he was always on firm ground here. Thrown off almost in passing is a
little comic masterpiece, the depiction of two fox hunting sisters:
"But when the time for riding did come, when the hounds were really
running--when other young ladies had begun to go home--then the Miss
Tristams were always there;--there or thereabouts, as their admirers
would warmly boast."
Julia Tristam plays a pivotal role in the major subplot as she makes
a difficult jump; Felix Graham and his friend Augustus Stavely, who
have been following her in an effort to participate in the best of
the hunt, attempt to follow, and Felix does not make it, falling off
his horse and finding that he cannot raise his arm and can hardly
breathe--an accurate portrayal of the symptoms of a broken collarbone
and fractured ribs. "Both Peregrine and Miss Tristam looked back.
'There's nothing wrong I hope,' said the lady; and then she rode on."
This injury results in Felix's confinement in the Stavely house,
where he and Madeline Stavely fall in love.
_Barchester Towers_ and Mrs. Proudie stand as evidence that
Trollope's greatest gift was comic, and we find some humor in _Orley
Farm_, even though a courtroom case doesn't allow for much levity.
Mrs. Furnival's quarrel with her husband supplies comic relief, and
Mr. Kantwise's sale of a metal table and chairs to Mr. Dockwrath and
to Squire Mason is appropriately memorialized in Millais's drawing
of Mr. Kantwise standing on the metal table: "There is nothing like
iron, Sir; nothing."
To attempt to place a value on _Orley Farm_: it is good enough to
be fairly compared to _Bleak House_, generally regarded as one of
Dicken's masterpieces, and one that has been successfully presented
as a television series. Nothing in _Orley Farm_ matches the opening
paragraphs of _Bleak House_, in which the description of the rain and
mud of London sends us to turn up the heat, even if the room is warm.
Dickens manages the pace of _Bleak House_ very well, with the tempo
galloping toward a conclusion in the last hundred pages or so.
But Lady Mason is a more interesting woman than Lady Dedlock. Mr.
Tulkinghorn is a lawyer of great power and mystery in _Bleak House_,
but Mr. Furnival is shown in greater depth, and in his concluding
speech to the court we see him at the peak of his powers. The
spontaneous combustion that Dickens invokes to carry off Mr. Krook
is so improbable that one doubts if even any of his readers believed
it; but the proceedings of _Orley Farm_, if not so violent, are
so true to life that the events might have been lifted from the
newspapers.
The major plot is a carefully constructed story of crime and
punishment; the reader is led to follow the uncertainty and the
sympathy with which the community views a woman accused of a crime
that only a few decades earlier could have sent her to the gallows.
In presenting this story Trollope has shown his skill in presenting
female characters--primarily Lady Mason, but also Sophia Furnival.
Our humanity is shown sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with irony,
sometimes with condemnation--but always as it is. Too bad we never
got to see Barbara Stanwyck play the title role. Who would have
played Sophia Furnival?
LEAR REVISITED
THE STRUGGLES OF BROWN, JONES, AND ROBINSON
By One of the Firm
Graduate students in business administration routinely bury
themselves in case studies, which have become a standard hurdle on
the way to attaining an MBA. In doing so, they learn to insist on
reliable data. However, should the students in the Stanford Graduate
School of Business find themselves analyzing the failure of the
London mercantile firm of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, they would
surely hope to have more objective information than that found in the
account of George Robinson, one of the three partners, as given in
_The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson, by One of the Firm_.
The reader begins to suspect early on that the firm failed at least
in part because of expensive and misleading advertising promoted by
Robinson, who himself never concedes as much. The dealings of the
firm were hardly transparent, even among the three partners; and the
senior partner, Mr. Brown, kept the books to himself. Meanwhile the
other partner, Mr. Jones, was taking funds from the till without
letting Mr. Robinson know.
Among the curious features of genius is its uneven nature. After
searching unsuccessfully for his métier with a few novels about
Ireland, a historical novel of the French Revolution, and a
play, Trollope found his way with _The Warden_ and _Barchester
Towers,_ which may be his best known and most loved works. Still
experimenting, however, he used his personal experience in the civil
service to write _The Three Clerks_, a critical success at the time
but not well known today. And then he continued his portrayal of
the world of mundane office work by venturing into a picture of the
entrepreneurial spirit as shown by _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_. He
broke off from it after two weeks and came back to it four years
later, but the result was an attempt to satirize the business world.
