It was settled that Dr Crofts and Bell should be married about the middle of June, and the squire determined to give what grace he could to the ceremony by opening his own house on the occasion. Lord De Guest and Lady Julia were invited by special arrangement between her ladyship and Bell, as has been before explained. The colonel also with Lady Fanny came up from Torquay on the occasion, this being the first visit made by the colonel to his paternal roof for many years. Bernard did not accompany his father. He had not yet gone abroad, but there were circumstances which made him feel that he would not find himself comfortable at the wedding. The service was performed by Mr Boyce, assisted, as the County Chronicle very fully remarked, by the Reverend John Joseph Jones, M.A., late of Jesus College, Cambridge, and curate of St Peter’s, Northgate, Guestwick; the fault of which little advertisement was this – that as none of the readers of the paper had patience to get beyond the Reverend John Joseph Jones, the face of Bell’s marriage with Dr Crofts was not disseminated as widely as might have been wished.
The marriage went off very nicely. The squire was upon his very best behaviour, and welcomed his guests as though he really enjoyed their presence there in his halls. Hopkins, who was quite aware that he had been triumphant, decorated the old rooms with mingled flowers and greenery with an assiduous care which pleased the two girls mightily. And during this work of wreathing and decking there was one little morsel of feeling displayed which may as well be told in these last lines. Lily had been encouraging the old man while Bell for a moment had been absent.
‘I wish it had been for thee, my darling!’ he said; ‘I wish it had been for thee!’
‘It is much better as it is, Hopkins,’ she answered, solemnly.
‘Not with him, though,’ he went on, ‘not with him. I wouldn’t a hung a bough for him. But with t’other one.’
Lily said no word further. She knew that the man was expressing the wishes of all around her. She said no word further, and then Bell returned to them.
But no one at the wedding was so gay as Lily – so gay, so bright, and so wedding-like. She flirted with the old earl till he declared that he would marry her himself. No one seeing her that evening, and knowing nothing of her immediate history, would have imagined that she herself had been cruelly jilted some six or eight months ago. And those who did know her could not imagine that what she then suffered had hit her so hard, that no recovery seemed possible for her. But though no recovery, as she herself believed, was possible for her – though she was as a man whose right arm had been taken from him in the battle, still all the world had not gone with that right arm. The bullet which had maimed her sorely had not touched her life, and she scorned to go about the world complaining either by word or look of the injury she had received. ‘Wives when they have lost their husbands still eat and laugh,’ she said to herself, ‘and he is not dead like that.’ So she resolved that she would be happy, and I here declare that she not only seemed to carry out her resolution, but that she did carry it out in very truth. ‘You’re a dear good man, and I know you’ll be good to her,’ she said to Crofts just as he was about to start with his bride.
‘I’ll try, at any rate,’ he answered.
‘And I shall expect you to be good to me too. Remember you have married the whole family; and, sir, you mustn’t believe a word of what that bad man says in his novels about mother-in-law.1 He has done a great deal of harm, and shut half the ladies in England out of their daughters’ houses.’
‘He shan’t shut Mrs Dale out of mine.’
‘Remember he doesn’t. Now, good-bye.’ So the bride and bride-groom went off, and Lily was left to flirt with Lord De Guest.
Of whom else is it necessary that a word or two should be said before I allow the weary pen to fall from my hand? The squire, after much inward struggling on the subject, had acknowledged to himself that his sister-in-law had not received from him that kindness which she had deserved. He had acknowledged this, purporting to do his best to amend his past errors; and I think I may say that his efforts in that line would not be received ungraciously by Mrs Dale. I am inclined therefore to think that life at Allington, both at the Great House and at the Small, would soon become pleasanter than it used to be in former days. Lily soon got the Balmoral boots, or, at least, soon learned that the power of getting them as she pleased had devolved upon her from her uncle’s gift; so that she talked even of buying the squirrel’s cage; but I am not aware that her extravagance led her as far as that.
