THE NOVELIST AND THE OFFICIAL IN THE MAKING
Activity at the Post Office during the thirties--The romance of
letter-carrying--One of the State’s bad bargains--Trollope’s
unhappy life, in the office and out of it--The novelist in the
making--London at the beginning of the Victorian era--Lost
opportunities--Mrs. Trollope’s influence on her son’s works--Her
religious opinions as portrayed in _The Vicar of
Wrexhill_--Anthony’s first leanings to authorship--Literary labours
of others of his name--With his mother among famous contemporaries
at home and abroad--The trials of a youthful London
clerk--Trollope’s remarkable friends of school and social life.
With his junior clerkship at the Post Office in 1834, Anthony Trollope’s
working life begins; now also commences his conscious preparation for
the literary labours that, seriously entered on a few years later, were
only to cease when death took the pen from his hand. The atmosphere of
the department which he was to serve for thirty years had in it much
calculated to stimulate the energies and even excite the imagination of
the new-comer. Till 1829 the postal headquarters had been, amongst other
places, at a house once belonging to Sir Robert Vyner in Lombard Street.
The St. Martin’s-le-Grand building had therefore been occupied just five
years when Anthony Trollope entered upon his Post Office experiences.
The early thirties were a season of great activity, of novel and
awakening enterprise at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Sir Francis Freeling,
supported, as chief secretary, by the Postmaster-General, the Duke of
Richmond, aimed at nothing less than reorganising the entire service.
Within a short time there were introduced thirty-nine specific reforms.
These dealt with the conveyance of letters by sea as well as land. The
whole system of mail-packets, when thus entirely recast, gradually made
deliveries from foreign parts as safe as those within the United
Kingdom. The steam-locomotive had just opened a rivalry with the
horse-drawn car which few people believed would at an early day achieve
complete success. As a fact, it was not till 1854 that Anthony Trollope
saw the Mail-Coach Office department become obsolete in the vocabulary
of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.
The youth of nineteen, who after the fashion already described now
became a Government servant, with his boyish readiness for rebellion
against any constraints on his liberty, of course fretted at times
against his occupation. From his mother, however, he had inherited the
imaginative faculty which was to do more than make him a novelist. It
had indeed already given him some feeling of the national and imperial
services that might be rendered by the department to whose staff he
belonged. “Why,” he asked himself, “should not that great achievement be
sensibly promoted by my individual efforts?” The new ambition, however,
did not at once save him from trouble for unpunctuality and for scamping
his work. Still, he gradually became conscious of associations with the
national life and movement which ennobled even a junior clerk’s daily
drudgery. A romantic instinct had already invested the whole system
which gave him employment with a poetry of its own. Looking back, he saw
the opportunities for letter communication first considered and long
remaining an exclusively royal privilege. The lads with whom he was
thrown counted for lost every odd half-hour not spent in drinking,
smoking, and card-playing. Like them, he saw only his natural enemies in
blue-books and official documents of every kind. But one day, when there
were no high-jinks with his brother clerks, he lighted upon, and out of
curiosity dipped into a heap of musty records, which told him how,
throughout the Tudor period, the Master of the Posts was as entirely a
Court official as the king’s fool. The maintenance of post-horses out of
public taxes only gave loyal subjects the satisfaction of knowing that
they effectually contributed to their sovereign lord’s conveniences and
comforts. “As I pieced these fragments together into a continuous story,
I found myself,” Anthony Trollope would say, “not for the first time,
but more unmistakably than I had ever felt before, realising that a Post
Office servant’s career might be one of profit to himself as well as of
usefulness to his fellow-creatures in all their concerns and interests,
whether as citizens or as family breadwinners. From what I saw had been
done in the past, I mentally constructed a scheme of possibilities for
the future.” Not till the seventeenth century, as Anthony Trollope saw,
did the Post Office even attempt to secure, for all the king’s
tax-paying subjects, speed and certainty in their communications with
each other, both inland and overseas. Every step forward covered a very
little distance; without painfully sustained caution and vigilance,
there was the risk or rather certainty of relapse. As a fact, after that
no inch advanced ever had to be retraced.
