Part 18

endeavoured to plead his own cause after his own fashion. This he had done after the good old English plan which is said to be somewhat loutish, but is not without its efficacy. He had looked at her, and danced with her, and done the best with his gloves and cravat, and had let her see by twenty unmistakable signs that in order to be perfectly happy he must be near her . . . . But he had never as yet actually asked her to love him. But she was so quick a linguist that she had understood down to the last letter what all these tokens had meant.

And there was a Victorian equivalent of Las Vegas, where the best entertainment can be enjoyed for the most reasonable prices, because a gambling house is a profitable business, and the entertainment is a "loss leader:"

Who does not know the outside hall of the magnificent gambling house at Monte Carlo, with all the golden splendour of its music-room within? Who does not know the lofty roof and lounging seats, with all its luxuries of liveried servants, its wealth of newspapers, and every appanage of costly comfort which can be added to it? . . . [At] Monte Carlo you walk in with your wife in her morning costume, and seating yourself luxuriously in one of those soft stalls which are there prepared for you, you give yourself up with perfect ease to absolute enjoyment. For two hours the concert lasts, and all around is perfection and gilding . . . . Nothing can be more perfect than the concert-room at Monte Carlo, and nothing more charming; and for all this there is nothing whatever to pay.

Rather a leisurely survey of one aspect of the Victorian scene. And as the author brings the story to a close, some of the characters are rewarded with their own chapters, in order to make their exits. Of these, that of Mr. Grey shows us the destiny of the lawyer who tried to be good and to do good. Disillusioned with how the world has changed under his feet, feeling guilty and inadequate after having had the wool pulled over his eyes by Mr. Scarborough, and uncomfortable with his junior partner's more lenient views of professional ethics, he retires and vows to do good deeds, starting with his sister's family of a drunkard husband and five daughters in need of husbands. He rings their doorbell and is met by Mr. Matterson, a widowed clergyman with five children who has offered to marry Amelia, the eldest. He then learns from Amelia that she has no reservations about leaving Papa, who "is getting to be quite unbearable," and marrying the clergyman.

Poor Mr. Grey, when his niece turned and went back home, thought that, as far as the girl was concerned, or her future household, there would be very little room for employment for him. Mr. Matterson wanted an upper servant who, instead of demanding wages, would bring a little money with her, and he could not but feel that the poor clergyman would find that he had taken into his house a bad and expensive upper servant.

"Never mind, Papa," said Dolly; "we will go on and persevere, and, if we intend to do good, good will certainly come of it."

And we devoutly hope so. There are two more chapters to tie up some loose ends. But this pretty much wraps it up. Is this what comes from a lawyer trying to be good and to do good?

PROMISES, PROMISES

AN OLD MAN'S LOVE

Some children discovered the first diamond in South Africa in 1867, an event described by Anthony Trollope in "The Diamond Fields of South Africa," [6] upon visiting the area during the last six months of 1877. The rush for diamonds then duly turned up five years later in a novel, _An Old Man's Love_, completed just six months before his death. John Gordon is the adventurer in the story; he goes away to make his fortune in diamonds when he is told that he cannot marry his beloved Mary Lawrie because he is a pauper--even though they have never spoken to each other of their love. He returns three years later as a rich man, only to find that Mary has promised, only a half hour earlier, to marry someone else--Mr. William Whittlestaff, who at fifty years of age is the "old man" of the title.

[Footnote 6: _South Africa_, Vol. 2, chapter VIII, 1878]

No matter that she told Mr. Whittlestaff, who took her into his house when her stepmother died, that she loved Mr. Gordon and would always think of him. A promise is a promise, not to be given or broken lightly. Though she would not allow the "old man" to kiss her, she would not break her promise. Bad timing. The diamonds don't seem to make much difference.

They certainly don't make much difference to Mrs. Baggett, the woman who rules Croker's Hall as Mr. Whittlestaff's housekeeper. She puts no trust in diamonds--"only in the funds, which is reg'lar." She has her own concerns; she is incensed that Mr. Gordon would even presume to come speak to the young woman in her master's house, and she sternly tells Mary that her duty is to see to it that the master has his way.

