by Roy Jenkins
Miss Boncassen’s mother was ‘homely’ but her father Ezekiel Boncassen was given the appearance and dress of Lincoln, although he was rich with second-generation wealth, scholarly, and, in a homespun way, of refined manners. He was also spoken of as a possible President of the United States, which was odd, for no one of remotely his type got near the White House between John Quincy Adams fifty years before and Theodore Roosevelt twenty-five years afterwards.
The Duke of Omnium much enjoyed grave comparative political conversations with Mr Boncassen, found Mrs Boncassen inoffensive, Miss Boncassen decorative and ladylike, and invited them all to stay (together with Silverbridge, Lady Mary, Lady Mab and the Phineas Finns) for two weeks at his lesser but more agreeable country seat in Yorkshire. He hoped that the visit would result in the arrangement of a marriage between Silverbridge and Mabel Grex, and was as amazed as he was dismayed when it was the New York girl who emerged as the winner of the duchess stakes.
Trollope is one of the four novelists who have given me the greatest sum of pleasure - ‘sum’ indicating quantity as well as intensity. The other three are Proust, Waugh and Anthony Powell. This does not mean that I regard them as the four greatest. I have no doubt that Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen and George Eliot, to name only an almost random half dozen, are in some sense ‘greater’ than at least two, including Trollope, of my quartet. In the same way I accept that the cathedrals of Chartres and Bourges are ‘greater’ than those of Chichester and Exeter, but the sum of pleasure from the latter two is none the less more, if only because I have visited them more often, partly through opportunity and partly through choice. And there is also the factor of special affinity, which, for example, and switching to art galleries, the Frick, the Moritzhuis and the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow possess for me and the Kunsthistorische and the Rijksmuseum do not. And as Trollope is the most prolific of my four authors he has a strong claim to the highest position on a graph that measures output along one axis and pleasure-giving quality along the other.
Like many of my generation, I first encountered Trollope during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945 I bought and read about twenty-five volumes in either the little Oxford World Classics or Dent’s slightly bigger Everyman edition. They cost about three shillings each and have survived fifty years very well. Then, unconsciously following fashion, I never read another word of Trollope for a quarter of a century. The news that Harold Macmillan had found him as addictive during government crises as Asquith had found letter-writing to ladies of fashion did nothing to stir me to emulation. In the 1970s, however, long after Macmillan’s reading patterns had ceased to preoccupy gossip writers, I suddenly took Trollope up again and plunged deep into the Barchester series, leavened with Can You Forgive Her? and The Duke’s Children from the political novels.
In 1988 the invitation to write this introduction sent me back to a leisurely reading of the latter. I then made the mistake of postponing the execution of the writing task. This made me feel that I had to go back for yet a fourth time, although on this occasion reading quickly and under pressure. So this work is in the position, perhaps unique to a book not my own (in these frequency is dictated by the need for revision and proof-reading as well as by narcissism), of having been read four times. Even so, I found on the last go that the difficulty was not, as is often the case, that skimming led to aquaplaning so that I was soon hardly touching the surface, but that I could not bring myself to strike with sufficient ruthlessness from headland to headland but still wanted to re-explore, for the second time within little more than a year, every inlet of the convoluted coast.
What gives Trollope this strong if fluctuating attraction for me? Is it, as his detractors would have it, the comfortingly reliable pull of the second-rate? I do not think so. He was certainly not consistent, except in his output per hour. His quality varied enormously, both between books and within them, and the variation was accompanied by a remarkable lack of discrimination as a self-critic. He could write a novel as bad as The Struggles of Brown, Jones and Robinson and one as good as Phineas Finn: The Irish Member within a year of each other, and not be aware of the difference in quality between them.
Nor was he nearly as pedestrianly plodding as his critics and sometimes he himself liked to pretend. He was prolix, partly because it was the fashion and partly because he was over-fluent, but in his better books, a few descriptive passages apart, he carried the reader over the ground with an easy momentum which belied his heavy frame and explained why he was so at home in the hunting field. His dialogue was always sure-footed.
This, however, is to some extent a defensive tribute, a refutation of those like Henry James who thought that Trollope was essentially a novelist for the unsubtle, even the stupid, in today’s parlance a sort of chronicler for the saloon bar or the golf clubhouse. His positive strength for me lies principally in his command over both the physical and the social topography of mid-Victorian England. Some of his work is like that Canaletto picture of Whitehall in which the detail was so accurate that, nearly two hundred years after it had been painted, the Westminster City Council find it a useful chart for drainage repairs.
There never has been a writer who, thanks to his work as a postal surveyor, knew the geography of England (and Ireland) so well. And over it, with almost unparalleled logistic skill, he could marshal an army of characters. They may turn out to be a stage army that comes round and round for the second, third and fourth times, but we are always glad to see again.
