The Reasonable Man: Trollope's Legal Fiction

The Reasonable Man: Trollope's Legal Fiction

by Coral Lansbury
The Reasonable Man: Trollope's Legal Fiction

The Reasonable Man: Trollope's Legal Fiction

by Coral Lansbury

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Overview

In a new interpretation of the fiction of Anthony Trollope, Coral Lansbury argues that Trollope's work in the Post Office, starting in 1834, had more influence on his fiction than did any literary figure or tradition. Drawing on her original research in Post Office Records, she reveals the ways in which legal forms and legal reasoning shape both the language and the structure of Trollope's published work.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691615073
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 07/14/2014
Series: Princeton Legacy Library , #666
Pages: 242
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Reasonable Man

Trollope's Legal Fiction


By Coral Lansbury

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06457-4



CHAPTER 1

The Legal Structure of Trollope's Fiction


A miserable childhood of pain and rejection would seem the prerequisite for a successful novelist in the Victorian period. Certainly, Anthony Trollope had experienced refinements of humiliation that surpassed the brutal shock of the young Charles Dickens set to pasting labels in a blacking factory. The ingenious torments of childhood were expressed with considerable resourcefulness by the masters and pupils at Winchester and Harrow when Trollope, shabby and dirty, awkward and ugly, shortsighted and dull, "became a Pariah" in their midst. With more time on their hands, the public school boys could maintain a bloody-minded oppression with far greater persistence than Dickens' cockney workmates. At least it was possible for Dickens to cherish the belief that he was a gentleman, cast down by fortune into a company that was alien to his nature. It was rather more difficult for Trollope to assert his proper station in society when gentlemen of all ages seemed bent on rejecting him. If his home and family had ever provided a refuge, a measure of consolation for the grief of childhood, it is possible that Trollope would have become neither so troubled a man nor the most judicial and pragmatic novelist of the age.

Trollope was twelve in 1827 when his mother went to America with his younger brother Henry and his two sisters. It was a journey that later produced a literary profit after the financial disaster of Frances Trollope's attempt to establish a cultural and commercial bazaar in Cincinnati where the resident natives could buy European gewgaws and acquire a little artistic polish. Social philanthropy as a result of capitalist enterprise was highly approved then and later, but few had attempted it with such flamboyance and slender means. Undoubtedly, the moral improvement of the Americans would have justified the Trollopes' descent into trade, but they were not to enjoy the satisfaction of doing good and making money at the same time. It was the record of this failure, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, which gave the family a momentary financial stability. The book was acclaimed by the conservative opposition to the Reform Bill as testimony to the folly of a democratic suffrage. The blame of failure for the Cincinnati bazaar was now satisfactorily accepted as the natural consequence of Radical enthusiasm and American crassness.

Trollope admired his mother's industry and fortitude throughout the agonies of illness when she later wrote her novels and nursed and buried all her family save Anthony and her eldest and best-loved son, Thomas Adolphus. However, Anthony's sympathies were tempered by an awareness that he had always been overlooked, and when not neglected, then made the whipping boy for many of the family's misfortunes. It seemed to him that his mother's gaiety in the face of disaster was more a reflection of her inability to accept facts than a reasoned optimism. His own misery as a child was made more painful by this disregarding cheerfulness. He was always seen as difficult and sullen, a boy whose cloddish mind was manifest in his ungainly appearance. Yet the dullard was capable of a brilliant commentary on Burke's On the Sublime when he was at Harrow, revealing on paper his power to test motive and act against social forms. No doubt it was part of Trollope's mode of critical enquiry at this age but it received neither attention nor commendation. It was not in tackling Burke that the young scholar received his laurels, but from an exhilarating encounter with a Greek threnodist.