Mrs. Baggett has her principles. Though she urges Mary to accept Mr. Whittlestaff in the first place, and to keep her promise when the matter appears to be in doubt, yet she maintains that she will not stay to serve under another woman who is mistress of Croker's Hall. Not only will she not stay, she will go to Portsmouth to take care of her drunken one-legged husband. Mr. Whittlestaff cannot shake her from this resolve, and she tells him he must not abandon his engagement: "It's weak, and nobody wouldn't think a straw of you for doing it."

The author reaches into his bag of churchmen to produce Reverend Montagu Blake, who is addressed appropriately by his fiancée when she says, "Don't be a fool, Montagu." We see the young curate celebrate his good fortune at the death of Rev. Harbottle, freeing his pulpit for Mr. Blake, and also permitting him to marry Kattie Forrester. "But now that old Harbottle has gone, I'll get the day fixed; you see if I don't."

What of the "old man?" Mr. Whittlestaff listens to his housekeeper's stern counsel to be a man and keep what is his. Then he retreats to a secluded hillside to consult his well-worn copy of Horace (the Victorian gentlemen knew their classics) in an effort to identify the wisdom of the ages. And finally he asks himself whether Mrs. Baggett's lessons correspond to those of Jesus Christ. In these ruminations he is shown as a man who rises above the cardboard cutout of a selfish old country squire in love with his young ward. His deliberations with himself are lengthy; though he consults his volume of Horace, he finds that he remembers Horace's counsel well enough to weigh it without looking; and he finds it wanting.

His moment of critical decision involves a short serious interview with his young fiancée--an unusually tender Trollopian interview--as he prepares to go to London to see John Gordon and offer Mary to him. She puts her arm upon him and entreats him not to go, telling him that he his entitled to have "whatever it is that you may want, though it is but such a trifle."

Mr. Whittlestaff finally settles the issue when she announces that she will burn the letter he had written to Mr. Gordon arranging to meet him; he calls for a sandwich and a glass of wine, swearing that he will start in an hour.

The reader must remember that her original agreement to marry Mr. Whittlestaff was verbal, not physical; she did not allow him to kiss her; nor did she go beyond putting her arm on him and looking into his face on this occasion. Though this modest gesture is sufficient to mark it as a tender interview, one cannot help concluding that this young Victorian woman fought the battle with one arm behind her back.

Mr. Whittlestaff shows that he understands this by the completion of his mission. The subsequent interview with Mr. Gordon in Green Park is hardly a tender one; indeed, it becomes a bit testy on both sides; but the mission is accomplished.

"The most important part of our narrative" is compressed into the last page of the book. Youth is served; but so well has the groundwork been laid in the relatively few pages of this short novel, that the reader closes the book feeling that it has all been a bit more than just a fairy tale.

This was Trollope's last novel to be completed. He was in the middle of writing _The Landleaguers_ when he had a stroke and died. _An Old Man's Love_ was published posthumously in 1884.

RUNNING IN FULL STRIDE AT THE END

THE LANDLEAGUERS

The sense of urgency that ordinarily attends the last few pages of a novel is absent as one approaches the end--but not the conclusion--of _The Landleaguers_, knowing that the story is to be terminated at the place where Anthony Trollope had the stroke that ended his writing career and, a month later, his life. The reader, instead of racing to the conclusion, tends to linger, watching for any clue as to the impending blow, dreading the moment when the storyteller closes the book for an unexpected interruption, never to return. At least the stroke did not occur during the writing, with the pen dropping from his hand in midsentence. He actually dictated these pages to his son Harry on the morning of November 3, 1882; on that evening he suddenly fell silent while everyone else was laughing at the reading of a comic novel after dinner in the home of his friend John Tilley, and it was apparent that he had had a stroke, leaving him with paralysis of his right side and inability to speak.