For half a dozen years young Trollope had to be at St. Martin’s-le-Grand
daily from ten to six. During that time, the irregularities of postal
deliveries throughout the United Kingdom steadily diminished, and the
Post Office clerk in whom we are interested recognised that there was
good and even great work to be done in his branch of the public service.
He decided that all the snubs and reprimands with which, justly or
unjustly, he might be visited, should not cow him into incapacity for
doing his part. Not that the Anthony Trollope of fact, as distinguished
from him of fiction, can ever have been in more danger of finding his
energies trampled out by autocratic or plain-spoken officialism in
London than at an earlier period by schoolmasters or schoolfellows at
Harrow. At St. Martin’s-le-Grand, however, during the years which
preceded his Irish appointment in 1841, he was unquestionably, by all
who were set over him, looked upon as one of the State’s bad bargains.
Sir Francis Freeling’s successor in the chief secretaryship was Colonel
Maberly. Maberly in due course was followed by Rowland Hill, not in the
order of official promotion, but under the urgent pressure of public
opinion. Who, from all sides came the question, but the master-mind that
had invented penny postage was equal to supervising and directing the
official arrangements by which his own great reforms were to be carried
out? With both Maberly and Hill, Trollope at different periods was on
terms not merely of disaffection, or even of veiled rebellion, but of
open war. Between 1834 and 1841, after Freeling’s retirement, he seemed
to his new chief, Maberly, an ill-conditioned youth, always in scrapes.
From 1854-64 it was one long duel between the outsider, Secretary Hill,
and Trollope as champion of the department’s old exclusive officialism.
Throughout the Maberly period, Trollope lacked the two conditions for
doing himself justice--a reasonably sympathetic superior, and anything
like home comforts. The privations of lodging-house life, and the snubs
of those in authority over him at the Post Office, produced in him a
chronic, brooding discontent, which left him without wish or power to
show what he had it in him to become. Naturally ambitious, and with a
nervous longing for the good opinion of his fellow-creatures, he no
sooner found himself balked in gratifying these two master passions
than, hopeless of any change for the better, he sank into a lethargy of
disgust, not more with his position than with himself. As a boy he began
to keep a diary in the hope of relieving a constitutional melancholy,
almost paralysing his moral and mental power. The daily entries,
however, yielded him none of the consolation he had expected. The
continual introspection incidental to the task only produced depressing
and unwholesome effects. His one real solace was the habit of private
study that he never lost through life. The Harrow and Winchester
school-books had not been dispersed in the wreck of his home, but were
carried about with him wherever he went. His Latin rudiments at least he
had learned thoroughly at school or at home. Great was his happiness one
day during 1840 in discovering that he could read Horace and Cicero in
the original, not as task work, but with pleasure as literature.
Then there were the English writers, a taste for whom his mother had not
so much encouraged in her son as created. Of the old Elizabethan
classics, Spenser had become his favourite. From Fielding onwards, he
spent long evenings in his lodgings over the makers of English prose
fiction, making notes while he read as if he had been taking them up for
an examination. Jane Austen, however, gave him more pleasure than all
her predecessors put together. Very early in his Post Office days, he
came to the conclusion that _Pride and Prejudice_ pleased him better
than any other fiction he had ever read, was not perhaps so great a work
as _Ivanhoe_, but was immeasurably above _Tom Jones_. Considered
therefore as an intellectual and literary seed-time, quite apart from
the business habits they helped to form, Trollope’s early Post Office
years were very far from being misspent. Throughout life it was
Trollope’s tendency to ponder a petty vexation or trivial crossing of
his own will till it became a grievance. Of harsh experiences his youth
had a full share. The embittering official relations with Maberly first,
with Rowland Hill afterwards, and the hardship of an ill-kept and
cheerless Marylebone lodging, were the sequel to a stern preparatory
training, whether at school or home. Yet no one more indignantly than
Trollope himself would have resented the suggestion of his spirit having
been in any way broken by the paternal boxes on the ear over his Latin
syntax, by his Winchester flagellations, or afterwards by his daily Post
Office reprimands and rows.
