Part 9

Mr. Furnival sees that unusual skill will be required to defend Lady Mason successfully, and she consents to his employment of that famous defense attorney, Mr. Chaffanbrass, and another clever defense attorney, Mr. Solomon Aram. Lucius, convinced of his mother's innocence, is offended by the retaining of these sharp attorneys, and he objects that a simple portrayal of the truth of the matter will be more than sufficient. But his mother, whom we often see sitting alone in her room brooding over these matters (we can only conclude from this and other novels of the period that people spent more time sitting and brooding than is done now) quietly declines her son's advice and, much to his frustration, excludes him from the decision-making process. Here the reader begins to suspect that since she knows what she really did, she realizes she had better have some sharp legal assistance.

She also cultivates the friendship of a noble neighbor, Sir Peregrine Orme, father of her son Lucius's friend young Peregrine Orme. Sir Peregrine is an old man, but he responds to her presence in his house by falling in love with her. He rashly makes her an offer of marriage, which is opposed by his son, her son, and a brother nobleman, all of whom attempt to dissuade him.

Lady Mason had hoped to obtain maximum support from Mr. Furnival and Sir Peregrine without being forced to choose between these two champions. She accepts Sir Peregrine's proposal, but it becomes apparent that she is sacrificing the sympathy of Mr. Furnival and everyone else. So here we have the crisis of the whole story, just at the start of Book Two, in which she confesses her guilt to Sir Peregrine and subsequently to his daughter-in-law, who has also become her great friend. So the reader learns that she did indeed forge the signature to the will twenty years earlier. Sir Peregrine cancels the engagement, but both he and his daughter-in-law maintain their friendship, support, and the secret.

John Everett Millais drew the forty illustrations for the book, and the cover of the Dover Publications edition shows Lady Mason in court. Her companion Mrs. Orme sits with head down and veil in place. But Lady Mason has lifted her veil and raised her eyes. She will face them down. "She was perfect mistress of herself, and as she looked round the court, not with defiant gaze, but with eyes half raised, and a look of modest but yet conscious intelligence, those around her hardly dared to think that she could be guilty."

Trollope shows us the infatuation of two older men with Lady Mason in great detail. Mr. Furnival, who has a wife (dowdy) and a daughter (clever, like he is) and a position in the London legal establishment, cannot consider a compromising liaison, but he enjoys the company of Lady Mason and schemes to meet her. He begins to perceive rather early the strong probability that she is actually guilty, but he has a strong desire to defend her successfully. Sir Peregrine Orme is an older man and a widower, and as she remains in his house as a guest, he begins to ask, "Why should I not?"

We are not denied the drama of the courtroom, and here we see the renowned Mr. Chaffanbrass taking a witness apart. Mr. Chaffanbrass is a recurrent player in several Trollope novels--most notably in _Phineas Redux_, when he undertakes the defense of Phineas Finn, who is accused of murder. Again we see this wily attorney as a role player in the adversarial system of justice: "To him it was a matter of course that Lady Mason should be guilty. Had she not been guilty, he, Mr. Chaffanbrass would not have been required. Mr. Chaffanbrass well understood that the defense of injured innocence was no part of his mission."

The subplots and ancillary characters fill out the space requirements of a proper Victorian novel and are generally done well. Sophia Furnival is a more interesting character than her friend Madeline Stavely, who is practically perfect in every way. In Mr. Furnival's closing speech to the court we finally see the brilliance of his work, and we see that Sophia comes by her wit naturally, since it's apparent that she doesn't inherit it from her mother. Sophia doesn't do much better than Lady Mason does in attempting to handle two admirers.

Felix Graham, a young lawyer who falls in love with Madeline Stavely, finally begins to come through as understandable, but only partially. The story of his earlier attachment to Mary Snow as a protégé whom he had intended to train to become his bride seems a bit far-fetched; perhaps it was not so far-fetched at the time. In any event, this little story is never wrapped up. We see Felix being pressed for more money by Mary's drunken father, by her keeper Mrs. Thomas, and by the apothecary who increases the price of a partnership for Mary's new lover, Albert Fitzallen. Felix has attempted to transfer Mary to Mr. Fitzallen, which appears to be agreeable to all parties, but the negotiations are left in limbo.

