Anthony Trollope's 'An Autobiography' 1883

 

The Trollope Society edition - 1999

I am back with a Trollope - this time the Great Man on himself. Although written in 1878, he told his son Henry that it was not to be published until after his death - which occurred on 6th December 1882. Henry made no alterations to his father's text, but suppressed a few passages but not more than would amount to two printed pages has been omitted. He also added a list of the books his father had published subsequent to the Autobiography being written This included one of my favourites, Doctor Wortle's School. The list totalled a further thirteen works.

William Blackwood first edition - 1883

Trollope has been criticised for the almost mercenary feel that he gives to his career as a Man of Letters. Certainly, the pages abound with references to how much he made from his books and his financial dealings with publishers, but he is very honest about it. In his Conclusion, Trollope lists not only the title and publication date of each work, but the total sum accrued. I found it interesting that the novel he received most money for was Can You  Forgive Her? (1864), for which he gained £3,525; it is not a book I have read. The only other books to net him £3,000 or more were Phineas Finn (1869) and He Knew He Was Right (1869) - both at £3,200; Orly Farm (1862) at £3,135; and, for £3,000, Small House at Allington (1864), The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) and The Way We Live Now (1875). Trollope totalled up his earnings by 1879 to £68,939 17s 5d. (which included £7,800 for Sundries!).

What also came across was the author's decided opinions on the merits, or demerits, of his books. He argues that Barchester Towers would hardly be so well known as it is had there been no Framley Parsonage and no Last Chronicle of Barset...The Three Clerks was a good novel... Doctor Thorne has, I believe been the most popular book that I have written - if I may take the sale as proof of comparative popularity...I have been surprised by the success of Doctor Thorne... I do not think that I have ever done better work on Orly Farm and Can You Forgive Her?...Outside Lily Dale and the chief interest in the novel, The Small House at Allington is, I think, good...Taking it as a whole I regard [The Last Chronicle of Barset] as the best novel I have written...The Way We Live Now was, as a satire, powerful and good... 

On the other hand, the story of The Bartrams is more than ordinarily bad, and as the book was redeemed by no special character it failed...Most of my friends say that [Orly Farm] is the best I have written. In this opinion I do not coincide...The Belton Estate is similar in its attributes to Rachel Ray and to Miss Mackenzie. It is readable and contains scenes which are true to life, but it has no peculiar merits and will add nothing to my reputation as a novelist... He Knew He Was Right - I do not know that in any literary effort I ever fell more completely short of my own intention than in this story...I look upon the story as being nearly altogether bad...Ralph the Heir have always thought it to be one of the worse novels I have written.  

It was good to read again about the embryo of The Warden: I visited Salisbury and whilst wandering there on a midsummer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I conceived the story of The Warden - from whence came that series of novels of which Barchester with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon was the central site. What a wonderful and productive wander!

As for his place in the Pantheon of English Literature, he wrote: I do not think it probable that my name will remain among those who in the next century will be known as the writers of English prose fiction; but if it does, that permanence of success will probably rest on the characters of Plantagenet Palliser, Lady Glencora and the Revd Mr Crawley. Well, not having read about the first two, I couldn't possibly comment; but, surely, one has to add Septimus Harding, the Warden; Archdeacon Grantley; Mrs Proudie; and even Mr Slope to that list.

I did empathise with his comment about his own Library and its cataloguing: As all who use libraries know, a catalogue is nothing unless it shows the spot on which every book is to be found - information which every volume also ought to give of itself. Only those who have done it know how great is the labour of moving and arranging a few thousand volumes. At the present moment I own about 5,000 volumes, and they are dearer to me even than the horses which are going, or than the wine in the cellar which is very apt to go and upon which I also pride myself. Well, I own no horse nor do I possess a cellar, but my books (I have over 3,000 more than Trollope) are very dear to me.  Nearly all the hardbacks are catalogued - what would I do without Libib? - many of them listed and illustrated in my privately produced author bibliographies; and I can go straight to any book on a shelf that an enquirer wishes to peruse. It is a harmless, relatively inexpensive passion, but book-collecting is a disease, pleasant though it might feel.

James Morris's 'Farewell the Trumpets' 1978

 

Faber and Faber first edition - 1978  

James Morris (who had gender reassignment surgery in 1972) died as Jan Morris in North Wales in November 2020, aged 94. Some years back, I read his/her book on The Venetian Empire (Penguin, 1990) and liked the easy style very much. Then, a couple of years ago, I bought and read Heaven's Command (Faber, 1973) the first - but not the first to be written - on the British Empire, which I have commented on in a previous Blog. This volume, taking the story from 1897 to Sir Winston Churchill's death in 1965, completes the trilogy. Inevitably for a proud Englishman, this is the most poignant volume to read.

One could argue that Kaiser Bill and Herr Hitler destroyed the British Empire, with a supporting heavy push by Comrade Stalin and a more cynical shove by Roosevelt and the USA. However, the increasingly strong stirrings from 'within', steadfastly propelled  by Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah; by Kenyatta and Nkrumah and Nyerere; and a host of less remarkable African, West Indian, and Far East leaders (demagogues?) were, by the end of the Second World War, pushing at an 'open door'. Harold Macmillan's tour of southern Africa, with his famous 'Wind of Change' speech, merely underlined what had been happening for well over two decades.