It failed, however, to match his success with the Church, the landed
gentry, and the political world of the ruling class.
True, one of his most acclaimed works, _The Way We Live Now_, dealt
with the business world; but it did so in a rough rather than a
gentle way, in a later period of his life when he had begun to
develop somewhat more jaundiced views of society as it had evolved.
The satire of _Brown, Jones, and Robinson_ is too clever by half.
George Robinson is the young pup who defends himself after the
bankruptcy of the firm with an unrepentant statement of his faith in
advertising, and he presents himself as the unreliable narrator with
a self-serving view of his stewardship. Demonstrating the creative
imagination that led him to ruin, he compares his senior partner
to King Lear. "Think what it must be to be papa to a Goneril and a
Regan--without the Cordelia. I have always looked on Mrs. Jones as a
regular Goneril; and as for the Regan, why it seems to me that Miss
Brown is likely to be Miss Regan to the end of the chapter."
Sarah Jane, the elder sister and the "Goneril," marries Mr. Jones;
and Robinson himself aspires to the hand of Maryanne, the "Regan" who
joins her sister in turning on their father and attempting to secure
his small fortune for themselves. Robinson's dedication to the
doctrines of Credit and Advertising, rather than to those of Capital,
leads him to run through that part of the four thousand pounds that
Brown provided to start their haberdashery business. Brown and Jones
stand agog as Robinson hires four men in armour to ride draft horses
through the streets announcing the opening of Magenta House. And Mr.
Brown cannot understand why Robinson should advertise four hundred
dozen white cotton hose. "We haven't got 'em. . . . I did want to do
a genuine trade in stockings."
"And so you shall, sir. But how will you begin unless you attract
your customers?" Robinson retorts, and he goes on to advertise
"English-sewn Worcester gloves, made of French kid," which actually
came from the wholesale houses in St. Paul's churchyard.
The inevitable downfall of the overextended firm can surely provide
a number of cautionary tales for future students of the success and
failure of businesses, but these lessons are lost on George Robinson,
who reacts by transferring his devotion from Maryanne Brown, who
abandons him in the end, to the goddess of Commerce. "Oh sweet
Commerce, teach me thy lessons! Let me ever buy in the cheapest
market and sell in the dearest."
What is it that made the foibles of the Church so humorous in
Trollope's hands, while the schemes of the business world merely led
to a ho-hum reaction at its cupidity and stupidity? Is it that the
men of the cloth retained a few cloaks of honor and respectability
yet to be stripped away, while the businessmen may never have had any
such cloaks? In any event, the reading public and the critics helped
Trollope to find his way, which was not along the way of Commerce and
Advertising.
BRINGING GOOD BEER TO DEVON
RACHEL RAY
Bad beer is being brewed in East Devon. This is cider country, where
apple trees grow and "men drink cider by the gallon." The bad beer
comes from the firm of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt, which is managed
by the latter after the death of the former. Thus Anthony Trollope
has given us a novel about beer.
But of course it's not primarily about beer. _Rachel Ray_ is mainly
a love story with plot lines familiar to readers of Trollope. The
heir to the late Mr. Bungall's interest in the brewery, Luke Rowan,
comes to town to assert his interests, meets a friend of the Tappitt
sisters, Rachel Ray, and falls in love with her. Rachel is a rather
typical Trollope heroine--spirited and bright, dwelling in an humble
cottage with her timid widowed mother and a domineering older sister,
also a widow. Rachel is attracted to Luke when he sits alone with
her on a churchyard stile and gazes at the clouds, but she consents
only by a silent nod to his proposal of marriage that comes soon
after. Once having given her silent nod, however, she vows lifelong
faithfulness, even though her mercurial fiancé may desert her.
