with it, which took precedence over a wife's using her husband's
surname. The legal maneuvers required by this requirement were quite
complicated, but after a detailed explanation by Mr. Apjohn, the
result was that when Isabel bore William a son, it is reported that
"Llanfeare was entailed upon him and his son, and . . . he was so
christened as to have his somewhat grandiloquent name inscribed as
William Apjohn Owen Indefer Jones."
There was always some question as to how Mr. Apjohn should be
recompensed for his work as Cousin Henry's "advocate." One would
guess that he was rewarded in more ways than one. Among other
compensations, he is recognized as the genius who solved the mystery
in an early example of the psychological crime study, one that
manages to hold the reader's interest through speculative passages
about how a man's mind may work under certain circumstances.
WHAT TO DO ABOUT MUDDY BOOTS
DR. WORTLE'S SCHOOL
Although Anthony Trollope traveled to North America five times and
wrote a two-volume travel book, _North America_, about his second
trip, only one of his novels, _Dr. Wortle's School_, includes any
scenes on American soil. It's a relatively short book, 199 pages,
and only two of its twenty-four chapters are set in the United
States. But it's a robust story, emphasizing action over reflection,
certainly in the two American chapters.
Dr. Wortle is a clergyman with a parish that occupies relatively
little of his time--time mainly devoted to his boarding school
that prepares boys for Eton. To this school comes an "usher" (a
subordinate or an assistant teacher at a school) who seems for Dr.
Wortle's purposes to be too good to be true. And indeed the mystery
that surrounds this overqualified teacher, a fellow of Oxford, and
his American wife, who seems equally overqualified for cleaning up
after unruly school boys, confirms that they bring with them baggage
that threatens the continued existence of the school itself. The
author unburdens himself of this mystery at the first opportunity,
with a lengthy "O kind-hearted reader" paragraph that explains his
intention of putting the "horse of my romance before the cart" by
revealing the mystery "in the next paragraph--in the next half-dozen
words. Mr. and Mrs. Peacocke were not man and wife."
Mr. Peacocke had gone to St. Louis and become Vice-President of the
College at Missouri, where he had met Mrs. Ferdinand Lefroy, whose
appearance--dark brown complexion, with hair dark and very glossy,
"tall for a woman, but without any of that look of length under which
female altitude sometimes suffers"--suggests that she must have been
a Creole, even though she was the daughter of a Louisiana planter
ruined by the Civil War. Colonel Ferdinand Lefroy had gone to Mexico
to seek his fortune, was reported to have been killed there, and
Mrs. Lefroy had then married Mr. Peacocke. When her supposedly dead
husband reappeared and again disappeared, Mr. Peacocke and Mrs.
Lefroy went to England as man and wife.
So here is a secret in an unstable state. The Peacockes' behavior
is so guarded--they accept no invitations, say nothing of their
history--that a secret is suspected, and when Ferdinand Lefroy's
brother suddenly appears and attempts to blackmail the Peacockes, the
fat is in the fire. Dr. Wortle remains loyal to his faithful usher,
but the hounds of gossip are hot on the scent, and a number of
students are withdrawn from the school, threatening its viability.
The unkindest cut of all is a paragraph in a London gossip sheet,
"Everybody's Business," alluding to Dr. Wortle's visits to Mrs.
Peacocke in the absence of her husband, who has gone to America to
seek out the truth about the status, living or dead, of Ferdinand
Lefroy.
"It must be admitted," said the writer, "that the Doctor has the
best of it. While one gentleman is gouging the other--as cannot
but be expected--the Doctor will be at any rate in security,
enjoying the smiles of beauty under his own fig-tree at Bowick.
After a hot morning with "τυπτω" [3] in the school, there will be
"amo" in the cool of the evening."
[Footnote 3: Τυπτω--to "thump", that is, cudgel or pummel by
repeated blows; by implication to punish]
How to respond? Here is the crux of the story. There are, to be
sure, interviews between Dr. Wortle and his bishop, and Dr. Wortle
seriously contemplates a suit for libel against the gossip sheet,
which will bring the bishop into court. But perhaps the most
pertinent interviews are those between Dr. Wortle and the colleague
whom he selects as his confidante and advisor, Mr. Puddicombe, rector
of a neighboring parish. Mr. Puddicombe effectively plays the role of
Jiminy Cricket, the conscience of Dr. Wortle. In Chapter XIII, "Mr.
