In recent months I have devoted quite a bit of my time to an activity that will no doubt surprise any regular readers of this space,
in view of my customary hostility towards religion. I have been reading a
series of novels that deal in immense detail with the lives of Anglican clergymen
in Victorian England.
Readers with a modicum of knowledge of English literature
will probably have immediately guessed that I have been reading the Barchester
novels of Anthony Trollope. I read some of them many years go, but recently came
across a couple of others that have been sitting in my library unread for
years, and was immediately hooked.
As portrayed
in Trollope, Anglican clergymen of that period
could more closely be compared to a nest of vipers, bitterly embroiled in resentful
behaviour towards those above and below them, than to the cosy milk-and-water nice blokes that we are
accustomed to think them.
The two novels that are the subject of this
article are Framley Parsonage, and The Last Chronicle of Barset, the latter
of which brings the series of six books to a close. Trollope, as I have
discovered from reading a biography of him written by James Pope Hennessy, was
an amazingly prolific writer who produced
almost 40 novels, plus a plethora of short stories, travel books and
other works in the 35 years that he was
an active writer, but who also, during most of that time held down a job in the
Post Office which took him to various places in the British Isles and even to
other countries.
He was a keen
observer of social conditions, and of politics, of which his so-called Palliser
novels take us into the centre of the politics of his time. One distinguishing fact about him according
to Pope Hennessy, was that he was incapable of recognizing his many bad works from
his many good ones; he would no doubt have been amazed to discover that his two
great series of novels are still being read 130 years after his death, and,
also according to his biographer, many other of his novels besides the Palliser
and Barchester series are among the finest novels ever written by an Englishman.
Trollope was
a gruff, rowdy, unprepossessing character,
marked for life by an horrendous boyhood in which he was neglected, virtually
ignored by his family, who at one point
emigrated to the United States with siblings in tow except that he was left
behind alone at a school in England. When he decided to become a writer –--
very much in the family tradition, because his mother became a famous popular
writer of travel books and novels --- he set himself a semi-industrial schedule
which required him to get up at 4.30 almost every morning of his life and write
until breakfast, producing in his almost illegible handwriting page after page
of plots that he had carefully worked out in advance.
These two
novels have cracking plots, but are even more impressive for the characters he
draws with such deep understanding. One aspect of the life of that time that I
found extremely fascinating from Trollope’s description of the country gentry and
those dependent upon them, is that the inequality of incomes that is so notable
a feature of our own times appears to have been even worse in those days than
today, when we so often hear claims that it has reached “the worst levels ever.”
Pope Hennessy claims that no other British writer has ever so clearly described
the concern about money shown by the gentlemen of the shires. Within the Church
the same thing was true: in Framley
Parsonage Bishop Proudie, was the top dog in theory, but in practice
he was a much despised weakling who was totally under the thumb of his aggressive, domineering, and, in the
parishes, bitterly resented, wife.
Bishop
Proudie came to his office against the wishes of Lady Lufton, a proud relic of
the landed family of the county, who had at her disposal a number of parishes and
other clerical appointments, some of which were accompanied by a substantial
income, but others that were fated to be among the very poorest in the land. Lady
Lufton had been nursing along one of her favourites, Mark Robarts, a handsome, likeable
young man who quite soon felt the need to assert some minimal independence from
his benefactor. He had his own horses, of course, with which to ride to hounds,
and he did not hesitate to have social intercourse with certain characters who
came under the rule of the Duke of Omnium, a man despised by Lady Lufton. This independent streak soon landed him in
trouble, for he agreed to sign a bill for an influential man of business and
politics, in the expectation that no call would be made on him to honour the debt. Of course the man was unreliable, and so the
Rev. Mark, who was a close personal friend of young Lord Lufton, eventually found
himself in some pretty dark waters.
Lady Lufton
was a woman of immense wealth, and her son could have paid off his friend’s debts
if only he had turned to him with a request for help. The Rev. however, was too
proud to do so. Lady Lufton was hoping
that her son might marry the eldest daughter of the Archdeacon, Griselda Grantly,
a beautiful but rather empty-headed girl, thus assuring his future for all time,
the Grantly’s being almost as wealthy as her ladyship. But Mark Robarts had a
sister, Fanny, unregarded by Lady Lufton or anyone else, except that it was
noticed that the young Lord was spending a lot of time in conversation with her.
In the event Lord Lufton steadfastly refused to marry Griselda, and caused a tremendous
kerfuffle by insisting that he would marry Miss Robarts.
