_THE LAST CHRONICLE OF BARSET_--LEAVING
THE POST OFFICE--_ST. PAUL'S MAGAZINE_.
I will now go back to the year 1867, in which I was still living at
Waltham Cross. I had some time since bought the house there which
I had at first hired, and added rooms to it, and made it for our
purposes very comfortable. It was, however, a rickety old place,
requiring much repair, and occasionally not as weather-tight as it
should be. We had a domain there sufficient for the cows, and for
the making of our butter and hay. For strawberries, asparagus, green
peas, out-of-door peaches, for roses especially, and such everyday
luxuries, no place was ever more excellent. It was only twelve miles
from London, and admitted therefore of frequent intercourse with
the metropolis. It was also near enough to the Roothing country for
hunting purposes. No doubt the Shoreditch Station, by which it had to
be reached, had its drawbacks. My average distance also to the Essex
meets was twenty miles. But the place combined as much or more than I
had a right to expect. It was within my own postal district, and had,
upon the whole, been well chosen.
The work I did during the twelve years that I remained there, from
1859 to 1871, was certainly very great. I feel confident that in
amount no other writer contributed so much during that time to
English literature. Over and above my novels, I wrote political
articles, critical, social, and sporting articles, for periodicals,
without number. I did the work of a surveyor of the General Post
Office, and so did it as to give the authorities of the department no
slightest pretext for fault-finding. I hunted always at least twice a
week. I was frequent in the whist-room at the Garrick. I lived much
in society in London, and was made happy by the presence of many
friends at Waltham Cross. In addition to this we always spent six
weeks at least out of England. Few men, I think, ever lived a fuller
life. And I attribute the power of doing this altogether to the
virtue of early hours. It was my practice to be at my table every
morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no
mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I
paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During
all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the
coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought
not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the
success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my
literary work before I dressed for breakfast.
All those I think who have lived as literary men,--working daily as
literary labourers,--will agree with me that three hours a day will
produce as much as a man ought to write. But then he should so have
trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during
those three hours,--so have tutored his mind that it shall not be
necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall
before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants
to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,--and it
still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to
myself,--to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself
250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words
have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three
hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task
by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take
me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear
the sound of the words and phrases. I would strongly recommend this
practice to all tyros in writing. That their work should be read
after it has been written is a matter of course,--that it should be
read twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be
a matter of course. But by reading what he has last written, just
before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and
spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming
to be unlike himself. This division of time allowed me to produce
over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up
through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of
three volumes each in the year;--the precise amount which so greatly
acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any
rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world
can want from the hands of one man.
I have never written three novels in a year, but by following the
plan above described I have written more than as much as three
volumes; and by adhering to it over a course of years, I have been
enabled to have always on hand,--for some time back now,--one or two
or even three unpublished novels in my desk beside me. Were I to die
now there are three such besides _The Prime Minister_, half of which
has only yet been issued. One of these has been six years finished,
and has never seen the light since it was first tied up in the
wrapper which now contains it. I look forward with some grim
pleasantry to its publication after another period of six years, and
to the declaration of the critics that it has been the work of a
period of life at which the power of writing novels had passed from
me. Not improbably, however, these pages may be printed first.
In 1866 and 1867 _The Last Chronicle of Barset_ was brought out by
George Smith in sixpenny monthly numbers. I do not know that this
mode of publication had been tried before, or that it answered very
well on this occasion. Indeed the shilling magazines had interfered
greatly with the success of novels published in numbers without other
accompanying matter. The public 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.
Feeling that this certainly had become the case in reference to
novels published in shilling numbers, Mr. Smith and I determined to
make the experiment with sixpenny parts. As he paid me £3000 for the
use of my MS., the loss, if any, did not fall upon me. If I remember
right, the enterprise was not altogether successful.
Taking it as a whole, I regard this as the best novel I have written.