His fictional imagination was not, however, bounded by his previous knowledge. He had great capacity to familiarize himself, as it were by order, with worlds he did not previously know but wished to write about. When he had already published The Warden and was deep in Barchester Towers he recorded: ‘I never lived in any cathedral city - except London,1 never knew anything of any close, never had any peculiar intimacy with any clergymen, and had not then even spoken to an archdeacon.’ But Trollope liked to make throwaway remarks about his own work, although not to sell it at throwaway prices. I wonder how seriously we should take such self-deprecation as: ‘When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it will end.’? His journeyman’s approach to writing, pretending it was no different from cobbling, was I suspect more designed to prick the illusions of uncomprehending interlocutors than to analyse his own methods and skills.
He was full of paradoxes: a man of boisterous, some said rather boorish, manners who loved social life, and who could write with delicacy about it and about more intimate human relations; a man who could satirize politics and politicians, but who regarded being a member of the British Parliament as the greatest honour that could possibly befall a man, and who in 1868 tried hard but unsuccessfully at Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire to get himself elected on a Liberal ticket.
He was perhaps lucky that he did not succeed, for I suspect that he would have meshed with the House of Commons no more happily than did, say, Hilaire Belloc nearly forty years later, and that the sourness of The Way We Live Now (1875) might have spilled over from its financial, literary and social milieu into the more political background of The Duke’s Children (1880) and produced a more discontented culmination to the political novels. However, it did not happen, and The Duke’s Children is essentially a good-tempered book. A few minor characters behave ludicrously, but only those who are created for villainy behave villainously, and even they, notably Major Tifto, do so rather pathetically.
Trollope was therefore able to remain relatively starry-eyed towards politics, much more like Harold Nicolson than like Belloc. Nicolson, essayist of near genius, biographer of quality, novelist with too exiguous an output to be properly judged in this category, always attached more importance to being a third-rate politician than to being a first-rate writer. After he lost his seat he recorded that he could never pass near to the Palace of Westminster at night and see shining the light which indicated that the House of Commons was still sitting wi
thout feeling a twinge of dismay that he was no longer there. I have always experienced exactly the reverse. But Trollope would have been with Nicolson. He would have liked to be there.
Indeed, he always liked being there, in the gallery of the House of Commons if he could not be on the floor, in the Garrick Club, in the Reform Club, in a literary circle, at a publishers’ evening party, at the kill in the hunting field. And this, combined with great technical skill, gives to his writing a gusto, a tolerance and an insight which puts him, after Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, on the fourth plinth in the pantheon of English mid-nineteenth-century novelists. And nowhere are these qualities better used than in The Duke’s Children.
Two Hundred Years of The Times
This was written for publication in a special Times supplement for the 200th anniversary of that newspaper in 1984
Newspapers, Perhaps because few of them achieve it, like longevity. As a result centenaries and bicentenaries are sometimes celebrated with a tenuous claim to continuity of identity. This is not true of The Times. It has throughout been a daily (always excluding Sundays), and its format, up to 1966, when news first appeared on the front page, bore a recognizable affinity to that of the first years.
The direct descendants of its founder, publisher and first editor, John Walter, remained as controlling proprietors until 1908, when Northcliffe moved in; and as partners in the enterprise for another fifty-eight years, until the arrival of Roy Thomson, when John Walter IV, aged ninety-three, relinquished his shareholding. (The Walters were almost unique among newspaper proprietors in spanning nearly two hundred years while hardly seeking and never acquiring a peerage.)
In addition the terms of editors, with a few exceptions, have been long. As a result there have been remarkably few of them. Six covered the 124 years from 1817 to 1941. There was a little more instability at either end, but fifteen made up the whole of the apostolic succession for the first two hundred years, exactly the same as the number of Popes over the period, a few more than the number of British monarchs but less than half the number of British Prime Ministers and little more than a third the number of American Presidents. (In the nine subsequent years, however, there have been no less than four editors.)
Has the influence been commensurate with the longevity? First, it must be said that while there have certainly been journals that have from time to time exercised more political influence than The Times (the Morning Chronicle in the early years of the nineteenth century, perhaps the Westminster Gazette in its heyday, the Daily Telegraph at the time of the Abdication, arguably the Daily Mirror at its Cudlipp/King political peak), there has been no paper that has come within miles of rivalling The Times over the two-hundred-year stretch as a whole.
Apart from other considerations there are very few papers that have been there for any comparable period. The Observer, which has benefited from two notable editorships this century, was founded in 1791, but has never been a daily and went through many nineteenth-century mutations. The Morning Post was there before The Times and preserved a continuous high Tory identity until subsiding into the arms of the Daily Telegraph in 1937. The rest of The Times’s London contemporaries of 1785 are long since dead. Its contemporaries of today are relative upstarts: the oldest are the Guardian, founded in 1821, but only a daily since 1855, the Daily Telegraph, which began in 1855, and the Daily Mail, which inaugurated the era of mass circulation in 1896.