Dwelling on the bright rather than the dark places of his early
retrospect, he had, at the age of nineteen, entered the Civil Service,
not unprepared to do the work expected of him, but also bent upon
tasting all those enjoyments which his school friends had found in
London life, and to which domestic poverty or severity had so far made
him almost a stranger. Some reminiscences of the London Trollope knew in
the thirties, though qualified by many modernising touches, may be found
in the pictures of City life given in _The Three Clerks_. The life as a
Post Office clerk he was free to lead was never better described than
by Aytoun and Martin:
“When I smoked my independent pipe along the quadrant wide,
With the many larks of London flaring up on every side,
Felt the exquisite enjoying, tossing nightly off, oh heavens!
Brandy at the cider cellars, kidneys, smoking hot, at Evans.
Or in the Adelphi sitting, half in rapture, half in tears,
Saw the glorious melodrama conjure up the shades of years.”
The existence which thus had the authors of the _Bon Gaultier Ballads_
for its laureates found its prose historian in Albert Smith, who, from
the doings of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen in _Pickwick_, drew the
inspiration which produced the Medical Student, the Gent, and various
other treatises on the fast life of the shabby-genteel. These were once
accepted as manuals of fashion; they still serve to illustrate the
difference between then and now. The side streets of the West End were
throughout the thirties honeycombed with gambling-houses. The larger
thoroughfares were ablaze with “free-and-easys” or dancing saloons. It
was the dull, heavy, coarse, debauched London, which had not then at any
point given place to the bright and amusing London, that Trollope lived
to see. Of this chiefly pre-Victorian, gin-and-bitters-drinking capital,
the most characteristic features are sketched from life in _The Three
Clerks_. Touches of it are not wanting to his other stories, and may be
seen at one or two points in the passages between John Eames and his
landlady’s daughter in _The Small House at Allington_.
Anthony Trollope, during his early Post Office years, might excuse
himself for falling into his own Charlie Tudor’s Bohemian ways on the
plea of isolation from the domestic life of his social equals, and the
coldness of his own kith and kin. For that solitude no one was to blame
but himself. He was shy, proud, rather awkward after the fashion of
callow youths, and in his out-of-office hours apt to show an irritable
impatience of all conventional restraints. In after years he deplored
that as a youth he had avoided the humanising influence of intercourse
with refined women. The drawing-rooms and tea-tables of his lady
relatives belonging to the Lincolnshire baronet’s branch were open to
him; he shunned them all, some for one reason, some for another. Mrs.
Clayton Freeling, his earliest benefactress, would have always welcomed
him beneath her roof; he seldom or never came. She wrote letters to him
of entreaty that, for his brave and clever mother’s sake, he would make
the best of the opening she had helped to secure him. Her social circle
was agreeable and wide; within its circumference he had only to choose
eligible acquaintances. His early Belgian experiences had gained him
some lifelong friends; one or two tours with his parents in Germany, as
well as the many good wishers, won by his father and mother when
Lafayette’s guests at La Grange, might, had he cared for it, have opened
for him a wide, varied, and genuinely agreeable visiting-list. As a
fact, not till he had reached middle age and fame did he really care for
society. Had this taste come earlier, the kinsfolk of his own name were
a host in themselves.
The whole Trollope clan, with their innumerable outlying
connections--Gresleys, Hellicars, and Meetkerkes--had all in 1809
welcomed the Trollope-Milton marriage, to which he owed his existence.
