Framley Parsonage
Authors: Anthony Trollope
FRAMLEY PARSONAGE
A
NTHONY
T
ROLLOPE
was born in London in 1815 and died in 1882. His father was a barrister who went bankrupt and the family was maintained by his mother, Frances, who resourcefully in later life became a bestselling writer. He received little education and his childhood generally seems to have
been an unhappy one.
Happily established in a successful career in the Post Office (from which he retired in 1867), Trollope’s first novel was published in 1847. He went on to write over forty novels as well as short stories, and enjoyed considerable acclaim as a novelist during his lifetime. The idea for
The Warden
(1855), the first of his novels to achieve success, was conceived while he wandered
around Salisbury Cathedral one mid-summer evening. It was succeeded by other ‘Barsetshire’ novels employing the same characters including Archdeacon Grantly, the worldly cleric, the immortal Mrs Proudie and the saintly warden, Septimus Harding. These novels are
Barchester Towers
(1857),
Doctor Thorne
(1858),
Framley Parsonage
(1861),
The Small House at Allington
(1864) and
The Last Chronicle of
Barset
(1867). This series is regarded by many as Trollope’s masterpiece, in which he demonstrates his imaginative grasp of the great preoccupation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novels – property. Almost equally popular were the six brilliant Palliser novels comprising
Can You Forgive Her?
(1864),
Phineas Finn
(1869),
The Eustace Diamonds
(1873),
Phineas Redux
(1874),
The Prime
Minister
(1876) and
The Duke’s Children
(1880). The notable titles among his many other novels and books include
He Knew He Was Right
(1868–9),
The Way We Live Now
(1874–5),
An Autobiography
(1875–6) and
Dr Wortle’s School
(1881).
D
AVID
S
KILTON
was educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Copenhagen University, and is Research Professor in English at
Cardiff University, where until 2002 he
was Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. He is Literary Adviser to the Trollope Society and General Editor of the Trollope Society/Folio Society edition of Trollope’s novels. His books include
Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries
(1972 and 1996),
Defoe to the Victorians
(1985).
The Early and Mid-Victorian Novel
(1993), and numerous editions of Victorian works, including
Trollope’s
Prime Minister
(1994) and
An Autobiography
(1996) in Penguin Classics.
P
ETER
M
ILES
lectures at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He is author of
“Wuthering Heights”: The Critics Debate
(1999) and co-author of
Cinema, Literature and Society
:
Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain
(1987). He has edited Tobias Smollett’s
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
, Arthur Morrison’s
A Child
of the Jago
and Wilkie Collins’s
The Dream Woman and Other Stories
. With David Skilton he has also edited Collins’s
The Woman in White
. He has contributed to such journals as
The Book Collector, The Library
and
Studies in Bibliography
.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID SKILTON
and
PETER MILES
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1861
Published in the Penguin English Library 1984
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1986
Reprinted with new
Further Reading and Chronology 2004
19
Introduction and notes copyright © David Skilton and Peter Miles, 1984
Further Reading copyright © David Skilton 2004
All rights reserved
Except In the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
EISBN: 978–0–141–90502–0
‘I W
ISH
Mr Trollope would go on writing
Framley Parsonage
for ever. I don’t see any reason why it should ever come to an end, and every one I know is always dreading the
last
number.’ Thus Trollope’s eminent novelist contemporary, Elizabeth Gaskell, writing to the publisher George Smith as soon as the third instalment had appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine
1
Having captured a very large market with his new monthly periodical, Smith had reason to be pleased
with the whole venture, and not least with the novel he had commissioned for the first sixteen issues. The
Cornhill
and
Framley Parsonage
hit educated middle-class tastes exactly, together establishing the full-length novel serial in a general-interest monthly as one of the dominant publishing forms of the eighteen sixties. ‘How good this “Cornhill Magazine” is!’ wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning
of the fourth number. ‘Anthony Trollope is really superb.’
2
Over 100,000 members of the public each month corroborated these judgements by buying the new magazine.
George Smith’s plan for his new periodical was simple but ambitious. Many of the greatest novels of the previous decades – major works by Dickens and Thackeray for example – had been published in nineteen monthly instalments at a shilling
a month, with a double quantity in the final number and illustrations to each. Smith rightly believed that a magazine at the same price which combined the same quantity or more of serial fiction, illustrated as before, with a variety of articles by specialists on important topics of the day, would change the pattern of novel publication. He was not the first person to have this idea
(Macmillan’s
Magazine
was on the bookstalls a month before the
Cornhill)
, but Smith owed his immediate supremacy to an outstanding team of contributors. In appointing Thackeray as his editor he at once acquired one of the best-loved novelists of the day and one of the most respected men of letters in the London literary world. And the names Thackeray recruited amply demonstrate his influence, as well as the
generous payments Smith offered. The first few years saw contributions from Thackeray himself, Trollope, George Eliot, Arnold, Ruskin, G. H. Lewes, Tennyson, and many others besides. Great care was to be lavished on the illustrations. John Everett Millais was employed to illustrate Trollope, and Thackeray illustrated his own work, while the then famous names of W. J. Linton and C. Swain, and the
resources of the Dalziel brothers, the finest wood-engravers in London, ensured the very highest standard.