Puddicombe's Boot," Dr. Wortle first goes to Mr. Puddicombe with his
resolution to reply to the "Broughton Gazette," which has written,
"Parents, if they feel themselves to be aggrieved, can remedy the
evil by withdrawing their sons."
Mr. Puddicombe tells Dr. Wortle that he has fallen into a misfortune
and advises restraint:
"It was a misfortune, that this lady whom you had taken into your
establishment should have proved not to be the gentleman's wife.
When I am taking a walk through the fields and get one of my feet
deeper than usual into the mud, I always endeavour to bear it as
well as I may before the eyes of those who meet me rather than
make futile efforts to get rid of the dirt and look as though
nothing had happened. The dirt, when it is rubbed and smudged and
scraped, is more palpably dirt than the honest mud."
Would that each of us had a Mr. Puddicombe to keep us out of trouble!
There is an obligatory little romantic subplot, with a romance
between Dr. Wortle's seventeen year old daughter Mary and a noble
young boarding student, Lord Carstairs, age eighteen years. Are they
too young for an engagement before he even enrolls at Oxford? Will
the young lord's father Lord Bracy accept the daughter of a clergyman
into his family? After a moderate amount of reflection, these issues
sort themselves out.
Mr. Peacocke's journey to America to seek the grave or the person of
Ferdinand Lefroy occupies the two American chapters. Peacocke goes
in the company of Ferdinand's brother Robert, an unscrupulous but
ingenious scoundrel whose inventions are matched by the determination
and bravery of the intrepid Mr. Peacocke. These adventures provide
an opportunity for Trollope to vent some of his observations about
American manners:
He found his wife's brother-in-law seated in the bar of the public
house--that everlasting resort for American loungers--with a
cigar as usual stuck in his mouth, loafing away his time as only
American frequenters of such establishments know how to do. In
England such a man would probably be found in such a place with
a glass of some alcoholic mixture beside him, but such is never
the case with an American. If he wants a drink he goes to the
bar and takes it standing--will perhaps take two or three, one
after another; but when he has settled himself down to loaf, he
satisfies himself with chewing a cigar, and covering a circle
around him with the results. With this amusement he will remain
contented hour after hour--nay, throughout the entire day if no
harder work be demanded of him.
This is one of those Fantastic Premise books, in which a credible
story is built around the Fantastic Premise--in this case, the Enoch
Arden story of the man who goes off to fight, is presumed dead,
and returns home to find his wife married to someone else. Not so
fantastic, perhaps; considering the time, distance, and inadequate
communication techniques of the period, it is only surprising that
such occurrences did not take place more often. The story carries
itself along with a good pace; but the greatest reason to read the
book is to follow the struggles of Dr. Wortle, sucked into challenges
to his pride, wrestling with how to dig himself out.
And for readers who like to close a book with a take-home lesson, one
could do worse than to remember what to do and what not to do with
muddy boots.
THE CURSE OF CONSUMPTION
MARION FAY
I was six years old when I met Tommy Wallace. He spent a good bit
of time with his Aunt Rushie, who lived two doors down from us,
while his mother spent a year at the Booneville Sanatorium with
tuberculosis. We still see an occasional patient with tuberculosis
nowadays, but the sanatoriums are all closed or used for other
purposes. However, it still causes 1.5 million deaths worldwide
each year, trailing only respiratory diseases, AIDS, and diarrheal
diseases as the leading infectious killers.
Tuberculosis, known back then as consumption, was widespread in the
nineteenth century, causing one out of four deaths in England in
1815. It only began to subside between 1850 and 1950, when deaths due
to tuberculosis decreased tenfold, from 500 per 100,000 population
in 1850 to 50 per 100,000 population in 1950. Improvements in public
health reduced the incidence of tuberculosis even before the advent
of antibiotics in 1946 with the introduction of streptomycin. Poor
living conditions and the development of resistance to antibiotics
have contributed to its resurgence and worldwide threat.