Thomas Anthony Trollope’s wife had no sooner achieved success with her
pen than her countless kinsfolk rallied round her, while John Forster’s
and Sir Henry Taylor’s ever helpful interest survived the long series of
her husband’s reverses.[2] Before the settlement of Anthony Trollope’s
parents in Keppel Street, Sir John and Lady Trollope had been at great
pains to find out a suitable and really useful present for the occasion.
They were only consoled for their absence from the wedding by an early
prospect of making their new cousin’s (the bride’s) acquaintance, and in
seeing a very great deal of them both, perhaps in due time of others, in
town. Afterwards, when the tide had turned against him, even in the
darkest hour of his misfortunes, his relatives of the titled branch had
stood by Anthony Trollope’s father. The family seat in Lincolnshire,
Casewick, was still open to him during his worst troubles, and his wife
describes their visits there as the bright spots in their lives. Many
others of the Trollope family were scattered through the Midlands. The
laymen of the family had in some cases risen to consideration during the
Middle Ages, and contracted alliances with countless stocks at least as
good as themselves. Amongst those connections were some Dutch immigrants
named Meetkerke. A Miss Penelope Meetkerke, by her marriage with the
Rector of Cottery St. Mary, Herts, had become Anthony Trollope’s
grandmother, and had left posterity which, if soon becoming extinct, in
Anthony Trollope’s youth flourished sufficiently to provide him with a
welcome beneath many comfortable roofs.
But all this time Anthony Trollope’s mother was not only, as she had
always been, his wisest counsellor and best friend, but the one
influence that, continuing to form and furnish his mind, necessarily
shaped his career. Returning to England after her husband’s death at
Bruges in 1835, she had created a new mode of industry for herself and
domestic centre for those she loved at Hadley, near Barnet. Anthony
Trollope had the satisfaction of seeing a favourite sister, Cecilia,
become the wife of a Civil Service official, afterwards Sir John Tilley,
and comfortably settled in Cumberland, whence she lavished invitations
on her brother. Frances Trollope, too, at her various settlements,
abroad even more than at home, had it within her reach to bring many
little pleasures into his existence. At Hadley he passed some nights
every week in the bedroom always kept in readiness for him, and on
several occasions there were for him excursions to Paris, where his
mother long pitched her tent. In the home surroundings, Anthony’s
intellectual promise had shown itself neither so brightly nor so soon as
had been the case with his eldest brother Tom, or his sister Cecilia.
His mother, however, at no time doubted in her heart that he would
eventually become the household’s bright particular star. She had
noticed the daily entries in his childish journal, regularly kept but
carefully guarded because at Winchester some of its records had brought
down upon the writer the furious application of a cricket-stump by Tom.
Again, almost so soon as he could hold a pen, Anthony took to describing
imaginary situations in which he placed himself, explaining and
justifying his conduct in those fictitious circumstances. Frances
Trollope not only thought this good practice for an infant novelist; she
gradually led on her boy to discuss the details he depicted in their
effect upon characters other than his own. This, if the most useful and
instructive, formed the least stimulating part of her son’s training for
that literary walk she had made her own. In the Harrow days _The Magpie_
formed the manuscript exhibition of the family talent, supplemented by a
few outsiders, Drurys and Grants. Here Anthony at first had seemed to
lag behind the other contributors. He soon picked up, and had the
satisfaction of finding his little contributions in prose and verse
generally given a place. It was not, however, these boyish essays, but
the regular appearance at short intervals of his mother’s publications,
which sealed young Anthony’s resolution to make authorship the chief
business of his life.
