CHAPTER I

APPRENTICESHIP TO LIFE

A “tally-ho” story--Anthony Trollope’s ancestry, historical and apocryphal--Among the Hampshire novelists--Frances Milton’s girlhood--Acquaintance with Thomas Anthony Trollope--Marriage and settlement in Keppel Street--Bright prospects soon clouded--Deep in the mire of misfortune--The American experiment and its consequence--Sold up--Mrs. Trollope becomes a popular authoress--Anthony at school--A battle-royal and its sequel--Rough customs at Harrow--“Leg-bail”--A family flight to Bruges--The future novelist as usher and prospective soldier--Friendly influences at the Post Office--Autobiographical touches in famous novels.

The Norman Tallyhosier, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, when hunting with his royal master in the New Forest, happened to kill three wolves; the King at once dubbed him “Troisloup.” The changes and corruptions of successive centuries left the word Trollope. Such at least was the traditional account of the patronymic volunteered by Anthony Trollope, when at Harrow, to his school-fellow, Sidney Herbert, and afterwards forcibly extracted from him upon many different occasions by the boys, whose fancy it tickled or whose incredulity it provoked. Such scepticism was the more pardonable, because the earliest Trollope of any distinction, Sir Andrew, in the fifteenth century, rose to knighthood during the Wars of the Roses from beginnings more humble than would be expected in the case of one whose forefathers were personages at the Norman Court. However that may be, the Trollope stock can claim description as ancient, honourable, and of high degree. Amid many changes of employment and fortune, Anthony Trollope’s bearing and conduct were those of one who, while modestly proud of his ancestral honours, yet always saw in them a Sparta given him by birth to adorn a social capital entrusted to him by nature for laying out at intellectual interest. Throughout all his trials and vicissitudes he lived with men distinguished by their position or achievements. Comparing himself with these, he might well be satisfied, not only with his power of transmuting manuscript into money, but with having done as little as any, and less than some, to bring discredit upon family antecedents and an historic name.

When Anthony Trollope’s _Autobiography_ appeared in 1883, much of its contents was already familiar outside the limit of his personal intimates. No man so largely preoccupied, as his temperament and pursuits made him, with himself, ever talked less about his interests and affairs except with a few particular friends in the privacy of home life. In the year of his death, 1882, mentioning to the present writer the sheets of self-record whose preparation he had several years before finished, he described them as a series of pegs. “On them,” he added, “may be hung those materials about my life and work which may be gathered by those who, like yourself, may be disposed to say something about me.”

For several reasons presently to appear, nothing could better match later associations of the Trollope family than for its mythical founder first to have been heard of in the county where much of his mother’s girlhood was passed, and where Anthony sometimes found a retreat for his declining years. Troisloup’s descendants--to assume that there existed some foundation in fact for the story which, without having thought much about it, young Anthony presaged the novelist’s inventiveness by telling his Harrow schoolmates--made no further contributions to Hampshire history, but gradually identified themselves with the north-midland or the northern counties. When the family baronetcy was created in 1641 the Trollopes had settled near Stamford, and soon supplied Lincolnshire with one of its great territorial magnates in Sir John Trollope, who for more than a quarter of a century represented the southern division of the county. He belonged to those “men of metal and large-acred squires” mentioned by Disraeli as forming Lord George Bentinck’s chief bodyguard of the Tory revolt against Sir Robert Peel in 1846. This was that typical county member who, during the full-dress debates on the Bill for opening the ports, agreed with Sir Charles Burrell, Sir William Jolliffe, and Sir Charles Knightley not to follow their leader. Under protection, it had been repeatedly said during the debate and on other occasions, the land failed to provide food for the people; Sir John Trollope declared there was not in his own neighbourhood a single acre lying waste, that from 1828 to 1841 Lincoln county had enlarged its wheat produce by 70 per cent., while the population had only increased 20 per cent. Thus, argued Sir John, there was a large surplus available to feed the manufacturing districts.

