Trollope

...He died on December 6. One can take the measure of N. John Hall's calmly comprehensive biography by looking back at James Pope Hennessy's 1971 attempt...

...Trollope's return to popularity after a posthumous eclipse is often dated to the Blitz and attributed to a longing for his cozy, windless, and edenic daydream world, now as exotic as that of The Tale of Genji (to use Pope Hennessy's comparison...

...In the 1850s he zigzagged all over Ireland and England on special assignments, homogenizing and modernizing the post...

...steeping himself in Irish life and fiction, he set his first two wild and uncharacteristic novels in Ireland: The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and Donald Lyons is a frequent contributor to the New Criterion...

...Ireland woke him up, gave him character, tone, flavor...

...Hall has read everything from the mighty pen, including a long, late life of Cicero...

...How he would have enjoyed his club, picking up the news of the day from all lips, while he seemed to give it to all ears...

...Trollope decided to do another Irish novel (his views on Ireland were growing quite conservative) and dragged a niece thither with him to do some looking around...

...The great planters were protectors, creditors, and counselors—"friends"—to the lesser farmers...

...The ensuing Australia and New Zealand caused distress down under, though Trollope thought he was being friendly...

...He did criticize much, especially the Post Office and Lincoln's too-quick embrace of Emancipation, but he found much to praise, including—astonishingly for us—the New York City public schools...

...This patriarchal order was accepted as part of the great chain of being stretching down from God to king to father of the family...

...Because they were pretty," answered one little girl...

...The grandson of one of the models for Phineas Finn, Pope Hennessy brought much Irish Trollopeana to light and was praised by Auden...

...Ireland also gave Trollope the initial impetus and subject for fiction...

...While eighteenth-century thinkers were intensely interested in republican government, they assumed it could be established only in small states, such as the Italian republic of Lucca or the Swiss canton of Zug...

...American society was also more stratified into patricians and plebeians...

...He was born in London in 1815 to a barrister and a vicar's daughter...

...Oxford is currently reprinting, in its paperback World's Classics series, nearly forty Trollope titles, many long unavailable...

...Besides, American religion centered more on commandments and interdictions than on rituals of worship...

...In his comedies of courtship, where bright and passionate women often strain sympathetically against various social codes, Trollope never lets one suppose that the human heart can do without order or structure of some kind...

...By the third Barset novel, Framley Parsonage (1860-61), Trollope was a hit with the public...

...and a professional life in public service (highly creditable to him in its execution, he was even a success in Ireland) gave him, one feels, his interest in organizations and professions, an interest that he turned on the Established Church, where he no doubt felt that the intrigues, clashes of personalities and wills, the tragedies and comedies, were translatable from those of the postal service he knew from the inside...

...his bow-wow, can-do, get-on-with-it energies were arguably more American than English, anyway...

...He nourished a typically Victorian sort of semi-public crush on a much younger American feminist/author/actress called Kate Fields...

...After the two unsuccessful Irish novels, he hit his commercial stride with six novels of (mainly) clerical life set in the imaginary county of Barsetshire...

...Pre-revolutionary American society reflected the imperial design of the colonial regime, but although the colonists shared every Englishman's love of political liberty, American domestic and community life before 1775 was more authoritarian than England's: wives and children were Maurice Cranston is the author, most recently, of The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 (University of Chicago Press...

...The world was astonished when the Americans set up a republic with a population of millions and a territory larger than any European kingdom...

...He started hunting and keeping hounds—an avocation that was to obsess him for thirty-five years...

...Finally, in 1877, Trollope sailed to South Africa...

...Let it never be said that we live in a barbarous time...

...Eighteen eighty-two was a time of trouble in Ireland involving Charles StewThe American Spectator April 1992 67 art Parnell, violent Fenians, and assassinations of English functionaries...

...In another class, on ancient Roman history, he felt more at ease...

...He was soon darting about the countryside, doing the work of ten to bring efficiency, speed, and honesty to the rural Irish post, and developing that blustery, intimidating, fee-fi-fo-fum personality that was to mark him all his days...

...He wed Rose, a Yorkshire girl he had met holidaying there with her family...

...what the reviewers said...

...By the time his ship reached home, he had finished writing The West Indies and the Spanish Main...

...One knows not if the youngster's father makes a dollar a day or $3,000 a year...

...T rollope's mother Frances, a queer and opinionated gadabout long before her son, had lived in America in Anthony's youth (without Anthony) and written Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), a book whose fastidious, disdainful pictures of social rawness and religious fanaticism caused enormous cisatlantic resentment...

...Wood argues that a far-reaching change was the secret of the United States' enduring success...

...One of his sons was getting bogged down in a feckless attempt to run a sheep ranch in Australia, and in 1871 Trollope sailed out to help—and, of course, to write it all up...

