Of all that Anthony there describes I saw nothing. I was attending the
“divinity lectures” in Oxford. But as soon as the short course of them
was completed, I left England to join my parents at Bruges. And here is
the condensed record of the journey as performed in 1834. I suppose that
I went by the Thames to Calais, instead of by Dover, as a measure of
economy. I left Oxford by the “Rocket” at three in the morning on
Tuesday, the 20th May, and on reaching London found that there was no
packet to Ostend till the following Saturday. I determined, therefore,
to go to Calais by that which left Tower Stairs on the Wednesday. It was
the first time I had ever crossed the Channel. The times I have crossed
that salt girdle subsequently must be counted by hundreds! I observe
that having begun my journey at 3 A.M. did not prevent me from finding
“Farren admirable” in both _The Minister and the Mercer_ and in _Secret
Service_, at Drury Lane that Tuesday evening. I slept at the Spread
Eagle in Gracechurch Street that night, and left Tower Stairs at 10
A.M. the next morning in the _Lord Melville_, Captain Middleton (names
of ship and captain duly recorded), and had a rough passage of thirteen
hours; all hands sick, “even I a little at last,” says the veracious
chronicle. I was taken by the victor in a sharp contest with half a
dozen rivals over my body, to the Hôtel de Londres, a clean,
comfortable, and quiet, but, I suppose, quite second-rate inn. There was
no conveyance to Dunkirk before one the next day. So, “after a delicious
breakfast on coffee.” (Ah! how _la belle France_ has _dégringoléd_ in
respect to coffee and some other matters since those happy days! Then
coffee really was _always_ good everywhere in France. Now England has no
cause whatever to envy her neighbour in that respect.) I spent the
intervening hours in going (of all things in the world) to the top of
the church tower. The diligence brought me to Dunkirk in time for supper
at the Tête de Flandres Hôtel, at which “a Frenchman, who sat next me,
insisted on my sharing his bottle of vin de Bourdeaux, and would not
hear of my paying my share of the cost, saying that he was at home in
his own country.” I find that I went after supper “to the top of a fine
tower” (my second that day! I had a mania, not quite cured yet, for
ascending towers), and started at five the next morning for Nieuport “in
a vile little barge, in company with two young pedestrianising
Belgians,” and arrived there about noon, after a most tedious voyage,
and changing, without bettering, our barge three or four times. At
Nieuport we found “a sort of immense overgrown gig with two horses,
which conveyed eight of us to Ostend.”
There I was most kindly and hospitably received by Mr. Fauche, the
English Consul, and his very lovely wife. Mrs. Fauche had been before
her marriage one of my mother’s cohort of pretty girl friends, and was
already my old acquaintance. She was the daughter of Mr. Tomkisson, a
pianoforte manufacturer, who had married the daughter of an Irish
clergyman. Their daughter Mary was, as I first knew her, more than a
pretty girl. She was a very beautiful and accomplished woman, with one
of the most delicious soprano voices I ever heard. I was anxious to join
my mother at Bruges, who, despite her literary triumphs, had passed
through so much trouble since I had seen her. But it needed the
reinforcement of this anxiety by a sense of duty to enable me to resist
Mrs. Fauche’s invitation to remain a day or two at Ostend.
I found my father and mother, and my two sisters, Cecilia and Emily,
established in a large and very roomy house, just outside the southern
gate of the city, known as the Château d’Hondt. It was a thoroughly good
and comfortable house, and, taken unfurnished, speedily became under my
mother’s hands a very pleasant one. Nor was it long before it became
socially a very agreeable one, for the invariable result of my mother’s
presence, which drew what was pleasant around her as surely as a magnet
draws iron, showed itself in the collection of a variety of agreeable
people--some from the other side of the Channel, some from Ostend, and
some few from Bruges.
All this made a social atmosphere, which with the foreign flavouring so
wholly new to me, was very pleasant; but it seems not to have sufficed
to prevent me from seizing the opportunity for a little of that
locomotive sight-seeing, the passion for which, still unquenched,
appears to have been as strong in me as when I hankered after a place on
some one of the “down” coaches starting from the “Cellar” in Piccadilly,
or gazed enviously at the outward bound ships in the docks. For I find
the record of a little week’s tour among the Belgian cities, with full
details of all the towers I ascended, observations of an ecclesiological
neophyte on the churches I everywhere visited, and remarks on men and
manners, the rawness of which does not entirely destroy the value of
them, as illustrating the changes wrought there too by the lapse of half
a century.