Trollope made two trips to Ireland during his last year to familiarize himself with the efforts at land reform and the accompanying violence that he depicted in _The Landleaguers_; he returned for a second visit after he had already begun writing it. This was the most topical of his novels, and he interviewed several government officials and other knowledgeable Irishmen, but not any of the Landleaguers--those who advocated reform measures that would infringe on the rights of property. Indeed, he interrupted his story of "our three heroines," declaring it necessary to describe the "political circumstances of the day" with an entire chapter. Although Trollope had personal affection for Ireland as the place where he had spent eighteen years and had begun his writing, he was a son of England first and foremost. He had no sympathy for rebellion.

Events on the ground in 1882 marched right through his story, including a reference to the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish on his first day on the job as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and of his Under Secretary T. H. Burke, in May, eleven days before Trollope arrived to begin his research. And in August, five members of a Joyce family were murdered--a tragedy he incorporated into his story.

Ordinarily, an unfinished work is not to be judged, but knowing what we know about Trollope's writing patterns, it seems unlikely that any major revisions would have occurred in what he had already written. We do have forty-eight of the planned sixty chapters, with a short note by Harry Trollope to confirm what any experienced Trollope reader would suspect as to who married whom and who was to be hanged in the end. And as we follow the misfortunes of the Jones family members who occupied Morony Castle, we see the effects of a campaign of terror in a quiet green countryside. Outside agitators, surely from America, have come among the "generous, kindly, impulsive, and docile" country Irish folk, leading them to believe that one man is as good as another (nothing said about the women, of course), and that those who rent land don't really have to pay their full rent to the lord of the manor. Farmers in America don't pay rent to a landlord, they are told. Each man has his own (small) farm. If the lands of America were there to be taken from the Indians, why should not the Irish farmers take it from the greedy landlords?

Mr. Jones's problems at Morony Castle begin when his sluice gates are opened, flooding eighty acres of good bottom land. His ten-year old son Florian, who happened to witness the event, is terrified into silence by his father's discontented renter who makes him swear not to tell, invoking the Catholic religion that the lad had innocently adopted as a bit of filial rebellion. After months of pressure and wheedling by his sisters, who guess correctly that he knows, young Florian finally names Pat Carroll as the culprit. On his way to the courthouse with his father to give testimony, he is shot through the head and killed by a double barrel rifle poked through a hole in a stone wall along the road.

This reign of terror happened to occur in rural Ireland; it could have been the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mafia in Sicily, the mob in Chicago, or the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South. But here in County Galway the usual ingredients were to be found: inadequate law enforcement, young men with more testosterone than employment, and a fearful populace.

Less violent but more widespread rebellion had already appeared in the disruption of a fox hunt. The author had learned fox hunting in Ireland, and many of the momentous events in his novels take place at fox hunts. On this occasion, whenever the hunters arrive at a gorse covert, they find the local farmers already there, having beaten the area so that no fox would have remained for the chase.

And the Jones family finds itself the victim of a boycott, a term that had only come into use two years earlier when Captain Charles Boycott, land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo in Ireland, had attempted to evict eleven tenants who refused to pay their full rent. Charles Parnell, the champion of Irish nationalism and a land reform agitator, had already recommended that an offending landowner might be ostracized. Captain Boycott then found himself victim of the process that later bore his name. And in _The Landleaguers_ all the servants but one leave the Jones household. The family is unable to buy anything in town, and no one in the town will buy from the farm. The daughters come to enjoy, in a way, household duties such as cooking, making beds, and churning butter. The family, though, is devastated.

And the women pay a surcharge. As we see Mr. Jones carving the mutton and serving a male visitor first, the author explains: "In a boycotted house you will always find that the gentlemen are helped before the ladies. It is a part of the principle of boycotting that women shall subject themselves."

