Maya Angelou

We note with sadness the death if American writer Maya Angelou at the age of 86, author of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I imagine Trollope would have been astonished at her success as a black woman raised in Arkansas, given his insights into the country when he travelled there at around the time of the Civil War. Angelou once said that “if you spend all your time trying to be normal you will never realise how amazing you can be.”  I think Trollope showed that there is also beauty to be found in the everyday.

…Or you can find it out by reading Trollope

The latest findings of the survey on social attitudes in Britain reveals that there is a growing level of racism.

http://www.natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/british-social-attitudes/

I wonder what Trollope would have made of this? In his day, the immigrants who were the cause of social concern were mainly Irish.  They came over here and took unskilled jobs at rates of pay that were lower than local labourers would want. Anti-Irish sentiment ran high.  But Trollope wrote novels on difficult Irish questions that were sympathetic to the realities of the situation facing the Irish in their home country, which drove them to emigrate. Even The Landleaguers, which is written from the landlord perspective and has a scheming Irish villain at the heart of the story, presents the situation with a balance and fairness that is strikingly absent from today’s political commentary on immigration issues. Perhaps there is something to be learned there?

And the winner is…

One can only speculate how the leaders of the two parties making up the coalition government are feeling today in the light of the European Election results they received over the bank holiday weekend. I suspect that the Prime Minister is the happier of the two, though I imagine Trollope would have felt more acutely the suffering of his Liberal Democrat Deputy. Nick Clegg is, after all, the nominal successor to the fictional Planteganet Palliser as head of the Liberal Party in office, though he has not quite achieved the top role. However, there is little doubt that the pain endured by the thin-skinned Palliser in The Prime Minister would have been all the greater had he been forced to undergo the media scrutiny that today’s politicians face.

Chelsea (and Districts?) Flower Show

Trollope wasn’t a great gardener. He might have used gardens and flowers as metaphors but the practical gardening wasn’t his thing. His interest in Chelsea might therefore be confined to the local politics and the thirsty voters whose support cost George Vavasor such a ruinous amount in Can You Forgive Her? Sadly, even an appearance in the guise of a gnome will not be possible for Trollope as they are once again banned from this year’s Flower Show.

Electioneering

I wonder what Trollope would have made of the European Election. Apart from his obvious amazement that Britain would be a part of Europe to participate in such an election at all, I think he might well have found parallels between his unhappy experience as a would-be Liberal candidate in the Beverley by-election in 1868 and that of his modern day Liberal Democrat successors. He describes in his Autobiography how his agent told him: “You won’t get in. I don’t suppose you really expect it… You will spend £1000 and lose the election. Then you will petition and spend another £1000… there will be a commission, and the borough will be disenfranchised. For a beginner… that will be a great success.” What might Nick Clegg regard as success? For a fictionalised account of proceedings you can also read Ralph The Heir.

Crime Short Stories Too

Leaving Crime Fest 2014, I must mention the one physically menacing character that Trollope created, Aaron Trow. Appearing in a short story published in the second Tales of All Countries collection in 1863, he is an escaped convict who appears at the home of Anastasia Bergen and terrifies her into preparing him some food but then attacks her when she does not give him money as well.  He is eventually killed in a dramatic struggle by Anastasia’s fiance, Caleb Morton.

There are also two short stories, The Man Who Kept His Money In A Box and Katchen’s Caprices in which boxes containing valuables go missing and may, or may not (you have to read them to find out), be stolen.

I don’t know whether the last few days’ posts have made the case for Trollope the crime writer, but I hope they have at least shown he was more than simply a recorder of domestic dramas.

Reading Group in Aldeburgh today

The Trollope Society East Anglia group is meeting today in Aldeburgh to discuss The Three Clerks.  The meeting is at 7:30pm.

Contact Ian Fyfe (email: fyfeian@tiscali.co.uk ) for details of the venue.

Swindlers, embezzlers and thieves

No author has ever understood the value of money, or the lack of it, and how it can affect a character, like Trollope. Essentially good men can bring themselves to do things they know to be wrong, like Henry Jones, the eponymous Cousin Henry who defrauds Isabel Broderick of her inheritance by concealing the last will of his uncle Indefer which changed the beneficiary from Henry to her. He was so plagued with guilt that he could not bring himself to destroy the document and kept it hidden in a book in the library of the house he inherited through his subterfuge.