In one place I find myself tasting the contents of the library of a
Carmelite monastery, and remarking on the strangeness of the _sole_
exception to the theological character of the collection having
consisted in a _Cours Gastronomique_, which appeared to me scarcely
needed by a community bound by its vows to perpetual abstinence from
animal food.
Some pages of the record also are devoted to the statement of “a case”
which I lighted on in some folio on casuistry, on the question “whether
it is lawful to adore a crucifix, when there is strong ground for
supposing that a demon may be concealed in the material of which it is
constructed!”
It seems to me on reading these pages (for the first time since they
were written), that I was to no small degree seductively impressed by
the music, architectural beauties, and splendid ceremonial of the Roman
Catholic worship, seen in those days to much better effect in Belgium,
than at the present time in Rome. But amid it all, the sturdy
Protestantism of Whately’s pupil manifests itself in a moan over the
pity, the pity of it, that it should “all be based on falsehood.”
All the pleasant state of things at the Château d’Hondt at Bruges,
described above, was of short duration however, for disquieting accounts
of the health of my brother Henry, who had been staying at Exeter with
that dear old friend, Fanny Bent, to whom the reader has already been
introduced, began to arrive from Devonshire.
It was moreover necessary that I should without loss of time set my hand
to something that might furnish me with daily bread. So on the 21st of
June I “went on board Captain Smithett’s vessel the _Arrow_ and had a
quiet passage to Dover.” On arriving there I “hastened to secure my
place on a coach about to start, and the first turn for having my
baggage examined at the custom-house. This examination was rather a
rigid one, and they made me pay 4_s._ 7_d._ for two or three books I had
with me. We reached Canterbury about nightfall, breakfasted at
Rochester, and arrived at Charing Cross at six.” My diary does not say
“six P.M.,” and it seems incredible that any coach--though on the
slowest road out of London, as the Dover road always was--should have
breakfasted at Rochester, and taken the whole day to travel thence to
Charing Cross; but it is more incredible still that we should have
stopped to breakfast at Rochester, and then reached London at 6 A.M.
It must have been 6 P.M.; but I read that “I started at once to walk to
Harrow by the canal (!) where I was received with more than kindness by
the Grants.”
I had come to London with the intention of giving classical teaching to
any who were willing to pay about ten shillings an hour for it. I had
testimonials and recommendations galore from a very varied collection of
pastors, masters, and friends. Several of the latter also were actively
eager to assist my object, foremost among whom I may name with
unforgetting gratitude Dr. David Williams, my old master at Winchester,
then Warden of New College. Thus furnished, pupils were not wanting, and
money amply sufficient for my immediate needs seemed to come in easily.
I did my best with my pupils during the short hours of my work; but much
success is not to be expected from pupils the very circumstance and
terms of whose tuition gives rise to the presumption that they are
irremediably stupid or idle, and the hired “coach” a _dernier resort_.
Such employers as I had to deal with, however, if they assigned you
somewhat hopeless tasks, appeared to be satisfied with an infinitesimal
amount of results, and I believe I gave satisfaction in all cases save
that of a lady, the widowed mother of an only son, a very elegant and
fashionable dame in Belgrave Square, who complained once to the
clergyman who had recommended me to her, that I had come to her house
one Monday morning “in a very dusty condition.” I fear she might have
said every Monday morning, for my custom was to walk up to my lesson
from Harrow, where I had been spending the Sunday with the Grants, and
“_immer noch stäuben die Wege_” hardly less on the Harrow road, than
Goethe found them to do in Italy! I had to tell her that the dust on my
shoes had not reached my brain, and that I had no pretension, and
entirely declined, to be an exemplar to her son in the matter of his
toilet. We parted very good friends however at the end of my engagement.
When she said some complimentary words about my work with her son, I
could not refrain from saying that I had done my best to prepare myself
for it by having my shoes carefully blacked. She laughed, and said, “I
could not find fault with your Latin and Greek, Mr. Trollope. And would
it not be better if people always confined their criticism to what they
_do_ understand?”
