Framley Parsonage

by Anthony Trollope

  Framley Parsonage is the fourth in Trollope’s first series of novels, the Chronicles of Barsetshire, which are nowadays read as though they belong to an undisturbed, idyllic past but which in their day were seen to relate the impact on an old-fashioned part of the country of the latest pressures and changes of the modern world. For the readers of the eighteen fifties and sixties the subject-matter was at once quaint and up-to-date, and this combination accounts for the simultaneous nostalgia and excitement which greeted the series. The first of the Barsetshire novels, The Warden, was published in 1855, and the story relates to events during Aberdeen’s coalition government of 1852–5. The central issue in The Warden arises from topical cases about the administration of charitable trusts at Rochester, Dulwich and Winchester, and the novel contains a satire on an obscure Parliamentary bill entitled the ‘Recovery of Personal Liberty in Certain Cases Bill’, debated in June 1853, as well as parodies of recent works by Dickens and Carlyle. Palmerston formed a government in 1855, and this occurs in fictional analogy at the opening of Barchester Towers, which was written in 1855–6 and published in 1857. This second novel is just as topical, with references to University reform, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the visit of the Begum of Oude in 1856, alongside an awareness in the characters of the controversies of the day about German scholarship, and about the ‘plurality of worlds’ or the possibility of life on other planets. Doctor Thorne and Framley Parsonage have stories which are less directly involved in politics but which show the same close awareness of current affairs in a mass of details.

  The Warden established the cathedral city of Barchester and its clergy, while the next two novels spread out into half the surrounding county to include the principal landowners, churchmen and other professional men, with Framley Parsonage effectively completing the fictional county. By this time Trollope was using a map to ensure consistency in his presentation of Barsetshire, with all its parishes, roads, railways, postal services and so on, and with the completion of two further novels, The Small House at Allington (1862–3) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1866–7), his rendering of well-to-do life in an entire county was unprecedent-edly thorough. Indeed George Eliot is on record as saying that she was encouraged to attempt Middlemarch by the detailed geographical and social complexity of Trollope’s novels, while Tolstoy must have had these qualities in mind when he later wrote, ‘Trollope kills me with his mastery.’18 There can be no doubt that Trollope has an important place in the development of the realistic novel in the nineteenth century.

  As far as English fiction was concerned, Trollope was the leading exponent of what was often called ‘realism’ in the sixties, with its rejection of intricate plot in favour of ‘truth to life’, and its insistence that sensational effects should give the impression of arising ‘naturally’ out of character interaction, rather than that the characters should seem to be constructed for the sake of the effects. When Framley Parsonage started to appear its greatest rival as a serial was Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, which had been featuring weekly in All the Year Round for five or six weeks. Incidentally, with unaccustomed carelessness, George Smith had let the book rights of this novel slip through his fingers, and so missed cornering two of the sensations of 1860. The two serials ran side-by-side until the end of August, to enormous acclaim, and, as The Woman in White was followed by a host of imitators, the two novels came to represent the two dominant modes of English fiction in the decade. Writing in the early eighteen seventies in his Autobiography, Trollope puts the matter with a characteristic blend of seriousness and tongue-in-cheek:

  Among English novels of the present day, and among English novelists, a great division is made. There are sensational novels and anti-sensational, sensational novelists and anti-sensational: sensational readers and anti-sensational. The novelists who are considered to be anti-sensational are generally called realistic. I am realistic. My friend Wilkie Collins is generally supposed to be sensational. The readers who prefer the one are supposed to take delight in the elucidation of character. They who hold by the other are charmed by the construction and gradual development of a plot. All this is, I think, a mistake, – which mistake arises from the inability of the imperfect artist to be at the same time realistic and sensational. A good novel should be both, and both in the highest degree.19

  There can be no doubt, however, that Framley Parsonage was not intended to rise to sensational heights, and it is noteworthy that Trollope cites his next novel, Orley Farm, as, he hopes, an example of the successful marriage of realism and sensationalism. Perhaps Wilkie Collins’s success influenced even him, as it certainly directly affected Dickens’s approach in Great Expectations in 1860–61. In any event, Trollope did exploit more overtly sensational plots in some of his later novels, notably The Eustace Diamonds, which he wrote in 1869–70.