It will not be difficult, when the proper place for doing so is reached,
to find in Frances Trollope’s volumes the germs from which grew some of
Anthony Trollope’s novels. Especially in the case of the clerical novels
that first brought him fame, the son’s fidelity to the maternal example
stands revealed. As a clergyman’s daughter, Frances Trollope in her
earliest days had seen more of parsonage life than, at a corresponding
period, was the experience of her son. None of her books created such a
stir as _The Vicar of Wrexhill_, which fluttered the dovecots of
evangelicalism in 1837, just eighteen years before her son made his
earliest hit with _The Warden_. That story presented no occasion for its
display; but those which came after showed pretty clearly that their
author had inherited some at least of his clever parent’s antipathy to
evangelical modes of conversation and temper. Not that Frances
Trollope, in the other schools of religious or moral thought then more
or less active, found her ideas better represented than by the
evangelicals themselves. She regarded as worthless for any practical
influence upon daily conduct the godless ethics incorporated into the
educational systems of Richard Edgeworth and of Thomas Day. On the other
hand, she never found the slightest spiritual attraction in the High
Anglican novelists with a purpose, represented at first by Elizabeth
Sewell, and afterwards by Charlotte Yonge.
The personages and incidents described in _The Vicar of Wrexhill_ may or
may not have included the Harrow clergyman, J. W. Cunningham. The more
carefully wrought accounts of mental distress, aggravated by Calvinistic
treatment, were a transcript of the ordeal through which her friend
Henrietta Skerrett had passed. Subsequently she had misgivings lest her
caricature might have gone too far, and showed some anxiety in
admonishing her children to remember that, while in matters of religion,
as of daily life, all excess must have its dangers, some good might
surely be found in every form of faith honestly held. She had, she said,
been brought up a Church of England woman. On the same lines she
honestly tried to train her children, putting them through their Church
catechism, collect, epistle, and gospel every Sunday, and seriously
begging them to remember that once they began by being unbelievers, they
would probably end with becoming Whigs or even Radicals. Meanwhile it
was one of the detested Whigs, Sydney Smith himself, who was advertising
the novelist and delighting all those for whom she laboured by quoting
_The Vicar of Wrexhill_ in his letter to Lord John Russell.
The evangelicals at that time were notorious for an officious and
pushing activity which made them interfere the more energetically where
they were the least welcome, and which secured for them, it was said,
far more than their due share of the good things in the Church. Hence
the great and immediate success of Mrs. Trollope’s satire upon Low
Churchmanship, more particularly in its social or secular aspects. It
at once had the effect of deepening popular interest in the author, and
gave her a place among the celebrities of the season. Incidentally this
novel produced two other results. In the first place, so far as he ever
gave such matters a thought, it imbued Anthony Trollope with his
earliest prejudices against evangelicalism. Secondly, it reflected
attention on its writer’s earlier works. Thus the critics were set upon
discovering merits they had at first missed in _Jonathan Jefferson
Whitlaw_, issued a twelvemonth earlier. This was altogether a stronger
composition than others of the series, which had by this time given
their author a high place among the literary favourites of the period.
_Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw_ appeared about half a generation in advance
of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; to that book it is without any resemblance in
spirit or treatment. It had, however, the undoubted effect of recruiting
fresh popular forces to the side of the movement already started against
slavery.
His mother’s dauntless industry furnished Anthony Trollope with an
inspiration which was to last throughout his life. With it there also
came shrewd and sensible advice. The boy had an idea that, after the
manner of one of his own Three Clerks, he might have increased his
pocket-money without any fresh draft on the family exchequer by
newspaper scribbling. Frances Trollope would not hear of it. “You left
school,” she said, “sooner than you ought to have done, or than we once
expected there would be any need for you to do. Make good the dropped
stitches of your own education before you take upon yourself to teach or
to amuse others in print. Remember the time for reading is now. Reading
you must have, not so much because of what it will tell you as because
it will teach you how to observe, and supply you with mental pegs on
which to hang what you pick up about traits and motives of your
fellow-creatures.” “We Trollopes,” was the burden of this lady’s wise
counsels, “are far too much given to pen and ink as it is without your
turning scribbler when you might do something better. Harrow and
Winchester will stand you in good stead at the Post Office; make St.
Martin’s-le-Grand the instrument that will open the oyster of the world.