I was never quite satisfied with the development of the plot, which
consisted in the loss of a cheque, of a charge made against a
clergyman for stealing it, and of absolute uncertainty on the part of
the clergyman himself as to the manner in which the cheque had found
its way into his hands. I cannot quite make myself believe that even
such a man as Mr. Crawley could have forgotten how he got it; nor
would the generous friend who was anxious to supply his wants have
supplied them by tendering the cheque of a third person. Such fault I
acknowledge,--acknowledging at the same time that I have never been
capable of constructing with complete success the intricacies of a
plot that required to be unravelled. But while confessing so much,
I claim to have portrayed the mind of the unfortunate man with great
accuracy and great delicacy. The pride, the humility, the manliness,
the weakness, the conscientious rectitude and bitter prejudices of
Mr. Crawley were, I feel, true to nature and well described. The
surroundings too are good. Mrs. Proudie at the palace is a real
woman; and the poor old warden dying at the deanery is also real.
The archdeacon in his victory is very real. There is a true savour
of English country life all through the book. It was with many
misgivings that I killed my old friend Mrs. Proudie. I could not,
I think, have done it, but for a resolution taken and declared under
circumstances of great momentary pressure.
It was thus that it came about. I was sitting one morning at work
upon the novel at the end of the long drawing-room of the Athenæum
Club,--as was then my wont when I had slept the previous night in
London. As I was there, two clergymen, each with a magazine in his
hand, seated themselves, one on one side of the fire and one on the
other, close to me. They soon began to abuse what they were reading,
and each was reading some part of some novel of mine. The gravamen
of their complaint lay in the fact that I reintroduced the same
characters so often! "Here," said one, "is that archdeacon whom we
have had in every novel he has ever written." "And here," said the
other, "is the old duke whom he has talked about till everybody is
tired of him. If I could not invent new characters, I would not write
novels at all." Then one of them fell foul of Mrs. Proudie. It was
impossible for me not to hear their words, and almost impossible
to hear them and be quiet. I got up, and standing between them, I
acknowledged myself to be the culprit. "As to Mrs. Proudie," I said,
"I will go home and kill her before the week is over." And so I did.
The two gentlemen were utterly confounded, and one of them begged me
to forget his frivolous observations.
I have sometimes regretted the deed, so great was my delight in
writing about Mrs. Proudie, so thorough was my knowledge of all
the little shades of her character. It was not only that she was a
tyrant, a bully, a would-be priestess, a very vulgar woman, and one
who would send headlong to the nethermost pit all who disagreed with
her; but that at the same time she was conscientious, by no means a
hypocrite, really believing in the brimstone which she threatened,
and anxious to save the souls around her from its horrors. And as
her tyranny increased so did the bitterness of the moments of her
repentance increase, in that she knew herself to be a tyrant,--till
that bitterness killed her. Since her time others have grown up
equally dear to me,--Lady Glencora and her husband, for instance; but
I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie, and still live much
in company with her ghost.
I have in a previous chapter said how I wrote _Can You Forgive Her?_
after the plot of a play which had been rejected,--which play had
been called _The Noble Jilt_. Some year or two after the completion
of _The Last Chronicle_, I was asked by the manager of a theatre
to prepare a piece for his stage, and I did so, taking the plot of
this novel. I called the comedy _Did He Steal It?_ But my friend the
manager did not approve of my attempt. My mind at this time was less
attentive to such a matter than when dear old George Bartley nearly
crushed me by his criticism,--so that I forget the reason given. I
have little doubt but that the manager was right. That he intended to
express a true opinion, and would have been glad to have taken the
piece had he thought it suitable, I am quite sure.
I have sometimes wished to see during my lifetime a combined
republication of those tales which are occupied with the fictitious
county of Barsetshire. These would be _The Warden_, _Barchester
Towers_, _Doctor Thorne_, _Framley Parsonage_, and _The Last
Chronicle of Barset_. But I have hitherto failed. The copyrights are
in the hands of four different persons, including myself, and with
one of the four I have not been able to prevail to act in concert
with the others.[10]
[Footnote 10: Since this was written I have made arrangements for
doing as I have wished, and the first volume of the series will
now very shortly be published.]
In 1867 I made up my mind to take a step in life which was not
unattended with peril, which many would call rash, and which, when
taken, I should be sure at some period to regret. This step was the
resignation of my place in the Post Office. I have described how it
was that I contrived to combine the performance of its duties with my
other avocations in life. I got up always very early; but even this
did not suffice. I worked always on Sundays,--as to which no scruple
of religion made me unhappy,--and not unfrequently I was driven to
work at night. In the winter when hunting was going on, I had to keep
myself very much on the alert. And during the London season, when
I was generally two or three days of the week in town, I found the
official work to be a burden. I had determined some years previously,
after due consideration with my wife, to abandon the Post Office when
I had put by an income equal to the pension to which I should be
entitled if I remained in the department till I was sixty. That I had
now done, and I sighed for liberty.
