From Trollope to Gide I

 I love a good Trollope. Well, let me qualify that. I have gained immense satisfaction from the Trollopes I have read: viz. The Barchester series, all six of them, and Dr. Wortle's School. I re-read all of them, in the correct chronological order of course, last year. More recently, I have been dipping into one of the Trollope Society's excellently produced tomes - Anthony Trollope on Clergyman of the Church of England (others I have include A Guide to Trollope by the Geroulds and Barchester Pilgrimage by Ronald A. Knox).

    

           Ronald Knox - 1935                The Geroulds - 1948              A. Trollope -1866

I finished Trollope's Clergymen during an atmospheric long weekend in Salisbury. Our hotel's lawns ran down to the River Avon and we could see, across a field with a few sheep in, the wonderful spire of the cathedral. A few minutes' stroll brought us into the Close and its surrounding Trollopian buildings - a long dip into the Salisbury Museum's marvellous collection, a sneer as I swiftly walked past the late Ted 'Grocer' Heath's 'chateau' and, then, a slow, slow wander inside the cathedral itself.  Memories of my researches into Walter Hungerford for the Richard III Society's Journal in the late 1970s came flooding back as I ambled past two Hungerford table tombs. 

 

                                 The River Avon                         The Rose and Crown

 

            Walter 1st Lord Hungerford d. 1449          Robert Lord Hungerford d. 1459

Then a pause at a memorial to the episcopal father of Chancellor Christopher Wordsworth (1848-1938) a dear friend of John Meade Falkner; another at Richard Jefferies' (1848-1887) wall-mounted memorial and a third at Gilbert Burnet's (1643-1715), Bishop of Salisbury, the great Scottish philosopher and historian. What a wealth of talent, and probable piety, is remembered in this great building. The refreshments and an original Magna Carta were bonuses.

   

                           Christopher Wordsworth                   Richard Jefferies

Gilbert Burnet

We tore ourselves away from Salisbury on the Sunday, to travel the few miles to Winchester, another great cathedral town. The highlight for me was not the cathedral (rather squat and grey, with nothing like the beauty of its sister); or the ruins of Wolvesey Castle (Bishop's Palace) - base of the famous Bishop Henry, brother of King Stephen. We met no Russians, either.

On the way back from the ruins I passed the rather forlorn-looking last domicile of Jane Austen, where she died in 1817. Chawton appears to be the Mecca. No, the highlight was recalling and then entering the superb, if tiny, second-hand book shop in the cathedral close. For once 'biography' didn't mean the vacuous irrelevance of modern pop-singers, 'celebrities', sports-people and other transient nonentities, but proper in-depth studies of the long-dead and history-making people.  I spent a happy half-hour in there, occasionally surreptitiously lowering my mask  to 'de-steam' my glasses. Two hardbacks (on Henry V and Redcoat: The Phantom Fox) joined two well-preserved first printing orange Penguins - novels by André Gide. I had heard of him but never read anything by him. That evening I started on his The Immoralist...