Anthony Trollope, An Illustrated Autobiography
Published by Alan Sutton, 1987
Introduction by Joanna Trollope
He was born three months before the Battle of Waterloo, fourth child in a family of six. From the beginning he was the odd child out. His nature, always sensitive, and craving love, was imprisoned inside a clumsy, unpromising body without even the gift of charm to give it some form of self-expression. His parents were both temperamentally quite incapable of helping him. In his boyhood, awkward as he was and a magnet for grubbiness, his contemporaries at Harrow gave him a wide berth.
'I avoided him,' Sir William Gregory of Coole - and later a warm friend - wrote in his memoirs, 'For he was rude and uncouth, but I thought him an honest brave fellow. His faults were external, all the rest of him was right enough… poor Trollope was tabooed. He gave no sign of promise whatever…'
There are no drawings or paintings of Trollope as a child; none indeed until he grew to be a public man and the spade beard and high round forehead like an upended light-bulb and small gold-rimmed spectacles gave us the now familiar image of him. He was always big, by the standards of the day, and grew bulky as he got older, and he never had perfect control of his limbs, but his hands were elegant, in contrast to the rest of him, and his short-sighted eyes, so dark a blue some supposed them to be black, were acutely perceptive. His mouth, which might have given much away, was always hidden in the springing riot of his beard, a full one - the fullest one, indeed, in the whole room of William Powell Frith's 1881 painting of the Private View at the Royal Academy. His nose was big and so were his ears, all signs of humorous and large-hearted qualities, but not in themselves, perhaps, things of beauty.
Trollope was the first to know that he lacked beauty and grace. His novels are full of young men who have both attributes and are loved by remarkable girls because of them; but he knew too well what he looked like and how he seemed, and, most poignantly as a young man, the wretchedness of longing to be otherwise.
'I was big and awkward and ugly,' he wrote of his time at Winchester, 'And, I have no doubt skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; now I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way to the top of the college tower, and from thence put an end to everything.'
An unhappy childhood proves frequently to be very formative. In Trollope's case, his later success seems only a just reward for a childhood and adolescence of quite baffling neglect and lovelessness. A little beauty might well have improved the quality of his childhood - his three brothers and two sisters were distinctly handsomer and, in varying degrees, distinctly more popular with their mother. Trollope had a robust physique which they lacked - four were to die of consumption - but for the first twenty or more years of his life, he needed love more than health. He didn't get it, from anyone. His father, scholarly, melancholic and slipping gradually into paranoia, and his extraordinary, irrepressible, unimaginative mother, found him incomprehensive and impossible. His relations with his brothers and sisters seem strangely remote - his elder brother, Tom, thrashed him daily at Winchester with a big stick in the name of discipline by deterrent - and clearly friends were out of the question. In a Dickens novel, a good hearted, sensitive boy like Anthony Trollope, would have been befriended by an affectionate cripple or a sweet-natured simpleton, but in real life, he had no-one. The void in which he lived reduced him to a kind of dumb day-dreaming passivity as a child; as a man, it turned him inward, most profitably, upon his creative imagination and outward, to feed that imagination, upon a most watchful observance of human kind.
His family were gentry. His father was a lawyer, his mother the daughter of a parson. Footmen in Trollope livery waited at the dining table in the house in Keppel Street where he was born, and while the evidence of social standing was real enough, the air of prosperity that supported it was illusory. Mr Trollope was indeed a lawyer, but one of such intractable and alarming temper that his clients were fleeing from him in droves. He did not care; he was in line for a considerable legacy and in any case, his financial recklessness was only exceeded by his wife's. He moved the infant Anthony, his mother and three small children to Harrow, built a large house there and settled down to be a gentleman farmer.
The story of Mr Trollope's complete failure was the background theme to Trollope's childhood and adolescence. His legal practice collapsed, the legacy never materialised, he was a hopeless farmer. In ill-fitting, shabby, hand-me-down clothes and boots, Trollope and his brothers trudged up the hill to Harrow School as despised charity boys. A series of other schools followed, as the family's harum-scarum finances veered and twisted about to avoid bankruptcy, but all schools meant to Trollope the same humiliation of his unpaid bills and the same boys' contempt for his graceless, unattractive person and personality.
As the finances careered perilously along, so did the houses. The first Harrow house had to go, there were experiments in America and Bruges, and at one point Trollope and his father were inhabiting, alone together for three years while Mrs Trollope was in the States, a decaying farmhouse in danger, he says, of falling into its own horse pond. Three of the children were visibly dying and their father, in despair at the malevolent gods which were destroying them all, and seemingly unable to do anything but provoke them further, withdrew into manic and obsessive scholarship, ever more erudite and pointless.