Trollope treats us to another fox hunt. A great lover of the chase, he was always on firm ground here. Thrown off almost in passing is a little comic masterpiece, the depiction of two fox hunting sisters: "But when the time for riding did come, when the hounds were really running--when other young ladies had begun to go home--then the Miss Tristams were always there;--there or thereabouts, as their admirers would warmly boast."

Julia Tristam plays a pivotal role in the major subplot as she makes a difficult jump; Felix Graham and his friend Augustus Stavely, who have been following her in an effort to participate in the best of the hunt, attempt to follow, and Felix does not make it, falling off his horse and finding that he cannot raise his arm and can hardly breathe--an accurate portrayal of the symptoms of a broken collarbone and fractured ribs. "Both Peregrine and Miss Tristam looked back. 'There's nothing wrong I hope,' said the lady; and then she rode on."

This injury results in Felix's confinement in the Stavely house, where he and Madeline Stavely fall in love.

_Barchester Towers_ and Mrs. Proudie stand as evidence that Trollope's greatest gift was comic, and we find some humor in _Orley Farm_, even though a courtroom case doesn't allow for much levity. Mrs. Furnival's quarrel with her husband supplies comic relief, and Mr. Kantwise's sale of a metal table and chairs to Mr. Dockwrath and to Squire Mason is appropriately memorialized in Millais's drawing of Mr. Kantwise standing on the metal table: "There is nothing like iron, Sir; nothing."

To attempt to place a value on _Orley Farm_: it is good enough to be fairly compared to _Bleak House_, generally regarded as one of Dicken's masterpieces, and one that has been successfully presented as a television series. Nothing in _Orley Farm_ matches the opening paragraphs of _Bleak House_, in which the description of the rain and mud of London sends us to turn up the heat, even if the room is warm. Dickens manages the pace of _Bleak House_ very well, with the tempo galloping toward a conclusion in the last hundred pages or so. But Lady Mason is a more interesting woman than Lady Dedlock. Mr. Tulkinghorn is a lawyer of great power and mystery in _Bleak House_, but Mr. Furnival is shown in greater depth, and in his concluding speech to the court we see him at the peak of his powers. The spontaneous combustion that Dickens invokes to carry off Mr. Krook is so improbable that one doubts if even any of his readers believed it; but the proceedings of _Orley Farm_, if not so violent, are so true to life that the events might have been lifted from the newspapers.

The major plot is a carefully constructed story of crime and punishment; the reader is led to follow the uncertainty and the sympathy with which the community views a woman accused of a crime that only a few decades earlier could have sent her to the gallows. In presenting this story Trollope has shown his skill in presenting female characters--primarily Lady Mason, but also Sophia Furnival. Our humanity is shown sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with irony, sometimes with condemnation--but always as it is. Too bad we never got to see Barbara Stanwyck play the title role. Who would have played Sophia Furnival?

LEAR REVISITED

THE STRUGGLES OF BROWN, JONES, AND ROBINSON By One of the Firm

Graduate students in business administration routinely bury themselves in case studies, which have become a standard hurdle on the way to attaining an MBA. In doing so, they learn to insist on reliable data. However, should the students in the Stanford Graduate School of Business find themselves analyzing the failure of the London mercantile firm of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, they would surely hope to have more objective information than that found in the account of George Robinson, one of the three partners, as given in _The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, by One of the Firm_. The reader begins to suspect early on that the firm failed at least in part because of expensive and misleading advertising promoted by Robinson, who himself never concedes as much. The dealings of the firm were hardly transparent, even among the three partners; and the senior partner, Mr. Brown, kept the books to himself. Meanwhile the other partner, Mr. Jones, was taking funds from the till without letting Mr. Robinson know.

