1 post tagged “trollope”
Never got anyone to publish this:
“In the autumn, 184-, business took me into the West of Ireland, and, amongst other places, to the quiet little village of Drumsna...”
So began, a century and a half ago, the literary career of Anthony Trollope. The “business”, reorganising the postal service in Ireland, brought him over in 1841 and here he stayed for eighteen years. That first novel, The MacDermots of Ballycloran (written in 1845 and published in 1847), and his unfinished final work, The Landleaguers (1883) were both, as the titles suggest, set in Ireland. In between, amongst his prodigious output, were several other “Irish” novels. In comparison with his “Barchester” and “Palliser” series, these are all little known, in England or in Ireland. While they are not perhaps up to the standard of his masterpieces, they are nevertheless hugely enjoyable, and offer a unique view of Ireland during those turbulent forty years.
Not that they are pieces of social history. Sex, money and obsessive behaviour, Trollope’s favourite themes, feature as strongly as in the rest of his work. But he does use, to a varying extent, the events of his time as backdrops to his novels, and he is almost invariably sympathetic to the Irish cause.
The MacDermots deals with the problems of an impoverished Catholic landlord in the West, and in particular the ruin of his sister by Myles Ussher, a Northern Protestant Revenue Policeman. Although a devout Anglican himself, Trollope did not, on the whole, deal kindly with Irish Protestants in his novels, portraying many of them as self-serving bigots. The book tends to the gothic at times, and has not received much critical acclaim, even from Trollope himself. Nevertheless, for all its faults, it is an engrossing work, and paints a fascinating picture of Irish rural poverty before the Famine.
His second novel, The Kellys and the O’Kellys, again has as its central character a down-at-heel Connaught landlord, but this time a step up the social scale. For a start, O’Kelly is nominally a Protestant, though no bigot, and while MacDermot is almost destitute, O’Kelly can keep a few race-horses. Already Trollope is maturing as a writer - this is a considerably more accomplished work - and he is beginning to develop themes that will dominate his mid-career novels. The hero falls for a wealthy Kildare heiress, and his love is returned, much to the displeasure of her relatives, who are desperate to keep her money in the family. A fascinating feature of the book is the contrast that Trollope depicts between the manners of the landed classes in Mayo and those in Kildare. Indeed The Kellys and the O’Kellys could be considered only half an “Irish” novel, the behaviour of the aristocrats in the East being virtually indistinguishable from that of their English cousins in, for instance, the “Palliser” series.
Where the novel falls down in comparison to those later works is in Trollope’s failure to use the political events of the time to draw analogies between public and private life. Tantalisingly, the story begins in Dublin with the trial in 1844 of Daniel O’Connell, but unfortunately this is forgotten about after Chapter One. He misses a trick here, and fails to turn a good book into a great one.
Trollope then left Ireland, both physically and artistically, for several years. His literary return is marked by Castle Richmond (1860). By this time he was a well established writer, with the Barset books under his belt, and he had developed a taste for describing the English squirearchy and their interactions with the aristocracy. Castle Richmond takes the same theme and transports it to Ireland. The central characters, like the Kilcullens in The Kellys and the O’Kellys, could easily be English. But the scene is set during the Famine, and the reactions of the principals to the misery around them is critical to the plot. Throughout the book Trollope shows enormous sympathy for the victims. There was a feeling in England at the time that a great deal had been done to help relieve the Famine, but with precious little thanks from the Irish. Trollope slaps this down:
“To call them ungrateful would imply too deep a reproach, for their convictions were that they were being ill-used by the upper classes. When they received bad meal which they could not cook, and even in their extreme hunger could hardly eat half-cooked; when they were desired to leave their cabins and gardens, and flock into the wretched barracks which were prepared for them, when they saw their children wasting away under a suddenly altered system of diet, it would have been unreasonable to expect that they should have been grateful. Grateful for what?”
But the book acquired a certain notoriety in Ireland because of the way Trollope extolled the abysmal British response - he was, remember, an English Civil Servant - and his Panglossian attitude to the after-effects of the Famine. His views were widespread at the time, but they jar to a modern reader and spoil an otherwise fine novel.
Although there would be Irish scenes, and an Irish catholic hero, Phineas Finn, in his great “political” works it would be another nineteen years before he next set a book primarily in Ireland. An Eye for an Eye, a strange little book, has points in common with The MacDermots. Trollope returns to the West and deals, melodramatically at times, with the betrayal of an Irish girl by a Protestant officer (English this time) and his eventual come-uppance. It is not obvious what Trollope was trying to say nor why he wrote the piece. Uniquely among his Irish novels, the contemporary social and political scenes do not feature in any way.
But he would more than make up for this in The Landleaguers. The book is at times almost a political statement. Trollope, the archetypal moderate conservative, disliked both Coercion and Land Reform. As one of his characters says:
“When they’ve passed this Coercion Bill they’re going to have some sort of Land Bill, - just a law to give away the land to somebody. What’s to become of the poor country with such men as Mr Gladstone and Mr Bright to govern it? They’re the two worst men in the whole empire for governing a country.”
The book was unfinished, and therefore unrevised, when Trollope died, so it is hard to judge it on its own as a work of art. But it is fair to group it with the other four Irish novels and ask how valuable a contribution he made to Irish literature. Certainly “Good, but could do better” would be justified. But considering that all five were commercial failures - the English didn’t want to read about Ireland at the time - his perseverance in writing on the topic and his unbigoted approach to the subject are to be applauded. He obviously loved his adopted country