The exact time chosen, the autumn of 1867, was selected because I
was then about to undertake other literary work in editing a new
magazine,--of which I shall speak very shortly. But in addition to
these reasons there was another, which was, I think, at last the
actuating cause. When Sir Rowland Hill left the Post Office, and my
brother-in-law, Mr. Tilley, became Secretary in his place, I applied
for the vacant office of Under-Secretary. Had I obtained this I
should have given up my hunting, have given up much of my literary
work,--at any rate would have edited no magazine,--and would have
returned to the habit of my youth in going daily to the General
Post Office. There was very much against such a change in life. The
increase of salary would not have amounted to above £400 a year, and
I should have lost much more than that in literary remuneration. I
should have felt bitterly the slavery of attendance at an office,
from which I had then been exempt for five-and-twenty years. I
should, too, have greatly missed the sport which I loved. But I was
attached to the department, had imbued myself with a thorough love of
letters,--I mean the letters which are carried by the post,--and was
anxious for their welfare as though they were all my own. In short, I
wished to continue the connection. I did not wish, moreover, that any
younger officer should again pass over my head. I believed that I had
been a valuable public servant, and I will own to a feeling existing
at that time that I had not altogether been well treated. I was
probably wrong in this. I had been allowed to hunt,--and to do as I
pleased, and to say what I liked, and had in that way received my
reward. I applied for the office, but Mr. Scudamore was appointed to
it. He no doubt was possessed of gifts which I did not possess. He
understood the manipulation of money and the use of figures, and was
a great accountant. I think that I might have been more useful in
regard to the labours and wages of the immense body of men employed
by the Post Office. However, Mr. Scudamore was appointed; and I made
up my mind that I would fall back upon my old intention, and leave
the department. I think I allowed two years to pass before I took
the step; and the day on which I sent the letter was to me most
melancholy.
The rule of the service in regard to pensions is very just. A
man shall serve till he is sixty before he is entitled to a
pension,--unless his health fail him. At that age he is entitled to
one-sixtieth of his salary for every year he has served up to forty
years. If his health do fail him so that he is unfit for further work
before the age named, then he may go with a pension amounting to
one-sixtieth for every year he has served. I could not say that my
health had failed me, and therefore I went without any pension. I
have since felt occasionally that it has been supposed that I left
the Post Office under pressure,--because I attended to hunting and to
my literary work rather than to postal matters. As it had for many
years been my ambition to be a thoroughly good servant to the public,
and to give to the public much more than I took in the shape of
salary, this feeling has sometimes annoyed me. And as I am still a
little sore on the subject, and as I would not have it imagined after
my death that I had slighted the public service to which I belonged,
I will venture here to give the reply which was sent to the letter
containing my resignation.
General Post Office,
October 9th, 1867.
SIR,--I have received your letter of the 3d inst., in
which you tender your resignation as Surveyor in the Post
Office service, and state as your reason for this step
that you have adopted another profession, the exigencies
of which are so great as to make you feel you cannot give
to the duties of the Post Office that amount of attention
which you consider the Postmaster-General has a right to
expect.
You have for many years ranked among the most conspicuous
members of the Post Office, which, on several occasions
when you have been employed on large and difficult
matters, has reaped much benefit from the great abilities
which you have been able to place at its disposal; and in
mentioning this, I have been especially glad to record
that, notwithstanding the many calls upon your time, you
have never permitted your other avocations to interfere
with your Post Office work, which has been faithfully and
indeed energetically performed.
There was a touch of irony in this word "energetically," but still it
did not displease me.
In accepting your resignation, which he does with much
regret, the Duke of Montrose desires me to convey to you
his own sense of the value of your services, and to state
how alive he is to the loss which will be sustained by the
department in which you have long been an ornament, and
where your place will with difficulty be replaced.
(Signed) J. TILLEY.
Readers will no doubt think that this is official flummery; and
so in fact it is. I do not at all imagine that I was an ornament
to the Post Office, and have no doubt that the secretaries and
assistant-secretaries very often would have been glad to be rid of
me; but the letter may be taken as evidence that I did not allow
my literary enterprises to interfere with my official work. A man
who takes public money without earning it is to me so odious that
I can find no pardon for him in my heart. I have known many such, and
some who have craved the power to do so. Nothing would annoy me more
than to think that I should even be supposed to have been among the
number.