Imitate my particular industry as much as you like, only do not let the
publishers break your heart by treating its products as their
playthings.” Anthony may have seen the wisdom of the advice; never for a
moment did he abandon his deeply formed and silently cherished designs
of literary fame. His brother Henry had been preferred before him by the
home circle to conduct the already mentioned _Magpie_. Very good. The
race of life should no sooner begin in earnest than he would run that
relative off his legs, and make all who bore the Trollope name proud of
it for his sake. In 1840, too, his brother Tom had made so successful a
dash into print with _A Summer in Western France_, that even his
cautious mother thought he might look forward to giving up his
Birmingham mastership. About this time, too, Charles Dickens, then at
the height of his _Pickwick_ fame, and long Mrs. Trollope’s friend,
introduced himself to the household. This, of course, had the effect of
deepening Anthony’s self-dedication to the novelist’s calling. From the
very first, whether at home, school, or at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the
attempt by entreaty or argument to shake a purpose or conviction once
formed aroused his instinct of pugnacity, as well as of contradiction.
The scenes and figures with which Frances Trollope filled her countless
canvases were so diversified that they could not but include many types
of character and place which her son afterwards made his own. To the
goodwill of her critics and of the literary rank and file Frances
Trollope was indifferent. Such a discipline as she had gone through
developed the sterner rather than the gentler qualities of womanhood.
Adversity and bereavement had pointed her pen with a sarcastic
sharpness, inherited only in a very moderate degree by her son, as much
above her in humour as he is below her in satire. Of that Mrs. Trollope
showed herself aware, when during the last eight years of her life,
having read _The Warden_, she impressed on her son the wisdom of working
the peculiar vein of narrative comedy it disclosed. “Of this,” she said,
“you owe nothing to me, and as yet I have observed nothing like it in
others of your period.” Mrs. Trollope’s comedy of the sort that best
suited the taste of the thirties and early forties is seen at its best
in _The Widow Barnaby_, _The Widow Married_, _The Widow Wedded_,
_Hargrave, the Man of Fashion_, _The Lottery of Marriage_, and in
_Petticoat Government_, to name only a few out of many. Of the group now
mentioned, the earliest, _The Widow Barnaby_, with its sketches of Bath
and Cheltenham ball-rooms, and of the conquests which the eminently
marriageable aunt set her niece an example of making, gave Anthony
Trollope some crude hints on which he greatly improved for Mrs.
Greenow’s adventures in _Can You Forgive Her?_ Mrs. Trollope’s novels
further resembled her son’s after 1855 in being none of them failures;
most of them indeed proved successively, in their way, little goldmines.
Family reminiscences, especially of a literary kind, were not in Anthony
Trollope’s way. Admiration of his mother’s heroic performances with her
pen in the way of bread-winning was unmixed with any admission of having
himself profited, either in his work, or in his relations with his
readers or with the publishers, from her gifts or from her reputation.
“She kept us all,” he would say, “from homelessness and want. As regards
myself,” he continued, “my special debt to her was that, but for the
‘open sesame’ which my sonship to her gave me, I should have had to wait
much longer than I did for my initiation into life and society upon all
those levels which it is part of a novelist’s stock-in-trade to know.”
Throughout the years following her husband’s death, Mrs. Trollope’s
literary biography was less of a personal record than a family
chronicle. Her industrial prosperity did not entirely exempt her from
occasional buffetings with publishers and editors. Such anxieties she
talked over with her favourite third son. A good while, therefore, in
advance of his turning author on his own account, Anthony Trollope had
seen something of the storms and cares which agitate the novelist’s
course. He only accompanied his mother once or twice to the great houses
which opened their doors for her reception at Paris. But she no sooner
returned than she confided to the lad whatever she had seen and heard
during his absence. In this way, while still working himself up through
junior positions at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, Anthony Trollope received
animated accounts from his mother of her Paris experiences. Amongst
these was her presentation at the Palace of Louis Philippe and his
Queen. On that occasion, Mrs. Trollope’s keen speech and ready wit,
according to a family tradition not perhaps entirely substantiated,
inspired her with an epigram in the same vein as Lady Blessington’s
well-known witticism at the expense of Napoleon III.[3] Admiring
_Domestic Manners of the Americans_, the French king, who himself in
1796 had found a refuge beyond the Atlantic, smilingly asked Mrs.