So long as he could persuade himself of a protectionist reaction being even remotely possible, Sir John Trollope stuck to the House of Commons, and took an active part in its business. Not indeed till some time after his leaders had suddenly acquiesced in free trade did he, in 1868, become Lord Kesteven. The exact place of Anthony Trollope in the family to which he belonged may be best described by saying that the high Tory, protectionist M.P. just mentioned, the seventh baronet, and the novelist were descended from a common ancestor, Sir Thomas Trollope, the fourth baronet. Between these two cousins of the Trollope name may be traced, as will appear hereafter, certain affinities of character and temperament as well as of blood. At each successive stage of his career Anthony Trollope was what circumstances made him. Few courses in an entirely new direction have ever shown more clearly and more perceptibly than Trollope’s the impress of hereditary influences. These, however, were less on the paternal than on his mother’s side.

The Hampshire, whose hunting-ground may or may not have witnessed the Norman lupicide’s threefold feat, began in the early eighteenth century to be the nursing mother of novelists. First, in order of time as well as of fame, comes Jane Austen, born at Steventon Rectory in 1775. Miss Austen’s works are as severely undenominational and as studiedly secular as those of Maria Edgeworth, or as the educational system of Thomas Day. Elsewhere in the same county, towards the close of the Georgian era, appeared an author possessing little in common with the woman of genius who opened her series with _Sense and Sensibility_. Charlotte Mary Yonge’s best known works of fiction are still _The Heir of Redclyffe_ and _The Daisy Chain_. These, with _Heartsease_ and _The Monthly Packet_, formed the most popular manuals in High Church households throughout the first half of the Victorian age. Five years after Jane Austen’s birth, her parents brought with them to Heckfield Vicarage, from their earlier home at Stapleton, near Bristol, the girl who, as Thomas Anthony Trollope’s future wife, was to become Anthony Trollope’s mother. To her third son, while yet a boy, she imparted the desire of emulating the industry and skill by which she was then supporting the household. The living at Heckfield had come to Frances Milton’s father from New College, of which he had been a Fellow; it provided him with leisure for intellectual pastimes, always praised but seldom remunerated, and provided his vividly imaginative, keen-witted, and sarcastic daughter with opportunities for her earliest studies of provincial character and life. The Rev. William Milton was a mathematician with a turn for practical mechanics. He had elaborated a patent that for some time he hoped might make his fortune; he had given proof of real ability in his favourite pursuit by submitting, during his stay at Stapleton, a scheme to the authorities of the town for improving Bristol port. Some merit these suggestions must have had, for the lines they indicated were afterwards followed in the actual development of the land and sea approaches to the harbour. The city corporation voted their thanks to the author of the design, but gave him nothing more.

Meanwhile the unsuccessful inventor’s daughter Frances Milton, by her personal endowments of a pleasant face, a bright manner, and a clever, sarcastic tongue, was attracting admirers. Amongst these was a young Chancery barrister, like Miss Milton’s father a Wykehamist and a Fellow of New College.

One of Mr. Milton’s sons, Henry Milton, obtained an appointment in a branch of the Civil Service afterwards ornamented by one of the Milton name,[1] and was frequently visited by his sisters at his London rooms. In this way Frances Milton and her lover contrived to see a good deal of each other. The street where Frances Milton now kept house for her brother was the same, Keppel Street, as that in which, though at a different number, the Chancery barrister, with his wife, was afterwards to live, and his children, amongst them his third son Anthony, were to be born. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s Lincoln’s Inn chambers were within a few minutes’ walk. When the two lovers were not billing and cooing together in Bloomsbury, they were exchanging letters dealing with many other subjects besides their own mutual attachment. In the earlier days of courtship the swain addressed his epistles to Henry Milton on the understanding that his sister was to see them. Sometimes on both sides these epistles ran into elaborate and rather pedantic essays, while on the gentleman’s they were couched in carefully thought out and even precious language natural to a clever, reflective, well-read, and rather supercilious young college don. Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads were coming out in 1798. Not less conservative in his taste than in his politics, Thomas Anthony Trollope had only a sneer for the fearful and wonderful products of the new romantic school: if Miss Milton wished to see some new poems that were at least good literature, let her read what had just been given to the world by two Wykehamist bards. One of these was named Jones, the other Crowe. Both were Fellows of New College, and both had won the highest praise of experts like Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers. When he deals with other subjects, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s epistolary style undergoes a portentous change. Both the gentleman and the lady are equally business-like, precise, and severely the reverse of ornate in the forecasts of their united future. Read with the intervening reminiscence of _David Copperfield_, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s summary of his present, and estimate of his prospective circumstances, curiously remind one of the language in which Wilkins Micawber described his obligations to “my friend” Traddles, as well as of the complete arrangements he had made for discharging these claims in full. The sum and substance of the Milton-Trollope calculations is that at their marriage the husband--his fellowship of course given up--would, from his Lincoln’s Inn practice and his patrimony, be able to count on something like nine hundred a year. On the other side the wife would bring a dowry of thirteen hundred pounds, independently of any resources provided by her father. As a fact, however, she was to receive a paternal allowance of fifty pounds a year, as well as occasional additions for clothes or other specific purposes.