Lord De Courcy we left suffering dreadfully form gout and ill-temper at Courcy Castle. Yes, indeed! To him in his latter days life did not seem to offer much that was comfortable. His wife had now gone from him, and declared positively to her son-in-law that no earthly consideration should every induce her to go back again – ‘not if I were to starve!’ she said. But which she intended to signify that she would be firm in her resolve, even though she should thereby lose her carriage and horses. Poor Mr Gazebee went down to Courcy, and had a dreadful interview with the earl; but matters were at last arranged, and her ladyship remained at Baden-Baden in a state of semi-starvation. That is to say, she has but one horse to her carriage.
As regards Crosbie, I am inclined to believe that he did again recover his power at his office. He was Mr Butterwell’s master, and the master also of Mr Optimist, and the major. He knew his business, and could do it, which was more, perhaps, than might fairly be said of any of the other three. Under such circumstances he was sure to get in his hand, and lead again. But elsewhere his star did not recover its ascendancy. He dined at his club almost daily, and there were those with whom he habitually formed some little circle. But he was not the Crosbie of former days – the Crosbie known in Belgravia and in St James’s Street. He had taken his little vessel bravely out into the deep waters, and had sailed her well while fortune stuck close to him. But he had forgotten his nautical rules, and success had made him idle. His plummet and lead had not been used, and he had kept no look-out ahead. Therefore the first rock he met shivered his bark to pieces. His wife, the Lady Alexandrina, is to be seen in the one-horse carriage with her mother at Baden-Baden.
APPENDIX 1
TROLLOPE’S AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ON THE SMALL HOUSE AT
ALLINGTON
The Small House at Allington redeemed my reputation with the spirited proprietor of the Cornhill, which must, I should think, have been damaged by Brown, Jones and Robinson. In it appeared Lily Dale, one of the characters which readers of my novels have liked the best. In the love with which she has been greeted I have hardly joined with much enthusiasm, feeling that she is somewhat of a female prig. She became first engaged to a snob, who jilted her; and then, though in truth she loved another man who was hardly good enough, she could not extricate herself sufficiently from the collapse of her first great misfortune to be able to make up her mind to be the wife of one whom, though she loved him, she did not altogether reverence. Prig as she was, she made her way into the hearts of many readers, both young and old; so that, from that time to this, I have been continually honoured with letters, the purport of which has always been to beg me to marry Lily Dale to Johnny Eames. Had I done so, however, Lily would never have so endeared herself to these people as to induce them to write letters to the author concerning her fate. It was because she could not get over her troubles that they loved her. Outside Lily dale and the chief interest of the novel, The Small House at Allington, is, I think, good. The De Courcy family are alive, as is also Sir Raffle Buffle, who is a hero of the Civil Service. Sir Raffle was intended to represent a type, not a man; but the man for the picture was soon chosen, and I was often assured that the portrait was very like. I have never seen the gentleman with whom I was supposed to have taken the liberty. There is also an old squire down at Allington, whose life as a country gentleman with rather straitened income is, I think, well described (An Autobiography, Chapter 10).
APPENDIX 2
TROLLOPE’S ‘HOBBLEDEHOY’ LETTER
TO MISS DANCERS
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16 August 1838
MY DEAR MISS DANCERS,
Like a man of honour I send you what I owe – that horrid white and pink which ought never to have won the race!! If the gloves do not fit pray let me know – & I will procure another pair.
Pray tell Ellen with my best thanks for her kindness – that I have her flowers blooming on my desk the envy of all the Clerks in the Office – tell her also that I have still the pin which she wanted, but was not able to purloin –
I trust your ‘cousin Emma’ is consoled for the loss of the gingerbread man – tell her that she should never allow grief for anyone to prey upon her spirits for so long. It is very bad for the complexion – She should learn to bear it with Christian meekness & patience.
