Framley Parsonage (3 page)

The chief problem which Mark brings on himself and his family is debt, something with which Trollope was personally well acquainted from his imprudent youth. Unlike the modern reader, he knew all about the drawing and endorsing of bills, and the discounting of them on the London money market. Once Mark has accepted the bills which Sowerby has drawn up, they
act as promissory notes by which Mark engages to pay certain sums at certain specified dates to whomsoever holds the bills at those dates. Since Mark is not known to be in debt, and has a good income and a position to maintain, as can readily be confirmed from the Clerical Directory, his signature is valuable, as was Lord Lufton’s before him. Sowerby, whose own signature is now valueless, will have
been able to obtain good sums for the bills which Mark has accepted. The bill-discounter, Tozer, will then have raised money on each bill by putting it up as security for loans from any number of investors, who expect repayment with profit at the date on which the bill falls due. The image of the small investor given confidence by seeing a clergyman’s name on a bill is used by Tozer to add to Mark’s
discomforts. Sowerby is clearly dishonest in misrepresenting the second bill to Mark as though it will cancel the first (which, as a more experienced man than Mark would know, it cannot), but it is not obvious that the Tozers have acted irregularly, even though Mark and Lord Lufton bluffly assume that they have, from an ancient prejudice against moneylenders. It is characteristic of fiction
of this period that the professional money-lender should be presented as lucky to escape the law, when the true crime lies with a well-born character whom nobody dreams of prosecuting for fraud. Mark of course is silenced by his own disgrace. A key moment occurs when he realizes just how deeply he is implicated in irregularities, and that he will be thought guilty of simony in acquiring his prebendary
stall as a ‘consideration’ for accommodating Sowerby.
²³
Trollope’s
narrator loves proverbs, and one of his favourites – that you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled – is fully exemplified by Mark’s story. As usual in Trollope the proverb seems trite, but the exemplification is rich and satisfying.

In his
Autobiography
Trollope calls
Framley Parsonage
‘a morsel of the biography of an English
clergyman who should not be a bad man, but one led into temptation by his own youth and by the unclerical accidents of the life of those around him’. The other main storyline about the love of Lucy Robarts and Lord Lufton is dismissed as ‘an adjunct necessary, because there must be love in a novel’. Nevertheless, Trollope claims in retrospect,

… it was downright honest love, – in which there
was no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so.
²⁴

Yet in Chapter 31 the narrator goes so far as to apologize for the fact that Lord Lufton feels a twinge of regret at Griselda Grantly’s
engagement to Lord Dumbello:

‘Your hero, then,’ I hear some well-balanced critic say, ‘is not worth very much.’

In the first place Lord Lufton is not my hero; and in the next place, a man may be very imperfect and yet worth a great deal… It is my belief that few young men settle themselves down to the work of the world, to the begetting of children, and carving and paying and struggling and
fretting for the same, without having first been in love with four or five possible mothers for them, and probably with two or three at the same time… In this way Lord Lufton had, to a certain extent, been in love with Griselda.
²⁵

Once Lufton has fully decided on Lucy Robarts, however, he goes about overcoming the obstacles in his path with a no nonsense vigour. It is somewhat of a shock then
to learn of his feelings at his actual marriage, and to hear the narrator’s opinions about a bridegroom’s expected sentiments:

I will not say that the happiness of marriage is like the Dead Sea fruit, – an apple which, when eaten turns to bitter ashes in the mouth… Never
theless, is it not the fact that the sweetest morsel of love’s feast has been eaten, that the freshest, fairest blush of the
flower has been snatched and has passed away, when the ceremony at the altar has been performed, and legal possession given?
²⁶