Trollope whether she would like to revisit the United States. “I
longed,” was her comment, “to return the question to him.” Her son told
the present writer she actually did so. The most valuable and
interesting result to Anthony himself of his mother’s frequent domicile
and great popularity abroad was an insight into all the great _salons_,
with their ornaments, of the time. Madame Récamier and Madame Mohl, as
yet only Miss Clarke, were among the most distinguished of these ladies.
The connection between the brightest as well as generally the best
society of London and Paris was even closer under the Orleanist monarchy
than that between the fastness or smartness of the two capitals became
under the third Empire or has ever been since then. The future Lord
Lytton and his brother, Sir Henry Bulwer, were both noticed by young
Trollope in this company, where the most commanding figure was, however,
universally recognised in the tall, well-proportioned form with the
handsome face, and its bright but grave expression, of Sir Henry Taylor.
The cosmopolitan coteries of which his mother’s name sufficed to make
her son free were more miscellaneously representative than any other
social assemblies of the time.
Friction against all sorts of odd people in the business of making a
livelihood out of her pen had not left Frances Trollope without the
pride of order and lineage becoming a daughter of the ancient Gresley
stock. That spirit she wished to remain in the family. Not, therefore,
without some misgivings did she see the mixed society of the time open
its doors to her sons. She was equally ready to satirise the polite
systems of Paris and Vienna. She enjoyed, however, both capitals in
their way. As for the French metropolis, it ought of course to be under
a legitimist sovereign. Failing, however, a Bourbon of the older branch,
she could manage to do with the bourgeois Court of Louis Philippe. With
respect to her boys, they had, she thanked Providence, enough of the
Trollope and Milton pride to keep them proof against contracting any
democratic taint of ideas or of demeanour. She had at first intended
that they should ripen into Parliament men. Fate had decided against
that. She had herself, by holding up to both of them the dark side of
the picture, done what she could to cool the literary enthusiasm both of
Tom and Tony. The rest she must leave to Heaven. The literary gift,
indeed, was much to be thankful for. She had beheld its growth with
pride, and done what she could to train it in her children, but only as
the intellectual ornament, adding a suitable grace and finish to those
whom Providence had above all things intended should be gentlefolk. It
was something to be, as Mrs. Trollope had undoubtedly made herself, the
most talked of and the most widely read among novelists. If that
achievement were not enough on which to rest, Mrs. Trollope, it must be
remembered, was a very sensitive and impressionable, as well as clever
and energetic woman. From her infancy she had lived among those who
always spoke as if the socially levelling movement, inseparable from the
Whig and Radical propagandism of the time, must have results ruinous,
not only to Church and Throne, but to the privileged classes, whose
welfare was as essential to the country as that of the Crown and Altar
itself.
To Mrs. Trollope there had seemed something of an indignity in her son
being bound over to Government service under an arbitrary taskmaster at
St. Martin’s-le-Grand. Whoever his chief there may have been, Colonel
Maberly or Rowland Hill, the fetters that bound him did not prove very
galling. No short-handedness in the department, no vindictive coercion
by the head of his room ever prevented young Anthony Trollope from
promptly obeying his mother’s invitation when she saw some opportunity
socially favourable for her boy. In town or country she rose every
morning at half-past four, and, sitting down to work at once, got nearly
her day’s task accomplished before breakfast. When she visited her
daughter and son-in-law in Cumberland, she made a kind of triumphal
progress through the county, crowning her round of visits with a little
stay at Lowther Castle, the headquarters of north country Toryism. Her
host, Lord Lonsdale, knew she had at least one son a Government clerk;
she must have him up there for a little change, to show him the place.