When he wrote his autobiography as an old man, Trollope remembered how at Winchester his brother Thomas had flogged him every day: "Hang a little boy for stealing apples, he used to say, and other little boys will not steal apples." There had been no stolen apples, just a failure to construe, and Thomas's own satisfaction in being able to inflict pain with the righteous authority of age and intellectual superiority. It was an attitude that he attempted to maintain over his brother throughout his life, gleefully pouncing on inaccuracies in Anthony Trollope's Commentaries of Caesar and Life of Cicero and commending his mother as a merry angel of delight after Trollope had noted, in his posthumously published Autobiography, that her enthusiasm had been balanced by an equal measure of insensitivity. Clearly, for Thomas, Anthony saw his childhood "too much en noir." Anthony had never known that darkness to be made light by a brother's presence.

Loneliness had been the measure of Trollope's youth. One summer he spent in his father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn:

There was often a difficulty about the holidays, — as to what should be done with me. On this occasion my amusement consisted in wandering about among those old deserted buildings, and in reading Shakespeare out of a bicolumned edition, which is still among my books. It was not that I had chosen Shakespeare, but that there was nothing else.


Loneliness can result in a stupor of mental and physical inaction; it may become the source of contending symbolic fictions within the mind. Shakespeare has kindled less active imaginations than Trollope's. As a child Trollope knew both the torpor of loneliness and the absorption of creating a fictional world. There was no comfort for him in family or friends at school. His father, once a brilliant barrister, now shambled in moods of neurotic depression either cuffing Latin into his sons or, in more genial moments, reading Sir Charles Grandison aloud as the evening's entertainment.

The brief flurry of financial success after The Domestic Manners of the Americans was soon buried in the customary debts. Like the Micawbers, the Trollopes could no longer afford to live in England as gentlefolk. They left for Bruges in a moonlight flit, barely managing to rescue a few belongings from the bailiffs who were about to take possession of "Julians," that blighted residence at Harrow, and all its contents. In Bruges Trollope's father and his brother Henry were to die and be buried. Thomas Adolphus had gone schoolmastering, but there seemed no occupation possible for Anthony save a wild suggestion of a post in an Austrian cavalry regiment. It was obvious that the awkward Anthony could not expect a straight and easy road to success. Returning to England, Frances Trollope remembered her dear friend, Mrs. Clayton Freeling, whose father-in-law, Sir Francis Freeling, was Secretary to the Post Office and the employer of many young men as clerks in his thriving service. A letter was sufficient, and Anthony Trollope became a junior clerk on November 4, 1834, in the Secretary's office, "in the room of Mr. Dizzle resigned." That unfortunate gentleman had, in fact, been dismissed. Trollope was to be given ninety pounds a year and lodging found for him in Northumberland Street in Marylebone.

Freeling, born in Bristol, had begun his long and illustrious career in the early 1770s, as an assistant to another young man destined for fame, John Palmer, a theater proprietor of Bath. Together they had worked on Palmer's plan to speed the mails by armed mail coaches and, the success of Palmer's plan assured, Freeling had become in 1787 head of the Post Office's corps of Riding Surveyors — men responsible to London for the supervision and efficient working of local postal services. The Post Office relied on the eyes and ears of these men, and the varied nature of the surveyors' duties proved an invaluable training-ground for men with the ability and energy of Freeling. By 1798 he had won, to some extent by patronage, but certainly by merit, the top appointment of Secretary to the Post Office. From that date until his death in 1836 he was in control of the Post Office, supervising the construction of the new headquarters and central sorting office near St. Paul's; extending rural posts where profitable; and regulating the Post Office's transition from the slower days of sailing packet and mounted postboys to the hurtling progress through the night of armed mail coaches on all the major post-roads and, later, into the new age of steampower over seas and by rail.

Without a university education and dependent upon patronage for his own post, Freeling was happy to oblige friends with positions for likely lads without the means of entering a profession. In his day this was the way appointments were made, with the requirement of an entrance examination no more than a gesture to the reforming zealots of the community. Freeling's ideal was the creation of a profitable postal service of surpassing excellence, and no aspect of it escaped his personal care, not even the welfare of a morose young clerk in the general office.