As the nonviolent civil disobedience changes to murder, the story takes on the dimensions of a western movie when the heralded lawman comes to town to institute law and order and set things straight. This was Captain Yorke Clayton, possessed of two attributes that would lead any man to fame: recklessness and light blue eyes. With these attributes he wins the hearts of both Jones sisters, Ada and Edith. Edith, the younger and brighter of the two, tells herself and everyone else that he will prefer Ada, the elder and the more beautiful. By the time he declares himself to be in love with Edith, she has such a difficult time getting rid of her story that the issue is not resolved within forty-eight chapters. After Florian is killed, Captain Clayton becomes obsessed with the identification of his killer. The villain is assumed to be Terry Lax, an agitator from another county who is guilty of murdering the other witness who was prepared to identify the opener of the sluice gate. This was done in a crowded courtroom with the pistol at the victim's head, and no one could be found who would say he had seen who did it. The author did not live to unravel the murder for us and wrap up all the loose ends; we are assured by Trollope's son Harry, however, that the Captain did marry Edith and that the infamous Mr. Lax was hanged by the neck until he was dead.

Besides all this there is the subplot, a story that moviegoers in the following century would recognize as show-biz melodrama. Young Frank Jones, son of the lord of Morony Castle, is in love with Rachel O'Mahony, whose beautiful singing voice on stage is her meal ticket. "We may best describe her by saying that she was an American and an actress," the author tells us. Rachel came to Ireland with her father, who had "probably" been born in America, though the family was Irish. She is accompanied by her manager, referred to by her as the "greasy Jew" Mahomet M. Moses, who also wants to marry her. Rachel, a tiny thing, holds out against him, but then she receives attention from Lord Castlewell, forty years old, eldest son of the Marquis of Beaulieu, with lots of money and a fondness for young ladies of the theater. Frank has not the money to support her, refuses to be supported by her, and, in short, she accepts Lord Castlewell's proposal--only to change her mind after she becomes ill and loses her singing voice. Harry tells us that Frank was to marry Rachel in the end.

And so Anthony Trollope began and ended his writing career with a novel about Ireland. He didn't live long enough to play this one out, but we're fortunate to have the first forty-eight chapters and his son's assurance of how it was to have ended in the last twelve. His last work was one that reprised some of his favorite themes--the fox hunt, a murder mystery, a young American woman with a smart mouth, a stubborn young woman reluctant to accept a suitor whom she loves, and the ways of the simple folk of Ireland. He was running in full stride when he fell.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One hesitates to implicate others in a private madness. A project such as this one requires a certain bit of monomania. However, there are a few who cannot escape complicity.

Chip Paris of Williams/Crawford & Associates has added great value to this and a previous book with graphic design of the cover. Amanda Holland's creativity has allowed _The Way They Lived Then_ to present itself to the reader in a fashion that has been pleasing to me and all who have been asked to comment. Kay Aclin, two of whose paintings hang in our house, provided valuable last minute advice on the color scheme of the cover. Chip's father Charles Paris is an old friend who provided the photograph of the author.

Todd Stewart and I share a few eccentricities, but he is far ahead of me in understanding how to prepare and publish a manuscript. I don't want to know how many hours he has devoted to promoting this and our other joint ventures.

Professor Rebecca Resinski of the Classics Department of Hendrix College maintains a web site for classical allusions in Trollope, www.trollope-apollo.com, which has been a handy way to try to keep up with Trollope's training in Greek and Latin. More important has been her personal encouragement.

My wife Mary read all these reviews, and nothing went out of the house, nor did I ever dare punch "Send," without her ok.

Taylor Prewitt grew up in McGehee, Arkansas and received his BA in English from the University of Arkansas and his MD from Washington University. His training in internal medicine and cardiology was at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He practiced cardiology at Cooper Clinic in Fort Smith, Arkansas, from 1969 to 2003, interrupted only by spending the year 1974 as a Senior Fellow in Cardiology at the Brompton Hospital in London.

He has been reading the novels of Anthony Trollope for some forty years. He is the author of _Reciting Robert Frost in the ICU:_ Essays in the Literature of Medicine and several other collections of book reviews.

Cover design by Amanda Holland

Author photograph by Charles Paris

Westfield Press