Among the curious features of genius is its uneven nature. After searching unsuccessfully for his métier with a few novels about Ireland, a historical novel of the French Revolution, and a play, Trollope found his way with _The Warden_ and _Barchester Towers,_ which may be his best known and most loved works. Still experimenting, however, he used his personal experience in the civil service to write _The Three Clerks_, a critical success at the time but not well known today. And then he continued his portrayal of the world of mundane office work by venturing into a picture of the entrepreneurial spirit as shown by _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_. He broke off from it after two weeks and came back to it four years later, but the result was an attempt to satirize the business world. It failed, however, to match his success with the Church, the landed gentry, and the political world of the ruling class.

True, one of his most acclaimed works, _The Way We Live Now_, dealt with the business world; but it did so in a rough rather than a gentle way, in a later period of his life when he had begun to develop somewhat more jaundiced views of society as it had evolved. The satire of _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ is too clever by half. George Robinson is the young pup who defends himself after the bankruptcy of the firm with an unrepentant statement of his faith in advertising, and he presents himself as the unreliable narrator with a self-serving view of his stewardship. Demonstrating the creative imagination that led him to ruin, he compares his senior partner to King Lear. "Think what it must be to be papa to a Goneril and a Regan--without the Cordelia. I have always looked on Mrs. Jones as a regular Goneril; and as for the Regan, why it seems to me that Miss Brown is likely to be Miss Regan to the end of the chapter."

Sarah Jane, the elder sister and the "Goneril," marries Mr. Jones; and Robinson himself aspires to the hand of Maryanne, the "Regan" who joins her sister in turning on their father and attempting to secure his small fortune for themselves. Robinson's dedication to the doctrines of Credit and Advertising, rather than to those of Capital, leads him to run through that part of the four thousand pounds that Brown provided to start their haberdashery business. Brown and Jones stand agog as Robinson hires four men in armour to ride draft horses through the streets announcing the opening of Magenta House. And Mr. Brown cannot understand why Robinson should advertise four hundred dozen white cotton hose. "We haven't got 'em. . . . I did want to do a genuine trade in stockings."

"And so you shall, sir. But how will you begin unless you attract your customers?" Robinson retorts, and he goes on to advertise "English-sewn Worcester gloves, made of French kid," which actually came from the wholesale houses in St. Paul's churchyard.

The inevitable downfall of the overextended firm can surely provide a number of cautionary tales for future students of the success and failure of businesses, but these lessons are lost on George Robinson, who reacts by transferring his devotion from Maryanne Brown, who abandons him in the end, to the goddess of Commerce. "Oh sweet Commerce, teach me thy lessons! Let me ever buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest."

What is it that made the foibles of the Church so humorous in Trollope's hands, while the schemes of the business world merely led to a ho-hum reaction at its cupidity and stupidity? Is it that the men of the cloth retained a few cloaks of honor and respectability yet to be stripped away, while the businessmen may never have had any such cloaks? In any event, the reading public and the critics helped Trollope to find his way, which was not along the way of Commerce and Advertising.

BRINGING GOOD BEER TO DEVON

RACHEL RAY

Bad beer is being brewed in East Devon. This is cider country, where apple trees grow and "men drink cider by the gallon." The bad beer comes from the firm of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt, which is managed by the latter after the death of the former. Thus Anthony Trollope has given us a novel about beer.

But of course it's not primarily about beer. _Rachel Ray_ is mainly a love story with plot lines familiar to readers of Trollope. The heir to the late Mr. Bungall's interest in the brewery, Luke Rowan, comes to town to assert his interests, meets a friend of the Tappitt sisters, Rachel Ray, and falls in love with her. Rachel is a rather typical Trollope heroine--spirited and bright, dwelling in an humble cottage with her timid widowed mother and a domineering older sister, also a widow. Rachel is attracted to Luke when he sits alone with her on a churchyard stile and gazes at the clouds, but she consents only by a silent nod to his proposal of marriage that comes soon after. Once having given her silent nod, however, she vows lifelong faithfulness, even though her mercurial fiancé may desert her.