Before the discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882, the common
understanding of consumption was that it was a constitutional
disorder with a strong hereditary element, giving a pale, even
"haunted" look to the sufferer. As such, it played a prominent role
in literature and the other arts. John Keats, Frederic Chopin, and
Franz Kafka died of consumption, as did Edgar Allen Poe's wife,
Virginia. Among the familiar victims in our collective consciousness
are Mimi in Puccini's _La Boheme_, Violetta in Verdi's _La Traviata_,
and Camille, played by Greta Garbo in the MGM film of 1936. Doc
Holliday died of tuberculosis in 1887, and his bloody cough figured
prominently in the 1993 film _Tombstone_. Consumption claimed a
number of characters in Dickens's novels: Little Nell in _The Old
Curiosity Shop_, Nell's friend Kit, Nicholas Nickleby's faithful
companion Smike, and both Richard Carstone and the boy Jo in _Bleak
House_. Thomas Mann's _The Magic Mountain_ portrays a sanatorium in
the Swiss Alps. Other victims include Ralph Touchett in Henry James's
_A Portrait of a Lady_; Edmund Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's _Long Day's
Journey into Night_; Fantin in Hugo's _Les Miserables_; Dostoevsky's
Katerina Ivanovna in _Crime and Punishment_ and Kirillov in _The
Possessed_; and Jane Eyre's best friend in Charlotte Bronte's novel.
Anthony Trollope's two sisters and two of his three brothers died
at a young age with consumption, an "established sorrow" described
in his autobiography as the horrid word, Consumption. With this
experience, it is no surprise that Trollope should write a novel,
_Marion Fay_, about a young woman with consumption. The wonder is
that it took him so long to write it; it was more than thirty years
after his first novel that he wrote _Marion Fay_, which was finished
in 1879.
Marion Fay's story is a sad one. A Quaker's daughter and the eldest
son of a marquis meet and fall in love with each other. She refuses
to marry Lord Hampstead, however, pleading first that it would be an
unequal match for him, but finally admitting she has a strong family
history of early death and does not expect to have a long life.
Hampstead's emotional reactions are described in great detail, and
much of their story is told from his point of view. She is determined
from the first that she will not marry, and there is little more to
think or say about it. She gradually becomes more open with him as
her illness progresses, writing frequent letters from her seaside
location. Most of the agonies belong to him, while she appears
relatively tranquil, though she does indulge in a Trollopian flop
onto the sofa to bury her tearful face in a cushion.
The reader is shielded from some of the details. For one thing, the
descriptions emphasize the mental processes. There are no bloody
scenes. The color would sometimes rise to Marion's cheeks, and those
in the room would hear only a preparation for a cough, not the cough
itself. This preparatory sound, the author tells us, is the one so
familiar to those obliged to follow the downward course of someone
dear to them. And that's it. Marion's illness is said to be a
description of the course of Trollope's sister Emily, and she is said
to have had a quiet and peaceful course and death. Apparently, if she
had a hacking cough or brought up bright red blood, Anthony missed
it. In any event, the reader is spared.
As Marion becomes more ill, a frustrated Hampstead, who has fallen
under the Victorian illusion that a woman is obliged to obey the man
she loves, fails to understand how he cannot control the situation.
He has difficulty accepting the inevitable fate she has predicted. A
woman has no right to accept such a fate. Such things must be left to
"Providence, or Chance, or Fate, as you may call it."
On the other hand, Marion's friend Mrs. Roden confirms her
understanding and acceptance, and she marvels that Marion can soar
above weakness and temptation. This angelic portrayal is surely
influenced by Trollope's recollection of his sister Emily.
Two chapters of comic relief follow the end of Marion's tragedy,
and the author's ironic touch is shown in his summation of the
Civil Service, which had figured in the novel's subplots and was
personified by Lord Persiflage: "Everybody knew that Lord Persiflage
understood the Civil Service of his country perfectly. He was a man
who never worked very hard himself or expected those under him to do
so; but he liked common sense, and hated scruples, and he considered
it to be a man's duty to take care of himself,--of himself first of
all, and then, perhaps, afterwards, of the Service."
Interestingly, the word "consumption" is never mentioned. Trollope
had written about Henry and Emily's illness in his autobiography,
saying that though she was doomed and he knew it, the word was never
spoken.