There is an unmistakable feeling that Trollope only really enjoys courtship when it leads to power struggles, like that between Lucy and Lady Lufton, but that the smooth-running of the course of love and, even worse, weddings, do not interest him. After all, the last
chapter is dismissively entitled ‘How they were all Married, had Two Children, and lived Happy ever after’. What does interest Trollope, on the other hand, is a working marriage, like that of Mark and Fanny, and many of the most moving moments in the novel concern Fanny’s loyalty to Mark, and, in the chapter ‘Consolation’, her sharing of the burden of his worry and relieving his guilt. This is the
kind of subject which appeals to Trollope, as do the dynamics of unhappy marriages too. The Thorne marriage promises to be a rewarding relationship in Trollopian terms because of the lack of moonshine about the partners. It would not be pure speculation to suggest that Trollope was drawing on his own marriage, and it is inescapable to suppose that he had felt and valued the loyalty and support of
Rose Trollope as he developed from an unprepossessing minor Post Office functionary into a major novelist. His remarks on marriage in
Framley Parsonage
brought a protest from George Henry Lewes, and in defending himself Trollope gives us a rare glimpse of his own experience:

You take me too closely au pied de la lettre as touching husbands & lovers. As to myself personally, I have daily to wonder
at the continued run of domestic & worldly happiness which has been granted me… [N]o pain or misery has as yet come to me since the day I married; & if any man should speak well of the married state, I should do so.

But I deny that I have done other. There is a sweet young blushing joy about the first acknowledged reciprocal love, which is like the bouquet of the first glass of wine from the
bottle – It goes when it has been tasted. But for all that who will compare the momentary aroma with the lasting joys of the still flowing bowl?
²⁷

Trollope had every reason to be grateful for his happiness, and the pressure brought about by George Smith’s commission for the
Cornhill Magazine
was a fit occasion to celebrate the virtues of a working Victorian marriage and a supportive Victorian
wife.

It may be that the story of courtship was the chief attraction to many thousands of the original readers of the
Cornhill
, but the Robarts marriage has an enduring value which better represents Trollope’s strengths as an analyst of social and domestic behaviour. He later wrote far more searching accounts of successful and unsuccessful marriages, but even a rather light novel like
Framley
Parsonage
marks an important stage in the development of conventional subject-matter in English fiction.

In so many ways the launch of the
Cornhill
at the end of the year which saw the publication of
The Origin of Species
, came at a watershed in English literary, intellectual and social history. It may be seen as apt that one of the great geniuses of the previous age expired just at that moment,
when Macaulay died in his library at the end of December 1859 with the first issue of the
Cornhill Magazine
open in front of him. 1860 is a year in which we seem to enter a recognizably new world.

The Writing and Printing of ‘Framley Parsonage’

As has already been explained, in 1859 Trollope contracted with the publishers Smith, Elder to write a novel of three-volume length which in the first
instance would appear in their new venture the
Cornhill Magazine. Framley Parsonage
was consequently first published (anonymously) as a monthly serial of sixteen instalments, each instalment consisting of three chapters. The serial ran from the magazine’s first issue in January 1860 (in which it occupied pride of place) until April 1861, and accompanying Trollope’s story were six illustrations
by John Everett Millais. In April 1861, with the conclusion of the serial, the bookform edition of the novel duly appeared, the title-page identifying the author as Anthony Trollope.

Unlike most printings
of Framley Parsonage
, the text of the present
Penguin edition is based on that of the
Cornhill
. Trollope’s letters, together with his
Autobiography
, suggest both that the practical and artistic
demands made by the serial format of publication – as opposed to those of the three-decker – entered significantly into his processes of composition, and also that he gave a fair amount of personal attention to the printing of his novel in the
Cornhill
. This was his first attempt at a serial novel –the ‘rushing mode of publication’, as he termed it
²⁸
– and Trollope very quickly became conscious
of the constraints and priorities of the medium, and in turn adapted his writing to suit them. In a letter of 25 November 1859 he refers to having cut a page out of the proof of his first submitted instalment in deference to the publisher’s requirements regarding length. Of this surgery he comments, ‘but it was as tho you asked for my hearts blood’; and he further frustratedly protests, in justification
of his overrunning, that ‘I had even the words counted, so that I might give you exactly what I had undertaken to give & no more’.
²⁹
A year later, however, he is sufficiently at home with his new medium to comment quite equably in returning a proof, ‘I have cut out five or six lines to bring in that last bit of a page’.
³⁰
Artistic freedom, it seems, is now content to bow to the practicalities
of publishing a novel in instalments.

