The Eustace Diamonds (5 page)
Read The Eustace Diamonds Online
Authors: Anthony Trollope
The years 1865â6 fit neatly with background details in the novel such as the Metropolitan Line underground (opened in 1863) and John Stuart Mill's attempts to get women into Parliament (1864â5). Clinching evidence is the frequent mention of the Liberals being in office and Frank and the Conservative Party in the opposition. Lord John Russell's Whig administration came to an end in June 1866, heralding the confused sequence of events of the subsequent twelve months culminating with the Conservatives, under Disraeli, pushing through reform (having âstolen the Whigs' clothes') in July 1867 â with, we may fantasize, the young firebrand MP Frank Greystock, now a junior minister, at their head and a loyal wife, Lucy, watching proudly from the Strangers' Gallery.
The Eustace Diamonds
, we may confidently assume, happens in the years immediately preceding the 1867 Reform Bill (nit-picking readers will note that this date creates some awkward chronological clashes with
Phineas Finn).
A less soluble puzzle is: why is Lizzie Eustace so consistently and embarrassingly in debt â as we are told over and again? Her only recorded outgoings are a few shillings for Frank's pony at Portray, some hay and grooming for her guests' beasts, a little modest entertaining, £70 p.a. for the wretched Miss Macnulty, a £150 loan to Mrs Carbuncle and a paltry £50 or so for Lucinda's wedding present. Her castle in Scotland is evidently run with all the Scottish miserliness that Andy Gowran can manage. Where, then, is Lizzie's £4,000 a year going? Why (against the terms of her husband's settlement on her) is she obliged to cut down and sell Portray's oak trees
for ready cash? Does she have expensive vices of which we are not told? One might speculate that the addiction to jewellery, so graphically chronicled from her avaricious childhood on, has continued into her widowhood. It remains a rather undeveloped tract of the plot which Trollope, perhaps, was keeping in reserve, should he have to multiply the woes that fall on her late in the story. As it is Lizzie's overdraft remains a mote to trouble the mind's eye.
The most tantalizing puzzle is that pertaining to the diamond thefts at the heart of the novel's plot. Despite Trollope's ostentatious candour (âThe chronicler⦠scorns to keep from his reader any secret that is known to himself' (
Chapter 52
), some details are perplexingly hazy. As we eventually learn, Patience Crabstick evidently conspired with the thieves to set up the two burglaries. Having rejected her below-stairs admirer, Thomas (a handsome fellow, who forlornly keeps her photograph next to his heart), she bestows her affections on the career thief Mr Smiler. He and Patience are, apparently, in league with the jeweller and fence Benjamin, who finances the crimes. They recruit another thief, the dandyish, diminutive and very smart Billy Cann. Billy is small enough to creep in through the hotel window in Carlisle (opened from the inside by Patience) and skilled enough in his thieving trade to saw out the inside bolt on Lizzie's door, creep, flannel-footed, into her room and steal the iron box from under the bed as she sleeps. Patience, evidently, instructs him where to saw and where (in the dark) to find the swag. As the police surmise, someone (surely Patience) has slipped a sleeping pill into Lizzie's nightcap. Smiler, the muscle, is meanwhile outside, waiting to force open the iron box and make off with its contents.
In the second attempt on the necklace (now secreted in a locked escritoire in Hertford Street) Smiler and Crabstick act alone â cutting out Cann. They do not need his skills, since the house is empty when they ransack it. It's a big mistake. Billy is thus disposed to peach, turning Queen's evidence on his former comrades. Having got his fee from Benjamin (who dispatches the necklace to be cut up on the Continent), Smiler arranges to marry Patience at Ramsgate. Presumably so that, as a wife, she can never give evidence against him. Why does she consent? He is ugly, middle-aged and brutal.
In the interval (the banns must be called over three Sundays) Detective Gager tracks Patience down at the Fiddle with One String where she is hiding out, frightens the truth out of her, persuades her to turn Queen's evidence along with Billy against Smiler and Benjamin, and finally, having known the lady only an hour, offers to marry her. Which, in the epilogue, we discover that he indeed does.
Patience Crabstick is, as I recall, the only domestic servant in Trollope's fiction who is honoured with a surname. These toilers in the background are as numerous and invariably as invisible as the serfs in Tolstoy's novels. That Miss Crabstick is named so early and ostentatiously in
Chapter 21
alerts the knowing Trollope reader that she is, or will be, a âplayer'. As indeed she is. She may, in fact, be the mastermind behind the theft. She is, surely, very ingenious. How, for example, did she get (at only hours' notice) the information to Spicer, Cann and Benjamin in London that the Eustace party were on their way to England and precisely where they would stay, the next day, at Carlisle. She cannot have done it by telegram: the post-office clerk would have read, and remembered, what she wrote. And, anyway, the nearest town, Troon, is miles away. If she sent a letter, it cannot have gone out with the Portray Castle post-bag: mistresses, in Victorian England, assumed the right to read their servants' letters. It would have been too dangerous (although possible) to sweet-talk the postman since regulations (as none knew better than Anthony Trollope) prohibited them from accepting letters from individuals.
Patience is, by Billy Cann's account, a good-looking woman â if rather too prominent around the nose (he prefers his ladies soft, round and pug-faced). Why then would she consent to be nasty old Spicer's wife? Why does Gager, who has never met her (but has appropriated Thomas's photograph and studied it carefully), propose marriage after a few minutes' acquaintance, and only four days before she is due to become Mrs Spicer? Gager is the sharpest of sleuths and a rising man at Scotland Yard. He can already run rings round his superior, Bunfit. He is ambitious. Will a confessed criminal for a wife help his professional prospects?