And so my connection was dissolved with the department to which I
had applied the thirty-three best years of my life;--I must not say
devoted, for devotion implies an entire surrender, and I certainly
had found time for other occupations. It is however absolutely true
that during all those years I had thought very much more about the
Post Office than I had of my literary work, and had given to it a
more unflagging attention. Up to this time I had never been angry,
never felt myself injured or unappreciated in that my literary
efforts were slighted. But I had suffered very much bitterness on
that score in reference to the Post Office; and I had suffered not
only on my own personal behalf, but also and more bitterly when I
could not promise to be done the things which I thought ought to be
done for the benefit of others. That the public in little villages
should be enabled to buy postage stamps; that they should have their
letters delivered free and at an early hour; that pillar letter-boxes
should be put up for them (of which accommodation in the streets
and ways of England I was the originator, having, however, got the
authority for the erection of the first at St. Heliers in Jersey);
that the letter-carriers and sorters should not be overworked; that
they should be adequately paid, and have some hours to themselves,
especially on Sundays; above all, that they should be made to earn
their wages; and latterly that they should not be crushed by what
I thought to be the damnable system of so-called merit;--these were
the matters by which I was stirred to what the secretary was pleased
to call energetic performance of my duties. How I loved, when I was
contradicted,--as I was very often and no doubt very properly,--to
do instantly as I was bid, and then to prove that what I was doing
was fatuous, dishonest, expensive, and impracticable! And then there
were feuds,--such delicious feuds! I was always an anti-Hillite,
acknowledging, indeed, the great thing which Sir Rowland Hill had
done for the country, but believing him to be entirely unfit to
manage men or to arrange labour. It was a pleasure to me to differ
from him on all occasions;--and looking back now, I think that in all
such differences I was right.
Having so steeped myself, as it were, in postal waters, I could not
go out from them without a regret. I wonder whether I did anything to
improve the style of writing in official reports! I strove to do so
gallantly, never being contented with the language of my own reports
unless it seemed to have been so written as to be pleasant to be
read. I took extreme delight in writing them, not allowing myself to
re-copy them, never having them re-copied by others, but sending them
up with their original blots and erasures,--if blots and erasures
there were. It is hardly manly, I think, that a man should search
after a fine neatness at the expense of so much waste labour; or
that he should not be able to exact from himself the necessity of
writing words in the form in which they should be read. If a copy be
required, let it be taken afterwards,--by hand or by machine, as may
be. But the writer of a letter, if he wish his words to prevail with
the reader, should send them out as written by himself, by his own
hand, with his own marks, his own punctuation, correct or incorrect,
with the evidence upon them that they have come out from his own
mind.
And so the cord was cut, and I was a free man to run about the world
where I would.
A little before the date of my resignation, Mr. James Virtue, the
printer and publisher, had asked me to edit a new magazine for him,
and had offered me a salary of £1000 a year for the work, over and
above what might be due to me for my own contributions. I had known
something of magazines, and did not believe that they were generally
very lucrative. They were, I thought, useful to some publishers
as bringing grist to the mill; but as Mr. Virtue's business was
chiefly that of a printer, in which he was very successful, this
consideration could hardly have had much weight with him. I very
strongly advised him to abandon the project, pointing out to him that
a large expenditure would be necessary to carry on the magazine in
accordance with my views,--that I could not be concerned in it on any
other understanding, and that the chances of an adequate return to
him of his money were very small. He came down to Waltham, listened
to my arguments with great patience, and then told me that if I would
not do the work he would find some other editor.
Upon this I consented to undertake the duty. My terms as to salary
were those which he had himself proposed. The special stipulations
which I demanded were: firstly, that I should put whatever I pleased
into the magazine, or keep whatever I pleased out of it, without
interference; secondly, that I should from month to month give in to
him a list of payments to be made to contributors, and that he should
pay them, allowing me to fix the amounts; and thirdly, that the
arrangement should remain in force at any rate for two years. To all
this he made no objection; and during the time that he and I were
thus bound together, he not only complied with these stipulations,
but also with every suggestion respecting the magazine that I made to
him. If the use of large capital, combined with wide liberality and
absolute confidence on the part of the proprietor, and perpetual good
humour, would have produced success, our magazine certainly would
have succeeded.