On the strength of these figures there seemed nothing rash in encountering the risk of an early union. Accordingly, on the twenty-third of the proverbially unlucky month of May 1809, the marriage was celebrated at the bride’s home, Heckfield. Then came the settlement at 16 Keppel Street; there they remained almost uninterruptedly until their migration to Harrow. There too were born their first five children; while two daughters came in Harrow Weald. Of this family, five died before they were sixty, the eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, and the third, Anthony, dealt with in these pages, reached the threshold of old age, though Anthony fell short by fifteen years of his elder brother’s term. As soon as the Keppel Street children could, in nursery phrase, take notice, they must have found themselves observed by interesting and distinguished company. The father was known among solicitors for a man quite as able as he was queer-tempered, and for a thoroughly sound lawyer. He had also just chanced upon one of those little personal advertisements sometimes useful at the Bar. His friend the artist Hayter was then, on the Duke of Bedford’s commission, painting the picture that speedily became famous, Lord William Russell’s trial; in Thomas Anthony Trollope he found the original for a foremost member of the legal group of spectators in the court.

Forensic success, however well won by brains, knowledge, and industry, sometimes suddenly, sometimes by faintly observed degrees, is apt to melt away. The head of the Keppel Street household could found, and to some extent build up, a valuable practice, but he was without the temper or tact which would ensure a politic or even a civil answer to a fool. And to him, especially in the legal world, most people seemed fools. The attorneys who brought briefs to his chambers, if their replies to his questions did not exactly suit his phraseological whim, found themselves as browbeaten as if they had been refractory or prevaricating witnesses badgered by a cross-examining counsel. For a long time Thomas Anthony Trollope’s clients meekly submitted to their fate, and, notwithstanding his ill-temper and unpopularity, the bitter-tongued lawyer made so handsome an income as to exchange the fogs of the Bloomsbury home for the clear air and fine views of a bracing suburb. Harrow, as within an easy drive of the law courts, was the spot selected. The residence, substantially built after its owner’s designs, and comfortably furnished, received the name of Julians. But though from one point of view a monument of Thomas Anthony Trollope’s legal triumphs, it proved a forerunner of his fall. As if under the breath of some evil genius, who could have been none other than himself, the rising fabric of his professional prosperity, by slow but sure degrees, crumbled into dust. Once having discovered that they could get their work done practically as well elsewhere by counsel not superior to the common courtesies of life, the long-enduring solicitors brought their papers to Trollope no more. Every week ruin, crushing and complete, drew visibly nearer. At last there was decided on a move of the whole family from Keppel Street to Julians.

Thomas Anthony Trollope’s New College Fellowship implied a competent acquaintance with Greek and Latin; he had shown his turn for the law when he won the Vinerian Scholarship. His ambition was that his sons should follow in his steps. Beginning to despair of that, he grew discontented with his own position at the Bar, notwithstanding his brilliant start as an equity lawyer. The growing infirmities of his temper frightened away clients; his practice fell off. With something like infatuation he resolved on exchanging a profession in which he might have made his fortune, and could still have done well, for a pursuit so absolutely ruinous as farming. For the failure now in store his own perverse impetuosity could alone be blamed. He was the most industrious of men, as well as the most exemplary and self-denying in all the relationships of life. “The truth is,” said Anthony Trollope, “my father soon found that the three or four hundred acre farm, which he rented of Lord Northwick, had been taken by him on a false representation of its opportunities. Even in the bitterness of spirit caused by the consequent disillusion, he looked forward, as he said, ‘to some compensation in having more time to teach me and my brother Tom our classics.’”