Luke Rowan is no paragon. His faults are declared to the reader in
a rather desultory fashion, showing him to be only slightly more
interesting than a stock representation of a young lover, which he
really is. It is enough to raise the reader's concern that Rachel
may be doomed to a fate similar to that of Lily Dale, the tragic,
faithful heroine of _The Small House at Allington_.
The story of Cinderella is retold with a few modifications, as
the three Tappitt sisters invite Rachel, not unanimously, to a
little party for the Rowans, which soon comes to be regarded as a
ball. Rachel is persuaded to attend the ball only after the fairy
godmother, in the form of Mrs. Butler Cornbury, invites Rachel to
accompany her in her coach. Mrs. Tappitt is scandalized that Luke
selects Rachel as his dancing partner of choice, and Cinderella is so
overcome by it all that she persuades her fairy godmother to take her
home two hours early. But to the amazement of all, the prince makes a
visit to the humble cottage to see Rachel the next day.
So here we have the love story. Now back to the beer:
It was a sour and muddy stream that flowed from their vats;
a beverage disagreeable to the palate, and very cold and
uncomfortable to the stomach. Who drank it I could never learn.
It was to be found at no respectable inn. . . . Nevertheless the
brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt was kept going, and the
large ugly square brick house in which the Tappitt family lived
was warm and comfortable. There is something in the very name of
beer that makes money.
Mr. Tappitt's determination to brew bad beer is reinforced by
the appearance of Luke Rowan, who aspires to participate in the
management of the brewery and brew good beer. But Mr. Tappitt knows
that would require capital investment. The brewery has been managing
to make money under his direction, and he wants neither to concede
any of his power nor to risk the profitability of the business with
newfangled ideas. This divergence of views comes to a climax when
Rowan offers to join the firm as an active partner, to allow Tappit
to retire with an annual pension, or to sell his share of the
business to Tappitt and then build his own competing brewery. Mr.
Tappitt's response is to brandish a poker, and at the conclusion of
this dramatic encounter Rowan departs, declaring that the matter will
be turned over to his lawyer.
Having been accepted by Rachel, he now leaves town, and Rachel is
left to the pernicious influence of community opinion, which is
against the young man in his apparent effort to unseat a longstanding
citizen of the community, even though he does brew bad beer. Rachel
is influenced by her mother, who is in turn influenced by her
spiritual advisor, the vicar Mr. Comfort, who in turn is influenced
by community opinion conveyed by a disaffected colleague. And so
Rachel's letter in response to her fiancé's first letter is so
much less than passionate that she fears she has terminated their
engagement.
So how will the matter be resolved? Here we see a second issue: a
political contest. Politics fascinated Trollope, and he even entered
an election himself. In this instance Tappitt supports a Jew from out
of town, Mr. Hart, against young Butler Cornbury, eldest son of the
neighboring squire. The author revels in the details of the campaign:
slurs against the Jew by his opponents who probably know better, the
raising of money, and the buying of votes. Luke Rowan reappears in
town after having purchased property from Rachel's mother for the
apparent purpose of building his own brewery. And Luke enters the
political contest, even though he is not an elector in Baslehurst,
supporting Butler Cornbury with fiery speeches. Luke is found to be a
radical--that is, "he desires, expects, works for, and believes in,
the gradual progress of the people," and he "will own no inferiority
to the manhood of another."
The outcome of the election is determined by one vote. Cornbury is
the winner, but Tappitt dreams of revenge. He is invited to a
dinner of Hart supporters and chairs their meeting. He meets the
unscrupulous lawyer Mr. Sharpit there and asks him to take his case
against Mr. Rowan because his own lawyer Mr. Honyman has recommended
capitulation and retirement.
But Mr. Tappitt has been ill, and his wife, who wants him to retire
so she and her daughters can enjoy the delights of Torquay, has
threatened to have him committed "under fitting restraint" if he goes
to the meeting. This is the red pepper program: "There may be those
who think that a wife goes too far in threatening a husband with a
commission of lunacy, and frightening him with a prospect of various
fatal diseases; but the dose must be adapted to the constitution, and
the palate that is accustomed to large quantities of red pepper must
have quantities larger than usual whenever some special culinary
effect is to be achieved."