As in his formative years as a Postal Surveyor, Freeling wrote continually: official minutes and reports to the Postmaster General, the political head of the Post Office; missives berating the drunkard who had a habit of spending more time at the pub than delivering the mail, letters of condolence with the odd fiver to a letter-carrier's widow; and minutes insisting that prisoners had as much right to a regular postal service and fair postage as other citizens of the realm. It was his boast that he knew, personally, every letter-carrier in London, and no doubt he did. Of course, he was fortunate that he did not have to work with long-established and entrenched rules of governance. The Post Office was still small enough for one man to run and its traditions were to be of Freeling's own making. His administration was benign, authoritarian, and, occasionally, idiosyncratic. It was also remarkably effective.

In his minute recommending Trollope's appointment, Freeling had generously described him as being "well educated," but this was not evident in the lad's variable spelling and eccentric grammar. Trollope had acquired a smattering of Latin and Greek at Winchester and Harrow, but he was essentially self-educated and as unprepared for civil service as Charley Tudor in The Three Clerk s. Nevertheless, in Trollope's day the survival of intelligence despite a public-school education was an accomplishment in its own right. In the Autobiography Trollope exaggerated his ignorance at this age in order to magnify his later success. As he had demonstrated in his commentary on Burke he was, like most young critics, pompous, opinionated, and obscure, but with the difference that marks originality from mere talent, he had already discovered his own voice. In his ability to measure received views by experience, Trollope was refining his perception to become the compass of honesty that set the course for his life and work. For example, he always affirmed that it was influence, not competence, which gained him a post in government.

In London, as at Harrow and Bruges, loneliness was as much self-imposed as actual. Genteel poverty is the worst poverty of all and Trollope felt that his place on the threshold of gentility was very precarious indeed. Gentlemen went to university like his brother Tom (even Henry had managed a term at Caius) or, better still, they inherited property and lived on an income not earned across a counter. It was socially acceptable for gentlemen to enter the public service after careers in the military or with a university degree, but now it was the lower middle class that was pushing its way into government departments and blurring the standards that separated a gentleman from the ordinary run of men. Trollope detested the monotony of his work and the tepid dissipations of his leisure hours. It was no fine thing to ape the heavy swell in a chophouse in Butcher Hall Lane, and he refused invitations from his mother's friends in London because he felt he had neither the manner nor the means to mix with gentlefolk.

The work at the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand was stupefyingly dull for the ungainly youth. He resented the servitude of regular hours from ten to four and complained about them as bitterly as any Manchester mill hand confined to his loom from dawn until dark. The right to leisure and the authority to regulate the hours of work was becoming a major distinction between the gentleman and the worker. At this stage of his career Trollope considered himself a drudge. Later he was to adjust his work to accommodate his passion for hunting, the confirmation of the rights of the gentleman over the duties of the civil servant.

After Waterloo it was the military officers who made excellent public servants. These were men accustomed to discipline and not afraid to exact it from others. Trollope felt oppressed under Freeling, but when Colonel Maberley was appointed Secretary at Freeling's death in 1836, life became a rebellious misery for the young clerk. Maberley was a blustering autocrat who treated his clerks like batmen and his colleagues like junior officers. Trollope resented being treated like a slovenly conscript and felt that he had been forced back into the slavery of his school days without the physical shame of being flogged.

At Harrow and Winchester Trollope had found a refuge from the daily stumble through classical texts in a world of his imagining. Now at the Grand he sought the same means of escape from copying minutes and reports and writing official letters. There was a crucial difference. Under Maberley at the General Post Office he found only a slight variation from the brutal tedium of school. However, whereas at the latter he learned little, at the Grand he was taught to write English and write it well. The seven years in the general office before he accepted a position as a postal surveyor's clerk in Ireland were to provide the structure for all Trollope's fiction. It was the conjunction and the conflict between the official factual report and the realm of fiction that created the novels.