Luke Rowan is no paragon. His faults are declared to the reader in a rather desultory fashion, showing him to be only slightly more interesting than a stock representation of a young lover, which he really is. It is enough to raise the reader's concern that Rachel may be doomed to a fate similar to that of Lily Dale, the tragic, faithful heroine of _The Small House at Allington_.

The story of Cinderella is retold with a few modifications, as the three Tappitt sisters invite Rachel, not unanimously, to a little party for the Rowans, which soon comes to be regarded as a ball. Rachel is persuaded to attend the ball only after the fairy godmother, in the form of Mrs. Butler Cornbury, invites Rachel to accompany her in her coach. Mrs. Tappitt is scandalized that Luke selects Rachel as his dancing partner of choice, and Cinderella is so overcome by it all that she persuades her fairy godmother to take her home two hours early. But to the amazement of all, the prince makes a visit to the humble cottage to see Rachel the next day.

So here we have the love story. Now back to the beer:

It was a sour and muddy stream that flowed from their vats; a beverage disagreeable to the palate, and very cold and uncomfortable to the stomach. Who drank it I could never learn. It was to be found at no respectable inn. . . . Nevertheless the brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt was kept going, and the large ugly square brick house in which the Tappitt family lived was warm and comfortable. There is something in the very name of beer that makes money.

Mr. Tappitt's determination to brew bad beer is reinforced by the appearance of Luke Rowan, who aspires to participate in the management of the brewery and brew good beer. But Mr. Tappitt knows that would require capital investment. The brewery has been managing to make money under his direction, and he wants neither to concede any of his power nor to risk the profitability of the business with newfangled ideas. This divergence of views comes to a climax when Rowan offers to join the firm as an active partner, to allow Tappit to retire with an annual pension, or to sell his share of the business to Tappitt and then build his own competing brewery. Mr. Tappitt's response is to brandish a poker, and at the conclusion of this dramatic encounter Rowan departs, declaring that the matter will be turned over to his lawyer.

Having been accepted by Rachel, he now leaves town, and Rachel is left to the pernicious influence of community opinion, which is against the young man in his apparent effort to unseat a longstanding citizen of the community, even though he does brew bad beer. Rachel is influenced by her mother, who is in turn influenced by her spiritual advisor, the vicar Mr. Comfort, who in turn is influenced by community opinion conveyed by a disaffected colleague. And so Rachel's letter in response to her fiancé's first letter is so much less than passionate that she fears she has terminated their engagement.

So how will the matter be resolved? Here we see a second issue: a political contest. Politics fascinated Trollope, and he even entered an election himself. In this instance Tappitt supports a Jew from out of town, Mr. Hart, against young Butler Cornbury, eldest son of the neighboring squire. The author revels in the details of the campaign: slurs against the Jew by his opponents who probably know better, the raising of money, and the buying of votes. Luke Rowan reappears in town after having purchased property from Rachel's mother for the apparent purpose of building his own brewery. And Luke enters the political contest, even though he is not an elector in Baslehurst, supporting Butler Cornbury with fiery speeches. Luke is found to be a radical--that is, "he desires, expects, works for, and believes in, the gradual progress of the people," and he "will own no inferiority to the manhood of another."

The outcome of the election is determined by one vote. Cornbury is the winner, but Tappitt dreams of revenge. He is invited to a dinner of Hart supporters and chairs their meeting. He meets the unscrupulous lawyer Mr. Sharpit there and asks him to take his case against Mr. Rowan because his own lawyer Mr. Honyman has recommended capitulation and retirement.

But Mr. Tappitt has been ill, and his wife, who wants him to retire so she and her daughters can enjoy the delights of Torquay, has threatened to have him committed "under fitting restraint" if he goes to the meeting. This is the red pepper program: "There may be those who think that a wife goes too far in threatening a husband with a commission of lunacy, and frightening him with a prospect of various fatal diseases; but the dose must be adapted to the constitution, and the palate that is accustomed to large quantities of red pepper must have quantities larger than usual whenever some special culinary effect is to be achieved."