In all such enterprises the name is the first great difficulty. There
is the name which has a meaning and the name which has none,--of
which two the name that has none is certainly the better, as it
never belies itself. _The Liberal_ may cease to be liberal, or _The
Fortnightly_, alas! to come out once a fortnight. But _The Cornhill_
and _The Argosy_ are under any set of circumstances as well adapted
to these names as under any other. Then there is the proprietary
name, or possibly the editorial name, which is only amiss because
the publication may change hands. _Blackwood's_ has indeed always
remained _Blackwood's_, and _Fraser's_, though it has been bought
and sold, still does not sound amiss. Mr. Virtue, fearing the too
attractive qualities of his own name, wished the magazine to be
called _Anthony Trollope's_. But to this I objected eagerly. There
were then about the town--still are about the town--two or three
literary gentlemen, by whom to have had myself editored would have
driven me an exile from my country. After much discussion, we settled
on _St. Paul's_ as the name for our bantling,--not as being in any
way new, but as enabling it to fall easily into the ranks with many
others. If we were to make ourselves in any way peculiar, it was not
by our name that we were desirous of doing so.
I do not think that we did make ourselves in any way peculiar,--and
yet there was a great struggle made. On the part of the proprietor,
I may say that money was spent very freely. On my own part, I
may declare that I omitted nothing which I thought might tend to
success. I read all manuscripts sent to me, and endeavoured to judge
impartially. I succeeded in obtaining the services of an excellent
literary corps. During the three years and a half of my editorship
I was assisted by Mr. Goschen, Captain Brackenbury, Edward Dicey,
Percy Fitzgerald, H. A. Layard, Allingham, Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Lynn
Linton, my brother, T. A. Trollope, and his wife, Charles Lever,
E. Arnold, Austin Dobson, R. A. Proctor, Lady Pollock, G. H. Lewes,
C. Mackay, Hardman (of the _Times_), George Macdonald, W. R. Greg,
Mrs. Oliphant, Sir Charles Trevelyan, Leoni Levi, Dutton Cook,--and
others, whose names would make the list too long. It might have been
thought that with such aid the _St. Paul's_ would have succeeded.
I do not think that the failure--for it did fail--arose from bad
editing. Perhaps too much editing might have been the fault. I was
too anxious to be good, and did not enough think of what might be
lucrative.
It did fail, for it never paid its way. It reached, if I remember
right, a circulation of nearly 10,000--perhaps on one or two
occasions may have gone beyond that. But the enterprise had been set
on foot on a system too expensive to be made lucrative by anything
short of a very large circulation. Literary merit will hardly set
a magazine afloat, though when afloat it will sustain it. Time
is wanted,--or the hubbub, and flurry, and excitement created by
ubiquitous sesquipedalian advertisement. Merit and time together may
be effective, but they must be backed by economy and patience.
I think, upon the whole, that publishers themselves have been the
best editors of magazines, when they have been able to give time and
intelligence to the work. Nothing certainly has ever been done better
than _Blackwood's_. The _Cornhill_, too, after Thackeray had left
it and before Leslie Stephen had taken it, seemed to be in quite
efficient hands,--those hands being the hands of proprietor and
publisher. The proprietor, at any rate, knows what he wants and what
he can afford, and is not so frequently tempted to fall into that
worst of literary quicksands, the publishing of matter not for the
sake of the readers, but for that of the writer. I did not so sin
very often, but often enough to feel that I was a coward. "My dear
friend, my dear friend, this is trash!" It is so hard to speak
thus,--but so necessary for an editor! We all remember the thorn in
his pillow of which Thackeray complained. Occasionally I know that
I did give way on behalf of some literary aspirant whose work did
not represent itself to me as being good; and as often as I did so,
I broke my trust to those who employed me. Now, I think that such
editors as Thackeray and myself--if I may for the moment be allowed
to couple men so unequal--will always be liable to commit such
faults, but that the natures of publishers and proprietors will be
less soft.
Nor do I know why the pages of a magazine should be considered to be
open to any aspirant who thinks that he can write an article, or why
the manager of a magazine should be doomed to read all that may be
sent to him. The object of the proprietor is to produce a periodical
that shall satisfy the public, which he may probably best do by
securing the services of writers of acknowledged ability.