And so, throughout Anthony Trollope’s youthful turn at the Post Office,
it continued. Money troubles, of course, he had. A young man without
private means, however much in luck’s way, could not have rubbed
shoulders with the best people in England and France without being
sorely put to it at times for ready cash. Naturally he got into debt,
and had small transactions with the petty usurers, then as now ready to
accommodate youthful civilians on the security of their weekly wage. His
recourse to the professional money-lender had the advantage of
preserving to him many private friendships which might otherwise have
been forfeited. Even as regards his mother, if there were advances to
him from that quarter, they generally came at her initiative rather than
at his own request. She usually contrived to have enough for her own
industry and health. Even when her ventures were most prosperous, she
denied herself much that she would have liked. Her son therefore, in all
his juvenile straits, seldom, if indeed ever, drew upon her. Others with
whom he was more or less closely connected, Meetkerkes or Miltons, were
suffered to know nothing whatever about his difficulties.
A well-connected young man like Anthony Trollope, however pressed at
any particular time, could always, if prepared to pay the price, have
raised ready money enough for existing personal needs. His transactions
with money-lenders were not, even in his earliest and most impecunious
youth, serious enough to prevent a settlement with the usurers before
the debt had swelled to any large amount. Such experiences of this sort
as he had find their way, after a rather monotonous fashion, into many
of his novels. They first appear in _The Three Clerks_, declared, both
by Robert Browning and, in terms still more enthusiastic, by his wife,
the poetess, to be Trollope’s best piece of work up to the year 1858.
After an eleven years’ interval the accommodating M‘Ruen of _The Three
Clerks_ is reintroduced in the same capacity, as the Clarkson who holds
the bill backed by Phineas Finn for Laurence Fitzgibbon. Whatever the
name under which he trades, or the period to which he belongs, this
dealer in ready cash is a personal reminiscence of Trollope’s boyish
out-at-elbows Post Office days. In each of the novels now mentioned the
burden of his talk admits only of a slight verbal variation. The form of
the reproach to Charley Tudor is, “You are so unpunctual”; the
exhortation to Phineas is, “Now, do be punctual.”
Trollope had, however, managed his small money matters on the whole so
well that he left no debts behind him when, in 1841, a friendly loan of
£200, duly repaid, supplied him with his Irish outfit. That was exactly
six years before he made the approach to literature by the road of
journalism. Charles Dickens, who admired his mother’s cleverness and
courage, had given her his good offices with the man who, as editor of
_The Examiner_ in 1847, was to become a power on the weekly press. As a
fact Dickens’ introduction of Mrs. Trollope to John Forster was destined
to promote her son’s interests by opening to him the columns of _The
Examiner_, after the manner presently to be described, in 1848.
One more famous friend of a very different kind from Forster had been
brought by family accident within Anthony Trollope’s reach. This was
Lord Ashley, afterwards to become Lord Shaftesbury. Recognising Frances
Trollope’s cleverness, and anxious to enlist it on the side of his own
philanthropies, he had encouraged her to interest the public in the
miseries of industrial life in the Black Country. The representative of
the “poor man’s peer” with Mrs. Trollope in this matter had been his
secretary, a dweller in Camberwell, the father of no less a son than
Benjamin Jowett. The story embodying Mrs. Trollope’s fulfilment of the
Shaftesbury suggestion, _The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong,
the Factory Boy_, was published in 1840, when, greatly to her disgust,
it found more friends among the Chartists than in any other class.
Ashley did not succeed to the family title till 1851. By that time
Anthony Trollope had left St. Martin’s-le-Grand for ten years. But some
time before then the future Lord Shaftesbury’s concern for Irish
distress made him open communications with Anthony Trollope, as one who
had inherited his mother’s faculty of keen observation, and whose
opinion, based on local knowledge of Irish difficulties and wants,
promised to be, as it proved, of real value to practical and
philanthropic statesmanship. This however, like the various events
connected with it, will more fittingly find a place in a new chapter.