...Hoping to atone for the maternal offense, Anthony visited the U.S...

...13 Histories of the American revolution have hitherto depicted it as similar to either the English revolution of 1688, as much conservative as radical...

...Where Pope Hennessy often obtrudes his epigrammatic cleverness, Hall is ever the deferential, efficient servant of Trollope, who would doubtless have warmed to his latest chronicler's modesty, industry, and common sense...

...His mother nearly packed him off to join the Austrian cavalry, but at the last minute got him, through a family connection, a clerkship at the London General Post Office, where he was miserable, lonely, and poor, but found a flair for the postal business...

...George Eliot, Trollope's highbrow chum, only wished she could write with his undeviating regularity...

...Back in London, he fell ill...

...the O'Kellys (1848...

...I have yet to sample one that is without pleasures, be it The Way We Live Now, a comprehensive indictment of literary and political London, or Is He Popinjoy?, a brilliant comedy of inheritance, or Nina Balatka, a pseudonymously published story of love vanquishing anti-Semitism in Prague...

...Energy and discipline characterized everything he did...

...Starring in two Palliser novels was Irish politician Phineas Finn, and contemporary Irish questions figure in the plots...

...James once shared a transatlantic crossing with Trollope and was amazed at the Englishman's matutinal scribbling in all weathers...

...But he had a real equipment in his now mature experience of rural and educated England...

...It could be argued against Wood that those institutions that most historians have seen as the breeding grounds of American democracy—the colonial legislatures and town meetings—were as subversive of patriarchalism as the institutions that preserved the medieval THE RADICALISM OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Gordon S. Wood Alfred A. Knopf/446 pages/$27.50 reviewed by MAURICE CRANSTON 68 The American Spectator April 1992...

...Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown, offers something commendably original: social history that explains the revolution by marshaling often-overlooked details without reference to sociology...

...I think, rather, that those who love Trollope feel the ubiquitous presence of Jane Austen in his language...

...But he was able to use his new feel for the big world in his second great series of novels, the six Palliser tales, centering on Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium and "advanced conservative liberal" Prime Minister—as well as on his wife, the bewitching Lady Glencora...

...The mistress asked the girls why the Romans ran away with the Sabine women...

...by 19, he seemed hopeless...

...more submissive, servants more servile, parishioners more docile, and tradesmen more deferential...

...In the great tradition of nineteenth-century novels about women and marriage and money, he comes just behind the giants—Austen and Eliot and James—who rethought the very premises of the genre...

...In the Caribbean, he climbed mountains dutifully, and poked about busily in the appalling heat, although, as readers of his fiction know, scenery was always a bore to Trollope, running a distant second to people and their talk...

...On the business side Hall is definitive and refreshingly uncondescending...

...Q. D. Leavis supplies the necessary analysis: His own equipment was the belief that Pride and Prejudice was the greatest of novels, and he clearly formed his habits of composition, natural dialogue and use of the correct, refined and educated language of the speech coming down from the eighteenth century by his admiration for, and sympathy with, the objects and techniques of Jane Austen...

...His break, the key change of air and pace, came in 1841 with his successful application for the lowly job of clerk to the postal surveyor of central Ireland...

...The final entry of the series, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866-67), contains a full-length portrait of a tragic figure much like Trollope's misanthropic father...

...The dalliance remained, if intense, innocent...

...The Post Office was forever sending him to places like Egypt to bring order...

...He went all over, west and east, scribbling away daily at North America...

...Hall treats fully the four memorable contributions by his subject to that quintessentially English genre, the travel book...

...how he got along with an array of publishers...

...he took possession of her, and turned her inside out . . . he bestowed upon her the most serious, the most patient, the most tender, the most copious consideration...

...Trollope loved reading the great Romans (not to mention minor Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists) and saw in Cicero a fellow clubman across the ages: "What a man he would have been for London life...

...Parliament and other medieval institutions that resisted patriarchalism in England meant little to Americans...

...He liked America...

...On November 3, he had a stroke at his brother-in-law's...

...Gaping with horror at the huge Kimberley mine, he found a Trollopean hope even in it: "Who can doubt but that work is the great civilizer of the world—work and the growing desire for those good things which work only will bring...

...And, given that political theorists had always said it was more difficult to maintain a republic than to establish one, how could it be kept in being...

...He was miserable, friendless, scruffy, ungainly, slow...

...he was an early champion of the letterbox...

...Of the forty-seven novels, most appeared in three or more volumes...

...In October, he thanked his fan Cardinal Newman for a home remedy for asthma...

...To this should be added the insight of his best (and by no means unvaryingly favorable) contemporary critic, Henry James: "Trollope settled down steadily to the English girl...