Tappitt comes home from the dinner drunk, and his wife finds him
vulnerable the next morning. She refuses to let him out of bed until
he agrees to invite Honeyman the lawyer back to the brewery, thus
achieving a compromise that allows Mr. Tappitt to sell out and
retire.
So everything works out. The author has also used our story to
indulge his fondness for church affairs. Rachel's widowed sister has
been attracted to the less formal side of the Church of England, and
in particular to a rather unsavory clerical representative of this
school of thought, one Mr. Prong, whose pride in his sermons exceeds
the results. But in the end Rachel's sister Dorothea shrugs off Mr.
Prong, who denies any interest in Dorothea's money but is unwilling
to forgo the husband's legal right to her money.
It's all a good story. We share the author's fun with the radicals,
the politics, the churchmen, the fairy godmother, and particularly
with Mr. Tappitt. Rachel's romance works itself out, but perhaps more
to the point, the men of Baslehurst will get better beer.
"HE COMETH NOT; I AM AWEARY"
MISS MACKENZIE
Garish images are the ones that stick. _Miss Mackenzie_ is a
beautiful story of a deserving young woman who finally achieves love
and fortune after years of service to the poor and the sick and the
dying, but the image that sticks in the mind is that of Rev. Jeremiah
Maguire, who was possessed "of the most terrible squint in his right
eye which ever disfigured a face that in all other respects was
fitted for an Apollo." In this case, as was usually the case in
Trollope's novels, the physical deformity was a ready clue to the
individual's character. Rev. Maguire ranks as one of the more
iniquitous of the sinners in the ranks of Trollope's clergymen. It
may not have been so bad that he tried to marry Margaret Mackenzie
for her money, but he did so with a devious scheme to establish
his own church and use the pew rents as security for the money that
he would say he was giving but would then take back as payment of
a loan. And when he learned that he had no chance of winning her
for himself, he embarrassed her by writing several "Lion and Lamb"
articles for a religious newspaper, saying that she was being cheated
of her inheritance by the man whom she wished to marry. He doesn't
match the villainy of Joseph Emilius, the preacher who only had a
"slight defect in his left eye" and a "hooky nose," and who murdered
Lizzie Eustace's protector Mr. Bonteen in _The Eustace Diamonds_;
it is apparent, however, that not all Trollope's clergymen went to
heaven.
But back to Miss Mackenzie: if one of the great pleasures in life
is watching someone start out with a pleasant set of gifts and then
develop a few more to become a joyous credit to the human race, then
the literary proxy is reading about such a one. We are introduced to
Miss Mackenzie as a Cinderella-type woman (Trollope had a weakness
for Cinderellas) who devotes herself to the care of her brother for
fifteen years until he dies. She is a generous but self-abasing
humble woman, but we see that she can stand up for herself. Finally
she appears to gain some conception of her own worth.
There has been some money in the family, but we see it slipping away
due to unfortunate business decisions, and none of it appears to be
destined for poor Margaret, who has little to show for the years of
her young womanhood. But then she is named the beneficiary of her
late brother's will! Suddenly she is a woman of independent means, if
not indeed wealthy.
And now we see her deal with the friends, relatives, and suitors who
flock to her. Her sense of self worth is hardly enhanced as she fends
them off, comprehending pretty quickly that they are interested in
her money, not so much in her. She longs to have a life. She's only
thirty-six. Her "time for withering" has not yet arrived. But she
feels that she should not live for herself alone, and there are
numerous opportunities for doing good deeds. The death of her brother
has left her sister-in-law with a house full of children, and
Margaret selects one of them, a fourteen year old girl, to live with
her. She will leave London, where the neighborhood just down the
streets to the Thames from the Strand is pretty dull, and she will
go to Littlebath and take lodgings in the Paragon. (Bath and the
Crescent, as in _The Bertrams_).
A gloomy story to this point, but it is told with the distant ironic
tone that tells the reader that this is a comedy. Margaret visits The
Cedars, home of her cousins the Balls, but finding them "very dull,"
she determines to proceed with the Littlebath plan.
