in Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds Dagni Bredesen In perhaps the best-known Uterary critique of the law in general and the common law doctrine of coverture in particular, Oliver Twisfs (1837-9) Mr. Bumble expresses outrage when told that "the law supposes that his wife acts under his direction." Mr. Bumble erupts, "If the law supposes that . . . the law is a ass - a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience, by experience" (461-2). Married to a former "widder," who refuses to submit to his dictates and issues many of her own, Mr. Bumble finds that he bears legal responsibility for her. Here, the comedy depends upon the discrepancy between that which the law "supposes" and Mr. Bumble's hen-pecked existence . This joke on Mr. Bumble, however, points to the serious rupture between social reaUty and the legal ideal of coverture. InstitutionaUzed in British common law, the doctrine of coverture placed a married woman under the covering, or "the guardianship" of her husband. To be sous couverture meant that a wife effectively lost a civil identity apart from as a spouse. Based on the notion that in marriage a husband and wife become one person, this doctrine of marital unity deemed a wife incapable of managing her own property or of having a wiU of her own, poUtical or otherwise, distinct from her husband's. Furthermore, according to Peregrine Bingham, coverture placed married women at a financial disadvantage or, in legal terms, "under a disabiUty" in that any contract she made in her own name was "void Victorian Review (2005)99 D. Bredesen at the outset" (180). In this paper, I begin by briefly tracing the term "legal fiction" from Bentham's pointed but general critique to its later appropriation, first by his disciples and then by advocates of female suffrage, to describe the doctrine of marital unity. I then look at two of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels - Can You Forgive Her?(\865) and The Eustace Diamonds (1873) - to show how Trollope exploits the narrative trajectories and contradictions produced by the intersection of money, property, and female marital status and how the figure of the widow is the lever he uses to do this, even as he tries to assimilate this figure in the end. In Can You Forgive Her? the three prominent female characters provide a representative sampling of women - those subject to coverture and those out from under that legal covering - each of whose financial status receives extensive narrative scrutiny and generates competing claims concerning its management.1 In The Eustace Diamonds, the narrative tracks the legal, marital, and monetary maneuverings of the female protagonist, whose contest over possession of the eponymous necklace, calls into question Victorian verities of law and gender. In both these novels, Trollope's compelUng representations, not only of womanhood in general, but of widowhood in particular, demonstrate the problems posed to a society predicated on gendered binaries by an autonomous woman, who makes her own monetary and matrimonial decisions, while retaining the patina of respectabiUty. Trollope attempts to resolve the contradictions the widow exposes in accordance with the legal notion that "under the law, women are either married or are going to be married" (Treatise of Feme Covert, preface v); that is, he marries her off. Nevertheless, although Trollope recovers the "uncovered" woman once more within the bonds of matrimony , while she moves in the world asfeme discoverte (and even in the marriages that ultimately follow), the widow demonstrates a financial and social intelUgence that reveals the way gender constructions Umit, even hamper, other women - whether spinster or married; indeed, the widow exposes these constructions as fictions in and of themselves. 100volume 31 number 2 "What's a Woman to Do?" I. The focus on the fiction of marital oneness, that is, coverture, is part of a larger debate concerning the uses and abuses of fictions of law. According to Black's Law Dictionary, a "fiction of law," arises when "[sjomething...

Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition

and superficial” (Novels 15). For a historicized contribution to this debate, see Nardin’s Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy. See particularly Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World, especially his account of the bildungsroman’s eventual collapse, in George Eliot, between the competing claims of labor and subjectivity: “For better or worse, vocation is depersonalized, objective, hostile to ‘personal experience’: to suggest that it can be fulfilled within everyday personal relationships implies a perversion of its meaning. It also implies a repression of the ‘other half’ of the novel: of the splendid and sorrowful account—short was the happy life of Tertius Lydgate—of the conflict between vocation and everyday life” (218). See also Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation. TROLLOPE AND THE CAREER 273 WINTER 2003 6There is an echo here of Said’s powerful account of the development of literary “careers”—a figure for the exile from secure conventions or any exterior agencies—out of literary “vocations” in Beginnings. For Said the fall from vocation into career is expressive of the unalterably subjectivist stance of the modern writer, without a home in literary precedent; in the Trollopian sense “career” expresses an analogous fall into a disconnected individuality that now can only compete with others, without the collectivist umbrella of “vocation.” See also Arac’s Commissioned Spirits for an analysis of the development of novelistic “careers” proper in the nineteenth century (23–27). 7See Corfield’s Power and the Professions for a sociological picture of “relative failure” in mid-nineteenth-century British professional life, a picture that cites Trollope’s father as an instance of the kind of stalled career-path which best expresses the term (224). For one acute version of the relation of sentimentality, or pathos, to social mobility, see Bailin. 8Bourdieu’s theory of the “disposition” explicitly responds to Weber: “The homogeneity of the dispositions associated with a position and their seemingly miraculous adjustment to the demands inscribed in it result partly from the mechanisms which channel toward positions individuals who are already adjusted to them, either because they feel ‘made’ for jobs that are ‘made’ for them—this is ‘vocation,’ the proleptic assumption of an objective destiny that is imposed by practical reference to the modal trajectory in the class of origin—or because they are seen in this light by the occupants of the posts—this is co-option based on the immediate harmony of dispositions—and partly from the dialectic which is established, throughout a lifetime, between dispositions and positions, aspirations and achievements” (Distinction 110). Bourdieu’s theoretical apparatus is useful here particularly because of its attempt to formalize a theory of biography based on the career, on successive choices made within particular fields of power, which is remarkably close to the biographical procedure of Trollope in the Palliser novels and even in such brief studies as his Lord Palmerston (1882). For both, the vocational “aspiration” is of far less moment than the kinds of choices the individual faces in the midst of a vocational pursuit—choices that are always limiting, and limited. See also “The Field of Cultural Production” for further definitions of “trajectory” and what Bourdieu calls “constructed biography.” Contemporary sociologies of careerism stress what is often called the investment effect: the increase of desire for what has been achieved, which turns career-paths into “a powerful factor of conformity with the existing social order and a source of basic conservatism” (Larson 229). 9Miller’s contention reflects a lively debate among Trollope critics as to how truly “political”—or, responsive to social changes outside of parliamentary tactics—the Palliser novels are; for a defense of Trollope’s engagement with the issues of the 1860s and 1870s, see Halperin, Trollope and Politics, and for an acute analysis of Trollopian politics as a “spectacle of violence directed against another” (22), see Dellamora, “Stupid Trollope.” One further useful account is Hillis Miller’s in The Ethics of Reading, where Trollope’s relation to the playing of games—cricket, whist, the novel—could be usefully extended to the game Trollope was finally excluded from playing, Parliament. The similarity this analysis of Trollope’s Parliament bears to contemporary accounts of the profession of literary criticism is intended; the monadic, self-enclosed nature of parliamentary government reflects Stanley Fish’s account, in Professional Correctness, of disciplines and their boundaries, while the self-adjusting and self-critiquing

The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775 by Betty A. Schellenberg

mainly expository, and he does not give his work context by drawing on theorists of visual meaning — no Gombrich, no Panofsky, no semiotics or cultural critique. This book could have been longer, deeper, and fuller. It reports a great deal that is useful, but it has no sustained argument. Its structure is based on chronological sequence. Blewett gives us ready (though less than full) access to fascinating material, and he opens a path to the further work that Defoe and his illustrators deserve. This is certainly an accomplishment that merits our thanks, and it may be mean-spirited of me to suggest, nevertheless, that greater sophistication would have been desirable. j a n is s v il p is / University of Calgary Betty A. Schellenberg, The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740-1775 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996). $US 34.95 cloth. In an ingenious attempt to rescue a group of mid eighteenth-century novels usually dismissed as “aesthetic failures,” Betty Schellenberg has identified and named a new sub-genre, the “conversational” novels, which share certain characteristics, notably sociability and consensus, that set them apart from their more successful rivals. The dominant or mainstream novels, which employ a “strongly linear, teleological narrative structure” (2)— a journey, or at the very least a struggle, involving adventure and hardship, and ending in reconciliation or death — have obscured a “handful” (3) of fictions built according to different principles. The straight line is replaced by the circle, specifically the social or domestic circle, often walled about and cut off, exclusive, communal, and harmonious. More than twenty years ago Ronald Paulson pointed out a change in prose fiction in the 1740s, from “a single hero on a pilgrimage to the unit of a family” (Emblem and Expression 130). This book carries Paulson’s observation a step further by distinguishing among the domestic fictions, separating out those whose “centripetal and static narrative structures” (17) leave “the impression of semi-ritualized tableaux or ceremonies” (20) — like the portrait group, or conversation piece, from which Schellenberg borrows her name. Or as the Oxford Companion to Art warns, in the group portrait “the sitters are engaged in conversation or social activity of a not very vigorous character.” Appropriately, Schellenberg begins her analysis with Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), “virtually a model for the intimate circle portrayed in the contemporary fictions to be discussed in this study” (29). The closeknit family formed by the two couples, linked by kinship, is an ideal of 200 “an egalitarian, transparent, unindividualistic [sic], non-conflictual [sic], and self-sufficient means of attaining social stability” (33) and as such sets “a standard that the subsequent texts do not approach” (29). But it also car­ ries the seeds of its own ultimate destruction, as its continuation, Volume the Last, separately treated by Schellenberg in the final chapter, attests. All too typically, its social stability is “fulfilled in terms of traditional hierarchy, polite deception, a denial of desire, an exclusion of sources of conflict, and a dependence on the material supports of leisured sensibility” (33). In addition to the two works by Sarah Fielding, five other novels are treated by Schellenberg. The greatest challenges the advocate of the con­ versational novel faces must be Richardson’s Pamela n and Sir Charles Grandison. Her defence of Pamela II is more ingenious than persuasive. Richardson has to be seen as deliberately setting out “to frustrate reader desire” by making his “novel of marriage and social relations” conform to “the same kinds of limits as must its female protagonist” (30), but there is no reason why this should be so, as Trollope’s wonderful Palliser novels demonstrate. Grandison is extolled as the ultimate “model of the conversa­ tional circle.” In its frictionless transit, “dramatic momentum is reduced to a bare minimum” (60); ironically, in this “the most fully developed and the most optimistic” (52) novel of the conversational circle, conversation itself will finally cease: “between Harriet and Sir Charles there appears to be little need for conversation at all” (65). Although the greater egalitarianism of Amelia — following upon Richard­ son’s relentless class-consciousness — makes its social circle the “most truly inclusive” (76), it is a...