I was living during these months in Little Marlborough Street, in a
house kept by a tailor and his mother. It was a queer house,
disconnected with the row of buildings in which it stood, a survival of
some earlier period. It stood in its own court, by which it was
separated from the street. I found all the place transmogrified when I
visited it a year or two ago. During the latter part of my residence
there the lodgings were shared by my brother Anthony, who, as related by
himself, had accepted a place in the secretary’s office in the Post
Office. The lodgings were very cheap, more so I think than the goodness
of them might have justified. We were the only lodgers; and the
cheapness of the rooms was, I suspect, in some degree caused by the fact
that the majority of young men lodgers would not have tolerated the
despotic rule of our old landlady, the tailor’s mother. She made us very
comfortable; but her laws were many, and of the nature of those of the
Medes and Persians.
Meantime matters were becoming more and more gloomy in the Château
d’Hondt, outside the St. Peter’s Gate, at Bruges. My brother Henry had
returned thither from Devonshire; and his condition was unmistakably
becoming worse. While I was still living in Little Marlborough Street,
my mother came over hurriedly to London, bringing him and my sister
Emily with her. They travelled by boat from Ostend to London to avoid
the land journey, I take it poor Henry was led to suppose that the
journey was altogether caused by the necessity of interviews between my
mother and her publishers. But the real motive of it was to obtain the
best medical advice for him and (as, alas! it began to appear to be
necessary) for my sister Emily.
All kinds of schemes of southern travel, and voyages to Madeira, &c.,
had been proposed for Henry, who, having himself, with the hopefulness
peculiar to his malady, no shadow of a doubt of his own recovery,
entered into them all with the utmost zest. A kind friend, I forget by
what means or interest, had offered to provide free passages to Madeira.
Alas! the first consultation with the medical authorities put an end to
all such schemes. And my poor mother had the inexpressibly sad and
difficult task of quashing them all without allowing her patient to
suspect the real reason of their being given up.
She had to take him back to Bruges; and I accompanied them to the boat
lying off the Tower, and remained with them an hour before it weighed
anchor. And then and there I took the last leave of my brother Henry, I
well knowing, he never imagining, that it was for ever.
And now began at Bruges a time of such stress and trouble for my mother
as few women have ever passed through. The grief, the Rachel sorrows of
mothers watching by the dying beds of those, to save whose lives they
would--ah! how readily!--give their own, are, alas, common enough. But
no account, no contemplation of any such scene of anguish can give an
adequate conception of what my mother went through victoriously.
Her literary career had hitherto been a succession of triumphs. Money
was coming in with increasing abundance. But these successes had not yet
lasted long enough to enable her, in the face of all she had done for
the ruined household to which she had returned from America, to lay by
any fund for the future. And though the proceeds of her labour were
amply sufficient for all current needs, it was imperative that that
labour should not be suspended.
It was under these circumstances that she had to pass her days in
watching by the bedside of a very irritable invalid, and her
nights--when he fortunately for the most part slept--in composing
fiction! It was desirable to keep the invalid’s mind from dwelling on
the hopelessness of his condition. And, indeed, he was constantly
occupied in planning travels and schemes of activity for the anticipated
time of his recovery, which she had to enter into and discuss with a
cheerful countenance and bleeding heart. It was also especially
necessary that my sisters, especially the younger, already threatened by
the same malady, should be kept cheerful, and prevented from dwelling on
the phases of their brother’s illness. This was the task in which, with
agonised mind, she never faltered from about nine o’clock every morning
till eight o’clock in the evening! Then with wearied body, and mind
attuned to such thoughts as one may imagine, she had to sit down to her
desk to write her novel with all the _verve_ at her command, to please
light-hearted readers, till two or three in the morning! This, by the
help of green tea and sometimes laudanum, she did daily and nightly till
the morning of the 23rd of December of that sad 1834; and lived after
it to be eighty-three!
But her mind was one of the most extraordinarily constituted in regard
to recuperative power and the capacity of throwing off sorrow, that I
ever knew or read of. Any one who did not know her, as her own son knew
her, might have supposed that she was deficient in sensibility. No
judgment could be more mistaken. She felt acutely, vehemently. But she
seemed to throw off sorrow as, to use the vulgar phrase, a duck’s back
throws off water, because the nature of the organism will not suffer it
to rest there. How often have I applied to her the words of David under
a similar affliction!
My brother died on the 23rd of December, 1834, and was buried at Bruges,
in the Protestant portion of the city cemetery. Had his life been much
prolonged, I think that that of my mother must have sunk under the
burthen laid upon it. I hastened to cross the Channel as soon as I heard
of my brother’s death, but did not arrive in time for his funeral.