To be fair, Mr Trollope did not single Anthony out for particular harshness and if he scarcely spoke to him except to goad him on to ceaseless study, he treated Tom the same. But his gloom pervaded their lives. If there was any fun to be had - the undoubted outdoor fun of life on a farm - Trollope did not choose to remember it in old age. But then, and more importantly, neither did he blame his father, whose agonising temperament he was later to portray in Josiah Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset. Indeed, he was so far from blaming him, that the description in the Autobiography is one written from a viewpoint of helpless and loving understanding.
'But everything went wrong for him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure…the worst curse to him of all was a temper so irritable that even those whom he loved the best could not endure it. We were all estranged from him and yet I believe he would have given his heart's blood for any of us.'
And what of Trollope's mother, that small, pretty, indomitable woman, who in the end saved the family finances by her own writing, starting at the age of fifty-two? There is an immense amount to admire in her, and the burdens she carried - an impossible husband, lingeringly dying children, permanent and wracking money worries - were terrifying. She not only carried them, she never complained of them. To elude the creditors, she bundled her husband - ill now, as well as demented - and two fading consumptive children off to Bruges and while there, in a bleak and unappealing house, nursed all three invalids by day and wrote novels to maintain them all by night. Her sheer practical un-self-pitying courage is awe-inspiring.
Perhaps, if she had had more imagination, she could not have done it. Certainly, if she had had more imagination she could not have been so relentlessly indifferent to her third son, either as a child or later, as a very successful man. When Trollope was at last acclaimed, his mother was amused and slightly incredulous; Anthony could never, ever be much to her, but of his elder brother Tom, she made a surrogate husband. If Trollope was hurt by this overt preference - when his father and his brother Henry died in Bruges, Mrs Trollope sent for Tom on both occasions, but not for Anthony - he left no hint of it. In fact, his tribute to his mother in his Autobiography was one of admiration for her womanly selflessness:
'But with her politics were always an affair of the heart - as indeed were all her convictions. Of reasoning from causes, I think she knew nothing. Here heart was in every way so perfect, her desire to do good to all around her so thorough, and her power of self-sacrifice so complete, that she generally got herself right in spite of her want of logic.'
The wish to see the objects of one's love as worthy, is the natural companion to being more loving than loved. But Trollope's memorials to his parents show, besides his own vulnerability, a most forgiving and perceiving nature.
When Mrs Trollope decided that Anthony should enter the Post Office as a clerk at ninety pounds a year, he accepted it as docilely as he has accepted her previous decisions that he should be an Austrian cavalryman or a schoolmaster in Brussels. The job itself consisted of intolerably tedious letter copying for the most part and Trollope, invariably late and always scruffy, was in hot water from the first. As a shell to protect his inner self, he began to develop the boisterous, obstinate, argumentative persona that was to exasperate and outrage his superiors throughout his long Post Office career. His life, for seven dreadful years, was this preposterous job, seedy digs in Marylebone, inevitable debt, periodic bouts of rowdy behaviour with fellow clerks smoking and drinking gin and brandy in squalid pubs, and night after night of solitary reading. He was bored, frustrated and acutely aware that he neither saw nor spoke to a person - and particularly a woman - of taste and civilisation. He says himself that occasionally 'the temptations of loose life will almost certainly prevail' with a young man with no friends and no money, left very much to his own devices. One can only be glad for him if they did, occasionally because his only other pleasure with his daily thought, a though that had grown out of daydreaming of his childhood, of one day writing a novel.
His release came by his own hand, the first positive step for himself that he had ever taken. He was twenty-six. A post office surveyor at Banagher in the west of Ireland needed a clerk, a post nobody appeared to want, despite it's carrying £400 a year. Trollope applied for it, and got it. Ireland changed his life, and his view of himself. Within three years there, he had discovered his considerable organisational capabilities, horses and hunting, some self-esteem, and a wife. He had at last, sufficient money and was master of his own open air life. 'It was altogether,' he said, 'A very jolly life I led in Ireland,' and the jollity included, in 1843, beginning upon his first novel.
He began it just before his marriage. We know, maddeningly, as little about Trollope's marriage as we do about his young appearance. His bride was called Rose Heseltine, the daughter of a minor Yorkshire bank manager, and they met near Dublin, at the seaside. She was very small, quite pretty and was all her life considered to be elegantly dressed. Trollope says nothing about her at all in his Autobiography except, pompously, that his marriage, like all marriages, is of no concern to anyone but the participants. But it was, from gleanings here and there, an immensely stable and happy marriage, the safe harbour to which Trollope's battered ship of a heart had eventually come. Rose copied out all his novels from his atrocious handwriting, dealt with all his literary affairs when he was abroad, bore him two sons and provided him, as he told his son Henry, with infallible literary judgement. Several critics think she may even have been the inspiration for the spirited, witty, unconventional girls of his novels, some of the most irresistible girls in all Victorian fiction, but if that were the case, would she not have appeared as such in contemporary memoirs which only, ever, mention her clothes? Late in life, Trollope did fall in love with such a free spirit, a young American called Kate Field, and Rose, with a prudence worthy of Susan Grantly, made a friend of the girl herself. But then, if Rose was not the ultimately exhilarating and liberating wife, she did most certainly supply what Trollope had so keenly lacked, stability, unshakeable loyalty and just the right degree of motherliness.