  There are other reasons too for the particularly gentle nature of the excitement in Framley Parsonage. To begin with, Thackeray and Smith had explicitly asked for an English and even a clerical tale, and it was clear that the Cornhill was intended to defer to middle-class standards of respectability. In the second place, Trollope was already engaged in writing an Irish novel, Castle Richmond, which, in stark contrast to Framley Parsonage, contains some extremely bleak and unpleasant views of life, by taking an unflinching look at starvation and disease during the Irish famine of the forties. Framley Parsonage is one of his sunniest novels; the darker side of his vision of life went into the vivid scenes of distress in Castle Richmond.

  To say this is not to imply that the issues in Framley Parsonage are unimportant. The troubles that afflict the Robarts family are not trivial, and although there is an atmosphere of comic confidence about the novel which assures us that what we are reading will have a satisfactory outcome, nonetheless the danger Mark faces is shown to be a minor instance of a major peril which has brought many men to ruin and disgrace. If there was ever a novel about the slippery slope, Framley Parsonage is it. Graham Greene makes the point about this underlying seriousness clearly enough: ‘Even in one of the most materialistic of our great novelists – in Trollope – we are aware of another world against which the actions of the characters are thrown into relief.’ Each character exists, Greene goes on, not only to the other characters, ‘but also in a God’s eye’.20 The tone of Trollopian comedy is set in the first few chapters of Framley Parsonage which, while letting us know that Mark will not offend too far, manage to hint at real sin. Close attention to Trollope’s style shows the narrator simultaneously making light of Mark’s temptations and failings, and giving them deeper resonances. The first paragraph of Chapter 4, which opens the second instalment, is a case in point: ‘It is no doubt wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so.’ At this point ‘naughty’ carries no more than its modern sense and makes Mark, who wants to visit Gatherum Castle against Lady Lufton’s wishes, a child who wants to act in defiance of its nursemaid. The next sentence starts in the same spirit but suddenly, by referring to the Fall, seems lightheartedly to be reviving an earlier sense of ‘naughty’ as ‘wicked’: ‘One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very essence of the evil into which we have been precipitated by Adam’s fall.’ Finally the paragraph ends by reinforcing this serious sense, as Trollope alludes to the General Confession and echoes a sentence from the Homily ‘Of the Misery of Man’, which runs, ‘We have sinned, we have been naughty’, to allow the word to ring below its modern childishness with some of its sixteenth-century severity: ‘When we confess that we are all sinners, we confess that we all long after naughty things.’ This passage neither asks us to judge Mark severely nor allows us to forget the slippery slope. The reader of Trollope must be perpetually alert to this doubleness of tone, at once taking things lightly and reminding us of an undertow of seriousness. To try to limit Trollope’s narrative voice to one level is to make it dull and to lose most of the sparkle, humour and moral implication of what it says.

  The reality of ‘g
oing to the bad’ is embodied in Nathaniel Sowerby, while as far as Mark Robarts is concerned we are anxious as to how, not whether, his problems are to be solved. The title of the first chapter sums up a great deal. ‘Omnes omnia bona dicere’ comes from the opening of Terence’s comedy The Andria, in which a father declares, in the translation which Trollope silently embeds in his first sentence, that ‘all men began to say all good things to him, and to extol his fortune in that he had a son blessed with so excellent a disposition’. The son goes astray, of course, and the quotation conveys to the aware reader that Mark is soon destined to fall from his initial perfection. Furthermore the reference indicates that, just as in the Terence, the complications will be resolved and our hero restored to favour. The quotation is half echoed in the final chapter, when Mark is safe, but this time it refers to Griselda Grantly, reinforcing a major theme of the novel by highlighting her great social success and undercutting it with an awareness of moral and human deadness. Meanwhile the stage is set for a new comedy to be played out in the future.