Patriarchal desire and Victorian discourse: a Lacanian reading of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels

Patriarchal desire and Victorian discourse: a Lacanian reading of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels

Rhetoric and Courtship in Can You Forgive Her?

Rhetoric and Courtship in Can You Forgive Her? Randall Craig Subtleties! my dear Miss O’Carroll. I am sorry to find you participating in the vulgar error of the reading public to whom an unusual collocation of words, involving a juxtaposition of antiperistatical ideas, immediately suggests the notion of hyperoxysophistical paradoxology. — Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey Alice Vavasor’s circuitous path to matrimony in Can You Forgive Her? is summarized by her father: “I do call it square. It has come round to the proper thing.” 1 The geometric illogicality implied by his figures of speech — a round route that results in a square figure — is more vividly expressed by Mr. Grimes, the aptly named political operative who protests that he is “as round as your hat, and as square as your elbow” (CYFH, 1:130). 2 Grimes’s avowal of integrity is subverted by the figurative paradox through which it is expressed. Indeed, the misshapen publican contorts himself to fit the political mold — round or square — of whichever party — Conservative or Liberal — will “come down with the stumpy” (CYFH, 2:317), that is, supply the ready cash. While Alice does not share this mercenary bent, her marital plans are at least as changeable as his political allegiances. The “noblest jilt that ever yet halted between two minds” (CYFH, 2:355) is alternately engaged to two men a total of four times. 3 The novel ends, however, basically where it began, with Alice’s betrothal to John Grey. Thus despite much circumambulation, she seems merely to have returned to square one. Her re-engagement may justify her father’s assessment that things have come round to be square, but another oxymoron is needed to describe Alice’s character — the laudatory adjective, “noble,” applied to the “odious word,” jilt (CYFH, 1:338). 4 Trollope is, of course, better known for a comfortable relation to readers and to his craft than for an interest in rhetorical paradox and linguistic complexity. His goal as a novelist is plainly stated in the Autobiography: [End Page 217] Language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader; — and not only some propositions of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no less, which the writer intended to put into his words.... The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as is the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery. 5 The commonplace and commonsensical view of Trollope’s style as “uniformly easy, flowing, clear, plain, unlaboured, unaffected, unmannered, and above all businesslike” suggests that he achieved his objective. 6 C. P. Snow among many others has observed that Trollope is not “much given to rhetoric.” 7 This direct and self-effacing style, however, tends to obscure his subtle insinuation of questions of rhetoric into the conduct of romance. When Glencora Palliser says, “Romance and poetry are for the most part lies.... I have seen something of them in my time, and I much prefer downright honest figures,” she seems to express Trollope’s view of fictional discourse. 8 Nevertheless, the Palliser novels exhibit a pervasive interest in the rhetoric of courtship and seduction, both of voters and of lovers. The former is epitomized by Sir Timothy Beeswax’s “pseudo-patriotic conjuring phraseology” (DC, 165), the latter by George Vavasor’s professed deprecation of “romantic phraseology” (CYFH, 1:389). By focusing on the language of romance, I hope to clarify the seeming paradox of Trollope’s shunning in style precisely that to which he is attracted in subject. This tension leads to a consideration of two rhetorical figures: one, oxymoron, is illustrated by the title originally considered for the novel, The Noble Jilt; the other, rhetorical question, is exemplified by that ultimately chosen, Can You Forgive Her?. 9 Together these titles imbricate eros and erotesis, and while Trollope may never be accused of the “hyperoxysophistical paradoxology” with which Peacock satirizes Coleridge, he is more than a little interested in the “collocations of words” with which courtships are conducted. Each of these rhetorical devices is associated with a specific speech...

Trollope Looks Back

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