Yes, one deduces she will be an admirable helpmeet, if she is as smart, and as knowing about the underworld, as this lady manifestly
is. Gager and Gager (née Crabstick) will, we foresee, be a formidable team in the Victorian fight against crime. Who knows, one day â in a novel never to be written by Anthony Trollope â they may even recover the Eustace Diamonds.
JOHN SUTHERLAND
T
HERE
are four excellent, and well-indexed, modern lives of the author: N. John Hall's
Trollope: A Biography
(Oxford, 1991), Victoria Glendinning's
Trollope
(London, 1992), Richard Mullen's
Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World
(London, 1990) and R. H. Super's
The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1988). Each has interesting (and different) things to say about
The Eustace Diamonds.
For many decades Trollopians had to rely on Michael Sadleir's
Trollope: A Commentary
(London, 1927), which is still informative â particularly about the author's relationship with his novel-writing mother. An entertainingly illustrated biographical account is given in C. P. Snow's
Trollope, His Life and Art
(London, 1975). Trollope's letters have been edited, in two volumes, by N. John Hall (Stanford, Calif., 1983). Sadleir's
Trollope: A Bibliography
(London, 1928), although sometimes unreliable, remains a valuable resource and is usefully supplemented by J. C. Olmsted and J. E. Welch's
The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925â1975
(New York, 1978) and Annette K. Lyons,
Anthony Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography
(Greenwood, Fla., 1985). R. C. Terry has put together the comprehensive collection of contemporary witness,
Trollope: Interviews and Recollections
(Basingstoke, 1987),
and A Trollope Chronology
(Basingstoke, 1989). Terry has also edited the invaluable
Oxford Reader's Companion to Trollope
(Oxford, 1998). Trollope's own
An Autobiography
(Edinburgh and London, 1883) and his brother T. A. Trollope's
What I Remember
(London, 1887â9) are necessary starting points. The best one-volume introductions to Trollope's age are
Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia
(New York and London, 1988), edited by Sally Mitchell; R. D. Altick's
The Presence of the Present
(Ohio, 1991); and
A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture
(Oxford, 1999) edited by Herbert F. Tucker. Trollope's reputation, from his own time to ours, is chronicled in Donald Smalley's
Trollope: The Critical Heritage
(London, 1969) and
David Skilton's
Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries
(London, 1972, repr. 1996).
There is a large and ever-growing corpus of general critical works on Trollope. A sound (and eminently readable) introduction is supplied by James R. Kincaid in
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(Oxford, 1977), Andrew Wright,
Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art
(London, 1983), Ruth apRoberts,
Trollope: Artist and Moralist
(London, 1971). Of particular value to the reader of
The Eustace Diamonds
are R. M. Polhemus's
The Changing World of Anthony Trollope
(Berkeley, Calif., 1968), Juliet McMaster's
Trollope's Palliser Novels: Theme and Pattern
(London, 1978) and John Halperin's
Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others
(London, 1977).
For those wishing to download or electronically search the text of
The Eustace Diamonds
there is a digitized version at www.princeton. edu/~batke/trollope/eustace/. The manuscript of the novel is held in the Taylor Collection, at Princeton University Library.
D
ICKENS
and Thackeray established the practice of publishing serious fiction in monthly parts. Each part had a paper cover and carried a few advertisements. At the conclusion of the part issue the novel was issued in volume, hardback form. From the 1860s, however, part issue was largely superseded by publication in one of the new, serious magazines such as
The Cornhill
or
Fraser's
because, as Trollope explains in
An Autobiography
, the âpublic finding that so much might be had for a shilling, in which a portion of one or more novels was always included, were unwilling to spend their money on the novel alone' (
Chapter 8
). Such journals, which have no modern equivalent, were by no means lightweight reading. They carried long informed articles on all subjects thought to interest the broadly educated reader and long reviews in which much of the best criticism of contemporary literature is to be found.
Trollope wrote
The Eustace Diamonds
from 4 December 1869 to 25 August 1870 â according to his practice counting the words written every day. The novel was published in the monthly magazine the
Fortnightly Review
, No. LV, NS. Vol. X, July 1871 to No. LXXIV, NS. Vol. XIII, February 1873. It was immediately reprinted in three-volume book form in December 1872 by Chapman and Hall, the publisher with whom Trollope had close connections. The text of this edition follows the serialized version. The end of each monthly instalment is indicated by three asterisks to give the reader an idea of how Trollope's first readers would have encountered his story. Trollope's occasionally idiosyncratic spellings â âaetherial', âphantasy', ârapt his cue down on the floor' â have been retained, evoking as they do the age in which
The Eustace Diamonds
first appeared.
THE
BY
ANTHONY TROLLOPE.
IN THREE VOLUMES
.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY.
1873.
9 Showing what the Miss Fawns Said, and what Mrs Hittaway Thought
13 Showing What Frank Greystock Did
14 âDoan't Thou Marry for Munny'
15 âI'll Give You a Hundred Guinea Brooch'
17 The Diamonds are Seen in Public
20 The Diamonds Become Troublesome
22 Lady Eustace Procures a Pony for the use of her Cousin
23 Frank Greystock's First Visit to Portray
24 Showing what Frank Greystock thought about Marriage
31 Frank Greystock's Second Visit to Portray
32 Mr and Mrs Hittaway in Scotland