I think Mr G.T. must have been hid in the cupboard yesterday evening – else Emma would not have been so very angry with me – Poor man if he was – he must have been very much confined –
Yours very faithfully,
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Source: N. John Hall, ed., The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford, 1983), I, p. 5. Hall points out that “This letter is the only surviving evidence of Trollope’s “hobbledehoyhood” while a junior clerk in the General Post Office in the late 1830s (An Autobiography, Chapter 3). The tone of the letter unmistakably recalls the tow characters generally regarded as autobiographical: Charley Tudor of The Three Clerks and Johnny Eames of The Small House at Allington.’
NOTES
I would like to express my indebtedness to Professor Philip Collins, whose Trollope Society Lecture ‘Trollope and London’ in Trollopiana: The Journal of The Trollope Society, No. 3, supplied much of the topographic detail for the notes on the London chapters of he novel; and to Professor James Kincaid, whose 1980 edition of The Small House at Allington in Oxford World’s Classics I found useful in compiling my own.
CHAPTER 1
1 (p. 3). entail: the estate is bound by some variant of ‘strict settlement’, restricting the inheritance of property, usually to a sequence of named persons within the male line.
2 (p. 4). luck of Edenhall: a legend associated with Penrith in Cumberland, which Trollope would most probably have encountered early in he 1840s, when his mother and elder brother Tom resided in the county. The legend, celebrated in at last two popular ballads, tells of a company of fairies dancing near St Cuthbert’s well in the garden of Eden Hall, leaving an enamelled drinking-glass behind them, and warning
If that glass should break or fall
Farewell the luck of Eden Hall.
In Trollope’s time the glass was kept in a case dating from the early fifteenth century. Tom Trollope, in his autobiography What I Remember (II, p. 34) says that the goblet was ‘shown to all visitors’ by its owner Sir Charles Musgrave, who was ‘the beau ideal of a country gentleman of the old school’. The glass is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and has been identified as Venetian work of the tenth century.
3 (p. 5). He had fallen in love with a lady who obstinately refused his hand: men who remain obstinately true to women who repeatedly refuse them occur frequently in Trollope. With Christopher Dale and Johnny Eames compare Harry Gilmore in The Vicar of Bullhampton, Larry Twentiman in The American Senator, Roger Carbury in The Way We Live Now and Tom Tringle in Ayala’s Angel.
4 (p. 8). cottage orné: an ornamented or embellished cottage within the precincts of a great house.
5 (p. 9). two ancient musicians blew their bassoons: Allington church is clearly unrestored and adheres to the traditional church music, progressively phased out in favour of organ or barrel-organ in rural parishes in early Victorian times. See Hardy’s Wessex novels passim, and especially Under the Greenwood Tree (1872, but set in the 1840s) for an account of this process.
6 (p. 10). the pulpit was an ugly useless edifice… a third position somewhat elevated: this is the traditional ‘three-decker’ pulpit, where clerk’s desk, reading desk and pulpit proper are ranged one above the other on three separate levels.
7 (p. 10). an apothecary, whom the veneration of this and neighbouring parishes has raised to the dignity of a doctor: the rivalry between the surviving traditional apothecaries and the newly established general practitioners occupies less space in this novel than in, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, where Lydgate is the object of envy and distrust to Toller and Wrench. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Allington apothecary lacks the proficiency, the qualifications and the esteem of the Guestwick practitioners, Crofts and Gruffen (see p. 210). For a detailed account of changes in the medical profession in the nineteenth century, see C. Nelson, The Evolution of Medical Education in the Nineteenth Century (1957).
CHAPTER 2
1 (p. 13). his slippered years: a reference to the ‘lean and slipper’d pantaloon’ from Jaques’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech (As you Like It, II, vii, 159).
2 (p. 13). the fifth commandment: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee’ (Exodus 20:12).
3 (p. 14). Beaufort… Sebright’s: Sebright’s Club was located in St James’s Square. The Beaufort Club also appears in The Duke’s Children (Lord Grex passes his time playing whist there), and in The Claverings where it is Harry Clavering’s club.