Margaret enters Littlebath society slowly and timidly. We are shown
that Littlebath is home to saints and sinners. The sinners go the
assembly rooms; the saints go to church--not the high Church of
England, but the Low Church. Margaret finds herself too timid to
attempt to be a sinner at the assembly rooms; it is easier to go
along with the women to tea at the home of a preacher to whom she
has been given a letter of introduction. Here she finds a company
of benighted souls in thrall to Mrs. Stumfold, wife of the great
preacher. Like Mrs. Proudie of the Barsetshire series, Mrs. Stumfold
brooks no disorder in the ranks, and we see Margaret stand up
for herself when Mrs. Stumfold calls on her to inquire as to her
intentions in regard to Mr. Maguire, of the squinting eye, who has
been seen paying conspicuous attention to Miss Mackenzie. Short
on self-esteem at this point, Margaret is shown to rank high in
self-assertiveness. When Mrs. Stumfold tells her that another lady
has a prior claim on Mr. Maguire (Mrs. Stumfold has been indulging
in a bit of match-making), she insults Miss Mackenzie, informing her
that another lady has been before her. "What would you think if you
were interfered with, though, perhaps, as you had not your fortune in
early life, you may never have known what that was?"
At this, Margaret terminates the interview, sending her to any friend
of hers who is behaving badly for the purpose of telling him so, and
then telling Mrs. Stumfold that she will hear nothing more about it.
Margaret shakes off three suitors, unworthy souls who merit
rejection, though she is so lacking in self-confidence that she gives
serious consideration to two of them. Mr. Maguire--the clergyman
with the wandering squinting eye--catches her by surprise with
his proposal, and she asks for two weeks to think it over. A big
mistake--it raises false hopes in Mr. Maguire. She is called away
because of her brother's illness before giving the ambitious curate
an answer, and she enters the orbit of her cousin John Ball, a
widower who had bored her by talking about nothing but money.
The author never refers to John Ball as the hero of the story, and
indeed he is not unblemished. But he turns out to be Miss Mackenzie's
hero, barely making the cut. He has a house full of children of his
own, and though a barrister by profession, he hardly practices law.
He is the Victorian equivalent of a day trader, going to town every
day to follow the market prices and manage his investments, which
seem to yield him barely enough to feed his family. He discusses
his investments with his mother every night. When he proposes to
Margaret, neither she nor the reader is sure whether it is for love
or for money, but whatever, she accepts.
And then Trollope pulls a rabbit out of the hat. In doing research
on disposition of the will that had seemed to leave Margaret her
fortune, the lawyer determines that the bequest had already been
deeded to the Ball family and was therefore not available to be left
to Margaret. So now John Ball has it all and Margaret has nothing.
And when Mr. Maguire appears and claims that Margaret is his fiancée,
John fails the test. He says nothing when it is time for him to
reassure Margaret that he believes her, and she immediately returns
to the miserable lodgings on the Thames in London. And during the
long deliberations about confirming whose money it really is, he says
nothing to her. She considers herself bound to him even though he may
no longer want her, having the money and not having to bother about
the girl. She is still pretty low on the self-esteem scale.
All this makes for an entertaining story. The family history and
the mystery of the will are complex enough to keep the reader on
the hook. A high-born cousin steps in late in the game to help Miss
Mackenzie think a bit more of herself. Mrs. Mackenzie, wife to
another cousin who lives far away in Scotland, comes to London for a
while and tells Margaret how the cow ate the cabbage. She tells her
she is sure that Miss Mackenzie will become Lady Margaret by marrying
John Ball, morose though he may be. Her instrument is a muslin
flecked with black to replace the mourning that Margaret had been
wearing in memory of her brother and then her uncle. A "make-belief
mourning bonnet" is tossed in, and these are to be worn to the Negro
Soldiers' Orphan Bazaar, at which John Ball sees her in something
other than all-black mourning, and both of them get the hint that
all need not be dark. This is a little set-piece in which two old
favorites appear to play cameo roles: Lady Glencora Palliser, who
steps out of the Palliser series, and Lady Hartletop, known to
readers of the Barsetshire series as Griselda Grantly.