A few days later I was, I find, consulting a Bruges physician, a Dr.
Herbout, whom I still remember perfectly well, about the health of my
father, which had recently been causing my mother some anxiety. Herbout
was an old army doctor who had served under Napoleon. It is probable
that he was more of a surgeon than a physician. His opinion was that my
father’s condition, though not satisfactory, did not indicate any cause
for immediate alarm.
I remained at Bruges till the first week in April. That is to say, the
Château d’Hondt was my home during those months, but the monotony of it
was varied by frequent visits to Ostend, which Mrs. Fauche always found
the means of making agreeable. One week of the time also was spent in a
little tour through those parts of Belgium which I had not yet seen, in
company with my old friend, and the reader’s old acquaintance, Fanny
Bent. It was an oddly constituted travelling party--the young man full
of strength, activity, and eagerness to see everything that
indefatigable exertion could show him, and the very plain, Quaker-like,
middle-aged old maid, absolutely new to Continental ways and manners and
habits. Yet few people, I think, have ever seen the many interesting
sights of the region we travelled over more completely than I and Fanny
Bent. The number of towers (Antwerp among them) to the tops of which I
took her, as recorded in my diary, seems preposterous. But Fanny Bent
bravely stuck to her work, and where I led she followed. I have since
squired many fairer and younger dames, but never one so bravely
determined on doing all that was to be done. And very much we both
enjoyed it.
Almost immediately after my return from this little excursion I received
a letter from an old Wykehamist schoolfellow, the Rev. George Hall, of
Magdalen, son of the head of Pembroke at Oxford, offering me a
mastership in King Edward’s Grammar School, at Birmingham. The head
master of that school was at that time Dr. Jeune, a Pembroke man, and
thence a close friend of George Hall, who himself held one of the
masterships, which he was about to resign. The salary of the mastership
offered me was 200_l._ a year, with, of course, prospects of
advancement. I at once determined to accept it, and with the promptitude
which in those days characterised me (at least in all cases in which
promptitude involved immediate locomotion), I decided to leave Bruges
for Birmingham on the morrow. I slept at Ostend the next night, and the
following day crossed to Dover with my friend Captain Smithett, of the
_Arrow_, “the only other passengers,” says my diary, “being a maniac and
a corpse.”
Smithett was a remarkably handsome man, and the very _beau-idéal_ of a
sailor. For many years he was the man always selected to carry any royal
or distinguished personage who had to cross the Channel from or to
Dover. He was an immense favourite with all the little Ostend
world--with the female part of it, of course, especially. I remember his
showing me with much laughter an anonymous _billet doux_ which had
reached him, beginning, “_O toi qui commandes la Flèche, tu peux aussi
commander les cœurs_,” &c., &c. I discovered the writer some time
subsequently in an extremely pretty _baigneuse_, the wife, I am sorry to
say, of a highly respected Belgian banker. Perhaps all his Ostend
admirers did not know that he had a charming wife at Dover. He was all
the more an object of our admiration from the singular contrast between
him and his colleague, a certain Captain Murch. Between them they did
in those days the whole of the Ostend and Dover mail business. Poor
Murch was much of an invalid, and, strange as it may seem, suffered
invariably on every passage, from year’s end to year’s end, from sea
sickness. Think of the purgatory involved in the combination of such a
constitution with such a profession! The port of Ostend was at that time
somewhat difficult to enter in heavy weather, and bad fogs were very
frequent on that coast. Poor Murch was always getting into difficulties
which involved “lying to,” and reaching his destination long after time;
whereas we held that the dashing _Arrow_ would go wherever the _Flying
Dutchman_ could. And indeed I have seen her come in when I could only
remain at the pier-head by lashing myself to a post. So much for “_le
beau, Capitaine Smitète_.”