4 (p. 15). Damon to any Pythias: Damon and Pythias were proverbial for their devoted friendship in Greek literature. Damon was in fact a philosopher of Syracuse who stood bail for his friend (who was really called Phintias) when he was sentenced to death by the reigning tyrant. He was saved from execution when Pythias/Phintias returned, reprieved, at the last minute.
5 (p. 15). Whitehall: Contains many of the principal government offices.
6 (p. 15). Somerset House: In the mid nineteenth century Somerset House was occupied by the Navy, Stamp Office and many smaller departments, in addition to the Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, and the Inland Revenue Office where Johnny Eames works. Trollope’s other ‘hobbledehoy’ Civil Servant, Charley Tudor in The Three Clerks, works in the same building as Eames, in the ‘Internal Navigation Office’. In Chapter 2 of The Three Clerks Trollope writes that the offices of Somerset House are ‘of less fashionable repute than those situated in the neighbourhood of Downing Street [i.e. Whitehall], but are not so decidedly plebeian as the Custom House, Excise and Post Office.’
7 (p. 16). Mount Street: Mount Street, on the Grosvenor Estate, extends from Berkeley Square to Park Lane, and at this time largely comprised small, unpretentious eighteenth-century houses, built c. 1720–40.
8 (p. 18). ‘As sweet and musical as bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair’: A reference to Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV, iii, 343.
9 (p. 19). croquet: croquet was gaining rapidly in popularity in England at this time. Hundreds of clubs had been established in England during the 1850s, when a manufacturer of sports goods, John Jaques, put the first sets of equipment on sale. The earliest comprehensive guide was Routlege’s Handbook of Croquet (1861), though the first all-England champion was not proclaimed until 1867. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which appeared the year after The Small House at Allington, includes a fantastic croquet game.
CHAPTER 3
1 (p. 24). meo periculo: colloquial classical Latin for ‘at my own risk’.
2 (p. 26). Rhadamanthine moralists: Rhadamanthus was the son of Zeus and Europa and assists with his brother Minos of Crete and Aeacus as a judge and severe.
3 (p. 27). Had not her lines been set for her in pleasant places?: from Psalm 16:6. Trollope makes frequent use of this quotation.
4 (p. 28). tire-woman: a lady’s maid, especially a wardrobe woman in a theatre.
5 (p. 30). succedaneum: a substitute.
CHAPTER 4
1 (p. 35). hobbledehoy: Webster defines ‘hobbledehoy’ as ‘a usually awkward callow adolescent male’. For Trollope on ‘hobbledehoys’, see also the portrait of Charley Tudor in The Three Clerks and An Autobiography, Chapter 3.
2 (p. 35). the warmth of a southern wall
: see Chapter 52, note 1.
3 (p. 36). the triumphs of his imagination: compare Trollope’s confessions in An Autobiography, Chapter 3, of his own addiction to day-dreaming at about Johnny’s age:
… it came to pass that I was always going about with some castle in the air family built within my mind. Nor were these efforts in architecture spasmodic, or subject to constant change from day to day. For weeks, for months if I remember rightly, from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced – nor even anything which, from outward circumstances, would seem to be violently improbable. I myself was of course my own hero. Such is a necessity of castle-building. But I never became a king, or a duke – much less when my height and personal appearance were fixed could I be an Antinous, of six feet high. I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me. And I strove to be kind of heart, and open of hand, and noble in thought, despising mean things; and altogether I was a very much better fellow than I have ever succeeded in being since.
4 (p. 38). eighty pounds a year: Trollope’s own starting salary as a Post Office clerk in 1835 was ninety pounds. Despite attempts after the 1853 Northcote–Trevelyan Report to normalize Civil Service salaries, different scales of pay in different departments were widespread into the 1870s and 80s (see Sir Norman Chester, The English Administrative System (1981), pp. 154–5). This tended to keep the Johnny Eameses and Adolphus Crosbies social worlds apart.
5 (p. 40). Aunt Sally: Aunt Sally is a game in which sticks or cudgels are thrown at a wooden (woman’s) head mounted on a pole, the object being to hit the nose of the figure, or break the pipe stuck in its mouth.
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