Tappitt comes home from the dinner drunk, and his wife finds him vulnerable the next morning. She refuses to let him out of bed until he agrees to invite Honeyman the lawyer back to the brewery, thus achieving a compromise that allows Mr. Tappitt to sell out and retire.

So everything works out. The author has also used our story to indulge his fondness for church affairs. Rachel's widowed sister has been attracted to the less formal side of the Church of England, and in particular to a rather unsavory clerical representative of this school of thought, one Mr. Prong, whose pride in his sermons exceeds the results. But in the end Rachel's sister Dorothea shrugs off Mr. Prong, who denies any interest in Dorothea's money but is unwilling to forgo the husband's legal right to her money.

It's all a good story. We share the author's fun with the radicals, the politics, the churchmen, the fairy godmother, and particularly with Mr. Tappitt. Rachel's romance works itself out, but perhaps more to the point, the men of Baslehurst will get better beer.

"HE COMETH NOT; I AM AWEARY"

MISS MACKENZIE

Garish images are the ones that stick. _Miss Mackenzie_ is a beautiful story of a deserving young woman who finally achieves love and fortune after years of service to the poor and the sick and the dying, but the image that sticks in the mind is that of Rev. Jeremiah Maguire, who was possessed "of the most terrible squint in his right eye which ever disfigured a face that in all other respects was fitted for an Apollo." In this case, as was usually the case in Trollope's novels, the physical deformity was a ready clue to the individual's character. Rev. Maguire ranks as one of the more iniquitous of the sinners in the ranks of Trollope's clergymen. It may not have been so bad that he tried to marry Margaret Mackenzie for her money, but he did so with a devious scheme to establish his own church and use the pew rents as security for the money that he would say he was giving but would then take back as payment of a loan. And when he learned that he had no chance of winning her for himself, he embarrassed her by writing several "Lion and Lamb" articles for a religious newspaper, saying that she was being cheated of her inheritance by the man whom she wished to marry. He doesn't match the villainy of Joseph Emilius, the preacher who only had a "slight defect in his left eye" and a "hooky nose," and who murdered Lizzie Eustace's protector Mr. Bonteen in _The Eustace Diamonds_; it is apparent, however, that not all Trollope's clergymen went to heaven.

But back to Miss Mackenzie: if one of the great pleasures in life is watching someone start out with a pleasant set of gifts and then develop a few more to become a joyous credit to the human race, then the literary proxy is reading about such a one. We are introduced to Miss Mackenzie as a Cinderella-type woman (Trollope had a weakness for Cinderellas) who devotes herself to the care of her brother for fifteen years until he dies. She is a generous but self-abasing humble woman, but we see that she can stand up for herself. Finally she appears to gain some conception of her own worth.

There has been some money in the family, but we see it slipping away due to unfortunate business decisions, and none of it appears to be destined for poor Margaret, who has little to show for the years of her young womanhood. But then she is named the beneficiary of her late brother's will! Suddenly she is a woman of independent means, if not indeed wealthy.

And now we see her deal with the friends, relatives, and suitors who flock to her. Her sense of self worth is hardly enhanced as she fends them off, comprehending pretty quickly that they are interested in her money, not so much in her. She longs to have a life. She's only thirty-six. Her "time for withering" has not yet arrived. But she feels that she should not live for herself alone, and there are numerous opportunities for doing good deeds. The death of her brother has left her sister-in-law with a house full of children, and Margaret selects one of them, a fourteen year old girl, to live with her. She will leave London, where the neighborhood just down the streets to the Thames from the Strand is pretty dull, and she will go to Littlebath and take lodgings in the Paragon. (Bath and the Crescent, as in _The Bertrams_).

A gloomy story to this point, but it is told with the distant ironic tone that tells the reader that this is a comedy. Margaret visits The Cedars, home of her cousins the Balls, but finding them "very dull," she determines to proceed with the Littlebath plan.