...Up in Boston, however, he saw something of Kate Field...

...Throughout his career, he was to return to the matter of Ireland, most memorably in his still-underrated novel of the famine, Castle Richmond (1860...

...He is evidently always more or less in love with her...

...Even a scientist and philosopher as renowned as Benjamin Franklin did not count as a gentleman until he had retired from his trade as a printer and, as Wood points out, "made no attempt to appear to be one" (although one suspects this was part of Franklin's well-known pose of being a plain man among his betters...

...and how the books sold...

...Fame and money saw Trollope set- tled in a country home with wife and two sons, welcomed in London clubs such as the Garrick, of which he at once became a convivial pillar, and palling around with Thackeray and other lions...

...but each reader of Trollope has his favorite trouvailles and none is wrong...

...He rose every morning, home or away, at 5:30 and wrote ten pages before 8:30...

...He actually liked the Irish, not only the Ascendancy but also "the working classes" and the Catholic clergy...

...The Palliser books were less immediately popular than the Barset series, but have come to enjoy at least equal esteem...

...The financial innovations that had made England a commercial society by 1750 were slow to take hold in the New World...

...He ran as a Disraeli-hating Gladstone Liberal and lost ignominiously in an election later voided for bribery...

...Protestant studies of the Old Testament yielded numerous suggestions that a patriarchal order was inspired by God...

...The amount of learning is "terrific": in one classroom of girls that he visited, the discussion about the properties of the hypotenuse quite overwhelmed him...

...Trollope did not do that, but he did import some of the manly flavor of Henry Fielding and his plein-air eighteenth century...

...Seventeenth-century metaphysics, with its picture of a systematically designed universe, reinforced this image of man's subordination to superior powers...

...In his prosperous fifties, Trollope flirted with politics, actually making a run for Parliament in 1868 in the notoriously corrupt borough of Beverley in the West Riding of Yorkshire...

...Professor Hall finds its views on blacks worrisome...

...The family moved to Harrow, where Anthony was able to attend, virtually for free, the famous local public school...

...the volumes that quickly followed showed sympathy for the Boers and—to the approbation of Hall—for the noble Zulus and their king Cetywayo...

...He loved to hunt and to entertain TROLLOPE: A BIOGRAPHY N. John Hall Oxford University Press/581 pages/$35 reviewed by DONALD LYONS 66 The American Spectator April 1992 glimpses of him seem to cross Squire Western with a Dickensian paterfamilias letting the children win at cards...

...Trollopean fecundity remains a daunting marvel of Victorian workmanship, like the railroads that were at the time reconfiguring the English landscape...

...in 1861...

...Once again, Hall faults Trollope's insensitive views on aborigines and Maoris...

...It proved the making of him...

...bow much and how he got paid (always money down, never royalties...

...He was not to finish The Landleaguers...

...He had liked the rough-and-ready Aussie ways...

...But, if he was a lover, he was a paternal lover, as competent as a father who has had fifty daughters...

...In contrast to the pupils in London free schools, Trollope found that, as Hall writes: The New York pupil is neither ragged nor dirty nor stigmatized socially...

...Wood sees the revolution, as did European observers at the time, as marking a deep rupture with the past...

...But compared to Hall's, the 1971 book seems arch, amateurish, and sketchy...

...This reduction of the great writer to an artificer of nostalgia is unnecessary...

...it was as though a woman had stepped back out of Henry James's as-yet-unwritten fiction into Trollope's real life...

...or to the French revolution, as a class struggle to be explained by sociological laws of a more or less Marxist kind...

...In the first, The Warden (1855), he groped, with some reliance on Fielding's Joseph Andrews, toward his true vein, which he found in the next, Barchester Towers (1857), a comic masterpiece of ecclesiastical jostling...

...But Hall is less satisfying on the sources and strengths of Trollope the artist, remarking, for instance, that "a close observation of daily life, a naturally good ear for dialogue, and the habit of day-dreaming" account for it...

...Though he weighs his pages with plot summaries of the novels, Pope Hennessy pretty clearly has not cracked the travel books or the Cicero biography...

...The American scholar N. John Hall, who gives Trollope's life its latest, fullest, and best recounting, delights in the minutiae of this amazing literary career: how and where he wrote...

...his mother, Frances, took to writing slapdash travel books and novels to support the six surviving children...

...His father, Thomas, was to lose his custom and drive the family to ruin through an irascibility and unpleasantness bordering on insanity...

...How was it accomplished...

...Artists and shopkeepers had patrons, not customers, and patronage characterized the relations between rich and poor...

...when they sent him in 1859 to the West Indies, he extracted from his publisher a contract for a travel book...

...Trollope is hard, though, on the pushy, rude women he saw on streetcars in New York...