The further
complication of this plot came through the plight of Mr. Crawley, the
impecunious holder of the parish of Hogglestock, a man of rigid virtue, immense
learning, unbendable principle, and a pride so intense that he would refuse to
allow his wife to accept gifts offered from better-off houses to ease the
burden of poverty imposed by his rigidity on his wife and children. It has been
written that Mr. Crawley is one of the greatest characters ever created in the English novel, a man so pious that even his wife recognized at times that his
piety drove him to the brink of actual lunacy. So poor were they that Mrs. Crawley
became stricken with typhoid, and to everyone’s amazement Miss Robarts insisted
on moving into the Crawley hovel to tend to the invalid, and stayed here
without ever leaving for many months until her patient had recovered.
With a girl
of such sterling qualities, Lord Lufton’s infatuation with her could not be
denied, especially since Griselda Grantly had begun to attract the attention of
a stodgy Lord Dumbello, who stood to inherit an earldom, thus clearing the way for
Lord Lufton to marry Miss Robarts, elevating
her into Her Ladyship, albeit at a lower level than the Archdeacon’s daughter.
The various
incomes of these people are said to have ranged from Duke of Omnium’s unmentionable fortune down through a graded
system past the wealthy Dean Arabin and Archdeacon Grantly, with their two hundred thousand a year, to Mark Robarts with his several hundred a year,
and lower to Mr. Crawley’s thirty-nine pounds a year, a veritable famine wage.
The clergymen
may have had the occasional duty but none of the monied people is ever
described as actually working for a living. They lived on their estates, and
presumably on the income derived from rents paid by their tenants, and of
course, from their investments. The
sterling Lucy Robarts arranged for Mr. Crawley’s children to be housed with
some of the more wealthy neighbours while their mother was ill, and one of
these children Grace, was found already to have a sound classical education
forced on her by her father, and in
other respects to be a girl deserving of high praise.
By the end of
Volume I of the Last Chronicle, Mr. Crawley
had been accused to having cashed a cheque for twenty pounds which belonged to
someone else. Thus he was accused of stealing, an offence which could end his
career as a clergyman, and plunge his family into a social status beyond the
imagination of any proper person. But there had been a further superb development
of the plot. Just as Trollope had succeeded in creating in Fanny Robarts a portrait
of a wonderful, pure, English girl, so he had created in Grace Crawley an even
more rigidly proper, even more engaging and delightful young woman, who was
lusted after by Major Henry Grantly, brother of the Marchioness, and son of the
wealthy Archdeacon, who was so outraged that his son could think of marrying a
girl from the family of a man likely to be convicted of theft, that he
threatened to strip him of the eight hundred pounds allowance that enabled his
son to live in relative luxury.
I simply had
to find Volume II of this book, and instituted an immediate internet search for
it. I was not surprised to find it was not available in second-hand bookstores
in North America, but no fewer than 50 small second-hand bookstores in England
had on offer exactly the Volume I was seeking. I bought one that was being sold
for one dollar, plus four or five dollars for the postage. Although obviously no
one could be making money on this transaction, the book arrived, printed in
1936, looking as if it had never been touched, in apple-pie order, and thus I
was able to finish the story.
The Archdeacon
was beside himself with fury that his son should have thought of marrying so
far beneath him. He was adamant on the matter, but when he was finally
persuaded to meet Grace Crawley, she so charmed him by her upright honesty and
winsome manner that he began slowly to regret his stern admonition. When told that his son had already proposed
to Grace and been rejected, the Archdeacon was delighted, the more especially
because her refusal arose from the most impeccable of reasons, namely, the impossibility, in her eyes, that she
should bring discredit on the Archdeacon’s family by allying it with a family
headed by a likely thief.
This is the
kind of dilemma that could occur probably only to the super-ethical heroines portrayed by Trollope. Certainly I
have never known such a woman in my life, and I am not sure I should have liked
her had I known such a one. But it all came out in the end, propelled by Miss Crawley’s
outstanding qualities: a family friend, John Eames, who himself had been denied
the girl he loved because, after falling for a bounder she had decided she
would be an old maid for the rest of her life,
undertook to go to Europe in search of the holidaying Dean Arabin, who,
in his younger days had been a close personal friend of Mr Crawley. This voyage was so successful that Mrs Arabin,
who had been unaware of the charges against Mr Crawley, readily admitted that
she had slipped the cheque into an envelope of notes that she had sent to Mr.
Crawley. The man was therefore cleared of theft, the whole case dropped, along with
the Archdeacon’s objections to Miss Grace Crawley. And Mr. Crawley was reluctantly
persuaded to accept an appointment to a better parish that would pay him a
living wage for the rest of his life.
I have no reason to doubt Mr. Pope Hennessy’s extremely high opinion of Trollope the
novelist. Certainly, once involved in his unlikely tales of intrigue among the
churchmen, I have proven unable to put them down. And I recommend them to
anyone who loves a rattling good tale, and who has the time to read some very
long books.
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