The influence of The Times must essentially be judged from the accession to the editorial chair of Thomas Barnes in 1817. Before then it was settling down. In the late eighteenth century it was an information sheet, the lesser offshoot of a printing business. By 1795 John Walter I was tired of his enterprise and handed over first to his elder son, William, who had more literary taste than journalistic flair, and then in 1803 to his second son, John Walter II, who made the paper but fractured his relations with his father. John Walter I wanted to be a printer to the government and to the aristocracy. John Walter II wanted to run something approaching a modern newspaper. The circulation when he took over was about 1700 copies, having been up to nearly 3000 in the 1790s. The circulation of all others, including the influential Morning Chronicle, was still lower, however. Newspaper prices were formidable. The Times opened at 2½d and quickly went to 3d, the equivalent of nearly £1 today. By the time of the death of John Walter II in 1847 its circulation was nearly 50,000. In mid-century, just before the full repeal of newspaper taxes, The Times was the nearest paper to approach a mass daily. The Daily Telegraph, within a few days of its own launch, paid it a somewhat convoluted tribute: ‘The circulation of the Daily Telegraph’, it announced, ‘exceeds that of any London morning newspaper, with the exception of The Times.’
More important, however, was that John Walter II first rejected political subsidies and lived successfully without them both during his own editorship from 1803 to 1810 and during his joint editorship of the next five years with John Stoddart, a barrister and Hazlitt’s brother-in-law; and that he then got bored with exercising control from the proprietor’s chair and withdrew to Wokingham to become a Berkshire country gentleman, and subsequently MP for the county, leaving Thomas Barnes with the elbow room to become the first independent editor.
Barnes was only thirty-two when he was appointed. It was not his youth that made him exceptional. Times editors have often been young when they started. Of his notable successors Delane and Buckle started at twenty-three and twenty-nine, and Dawson and Rees-Mogg at thirty-eight. (They have also shown a regrettable tendency to die young, mostly while still in office.)
Barnes was the son of a Kent solicitor, educated at Christ’s Hospital and Pembroke College, Cambridge, of high intellectual gifts, who as a young man lived in the literary society of Leigh Hunt, Lamb and Hazlitt. He came to editorship by way of theatre criticism and parliamentary sketch writing.
He was considered a very advanced liberal at this time, and always wrote, and encouraged others to write, in a fairly rough tone. ‘Put a little devil into it’ was one of his prescripts for his own and other people’s writing. He was a full editor not merely by virtue of his independence of his proprietor but also because he orchestrated the whole paper. Leigh Hunt considered him to have placed it ‘beyond the range of competition not more by the ability of his own articles than by the unity of tone and sentiment which he knew how to impart to the publication as a whole’.
Barnes supported Catholic emancipation and the great Reform Bill, was generally favourable to the Grey administration, and was particularly close to the Lord Chancellor, Brougham. In 1834 he did a great switch of sides, and in so doing gave a most remarkable demonstration of the power of the instrument he had partly created. He quarrelled with the Whigs and provoked the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Althorp) into writing to Brougham a subsequently notorious letter requesting an urgent meeting to discuss ‘whether we should declare open war with The Times or attempt to make peace’.
Months later, when William IV in effect dismissed Melbourne, and Peel was being hurriedly summoned back from Rome (still taking almost exactly as long as Caesar would have done), Barnes attempted to lay down with Lyndhurst, the new Lord Chancellor, and (of all people) the Duke of Wellington, who were temporarily in charge in London, the terms on which he would support a Conservative government. They were: no going back on the Reform Bill or on other measures, such as the Tithe Act and the Corporations Act, already voted by the House of Commons, and a continuity of foreign policy. What is still more remarkable is that they were substantially accepted. The brief first Peel Government came into being, the Tamworth Manifesto was issued, and the way was paved for the creation of a Conservatism that could live with the railway age and the nineteenth-century middle-class. ‘Why,’ Lyndhurst reportedly said to Greville, ‘Barnes is the most powerful man in the country.’
Lyndhurst further endorsed Barnes’s importance by giving him a dinner party. This was regarded as being almost the most remarkable of this entire series of events, f
or Barnes rarely went into society and Lord Chancellors or other great officers of state did not habitually entertain journalists. Fortunately, perhaps, ladies were not included, for Barnes remained faithful to his early bohemianism by not being married to his ‘wife’, who looked to Disraeli like ‘a lady in a pantomime’.
However, he maintained a considerable style of life, first in Great Surrey Street, over Blackfriars Bridge, and then, after his salary had been raised to the considerable sum of £2000 (augmented by a one-sixteenth share in what he had made a very profitable enterprise), in a fine house in Soho Square. There he indulged his high taste for wine and food, was much called upon by politicians, and died in May 1841. ‘The Thunderer’ had achieved its soubriquet under his reign.
John Thadeus Delane, the son of W. F. A. Delane, manager of The Times, had been with the paper for about a year, mainly on parliamentary reports, when he succeeded Barnes. He was appointed what can perhaps best be described as ‘lieutenant editor’. John Walter II moved back to take substantial responsibility and Delane did not assume Barnes’s full authority until that chief proprietor’s death in 1847.
