we know about Trollope's writing patterns, it seems unlikely that any
major revisions would have occurred in what he had already written.
We do have forty-eight of the planned sixty chapters, with a short
note by Harry Trollope to confirm what any experienced Trollope
reader would suspect as to who married whom and who was to be hanged
in the end. And as we follow the misfortunes of the Jones family
members who occupied Morony Castle, we see the effects of a campaign
of terror in a quiet green countryside. Outside agitators, surely
from America, have come among the "generous, kindly, impulsive, and
docile" country Irish folk, leading them to believe that one man is
as good as another (nothing said about the women, of course), and
that those who rent land don't really have to pay their full rent
to the lord of the manor. Farmers in America don't pay rent to a
landlord, they are told. Each man has his own (small) farm. If the
lands of America were there to be taken from the Indians, why should
not the Irish farmers take it from the greedy landlords?
Mr. Jones's problems at Morony Castle begin when his sluice gates are
opened, flooding eighty acres of good bottom land. His ten-year old
son Florian, who happened to witness the event, is terrified into
silence by his father's discontented renter who makes him swear not
to tell, invoking the Catholic religion that the lad had innocently
adopted as a bit of filial rebellion. After months of pressure and
wheedling by his sisters, who guess correctly that he knows, young
Florian finally names Pat Carroll as the culprit. On his way to the
courthouse with his father to give testimony, he is shot through the
head and killed by a double barrel rifle poked through a hole in a
stone wall along the road.
This reign of terror happened to occur in rural Ireland; it could
have been the Taliban in Afghanistan, the mafia in Sicily, the mob
in Chicago, or the Ku Klux Klan in the Jim Crow South. But here in
County Galway the usual ingredients were to be found: inadequate law
enforcement, young men with more testosterone than employment, and a
fearful populace.
Less violent but more widespread rebellion had already appeared in
the disruption of a fox hunt. The author had learned fox hunting in
Ireland, and many of the momentous events in his novels take place at
fox hunts. On this occasion, whenever the hunters arrive at a gorse
covert, they find the local farmers already there, having beaten the
area so that no fox would have remained for the chase.
And the Jones family finds itself the victim of a boycott, a term
that had only come into use two years earlier when Captain Charles
Boycott, land agent of an absentee landlord in County Mayo in
Ireland, had attempted to evict eleven tenants who refused to pay
their full rent. Charles Parnell, the champion of Irish nationalism
and a land reform agitator, had already recommended that an offending
landowner might be ostracized. Captain Boycott then found himself
victim of the process that later bore his name. And in _The
Landleaguers_ all the servants but one leave the Jones household. The
family is unable to buy anything in town, and no one in the town will
buy from the farm. The daughters come to enjoy, in a way, household
duties such as cooking, making beds, and churning butter. The family,
though, is devastated.
And the women pay a surcharge. As we see Mr. Jones carving the
mutton and serving a male visitor first, the author explains: "In a
boycotted house you will always find that the gentlemen are helped
before the ladies. It is a part of the principle of boycotting that
women shall subject themselves."
As the nonviolent civil disobedience changes to murder, the story
takes on the dimensions of a western movie when the heralded lawman
comes to town to institute law and order and set things straight.
This was Captain Yorke Clayton, possessed of two attributes that
would lead any man to fame: recklessness and light blue eyes. With
these attributes he wins the hearts of both Jones sisters, Ada and
Edith. Edith, the younger and brighter of the two, tells herself
and everyone else that he will prefer Ada, the elder and the more
beautiful. By the time he declares himself to be in love with Edith,
she has such a difficult time getting rid of her story that the issue
is not resolved within forty-eight chapters. After Florian is killed,
Captain Clayton becomes obsessed with the identification of his
killer. The villain is assumed to be Terry Lax, an agitator from
another county who is guilty of murdering the other witness who was
prepared to identify the opener of the sluice gate. This was done in
a crowded courtroom with the pistol at the victim's head, and no one
could be found who would say he had seen who did it. The author did
not live to unravel the murder for us and wrap up all the loose ends;
we are assured by Trollope's son Harry, however, that the Captain
did marry Edith and that the infamous Mr. Lax was hanged by the neck
until he was dead.
Besides all this there is the subplot, a story that moviegoers in the
following century would recognize as show-biz melodrama. Young Frank
Jones, son of the lord of Morony Castle, is in love with Rachel
O'Mahony, whose beautiful singing voice on stage is her meal ticket.
"We may best describe her by saying that she was an American and
an actress," the author tells us. Rachel came to Ireland with her
father, who had "probably" been born in America, though the family
was Irish. She is accompanied by her manager, referred to by her
as the "greasy Jew" Mahomet M. Moses, who also wants to marry her.
Rachel, a tiny thing, holds out against him, but then she receives
attention from Lord Castlewell, forty years old, eldest son of the
Marquis of Beaulieu, with lots of money and a fondness for young
ladies of the theater. Frank has not the money to support her,
refuses to be supported by her, and, in short, she accepts Lord
Castlewell's proposal--only to change her mind after she becomes ill
and loses her singing voice. Harry tells us that Frank was to marry
Rachel in the end.
And so Anthony Trollope began and ended his writing career with a
novel about Ireland. He didn't live long enough to play this one out,
but we're fortunate to have the first forty-eight chapters and his
son's assurance of how it was to have ended in the last twelve. His
last work was one that reprised some of his favorite themes--the fox
hunt, a murder mystery, a young American woman with a smart mouth, a
stubborn young woman reluctant to accept a suitor whom she loves, and
the ways of the simple folk of Ireland. He was running in full stride
when he fell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One hesitates to implicate others in a private madness. A project
such as this one requires a certain bit of monomania. However, there
are a few who cannot escape complicity.
Chip Paris of Williams/Crawford & Associates has added great value
to this and a previous book with graphic design of the cover. Amanda
Holland's creativity has allowed _The Way They Lived Then_ to present
itself to the reader in a fashion that has been pleasing to me and
all who have been asked to comment. Kay Aclin, two of whose paintings
hang in our house, provided valuable last minute advice on the color
scheme of the cover. Chip's father Charles Paris is an old friend who
provided the photograph of the author.
Todd Stewart and I share a few eccentricities, but he is far ahead of
me in understanding how to prepare and publish a manuscript. I don't
want to know how many hours he has devoted to promoting this and our
other joint ventures.
Professor Rebecca Resinski of the Classics Department of Hendrix
College maintains a web site for classical allusions in Trollope,
www.trollope-apollo.com, which has been a handy way to try to keep up
with Trollope's training in Greek and Latin. More important has been
her personal encouragement.
My wife Mary read all these reviews, and nothing went out of the
house, nor did I ever dare punch "Send," without her ok.
[Illustration: Photograph of Taylor Prewitt]
Taylor Prewitt grew up in McGehee, Arkansas and received his BA in
English from the University of Arkansas and his MD from Washington
University. His training in internal medicine and cardiology was
at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He practiced
cardiology at Cooper Clinic in Fort Smith, Arkansas, from 1969 to
2003, interrupted only by spending the year 1974 as a Senior Fellow
in Cardiology at the Brompton Hospital in London.
He has been reading the novels of Anthony Trollope for some forty
years. He is the author of _Reciting Robert Frost in the ICU:_
Essays in the Literature of Medicine and several other collections
of book reviews.
Cover design by Amanda Holland
Author photograph by Charles Paris
Westfield Press