Such was the scale of the enterprise to which Trollope had modestly asked to be allowed to contribute in a letter to Thackeray dated 23 October 1859, in which he offered a series of short stories, entitled
Tales of All Countries
, each ‘redolent of some different country’ and arising out
of his extensive travels.
3
He expected at least £20 for each story, and was quickly answered instead with an offer from Smith of £1,000 for a novel to take the leading position in the new magazine. A letter from Trollope’s idol, Thackeray, followed, expressing the warmest admiration for his recent work:
There was quite an excitement in my family one evening when Paterfamilias (who goes to sleep
on a novel almost always when he tries it after dinner) came up stairs into the Drawing room wide awake and calling for the second volume of The Three Clerks. I hope the Cornhill Magazine will have as pleasant a story…
4
The terms and the praise were sweet to Trollope, who was then, he says in his
Autobiography
, at the bottom of the tree.
5
He had some well-thought-of books behind him, but commanded
no great money from publishers; although increasingly successful as a Civil
Servant in the Post Office, he was stationed in Ireland and hence quite out of touch with the London literary scene. The offer from George Smith was the turning-point in his writing career. He was at once to become not merely prosperous but one of the leading novelists of the day, and to confirm the judgement of him by
The Times
as ‘the Apollo of the circulating library’.
6
Tales of All Countries
were eventually written incidentally and appeared in a number of periodicals, though Thackeray found the stories too strong for his ‘squeamish’ readership of the
Cornhill.
7
What the magazine required was distinctively English fiction.
Framley Parsonage
proved to be the epitome of a certain kind of Englishness. In
Journey
to a War
(1939) W. H. Auden and Christopher Isher-wood were to capture their sense of cultural incongruity as they journeyed towards the Sino-Japanese war zone by means of an image of themselves insulated in a railway compartment reading aloud Scott’s
Guy Mannering
and Trollope’s
Framley Parsonage
, while outside in the corridor patrolled armed Chinese guards.
8
When George Smith’s offer came Trollope
was already well advanced with a novel set during the Irish famine, and Chapman and Hall generously agreed to release him from his arrangement with them so that it could be printed in the
Cornhill
if it would suit. He hurried to see Smith, who, hearing that the novel in question,
Castle Richmond
, was an Irish story, Trollope relates,
… begged that I would endeavour to frame some other for his
magazine. He was sure that an Irish story would not do for a commencement – and he suggested the Church, as though it were my peculiar subject… He wanted an English tale, on English life, with a clerical flavour. On these orders I went to work, and framed what I suppose I must call the plot of
Framley Parsonage.
9
So Trollope found himself writing two novels at once and, for the only time in
his life, publishing the opening of a serial before he had finished it. Now began a period which was unusually busy even in Trollope’s extraordinarily busy life. Suspending work on
Castle Richmond
for two months, he launched himself on
Framley Parsonage
on the journey home to Ireland at the beginning of November 1859, and was already correcting proofs of the first three chapters on the twenty-fifth
of the same month. In December, while still writing hard, he moved house from Ireland to Waltham Cross, a dozen miles from London, with his wife and two sons, to take charge of the Eastern District of the General Post Office. The move and the responsibilities of his new post did not prevent the completion of
Castle Richmond
in March of 1860, and of
Framley Parsonage
in June of the same year.
10
We know little about Rose Trollope, the wife of this energetic author and Civil Servant, and can only speculate on the enormous effort she too must have exerted at this and many other stages in his career.
Her husband had certainly progressed in life since their marriage in 1844, when he was only just establishing himself in any sort of respectability as Deputy Postal Surveyor at Banagher in
the centre of Ireland after a miserable boyhood and youth, which he later vividly described in
An Autobiography
(1883). The son of a failed barrister and most difficult man, and of a brilliant and energetic woman who turned writer in her middle life to save the family from the ruin to which her husband had brought it, Anthony Trollope was universally judged destined for a lifetime of failure.
He was procured a clerkship at the General Post Office, through family interest rather than his own abilities and education, and fell into a course of debt and minor dissoluteness that cannot even qualify as glamorously bohemian. In a sense he grew up when he was sent on his lowly but rather independent posting to Banagher, where all at once he found himself a person of a little consequence, respected
for the integrity with which he carried out his duties, and popular for the energy with which he followed the hounds.
During the forties he turned to the family industry of writing, and his first novel,
The Macdermots of Ballycloran
, came out in 1847 when his mother’s twenty-first novel was in the press and his elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, had been publishing for seven years. There is evidence
that Anthony always secretly
wanted to be a writer but, unlike Thomas Adolphus, he received no encouragement from his eminent mother, who seems to have entertained no hopes for him and largely to have ignored him. Although
The Macdermots
is now critically respected it was not a success in 1847 and the new novelist had to wait until 1855 and his fourth novel,
The Warden
, for any degree of recognition
at all. It was only with
Barchester Towers
in 1857 that his name became known, and between that date and his important connection with the
Cornhill Magazine
he managed with characteristic energy to publish
The Three Clerks
(1857),
Doctor Thorne
(1858),
The Bertrams
(1859) and
The West Indies and the Spanish Main
(1859), as well as negotiating a postal treaty with Egypt early in 1858 and reorganizing
postal services in the West Indies during the winter of 1858–9. When Thackeray found himself then without a major novel of his own to take the leading position in the
Cornhill Magazine
, there was no practitioner more reliable than Anthony Trollope to whom he could turn.