Losing no time in London I reached Birmingham on the evening of Sunday
the 5th, and found my friend Hall quite sure of my election by the
governors of the school on the recommendation of _his_ friend Jeune. But
then began a whole series of slips between the cup and the lip! There
appeared to be no doubt of their electing me if they elected anybody;
but a part of the board wished, on financial grounds, to defer the
election of a new master for a while. The governors at their meeting put
off the decision of the matter to another meeting on the 24th. On the
24th the matter was again put off. I had left Birmingham on the 12th,
with the promise from Jeune, in whom on that, and on subsequent
occasions, I found a most kind friend, that he would do all he could to
urge the governors to a decision, and lose no time in letting me know
the result. On the 24th the election of a new master was again
“deferred” by the governors, and the prospect of their coming to a
decision to elect one shortly seemed to become more uncertain. Many
other meetings of the board took place with a similar result. On one
occasion Jeune told me that, had he been in Birmingham at the time of
the meeting, he felt sure that he could have induced them to come to an
election; but he had unfortunately been absent. At another meeting I was
told that I should have been elected had not Sir Edward Thomason, one of
the governors who wished to elect a master, run away to a dinner party,
thus leaving the non-content party in the majority.
Meantime I took my degree at Oxford on the 29th of April, which was
needed for holding the appointment in question, and waited with what
patience I could in London, dividing my time between the dear and ever
kind Grants, and my brother Anthony, who was doing--or rather getting
into continual hot water for not doing;--his work at the Post Office. He
was, I take it, a very bad office clerk; but as soon as he was appointed
a surveyor’s clerk became at once one of the most efficient and valuable
officers in the Post Office.
Leaving Oxford on the night of the 29th I returned to Birmingham, and
was again tantalised by repeated inconclusive meetings of the school
governors, till at last, on the 6th of May, Jeune told me that he
thought that they would not come to an election till midsummer, but that
in any case there was another of the masters whose resignation he had
reason to believe would not be long deferred, and I should assuredly
have his place. On this I returned to London, and on the 8th of May left
it for Dover on my way to join my mother in Paris.
Having spoken of Anthony’s efficiency as an officer of the Post Office,
I may, I think, in the case of so well known a man, venture to expend a
page in giving the reader an anecdote of his promptness, of which, as of
dozens of other similar experiences, he says nothing in his
_Autobiography_. He had visited the office of a certain postmaster in
the south-west of Ireland in the usual course of his duties, had taken
stock of the man, and had observed him in the course of his interview
carefully lock a large desk in the office. Two days afterwards there
came from head-quarters an urgent inquiry about a lost letter, the
contents of which were of considerable value. The information reached
the surveyor late at night, and he at once put the matter into the hands
of his subordinate. There was no conveyance to the place where my
brother determined his first investigations should be made till the
following morning. But it did not suit him to wait for that, so he hired
a horse, and, riding hard, knocked up the postmaster whom he had
interviewed, as related, a couple of days before, in the small hours.
Possibly the demeanour of the man in some decree influenced his further
proceedings. Be this as it may, he walked straight into the office, and
said, “Open that desk!” The key, he was told, had been lost for some
time past. Without another word he smashed the desk with one kick,
and--there found the stolen letter!
I have heard from him so many good stories of his official experiences,
that I feel myself tolerably competent to write a volume of “Memoirs of
a Post Office Surveyor.” But for the present I must content myself with
one other of his adventures. He had been sent to South America to
arrange some difficulties about postal communication in those parts
which our authorities wished to be accomplished in a shorter time than
had been previously the practice. There was a certain journey that had
to be done by a mounted courier, for which it was insisted that three
days were necessary, while my brother was persuaded it could be done in
two. He was told that he knew nothing of their roads and their horses,
&c. “Well,” said he, “I will ask you to do nothing that I, who know
nothing of the country, and can only have such a horse as your post can
furnish me, cannot do myself. I will ride with your courier, and then I
shall be able to judge.” And at daybreak the next morning they started.
The brute they gave him to ride was of course selected with a view of
making good their case, and the saddle was simply an instrument of
torture. He rode through that hot day and kept the courier to his work
in a style that rather astonished that official. But at night, when they
were to rest for a few hours, Anthony confessed that he was in such a
state that he began to think that he should have to throw up the sponge,
which would have been dreadful to him. So he ordered two bottles of
brandy, poured them into a wash-hand basin, and _sat in it_! His
description of the agonising result was graphic! But the next day, he
said, he was able to sit in his saddle without pain, did the journey in
the two days, and carried his point.
But I must abstain from further anticipations of the memoirs above
spoken of, the more especially as I left my own story at the point where
I had before me, like Rousseau--and probably with no less rose-coloured
anticipations--_un voyage à faire, et Paris au bout_, and that for the
first time in my life!