  Mark’s situation is particularly delicate because at this date clergymen were expected to attend to their duties and regulate their lives with an earnestness rare a generation or two before, and Framley Parsonage, like the three earlier Chronicles of Barset-shire and like much of Thackeray and George Eliot too, records the triumph of Victorian seriousness and morality over Regency manners in secular and religious life. The point is confirmed if we look at another instance in which a judgement is simultaneously taken seriously and gently mocked. Lady Lufton regards the Duke of Omnium as ‘the very head of all such sinners’ who reject family life in favour of a free, bachelor existence, and sees him as ‘that fabricator of evil’ and ‘the nearest representative of Satanic agency, which… was allowed to walk this nether English world of ours’.21 Clearly she exaggerates, and is affectionately made fun of for it. But equally she is right. The Duke of Omnium is an old rake, and does represent those old Regency habits that would spell ruin to a mid-Victorian young man like Lord Lufton, or to a mid-Victorian young clergyman like Mark Robarts. Sowerby is ruined and is dishonest, and he is hardly to be called a gentleman, morally speaking. Prudential middle-class morality has generally triumphed in all but a few old aristocratic circles, or among ‘fast’ people in London. Lady Lufton’s encounter with the Duke at Miss Dunstable’s ‘at Home’ is a piece of social pantomime, but it is also a moment in the history of English ideology.

  In Framley Parsonage Trollope is concerned, as always, with examining the standards of behaviour appropriate to the ‘gentleman’, defined now in the Victorian period by moral standing and not by rank in society alone. To be a Victorian gentleman is to behave in all the complex circumstances of life with a constant regard for others and respect for oneself; moreover, the circumstances in question being so many and so varied, the qualities of gentlemanliness resist simple codification, and can only be acquired and demonstrated in practice. Trollope’s novels typically trace the acquisition and exercise of the moral maturity required in the gentleman, and although his clerical characters are in some aspects of their lives necessarily unlike his laity they share with them a common basis of gentlemanly behaviour. Froude’s famous dictum springs to mind about the Church of England providing in its clergy a resident gentleman in every parish in the country. Mark Robarts learns through his dangers and mistakes, and becomes qualified for this important Victorian role.

  Mark’s temptation is tuft-hunting and an ambition to advance himself outside the sheltered existence of Framley. Another double-ness of narrative tone can be seen in this connection. Framley Parsonage is a comedy which celebrates the small, conservative, rural society of Barsetshire though it perceives pain and injustice, such as that which Crawley suffers, even in this protected world. The moral, political, theological and financial threats all come from London, the centre of fashion, power and speculation. The narrator and his ideal reader understand and enjoy this larger world: the narrator indeed belongs to it, and from it he judges Framley matters as unimportant and charming, even while putting special value on the country virtues which in the end are triumphant. A comparison with Mansfield Park, another novel which shows the moderation of genteel country life invaded by the corruption of the capital, reveals a crucial difference in narrative stance. Jane Austen’s narrator is more intelligent and more knowing than her characters, but is not herself part of the dangerous London world. Trollope’s narrator, on the other hand, is, and his own particular knowing tone adds a further piquancy to the old conflict between Town and Country values. The public of 1860, moreover, read Framley Parsonage with an awareness that cities like Barchester were now only a few hours away from the capital by railway, and that local power, local politics and local customs were being overwhelmed by the forces of London influence and central government.22