The Julians experiment initiated a series of reverses that beggared the father; it would have left the sons without home or education, but for the extraordinary exertions of a resourceful, gifted, and heroic wife. Anthony Trollope’s mother had an indomitable faculty of finding material for success in the very welter of misfortune. The eligible modern mansion Julians had, of course, soon to be deserted for the much less dignified and commodious Julians farm. Next came settlement beneath a smaller and meaner roof. Even here Mrs. Trollope contrived almost miraculously to transform her environment, and convert what threatened to become a ruin into an habitable if not a comfortable shelter. It was only after her departure on missions of domestic duty that Anthony Trollope and his father realised the full misery growing out of the removal from Bloomsbury to Harrow Weald. Weak lungs had been inherited by most of the children from their father, whose health now, under the quickly successive trials, had permanently given way. Further gold invested in the agricultural experiment would, it had now become clear, only pave and hasten the approach to the Bankruptcy Court.

“If he looks at a card, if he rattles a box, Away fly the guineas from this Mr. Fox.”

The sentiment of the familiar couplet was exactly applicable to Thomas Anthony Trollope. Except in the possession of the most capable and unselfish wife in the world, and of children all intellectually above the average, and in two instances destined to achieve fame as well as fortune, fate and luck had an undying grudge against him. Part of his little house property had become commercially useless because the title-deeds were lost. At the same time something went wrong with money which, at her marriage, had been settled on Mrs. Trollope.

Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer and Bloomerism did not become household words till 1849. Almost fifty years Mrs. Bloomer’s senior, Robert Owen had acquired in the State of Indiana twenty thousand acres of land for establishing a communistic colony near the Wabash River, known as New Harmony. Miss Frances Wright constituted herself in England at once the missionary of Owen’s socialistic gospel and, by her habit, the anticipatory pioneer of the Bloomer dress. In the Bloomer costume, afterwards a standing subject of pictorial jokes in _Punch_, she delivered a series of enthusiastic lectures throughout the south of England. By her various proofs of disinterested zeal for the movement, she secured first the interest, then the admiration and friendship, of the lady who presided over the Trollope _ménage_ successively in London and at Harrow, and whose natural sympathies always impelled her towards whatever novelty might excite popular laughter and opposition. The short tunic, the wide sash round the waist, the full trousers gathered in at the ankles, and the broad-brimmed straw hat, generally held in the hand, all proclaiming the presence of the earliest lady lecturer from the new world, were soon familiar beneath the Trollope roof. They imprinted themselves indelibly on the young Anthony’s mind. About the same time he made some other useful or interesting acquaintances of a cosmopolitan sort. Chief amongst these was the French republican soldier, General Lafayette, who had fought in the United States army against the English. The Trollope family’s experiences, whenever and wherever gathered, formed a common stock on which all might and did draw as they chose for conversational or literary use. In his parents’ earlier continental trips Henry was the son usually taken, Anthony being left behind to the tender mercies of his brother Tom, and his school work at Winchester. Afterwards, however, Anthony found himself compensated for missing his share in these earlier excursions by a quick succession, in a few years, of more pleasure trips abroad than a lifetime brings to most English boys.

For the moment, however, the effect of Miss Wright’s visits to Julians or to the other Harrow abodes was to fill Thomas Anthony Trollope with dreams of regaining in the new world what he had lost in the old; and the rest of that clever but self-deluded good man’s record really suggests an exaggerated version, from which Dickens’s genius shrank, of the money-making experiments resorted to by Wilkins Micawber. America was a young country, just acquiring a taste for the prettinesses and elegancies of life. A bazaar or store for fancy goods, not of course in New York, but at some provincial capital like Cincinnati, might prove a success. The premises might also include a room to be used for lectures or fine art exhibitions; if the latter, the French artist, Auguste Hervieu, had long been an intimate of the Trollope household, and might render valuable service. As a fact, the accomplished and amiable Gaul had already been induced by Miss Wright to establish himself on American soil. Nashoba, however, whither he had been directed, disappointed him; he was now free to place himself entirely at the disposition of Mrs. Trollope and the son, Henry, who had accompanied her. Commercially, the transatlantic trip miscarried not less signally than everything else to which Anthony Trollope’s father put his hand. At the same time it turned his wife into a highly popular author, and created in her third son, then a lad of seventeen, a determination to imitate the maternal performance. The United States experience also provided a theme for her earliest essay at recovering with her pen the prosperity that had been blighted by her husband’s evil star. Even in some of the later fiction that proved the chief gold-mine, Frances Trollope brought in her American experiences. These, however, long before that, had formed the exclusive subject of the book on which alone her earliest reputation rested. _Domestic Manners of the Americans_ had been roughed out in a first draft before her return voyage to England was at an end.

By this time, her husband’s embarrassments had reached the desperate stage. In 1834 came the final crash. Mrs. Trollope now divided her time between the direction of her home and the preparation of the book which was to support it. Her husband occupied himself with his pen to less profitable account. Even the pretence of farming had been well-nigh given up. Early one morning in the March of 1834, young Anthony, then a Harrow boy of nineteen in his last half, was told to drive his father to London in the gig, which up to that time had been retained. To the boy’s surprise, the point to be made for was not the more or less familiar legal quarter, but St. Katherine’s Docks. Here the father disappeared into a vessel bound for Antwerp; the lad regained the cottage at Harrow, to find it in the bailiffs’ hands. The landlord, Lord Northwick, had in fact put in an execution. The Trollopes, however, had made substantial and loyal friends in the Harrow district. To know Mrs. Trollope was to admire her courageous activity under calamities, crushing or paralysing in their character and degree. When her own roof-tree had been rooted up, offers of hospitality poured in from every side. Still the eventual necessity of securing a home remained. The father of the family had found the conventional ambulatory solution of the difficulty, and, giving his creditors the security of “leg-bail,” had fled, as we have seen, across the Channel. For the present their settlement was Bruges, a house called the Château D’Hondt, just outside St. Catharine Gate. Here the father recedes into the background. The central figure of the whole Belgian episode is his wife, who during these years left the impress of her own personality, moral and intellectual, in characters so distinct upon her son that her example decided for him what was to be his life’s business. Her pen formed the staff on which the whole family leaned, and alone supported the roof which sheltered them. Her husband’s days were visibly numbered. Lung disease of a hopeless kind had set in with her son Henry and her daughter Emily. Always nursing her invalids, she never failed to produce her daily tale of “copy” for the printer.

At the time of her husband’s death in 1835 she was busy at, and soon after published, her work on Paris and the French. The vivacity and truth of this volume made it a success within a few weeks of its coming out. It was not till some years later, when her son Anthony, preparing at the time for authorship, directed attention to it, that its chapter devoted to George Sand was discovered to be the best thing of its kind that had yet come from an English pen. Mrs. Trollope’s books, beginning with _Domestic Manners of the Americans_ in 1832 and, twenty-four years later, ending with _Fashionable Life_, were mostly written in the intervals of nursing, feeding, and in all ways caring for husband and children smitten with a mortal disease. So far as they influenced her third son, they will be reverted to in these pages. Mrs. Trollope was a well-born, well-bred, well-connected, delicately nurtured as well as exemplary woman. Her father, William Milton, the Heckfield clergyman, had gone to the ancient and honourable stock of Gresleys for his bride. The daughter of this marriage, Frances, had from her childhood lived in the best society, metropolitan or provincial, during its most exclusive periods. Her wealthier relatives and acquaintances never allowed their connection with her to drop. Hence the opportunities which, quite as much as those given by his paternal relationships, introduced Anthony Trollope himself, as a young man, to the most desirable houses of his day.

Meanwhile the elder Trollope’s death had been preceded by a crisis in the life of his third son. Thirteen years before the date now reached, his parents’ settlement at Harrow had naturally caused him to be sent as a day-boy to the great school, then in the ground-swell left by domestic disturbances which, though they had occurred so long since as almost to be forgotten, projected some demoralising influence upon a generation yet to come. In 1805, Joseph Drury retired from the headmastership. George Butler was elected his successor by Archbishop Manners-Sutton’s casting-vote, against Mark Drury, the local favourite. The poet Byron, then a boy at the school and a monitor, led a rebellion against the new Head. Other disturbances and barrings-out followed. Twelve years before Anthony’s entrance there had happened events not favourable to the position of day-boys at the school. The Harrow parishioners in 1810 petitioned Chancery for the restriction of the school to local residents, chiefly, of course, shopkeepers. The counsel employed by the school bore a name, Fladgate, which, in connection with the Garrick Club, was to be well known by Anthony Trollope in later years. The whole episode, being much talked about at the time, had the effect of familiarising Trollope, while a boy, with the old school of lawyers, figuring so frequently in his novels. Sir William Grant, as Master of the Rolls, thought the boarders so essential to the school’s prestige and prosperity, that he would not sanction any limitation of their number. He risked, however, offending the masters by insisting on fresh guarantees as regards day-boys for the rights of residence. “The controversy,” said Trollope to the present writer, “had the effect of adding a fresh sting to my position as a day-boy. The masters snubbed me more than ever because I was one of the class which had brought about legal interference with their vested interests. The young aristocrats, who lived sumptuously in the masters’ houses, treated me like a pariah.”

At the same time the tenant of Julians Farm supplemented the supervision of the boy’s home-lessons with Spartan severity of physical discipline, at least one box on the ear for every false quantity in a Latin line. Nor was there any gilding of the pill with pocket-money, books, or even proper clothes. Harrow had then a larger percentage of exceedingly rich men’s sons among its boys than either Eton or Winchester. Anthony’s appearance may often have been against him; but the public opinion of the place, if not at first, would in the long run have declared itself against persecuting a boy who was not a fool, who knew the use of his fists, and against whom the worst that could be said was that he came from a poor home. He was, however, as throughout life he remained, morbidly sensitive. “My mother,” he said to me in the year of his death, “was much from home or too busy to be bothered. My father was not exactly the man to invite confidence. I tried to relieve myself by confiding my boyish sorrows to a diary that I have kept since the age of twelve, which I have just destroyed, and which, on referring to it for my autobiography some time since, I found full of a heart-sick, friendless little chap’s exaggerations of his woes.”

In all great schools sets are inevitable, and disappointments, heartburnings, and jealousies at real or imaginary exclusions are rife. Trollope, however, showed himself capable of holding his own, both in the schoolroom and in the playground. Judge Baylis, his contemporary, admits that home boarders were often bullied and pursued with stones, but emphatically testifies that Trollope, being big and powerful, got off easily; he once, it seems, fought a boy named Lewis for nearly an hour, punishing his adversary so heavily that he had to go home. Of course it was, as at every big English school of the time, a rough and occasionally a brutal life, enlivened with such customs as “rolling-in,” “tossing,” and “jack-o’-lantern”; this last was put down by Longley, who followed Butler as headmaster during Trollope’s time. The education was exclusively Latin and Greek, as it was everywhere else. But at home Anthony Trollope received a thorough grounding in modern languages, especially French and Italian, from his accomplished mother, and was noticed by his contemporary Sydney Herbert as a boy full of general knowledge. At a private school kept by one of the Harrow Drurys near Sunbury, some of the time coming between his two Harrow periods was sandwiched in with really good results. Among his Harrow friends other than Herbert were the three Merivales: John, afterwards Registrar in the Court of Chancery, Herman, the permanent Colonial Under-Secretary, and Charles, the Roman historian, who, as Archdeacon of Ely, remained Trollope’s friend through life, and whom I have met at dinner at his house in Montagu Square.

His father’s ambition to get Anthony, like his brothers Thomas and Henry, into Winchester was fulfilled in 1827, when Anthony had for his fellow-Wykehamists, amongst others, Roundell Palmer, Robert Lowe, and Cardwell. The three years of St. Mary Winton were followed in 1830 by another Harrow spell of three or four. After that Anthony Trollope, like the rest of his family, remained a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and homeless until his parents gained a resting-place at Bruges. Disraeli’s Young Englanders in _Coningsby_, despairing of a career in England, are about to join the Austrian service. Young Anthony Trollope, if not from any Disraelian motive, seriously determined to do the same thing. Subject to an examination in European languages, he contrived to secure the promise of a cavalry commission in the Austrian army. To place himself in the way of picking up the necessary acquaintance with continental tongues, he became for a few weeks an usher in a Belgian school. From that slavery he was delivered by the unexpected opening of the employment that was to make him first a useful member of society, and then a distinguished and a successful man.