If Trollope had not sought and found a world of his own design, just as the Brontës had fashioned Angria and Gondal at Haworth, it is possible that he would have committed suicide or succumbed to that worse death in life which gives the mind to inaction and the body to sloth. "But, ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart," he recalled as an old man, "how I considered whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything." And as a boy he had written in response to Burke's reasoned aphorisms that the pleasure of melancholy is a component of grief: "NO ONE CAN LIKE GRIEF." When Burke stated that no man would choose a life of perfect pleasure at the cost of a death in torment, Trollope's comment in the margin was terse and from the heart: "I would." At school he had not been permitted to play cricket or squash rackets. His few friends were the despised solitaries like himself. Only the solace of his daydreams enabled him to survive.

These dreams were not the panting fantasies of sexual heroism that inspire most lads, but an ordered and genial society in which he was neither famous nor heroic, simply bright and popular:

I coveted popularity with a coveting which was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my schooldays has clung to me all through life.


Trollope hungered to be liked by all, to exert the unconscious charm of a Phineas Finn or a Harry Annesley; instead the pariah of Harrow had become the misfit of the Post Office, writing letters, copying reports.

It was not Colonel Maberley who had projected the form and style of the reports that Trollope initially found as dull as Greek syntax, but Sir Francis Freeling, who had given him a job and then tried fruitlessly to befriend him. Freeling's work at the Post Office has been largely forgotten, obscured not by Maberley's "military governorship" that lasted eighteen years, but by the much-acclaimed success of Rowland Hill and his system of uniform penny postage of 1840. Yet it was Freeling who had already set the pattern the postal service was to follow throughout Hill's subsequent administration, even down to the end of the century and beyond — speed, efficiency, and a reasonable profit. It was the working of the internal bureaucracy of the Post Office that had most clearly reflected Freeling's determination to make it the most efficient, best regulated, and — of paramount importance in Freeling's day, when the posts were a major source of revenue — the most profitable department of government.

Freeling's industry had been prodigious. He did not publish, like his friend, Sir Henry Taylor at the Colonies. His life was the Post Office. One of Freeling's reforms was the change in the structure and style of all letters, minutes, and reports in the Post Office. Throughout his long term of office all submissions to the Postmaster General were written by Freeling himself, in his own hand. Some two hundred bound volumes and nearly seven hundred large boxes crammed with his original reports still remain in Post Office records as witness to and nearly seven hundred large boxes crammed with his original reports still remain in Post Office records as witness to his industry. Invaluable to the historian — whether his field is local, economic, social, or political history — these detailed records of Freeling's administration provide a unique and comprehensive picture of communications throughout the empire.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Reasonable Man by Coral Lansbury. Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

  • FrontMatter, pg. i
  • Table Of Contents, pg. vii
  • Preface, pg. ix
  • Acknowledgments, pg. xi
  • I. The Legal Structure Of Trollope's Fiction, pg. 1
  • II. Order And Vision, pg. 26
  • III. Society Examined: The Travel Books, pg. 48
  • IV. Success And Personality: Autobiography And Biography, pg. 69
  • V. Society And The Language Of Law, pg. 82
  • Vi. The Macdermots of Ballycloran, pg. 112
  • VII. The Single Transaction—Conscience And Society: The Warden, pg. 129
  • VIII. The Single Transaction—Guilt And Society: Cousin Henry, pg. 144
  • IX. The Multiple Transaction—Social Contracts—Law And Justice: Orley Farm, pg. 157
  • X. The Multiple Transaction—Social Contracts—The Rebels: Mr. Scarborough's Family, Ayala's Angel, pg. 172
  • XI. The Extended Multiple Transaction—The Rights and Duties of Barchester: The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, The Last Chronicle of Barset, pg. 190
  • XII. The Extended Multiple Transaction— Privilege and Power in Politics: Can You Forgive Her? Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, The Prime Minister, The Duke's Children, pg. 212
  • Index, pg. 225



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