The edition published by the University of Michigan Press in 1982
features the original illustrations of William Small, in which we
see the Marquis of Kingsbury (father of Lord Hampstead) looking
remarkably like the author, who was used as the model for the
Marquis.
No one can begrudge Trollope his novel about consumption. His
brothers and sisters died from it, and he used his observations of
his sisters to create Marion Fay. The tragedy of the fatal familial
curse is presented, and, though it is quite sentimental, it is not
badly done. The artist in Trollope knew that he had to leave ‘em
laughing, and he backed away from the central sadness of the story to
return to his objects of fun. Good. He was better at comedy than he
was at tragedy.
THE DOG THAT WOULDN'T STAY UNDER THE BED
KEPT IN THE DARK
"Secret" is a powerful word--secret police, the Secret Service, The
Secret Garden, a secret passage, family secrets, trade secrets,
secret recipes, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." And secrets are
sometimes too good to keep--"That dog won't stay under the bed." Such
a secret is the subject of one of Trollope's last novels, _Kept in
the Dark_, written in 1880. Relatively simple and short, the story is
a cautionary tale, one of those that could be recommended as a lesson
in life.
A man tells a new female acquaintance about a recently terminated
engagement, and the young woman, who has also terminated an
engagement recently, fails to respond with an immediate, "Oh, really!
Why, that's just happened to me!" And then she feels that she doesn't
want to take anything away from his story by sharing her own.
And later he proposes to her, and for some reason she postpones
making the full disclosure that she knows she must make. And then
circumstances fail to provide her with a good enough opportunity;
they part, to meet again only shortly before the wedding, and it gets
harder and harder for her to tell her story.
Why doesn't she tell, the reader keeps wondering; and the reader is
told, in great detail, why she dithers, and of the great pride of the
new husband, whose wrath will now be terrible when he is told.
The frustrated reader is now diverted a bit by the closest thing to
a subplot in this short and straightforward story line: the young
bride (Cecilia Holt) has a friend, Miss Francesca Altifiorla, who is
sufficiently bored with the advantages of the single life that she
has been espousing to Cecilia, that it becomes clear that the great
secret, which of course is known to everyone except the happiest of
men (Mr. George Western) is not safe. Miss Altifiorla is not proof
against the wicked plans for revenge being plotted by Cecilia's
first fiancé, Sir Francis Geraldine, who is smarting from having
been jilted with good cause. (Instead of continuing to court his
prospective bride after the engagement was made known, he took
himself off to the races at New Market, saying that he would be back
in a few weeks in time for the wedding, thinking that his title and
relative wealth gave him such privileges. Cecilia, with more spunk
than either title or wealth, thought otherwise, summarily dismissed
him, and then refused to tell her friends who had jilted whom,
considering it to be a private matter.)
But the mischievous Miss Altifiorla succeeds in bumping into
the recently liberated Sir Francis at the railroad station and
subsequently sharing a compartment sitting opposite him on the way to
London. From this point, things are foreordained. In the course of
giving Sir Francis an opportunity of seeking revenge by letting Mr.
Western know of his previous engagement, Miss Altifiorla even has
a moment of glory as a temporary fiancée of Sir Francis in her own
right.
Their short-lived engagement is the entertainment highlight of the
book. Miss Altifiorla sets her trap in the railroad carriage with
care and skill. "You know," she said, "that Cecilia Holt was my
dearest friend, and I cannot bear to hear her abused." Sir Francis
squeezes her hand as they part at Waterloo, and he proceeds to write
his poison pen letter to Mr. Western. Considering Miss Altifiorla to
be a broadminded woman, likely to tolerate his little ways, and as
likely as any to serve his eventual need for a wife, he writes a much
more cautious last paragraph in a letter to her: "Don't you think
that you and I know each other well enough to make a match of it?
There is a question for you to answer on your own behalf, instead of
blowing me up for any cruelty to Cecilia Holt. Yours ever, F. G."
Here the clever Miss Altifiorla allows herself to be faked out, and
she overplays her hand. Soon, "The milliners, the haberdashers, the
furriers and the bootmakers of Exeter received her communication
and her orders with pleased alacrity." Unfortunately for her, Sir
Francis has already become a bit bored with the wit in her frequent
and lengthy love letters; he seizes upon a gossipy mention of his
projected marriage in the Exeter newspaper, protests in a follow-up
letter to her that he may have expressed himself so badly in his
previous letter that she may have understood more than he meant; and
then he leaves for the United States.