Indeed, many of Trollope’s swindles and embezzlements are in a domestic setting. In The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson, the partners’ business is brought down in part through the embezzlement perpetrated by Jones who was Brown’s son-in law. Reversing this role, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, Walter Marrable is swindled out of his fortune by his own father.

Trollope, ever the true public servant, was particularly strong in his condemnatory drawing of Alaric Tudor, one of The Three Clerks, when he abused his position to embezzle money from trust funds.

He was, perhaps a little kinder to Major Tifto in The Duke’s Children, whom he allowed to be an attractive, amusing character while perpetrating the horse-racing fraud at the St Leger with a horse called Prime Minister which cost Plantagenet Palliser’s son Lord Silverbridge the then enormous sum of £70,000.

It seems that for Trollope, the status of victim had a bearing on how seriously he viewed the crime. In the case of Silverbridge, there is always the expectation that his father the Duke would be able to see him right and therefore it is not so serious a crime as where the victim would be left destitute by the villain. In this his attitude is strikingly modern.

Spoiler Alert

Trollope, it is probably fair to say, really needed a spoiler alert just about every time he spoke directly to his readers in his narrator’s voice from chapter one onwards in his novels. Indeed, even he recognised this trait when he lamented in his Autobiography that, “The plot of Orley Farm is probably the best I have ever made; but it has the fault of declaring itself, and thus coming to an end too early in the book. When Lady Mason tells her ancient lover that she did forge the will, the plot has unravelled itself; – and this she does in the middle of the tale.”

This did not prevent him from continuing to make crimes the heart of many of his novels. The Eustace Diamonds are stolen not once but, in a brilliant double twist, twice. Lizzie Eustace first fakes their theft in Carlisle to cover her desire to pawn them for cash only to have them subsequently stolen from her for real in London.

Lizzie makes for an engaging thief with her forgetfulness in the details of her cover story of how her late husband gave her the jewels but I must confess to a degree of exasperation with the Reverend Crawley whose other-worldliness is so extreme that he plain forgets what he did with a cheque that he is accused of stealing in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Perhaps, Trollope’s greatest crime story is the financial fraud on a grand scale perpetrated by Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now. His South Central Pacific and Mexican Railroad scam is a classic of its kind and as viable today as it was when published in 1875. The words “too big to fail” spring to mind and any passing resemblance to Bernie Madoff is perforce purely coincidental.

Yet Melmotte is not an unattractive villain. His fall is drawn with genuine sympathy which makes it all the more powerful. Trollope’s ability to create character is surely at its best in creating such a character who is painted not black but in many shades of grey. He is even the victim of theft himself as his daughter Marie, another sympathetically drawn character (who would be the daughter of such a father?), steals from him the cash needed to finance her attempt to elope.

 

More mayhem in Trollope

Having shown Trollope’s penchant for including murder in his plots, it is only proper to continue the crime-related theme in honour of Crime Fest 2014 and mention that he also included several unsuccessful attempted murders in addition to the one in The Landleaguers mentioned yesterday.

Indeed, the first attempted murder is in only his second novel, The Kellys and the O’Kellys – another Irish crime scene! Here we see Barry Lynch attempt to kill his sister Anty to get his hands on her money.

However, once again it is love, or frustrated love that more often provides the spur for other attempted murders in Trollope’s novels. In Phineas Redux, Mr Kennedy tries to shoot Phineas Finn, whom he believes to be responsible for his wife’s continued refusal to return to him. And it is maternal love, however misguided, that drives Lady Lovel to make a similar attempt on the life of Daniel Thwaite, her daughter’s would-be suitor, whom she considers unsuitable (pun intended) in Lady Anna.

There are also a number of violent assaults, such as that by Frank Gresham with a horse-whip on Mr Moffat, who jilted his sister Augusta in Dr Thorne, which, while perhaps not attempts at murder, are contrary to the popular misconception of Trollope as a teller of genteel Victorian tales.