For someone who grew up on two British West Indian Islands in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and whose Geography lessons were all about trade between a 'Mother Country' and its brood, the Empire appeared to be an orderly, well-run, 'natural' state of affairs - by 'Heaven's Command' almost. What Morris' final volume shows, is just how shaky - almost 'unnatural' - everything was. Mountbatten's precipitate Imperial withdrawal from the Indian subcontinent had major flaws, but the alternative would have surely been worse. The Palestinian mandate was a poisoned chalice which should have been steered clear of - the eternal enmity between Jew and Arab is still going strong after nearly seventy years. Few African states (British or otherwise) are well governed; anarchy or brutal dictatorship rules in most. It becomes increasingly difficult to keep blaming the European powers for the continuing mess. 

Morris skilfully weaves the general with the specific, explaining the developments in the various states - from the Far East (Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Burma); the Middle East (Palestine, Iraq, Persia, Aden and Syria); West and East Africa (the Gambia, Gold Coast/Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya Tanganyika), Southern Africa (the Rhodesias, Nyasaland, South Africa); the West Indies (Jamaica, Trinidad, British Honduras, Bermuda...); and the far flung Falkland Islands, Mauritius, the South Sea islands. His travels in the early and mid seventies gave him the geographical mindset and the personal anecdotes to sustain the interest of the reader. Occasionally, I felt his gift of hindsight made him perhaps more cynical than he might have been.  But his Envoi, at the end of the book, redeemed him for me. 

The arrogance of the Empire, its greed and its brutality was energy gone to waste: but the good in the adventure, the courage, the idealism, the diligence had contributed their quota of truth towards the universal fulfilment...The wind dies, and is forgotten, but some of the seeds it blows about will be fertile in the end.    

Eamon Duffy's 'Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor' 2009

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Yale University Press first edition - 2009

I have two other books by Eamon Duffy - the splendid and provocative The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale U. P., 1992; and Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (Yale U.P., 2006). He is an historian of the first order, burrowing into original sources and using and explaining them with skill. He can be ranked with other catholic apologists - Christopher Haigh, Diarmaid MacCulloch - as responsible for transforming one's approach to the Roman Catholic story under the Tudors. My sixth form and university days were formed by such as A.G. Dickens, Geoffrey Elton and Joel Hurstfield, and even during much of my teaching career which focussed on the Tudor period, this veritable revision of the traditional Protestant/Whig approach mainly passed me by. It was not surprising that he would turn to an appraisal of Mary I's reign;  'Bloody Mary' was summed up in Elton's England Under the Tudors (1955) - my main Sixth Form textbook - Positive achievements there were none; Pollard declared that sterility was its conclusive note, and this is a verdict with which the dispassionate observer must agree...[Mary's] life was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, but the pity which this naturally excites must not obscure the obstinate wrong-headedness of her rule.   

Duffy is anything but a dispassionate observer. He states that this book was long in the making, with one origin being the short account of the restoration of catholicism in the reign of Mary he published in The Stripping of the Altars in 1992.  He has now expanded and added material to five lectures he delivered in Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term of 2007.  He is a clever, most persuasive writer. There are plenty of sweeping statements - Protestantism was a minority faith everywhere in England, except possibly in one or two of the villages of the Stour valley - but such is Duffy's well-honed craft that the reader doesn't really notice he/she is being swept along.  A time-consuming project would be to detail the use of adjectives to describe Catholic compared with Protestant figures, beliefs or events. Again, one has to admire Duffy's grammatical technique. This is not to say that reading his book was not enjoyable or compelling. Certainly it was provocative.

What I did agree with was the author's elevation of Cardinal Reginald Pole to the forefront of the decision-making and cohesion of the reign. Whether it was the broadsheets, the sermons or the burnings, it was usually Pole's vision which was triumphant. Mary was not far behind, either. It was somehow apt that both queen and cardinal archbishop died on the same day. Secondly, I could understand Duffy's argument that the Marian church was not a backward-looking and sterile failure, but that it was one of the cogs in the Counter Reformation wheel. It heavily influenced the recusants of Elizabeth I's reign.                 

Fires of Faith has, of course, a double meaning. Faith was/is not the preserve of Roman Catholics. Many, if not most, of the Protestants they burned had just as a sincere and deep faith as themselves. Duffy is right to say that 21st century sensibilities means a horrified recoil from the burnings (and yet our world dishes up similar, if not worse, behaviour). Where this lapsed Methodist parts company with the author - and would always side with the Protestant cause - is in the role of the Papacy. Cisalpine catholicism? just bearable. Transalpine/ultramontane Roman Catholicism? ugh! Moreover, I didn't subscribe to Duffy's rather strange argument about Sir Thomas More - being God's special grace to England and to London. It was the privilege of martyrdom, granted to no other country afflicted by religious division. These two (Bishop Fisher too) men, the paragons of their age, were special legates from God to England... More's vicious persecution of so-called heretics was downplayed both by the Marian Catholic propagandists and Duffy himself. No similar appraisal of any of the Protestant 'martyrs' such as Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer. 

Duffy is persuasive in that his reassessment portrays Mary's regime as neither inept nor backward-looking. But in 1558 death took not only Mary and Pole, but also their cause. Equally skilful propaganda over the next few centuries meant Roman Catholicism and the Papacy were equated with foreign domination and treachery. Not until the early nineteenth century were Catholics officially allowed any semblance of religious freedom again.