Trollope’s letters further indicate his degree of involvement in allowing the inference that he often worked through two stages of proofs for the
Cornhill
printing. On occasion this proof stage provided him with opportunities not just to correct mistakes, but to polish his writing and to develop conceptions. A comparison between the
Cornhill
printing and
the manuscript of
Framley Parsonage
reveals a number of self-evidently authorial changes which must have been made in proof, notably, for example, in the elaborate mock-heroic opening of
Chapter 20
. (The manuscript, which comprises
Chapters 19
–
48
and which is held by Harrow School,
³¹
seems to constitute the original printer’s copy, for not
only was it donated to the school by the family of Trollope’s
publisher, George Smith, but it is regularly marked up in other hands with the names of the individual compositors assigned to set up each section of the novel in type. Such authorial variants from the manuscript as appear in the
Cornhill
printing must thus have been made by the author in proof.) In his letters, indeed, Trollope gives the impression of his being a first-rate proofreader, keeping
the printers on their toes. He conscientiously asks his publisher to return the manuscript copy with the first proof (to enhance the accuracy of his corrections), and he also requests duplicate sets of the second proof or ‘revise’ (presumably so that he can keep a record of his final changes and thus ensure that he will be able to check the final published text).
³²

In April 1860 Trollope is found
fuming in a letter, though not without humour, about the misinterpretation of one of his proof corrections: ‘see what the printer has done for me by changing a word in one line instead of the one below. Utterly destroyed the whole character of my own [?most] interesting personage. If he dont put the word back I shall resign.’
³³
In consequence, a remark he makes in the course of July seems uncharacteristically
casual: ‘I suppose I did correct 25-26–& 27, but I dont remember.’
³⁴
In November, freed from the distractions of an intervening trip to Italy, he returns to his previous manner:

Remember I have not corrected any further in F. P. I fear I must ask your people for a revise, which I have not had for the last few numbers, as I think I trace a little independent punctuation – no doubt better than
my own, – but soil not my own. I am not clear also that I have not come across a slight omission or two…
³⁵

One may well suspect that some of this was bluster on Trollope’s part, an attempt to impress upon his valued publisher just how seriously the new author took his literary responsibilities. (Later he in fact admitted that he had been wrong about the omissions he thought he had spotted.) It
must be admitted that Trollope’s own punctuation in the manuscript (like his spelling) is erratic
and often ambiguous, and hardly constitutes a platform from which to complain about ‘a little independent punctuation’ stemming from the printing house. Indeed, one may well conclude that the
Cornhill
printing probably does contain rather a lot of ‘independent punctuation’, but that it is punctuation
needed by the novel, and punctuation tacitly accepted by Trollope rather more than he cares to admit. Putting his protestations to one side, Trollope’s practice as a proofreader is not that impressive, at least given the amount of variation in the conventions – of typography, spelling, punctuation and capitalization – that the
Cornhill
printing displays, and which Trollope seems
not
to have rectified.
There are also a number of inconsistencies of plotting and circumstantial detail which passed the author undetected. However, the fact remains that evidence, internal or external, for Trollope having had any direct hand in the succeeding bookform editions of
Framley Parsonage
is minimal. Whatever his limitations in supervising the
Cornhill
printing, his involvement with that edition was far greater
than with any succeeding one. Indeed, having done the job on the novel once, Trollope seems to have been reluctant ever to do it again. In a letter first published in N. J. Hall’s 1983 edition of Trollope’s letters, the author is found, in March 1861, writing to George Smith: ‘I do not care to correct the sheets of F. P. again, unless you wish it. I dare say I shall see you before it comes out
in its new shape.’ Later that month he is writing again to George Smith asking for some copies of the three-volume edition and remarking on the difficulty of seeing the publisher now that he has two offices.
³⁶
Trollope’s involvement with the printing would seem to have been negligible. If his attitude towards the book edition of
The Small House at Allington
(four years later) is anything to go
by, he was positively blasé about such follow-up printings: ‘Your men I have no doubt will see the book properly thro’ the press without my correcting it. I have put one error right in the portion I have returned.’
³⁷
So, in short, if the manuscript of
Framley Parsonage
shows an incompletely developed text, the first book-form edition signals the withdrawal of the author and, for the most part,
the instigation of a process of corruption of the text.
The
Cornhill
text is the only printing reflecting a period of sustained supervision by the author.