But as for the husband who has been kept in the dark, and the wife
who allowed such a thing to happen: we are given such detailed
insights into their backgrounds, personalities, and thoughts that
such an improbable understanding begins to seem credible. He takes
himself off to Dresden in a huff. (One would think that there must
have been a fraternity of fictional English exiles in Dresden, the
apparent destination of choice for the disaffected.) He shows all the
signs of terminal stubbornness, nursing his wounded pride and making
generous provisions for his disgraced wife, who, in her own pride and
stubbornness, refuses all such provisions. It becomes apparent that
an intervention will be required to break the stalemate, and I had
wondered if Sir Francis's disenchanted friend, Dick Ross, who told
Sir Francis that he was doing an evil thing, thus giving up his
friendship and patronage, would be the agent of reconciliation; but
it turned out to be Mr. Western's sister, Bertha Grant, who left her
husband and children to make the pilgrimage to Dresden to bring her
brother to his senses so he could make the right decision.
It's a short book that tells its story in 176 pages, much less
space than was devoted to the similar story of mutual pride and
misunderstanding in _He Knew He Was Right_. Both are intimate
stories of marital relationships. Cecilia Holt may be a little less
headstrong than Emily Rowley, but Cecilia's pride is brought out by
the mischievous letter of her "most affectionate friend, Francesca
Altifiorla": "What has Mr. Western said as to the story of Sir
Francis Geraldine? Of course you have told him the whole, and I
presume that he has pardoned that episode."
The ploy worked. On reading it, Miss Holt's immediate reaction was
that she had done "nothing for which pardon had been necessary."
Cecilia's lengthy reflections go further, of course; the more
she procrastinates, the more she dreads the unveiling of the
secret. Nothing is off the record, as celebrities and others have
demonstrated many times. The more she dithers, the more, heaven help
me, I sympathize with her husband. He deserved better. But he did
overreact a bit. A little toot would have been in order. Victorian to
the core, he indulged in a big toot.
Trollope excelled in the nuances of familiarity between man and
woman. This comes across as another variation on the theme of poor
communications; "secret" is not one of the better policies.
THE ADVANCE DIRECTIVE
THE FIXED PERIOD
Dr. William Osler, upon his retirement as head of Medicine at Johns
Hopkins Medical School in 1905, delivered a speech, entitled "The
Fixed Period," in which he alluded to Trollope's 1881 novel of
the same name with comments which, to his astonishment and dismay,
brought down a storm of journalistic and popular fury and mockery
on his head. Sharing wry and politically incorrect observations
which might better have been reserved for private conversation, Osler
described two "fixed ideas well known to my friends": the comparative
uselessness of men above forty years of age, and the complete
uselessness of men over sixty. (Osler was sixty himself at the time.)
He went on to describe the plot, which "hinges upon the admirable
scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year
of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform." The
comments were made in an ironic and self-deprecatory mode, and
Osler's colleagues congratulated him. Journalists, however, knew a
good story when they found one, and Osler, who was leaving the United
States to become Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, was made
miserable by the exaggerations of mischievous newspaper reporters and
the outrage of simple souls to whom it was not funny. "Oslerization"
entered the language and was listed in some dictionaries as a synonym
for euthanasia. [4]
[Footnote 4: Bliss, Michael: _William Osler: A Life in Medicine_,
Oxford University Press, 1999]
And what was the fate of the author of the novel that Osler
imperfectly recalled? (The planned technique was the letting of
blood from the jugular vein, not chloroform. And it was done at age
sixty-eight, not sixty.) Anthony Trollope was sixty-six when he wrote
_The Fixed Period_. He described himself as an old man, and indeed
he died of a stroke two years later, before publication of the
novel in book form. Osler was one of the few who could appreciate
its ambiguity and irony. The book sold only 877 copies, and the
publishers lost money. [5]
[Footnote 5: Terry, R. C., editor: _Oxford Reader's Companion to
Trollope_, Oxford University Press, 1999]