In _A Publisher and His Friends_, the second John Murray, at Mrs. Trollope’s request, is said to have obtained for her third son the Post Office clerkship which took him back in 1834 from Bruges to London. Other influences, however, co-operated in the same direction as those of Albemarle Street. Among Mrs. Trollope’s wide, varied, and influential acquaintance was Mrs. Clayton Freeling, daughter-in-law of the then chief secretary at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Sir Francis Freeling. That lady overflowed with admiration of the splendid struggle made by her friend to keep her home together and secure a future for her boys. Sir Henry Holland, the great physician of the time, a man whose word on any subject went for much in official and political circles, had already helped the future Sir Henry Taylor to a career in the Colonial Office; he had also, as one gathers from his autobiography, been looking out for a chance of doing the Trollopes a good turn. Any one of these agencies would have been enough in young Anthony Trollope’s case. Their combination in his favour gave him the additional advantage of reminding the heads of the department he entered that he possessed powerful friends in high places. His family connections stood him also in good stead. So, said Mrs. Freeling, they ought to do, especially with the Postmaster-General; for had not young Anthony’s kinsman, Admiral Sir Henry Trollope, Sir Thomas Trollope’s grand-nephew, not only rendered his country heroic service at sea in the French wars, but also won special fame and promotion as a sort of amateur postman by carrying despatches from the chief commander of the fleet abroad to the Government in London--particularly in 1781, during the whole episode of Gibraltar’s release by Admiral Rodney. Sixteen years later he secured fresh distinction in suppressing the mutiny at the Nore. For reward a peerage and the capital to support it would not have been excessive. As it was, he only received such a pension as enabled him to lead a country gentleman’s life in Herefordshire. The utmost therefore, urged Mrs. Freeling, that the Whigs then in power could do for her friend’s boy would be only an instalment towards paying the arrears of the public debt due for Admiral Trollope’s tact, presence of mind, and naval eminence. Finally, protested this indefatigable lady, the Whigs owed some reparation for their breach of faith towards her _protégé’s_ father.

Thomas Anthony Trollope had indeed been actually promised a London police-magistrateship by Lord Melbourne, who wriggled out of his engagement under some backstairs pressure. Their reverses therefore had not robbed the Trollope family of “friends at Court.” Young Anthony, in fact, belonged by birth and connection to the governing classes. He might well have aspired to a higher branch in the Civil Service. During the Victorian era another man of letters, more brilliant perhaps but less famous afterwards than Trollope became, Grenville Murray, was given a position in the Foreign Office without satisfying any severer test of fitness than was done by Trollope when he began work at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. From one point of view what he had picked up at Harrow and Winchester formed the least remunerative part of his equipment. As a public school boy he had learned to look after himself, let people see he was a gentleman, intended to be treated as one, and to adapt himself to circumstances. As much classics as either school gave him he might have acquired in his father’s study, if the teacher and the scholar had not come to open war before the course was over. As it was, Thomas Anthony Trollope, almost as soon as his son could hold a pen, taught him the points to be aimed at in letter-writing--clearness, conciseness, abstinence from the repetition of words or ideas, and the non-introduction of any unnecessary or irrelevant matter. At the same time he instructed him by example in the theory and practice of _précis_ writing. This formed the morning’s educational routine in the Harrow home. After tea came the mother’s turn. Mrs. Trollope was a far more cultivated woman than might be supposed from her books. Proud, as well as fond, of all her boys, she taught them of an evening enough French, German, and Italian to speak and write these languages correctly, as well as understand them when spoken, without difficulty, and converse in them with ease.

“As for my father,” once said Trollope, “while the soul of honour and unselfishness, after he gave up the Bar he showed a want of ballast, a fickleness, and an inability to make both ends meet, really reminding one of Micawber in _David Copperfield_.” Trollope’s own apprenticeship to work for his livelihood came some years later than it had done to Dickens. Years after the establishment of his literary fame, Trollope adopted the habit of interspersing his stories with touches as really autobiographical as anything in _David Copperfield_. He had not long exchanged the Harrow home for continental wandering, when his efforts to support himself began. These took an educational direction. His eldest brother eventually became, under Dr. Jeune, a master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. To that height Anthony did not aspire, and was satisfied, till some other employment came, if he could cease to be a burden to his mother, by giving English lessons to small boys in a Belgian school.