With Rose beside him, Trollope's adult life and character began in earnest. His first novel, The MacDermots of Ballycloran, and a second, lost money but received good and thoughtful reviews; his career in the Post Office was prospering, his family life contented him. He began too - and this revealed itself in the Autobiography - on the making of codes of conduct for himself, patterns of honourable behaviour (no problem since he was very brave both physically and morally) and schedules of unremitting application to his, now, double career, Civil Servant and novelist. The lack of ego that made him so perceptive of other people also meant that melancholy and self-doubt had to be kept at bay by work, and by refusing to be downhearted about adverse criticism. It seems that he wanted the world to think him much more confident and complete a personality than he knew himself to be, and that his deliberate projection of himself as a bluff, simple, gentlemanly fellow only became possible when he had a private life and the infinite joy of writing to retreat to. His novels are psychologically as revealing as they are largely because he never became reconciled to himself, however much he was gratified to be an eminent Civil Servant and a literary lion.
All the time this character-building was going on, Trollope's Post Office duties had taken Rose and the boys all over south west England and back to Ireland (The Warden was written in Belfast) re-organising postal deliveries. Trollope loved every moment; Rose's feelings about being constantly uprooted are not recorded. Eleven years after they were married, The Warden was published to very serious reviews indeed. It was followed by Barchester Towers in 1857 and Framley Parsonage in 1861. By then Trollope was forty-six and he was, at long last, a success, and the substantial kind of Victorian success at that, which meant a good country house, hunting, entertaining and the cherished membership of clubs.
'I have long been aware,' he wrote about this time, 'of a certain weakness in my character, which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me - a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified… The Garrick Club was the first assembly of men at which I felt myself to be popular.'
He had friends at last, patient friends at whom he would boom insensitive remarks and then half-kill himself in apology and contrition. 'Crusty,' the journalist George August Sala called him, 'Quarrelsome, wrong-headed, prejudiced, obstinate, king-hearted and thoroughly honest old Tony Trollope.' He had friends in London, literary friends, political friends, friends of the calibre of Thackeray and Millais and G.H. Lewes. He had friends in the country whom he invited to dinner at Waltham House, and friends on the hunting field.
His three days took on the now celebrated shape - a five a.m. call, coffee and then three and a half hour's writing, two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour, his watch on the desk in front of him. At nine-thirty he dressed, ate a tremendous Victorian breakfast (he would not eat again until the evening) and set off either for London or duties in the eastern counties. If in London he worked through until five, then went to the Garrick or the Athenaeum for tea and whist, and after that, home to Essex and usually a substantial dinner party at which he drank moderately and ate more. 'Thank God, I am very greedy,' he said once to a woman who coquettishly pointed this out. He hunted two days a week. When his Autobiography was published, there was an outcry at this method of writing books, as pedestrian a method as a cobbler mending boots, it was said. Trollope would have enjoyed the outctry for it would have meant that the world was taking him as he wished to be taken, as the straightforward, honest, workaday English squire, entirely untroubled by any dark inner fears.
When he died, in November 1882, of a stroke, he had completed forty-seven novels and his immense popularity was on the wane. The novelist who had been admired by Tolstoy - 'Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence!' he had cried of The Prime Minister - fondly beloved of George Eliot (he had admired and loved her immensely in return) and detested by Rowland Hill, had earned, by his pen, some seventy thousand pounds which he rightly considered good, but not brilliant. The posthumous publication of his Autobiography, a peculiar, interesting and sometimes cantankerous book, did his fame little good and his novels fell from favour, an obscurity they remained in for over half a century. But then came the Second World War, and soldiers all over the Middle and Far East were to be seen carrying the little blue and gold editions of the World's Classics. Trollope, with his Englishness, his infinite perception of personality, his absorbing tracing of relationship and moral dilemma, had made the beginnings of a comeback that is still gathering momentum, a momentum so immense that his reputation has overtaken Thackeray and is hard on the heels of Dickens. The boy whose consciousness of the miseries of his childhood made him 'wretched - sometimes almost unto death' has become a household name.
© Joanna Trollope
Coln St Aldwyns
March 1987