For evidence of how good Thackeray’s choice was in market terms we need only look at a few of the contemporary reviews. The
Saturday Review
, which generally rather looked down on all but the most intellectual novels, describes the popularity of
Framley Parsonage
in striking terms:
The author of
Framley Parsonage
is a writer who is born to make the fortune of circulating libraries. At the beginning of every month the new number of his book has ranked almost as one of the delicacies of the season; and no London belle
dared to pretend to consider herself literary, who did not know the very latest intelligence about the state of Lucy Robarts’ heart, and of Griselda Grantley’s [sic] flounces… It seems a kind of breach of hospitality to criticise
Framley Parsonage
at all. It has been an inmate of the drawing-room – it has travelled with us in the train – it has lain on the breakfast-table. We feel as if we had
met Lady Lufton at a country house, admired Lord Dumbello at a ball, and seen Mrs Proudie at an episcopal evening party.
11
Towards the end of the serialization, the editor of the
Athenaeum
refers to ‘the hundred thousand readers who have followed with breathless eagerness the loves of Lucy Robarts and Lord Lufton,
and who have gossiped and cried over Mark and Mrs Mark, as though they had been
living personal friends’, and predicts that they will ‘miss the pleasant excitement, the chatty good humour, and the light, bright playsomeness of this monthly visitation’.
12
For his part, the reviewer of the first book edition in the
British Quarterly Review
declared that he was quite exceptional in not having been able to read the novel in serial form:
It is, we think, a story which, though
perfect in its elaboration, and charming in the flow of continuous narrative, is not well suited to the monthly driblets of a periodical. Now, however, that it has appeared in three-volume completeness, we have read it with an interest that could not flag, and which, in fact, refused us any respite till we had exhausted the last page.
13
The critics of the day identify some of the qualities which
made
Framley Parsonage
popular on its first appearance and which still retain their appeal today: the fluent and expressive style, the humour, the intelligent absorption in the essentially everyday, the tolerant analysis of conduct in the commonplace business of life; and, in addition, the moderate suspense, the ordinary and almost ‘approachable’ characters, and the comforting sense of life going
on, which made it a successful serial then, and once again, almost a century later, on the radio in the 1950s. For Trollope’s contemporaries, though, there were still other attractions. In particular they received a strong impression of life as it was lived at that very time. On his death one of his best critics was to go so far as to claim that his novels ‘picture the society of our day with
a fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world’.
14
There was, too, a special sense of topicality about Trollope’s fiction. For various reasons Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot usually set their novels about their own age back a few decades – often to the period of their own childhood or youth – and hence costumes and customs were dated, and references
to up-to-the-minute ideas and events had to be rather carefully
encoded to avoid damaging the chronology. Trollope’s procedure was quite different. He wrote with an eye to the very moment of composition, incorporating numerous references to current affairs calculated to give the reader the impression that the characters of the novel inhabited the same world and read the same newspapers as he did.
Among the topics of the day alluded to in
Framley Parsonage
, apart from clear references to the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, are the new divorce court, established in 1858, the abolition of the Paper Duties in 1860, the Reverend Bryan King and the ritualism riots in East London in 1859–60, the Reverend Charles Spurgeon and his Metropolitan Tabernacle, opened in 1861, and even the introduction
of a new invalid’s food in the eighteen fifties under the name ‘Revalenta Arabica’. Other topical matters can be less precisely dated, such as the public debate on clerical incomes, with particular reference to curates’ stipends, or the change from
service à la française
to
service à la russe
at the dinner-table, which the historian of nineteenth-century French food, Jean-Paul Aron, places in
the eighteen fifties and sixties.
15
These things, which are identified and explained in the notes to this edition, give an exceptional feeling of actuality to the novel. Indeed readers seem actively to have expected the novelist to deal with topical issues of the day, and Lord Carlisle, the Viceroy of Ireland, wrote to say that he was ‘curious to know what effect the Essays and Reviews may produce
upon the Barchester Society’.
16
At one point John Everett Millais, who was illustrating the novel, was even more up-to-the-minute than Trollope, and pictured a dress in the latest fashion which, the author protested to George Smith, would be thought ‘simply ludicrous’. If proof is needed of Trollope’s consciousness of the topical appearance of his fiction, it can be found in a letter of 21 July
1860 in which he withdraws his objection: ‘I will now consent to forget the flounced dress. I saw the
very pattern of that dress
some time after the picture came out.’
17
Actuality was the final arbiter of the question – though we shall never know
whether Millais’s plate had been the original model for the dress in question.