  The chief problem which Mark brings on himself and his family is debt, something with which Trollope was personally well acquainted from his imprudent youth. Unlike the modern reader, he knew all about the drawing and endorsing of bills, and the discounting of them on the London money market. Once Mark has accepted the bills which Sowerby has drawn up, they act as promissory notes by which Mark engages to pay certain sums at certain specified dates to whomsoever holds the bills at those dates. Since Mark is not known to be in debt, and has a good income and a position to maintain, as can readily be confirmed from the Clerical Directory, his signature is valuable, as was Lord Lufton’s before him. Sowerby, whose own signature is now valueless, will have been able to obtain good sums for the bills which Mark has accepted. The bill-discounter, Tozer, will then have raised money on each bill by putting it up as security for loans from any number of investors, who expect repayment with profit at the date on which the bill falls due. The image of the small investor given confidence by seeing a clergyman’s name on a bill is used by Tozer to add to Mark’s discomforts. Sowerby is clearly dishonest in misrepresenting the second bill to Mark as though it will cancel the first (which, as a more experienced man than Mark would know, it cannot), but it is not obvious that the Tozers have acted irregularly, even though Mark and Lord Lufton bluffly assume that they have, from an ancient prejudice against moneylenders. It is characteristic of fiction of this period that the professional money-lender should be presented as lucky to escape the law, when the true crime lies with a well-born character whom nobody dreams of prosecuting for fraud. Mark of course is silenced by his own disgrace. A key moment occurs when he realizes just how deeply he is implicated in irregularities, and that he will be thought guilty of simony in acquiring his prebendary stall as a ‘consideration’ for accommodating Sowerby.23 Trollope’s narrator loves proverbs, and one of his favourites – that you cannot touch pitch and not be defiled – is fully exemplified by Mark’s story. As usual in Trollope the proverb seems trite, but the exemplification is rich and satisfying.

  In his Autobiography Trollope calls Framley Parsonage ‘a morsel of the biography of an English clergyman who should not be a bad man, but one led into temptation by his own youth and by the unclerical accidents of the life of those around him’. The other main storyline about the love of Lucy Robarts and Lord Lufton is dismissed as ‘an adjunct necessary, because there must be love in a novel’. Nevertheless, Trollope claims in retrospect,

  … it was downright honest love, – in which there was no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so.24

  Yet in Chapter 31 the narrator goes so far as to apologize for the fact that Lord Lufton feels a twinge of regret at Griselda Grantly’s engagement to Lord Dumbello:

  ‘Your hero, then,’ I hear some well-balanced critic say, ‘is not worth very much.’

  In the first place Lord Lufton is not my hero; and in the next place, a man may be very imperfect and yet worth a great deal… It is my belie
f that few young men settle themselves down to the work of the world, to the begetting of children, and carving and paying and struggling and fretting for the same, without having first been in love with four or five possible mothers for them, and probably with two or three at the same time… In this way Lord Lufton had, to a certain extent, been in love with Griselda.25

  Once Lufton has fully decided on Lucy Robarts, however, he goes about overcoming the obstacles in his path with a no nonsense vigour. It is somewhat of a shock then to learn of his feelings at his actual marriage, and to hear the narrator’s opinions about a bridegroom’s expected sentiments:

  I will not say that the happiness of marriage is like the Dead Sea fruit, – an apple which, when eaten turns to bitter ashes in the mouth… Nevertheless, is it not the fact that the sweetest morsel of love’s feast has been eaten, that the freshest, fairest blush of the flower has been snatched and has passed away, when the ceremony at the altar has been performed, and legal possession given?26

  There is an unmistakable feeling that Trollope only really enjoys courtship when it leads to power struggles, like that between Lucy and Lady Lufton, but that the smooth-running of the course of love and, even worse, weddings, do not interest him. After all, the last chapter is dismissively entitled ‘How they were all Married, had Two Children, and lived Happy ever after’. What does interest Trollope, on the other hand, is a working marriage, like that of Mark and Fanny, and many of the most moving moments in the novel concern Fanny’s loyalty to Mark, and, in the chapter ‘Consolation’, her sharing of the burden of his worry and relieving his guilt. This is the kind of subject which appeals to Trollope, as do the dynamics of unhappy marriages too. The Thorne marriage promises to be a rewarding relationship in Trollopian terms because of the lack of moonshine about the partners. It would not be pure speculation to suggest that Trollope was drawing on his own marriage, and it is inescapable to suppose that he had felt and valued the loyalty and support of Rose Trollope as he developed from an unprepossessing minor Post Office functionary into a major novelist. His remarks on marriage in Framley Parsonage brought a protest from George Henry Lewes, and in defending himself Trollope gives us a rare glimpse of his own experience: