Phineas Finn, the Irish Member

by Anthony Trollope

  ‘Not exactly a great novelist’ was one cautious estimate at the time of Trollope's death. Phineas Finn is, in the same un-ironic sense, not exactly a great novel. It is, however, a very fine one and participates in a larger design whose achievement is acknowledged. But the Palliser connection aside, Phineas Finn has its individual excellences. The liveliness of mood and the consonant preoccupation with socio-political freedoms have been indicated, as have the characteristically subtle ambivalences of Trollope's moral inquisitions. There is more than this: he is nothing if not generous in what he offers the reader. Some parts of Phineas Finn will please more than others but hopefully future readers will agree with Trollope's verdict, in his usual hit-or-miss manner, that the work is to be judged a ‘success’.

  Bibliography

  TROLLOPE'S fiction is so massive in itself that one is loth to burden the reader with secondary material. But clearly appreciation of any of the Palliser novels is enlarged and pleasure multiplied by reading others in the series, more so if they are read in sequence. Those unwilling to undertake this labour might go on to the other novel in which Finn is the hero, Phineas Redux. By far the best introduction to Trollope's fiction is his own Autobiography (1883). There is no complete biography, but M. Sadleir's Trollope: a Commentary (1927, rev. 1945) has in its forty years never been supplanted as the standard account of the author's life and work, and has only recently been challenged by James Pope Hennessy's Anthony Trollope (1971). The Letters (1951) have been collected and edited by B. A. Booth.

  There are a number of book-length criticisms of Trollope's fiction: T. H. S. Escott's Trollope: his Work, Associates and Literary Originals (1913) is probably the best done by those critics for whom the memory of the author in life was still fresh. More recently four books stand out: B. A. Booth's Trollope: Aspects of his Life and Work (1958), A. O. J. Cockshut's Trollope: a Critical Study (1955), R. M. Polhemus's The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (1968) and Trollope: Artist and Moralist (1971) by Ruth apRoberts. Each of these makes a different case for reassessing an author whose reputation has never stood as high as it should have done. A wide selection of reviews of Trollope's work has been made by D. Smalley in his Critical Heritage (1969) volume and D. Skilton's Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries examines the novelist in relation to the criticism of his age. Readers with access to a good library will find a wealth of criticism on Trollope in the pages of the journal Nineteenth Century Fiction (formerly the Trollopian), though little of it is specifically on Phineas Finn. Asa Briggs in his Victorian People (1954) has a chapter on Trollope and Bagehot, and those interested in the novelist's political thought will find Bagehot's The English Constitution (1872) usefully complementary.

  The Background to Phineas Finn

  THE late 1860s was a period when politics and literature crossed each other's lines more than is usual in England. Phineas Finn joins Felix Holt, Culture and Anarchy, Shooting Niagara, Put Yourself in his Place and The English Constitution as works which reflect on the reform issue, the great question of the day. As Trollope wrote Phineas Finn it was a question which was near to being resolved: a calendar of events is, in this respect, illuminating.

  Trollope writing

  Phineas Finn mid May 1866— —12 March 1866. Gladstone publishes his Reform Bill.

  18 June. Dunkellen's motion defeats the government.

  3 July. Conservatives accept office.

  mid June 1867— February 1867. Disraeli outlines his reform proposals.

  February-July. Disraeli sacrifices his ‘fancy franchises’.

  July 1867. Disraeli's Bill passes.

  Since, as is well known, Trollope wrote a regular daily quota it is possible to chart certain currents in the novel against contemporary events. One notes in the early chapters, for example, numerous references to the vulnerability and brevity of Conservative administrations. Trollope in fact builds the first act of his political plot around the collapse of the Conservative Daubeny—Terrier ministry. The Disraeli—Derby government did not, however, collapse and as the novel gets into its stride scornful references to this Conservative weakness cease. They are replaced by a rather more stoical mood; in the crucial chapter ‘Mr Monk upon Reform’ which must have been written around February 1867 we find Monk, who in general speaks for Trollope, making the interesting comment: ‘I may truly say that I would as lief have a good measure from Lord De Terrier as from Mr Mildmay [the Liberal leader].’ This probably reflects Trollope's cautious optimism at the period. Disraeli's submissions, however, allowed much more radical reform than Trollope cared for. He regarded this surrender as the kind of treachery to which the Conservative party was peculiarly prone (his other favourite example of such treachery was the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846). The gathering pessimism and gloom of the novel towards the end when it seems all an honest politician can do is give up politics probably arise from Trollope's depression just before the triumph of Tory ‘Expediency’.

  So much for the shifting mood of the novel. The actual political events it recounts are somewhat different. Trollope invents the fiction that the Liberals, not their opponents, passed the second Reform Bill (in May 1866 and up to Spring 1867 he may have expected them to come back and do so). But he has them pass it in a historical context which is recognizably contemporary. From the early pages the novel is casually sown with topical references to events of 1865–7. Fenianism, the Adullamite Cave, new Government buildings, Mill's feminist Bill, the expected trial of Jefferson Davis, the Hyde Park riots and, arching over all, the reform issue: the modern eye passes these largely unregistered but they would have set Phineas Finn firmly in the present and immediate past for the reader of 1868. There is no more misleading remark about the novel than Lord David Cecil's in his Early Victorian Novelists that ‘if we were wafted suddenly back to 1840, we should find… the world of Phineas Finn’. The close identification of the novel's action with a narrow historical period does, however, raise one obvious chronological problem: the hero's career starts in 1864 and finishes five years later in 1866. To explain this we must assume a double time-scale, one for Phineas, the other for his political world. It is no great difficulty.

  Trollope's use of historical personalities in his fiction is more vexed than his use of current historical events. A. O. J. Cockshut in his Trollope: a Critical Study goes so far as to assert that the question of who are the originals of Trollope's political personages should not even be asked, and the reader would lose little by taking the advice. Controversy and far-fetched speculation have, however, made the issue unavoidable. Briefly: there is conclusive evidence that Daubeny is, on occasion at least, Disraeli and Gresham is almost as certainly, on occasion, Gladstone. It has been suggested that Palliser is based on Lord John Russell. Candidates for Mildmay are Palmerston and Russell again. None of these is prominent in Phineas Finn. Turnbull is, and if he was not meant to represent John Bright Trollope was much maligned, for Turnbull was almost universally taken to be a caricature of the great radical. For the rest: T. H. S. Escott asserts that Chiltern is Trollope's ‘snapshot’ at Lord Hartington, later Duke of Devonshire. That they both had red hair and a wild university career behind them supports this identification, nothing else. Hartington, for instance, served a useful parliamentary career; Chiltern never does anything more than play with his dumb-bells and be an M.F.H. Escott also alleges that Madame Max Goesler is a portrait of a famous society hostess whom he is too delicate to name. Finally Phineas himself: Sadleir confidently claims that ‘physically he was Joe Parkinson, an English journalist who married a millionaire's daughter and became a wealthy director of companies; intellectually and politically he was John Pope Hennessy, a young Irish politician of brilliant parts’. Pope Hennessy (1834–91) was Catholic and helped amend the Irish Poor Law in 1862, but he was a staunch Conservative which hardly fits. Assuming Phineas is anybody it seems to me more likely that Trollope had Samuel Chichester Fortescue in mind (see note 98).

  All this is the stuff that footnotes are ma
de of, and probably not very important footnotes. We cannot, as with Disraeli's novels, append a key. Trollope was too prudent and, unlike Disraeli, not an insider for whom veiled indiscretion would have an appeal. Clearly he drew ideas and traits from his contemporaries. But since he went to some pains to confuse identifications we should not, perhaps, take greater pains to invent them.

  A Note on the Text

  THE text of this edition is printed from that first published serially in Saint Paul's Magazine from October 1867 to May 1869, with illustrations by Millais. Asterisks are left to show where the monthly gaps came. Saint Paul's was primarily a political magazine though it regularly carried fiction and articles of general appeal. Trollope was its founder editor and Phineas Finn his main contribution to getting the journal off the ground.

  Trollope was not a careful proof reader of his own work. In a justly famous series of articles some twenty-five years ago R. W. Chapman suggested speculative emendations to the then current texts of Trollope's novels. The revisions which, with John Sparrow, he put forward for Phineas Finn were proved to be substantially correct and, where so, have been gratefully adopted here. (A full list of Chapman and Sparrow's emendations for the novel, together with ensuing correspondence, can be found in the TLS, 1944, pp. 156, 192, 372.) A handful of other preferred readings from the manuscript have been silently included in this edition. One, perhaps, calls for some small comment: in the letter to her lodger in chapter 17 Mrs Bunce signs herself ‘Yours 'umbly and respectful’. Bradford Booth in his Trollope: Aspects of his Life and Work rightly points out that this is ludicrous since semi-literates do not annotate their own mis-spellings. The manuscript shows that Trollope wrote ‘Yours umbly and respectful’ so it would seem that the printer, rather than the novelist, deserves Booth's censure.

  A facsimile of the title-page from the

  first volume of the first edition

  CHAPTER 1

  Phineas Finn Proposes to Stand for Loughshane

  DR FINN, of Killaloe, in county Clare, was as well known in those parts, – the confines, that is, of the counties Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, and Galway, – as was the bishop himself who lived in the same town, and was as much respected. Many said that the doctor was the richer man of the two, and the practice of his profession was extended over almost as wide a district. Indeed the bishop, whom he was privileged to attend, although a Roman Catholic, always spoke of their dioceses being conterminate. It will therefore be understood that Dr Finn, – Malachi Finn was his full name, – had obtained a wide reputation as a country practitioner in the west of Ireland. And he was a man sufficiently well to do, though that boast made by his friends, that he was as warm a man as the bishop, had but little truth to support it. Bishops in Ireland, if they live at home, even in these days, are very warm men; and Dr Finn had not a penny in the world for which he had not worked hard. He had, moreover, a costly family, five daughters and one son, and, at the time of which we are speaking, no provision in the way of marriage or profession had been made for any of them. Of the one son, Phineas, the hero of the following pages, the mother and five sisters were very proud. The doctor was accustomed to say that his goose was as good as any other man's goose, as far as he could see as yet; but that he should like some very strong evidence before he allowed himself to express an opinion that the young bird partook, in any degree, of the qualities of a swan. From which it may be gathered that Dr Finn was a man of common-sense.

  Phineas had come to be a swan in the estimation of his mother and sisters by reason of certain early successes at college. His father, whose religion was not of that bitter kind in which we in England are apt to suppose that all the Irish Roman Catholics indulge, had sent his son to Trinity; and there were some in the neighbourhood of Killaloe, – patients, probably, of Dr Duggin, of Castle Connell, a learned physician who had spent a fruitless life in endeavouring to make head against Dr Finn, – who declared that old Finn would not be sorry if his son were to turn Protestant and go in for a fellowship. Mrs Finn was a Protestant, and the five Miss Finns were Protestants, and the doctor himself was very much given to dining out among his Protestant friends on a Friday. Our Phineas, however, did not turn Protestant up in Dublin, whatever his father's secret wishes on that subject may have been. He did join a debating society, to success in which his religion was no bar; and he there achieved a sort of distinction which was both easy and pleasant, and which, making its way down to Killaloe, assisted in engendering those ideas as to swanhood of which maternal and sisterly minds are so sweetly susceptible. ‘I know half a dozen old windbags at the present moment,’ said the doctor, ‘who were great fellows at debating clubs when they were boys.’ ‘Phineas is not a boy any longer,’ said Mrs Finn. ‘And windbags don't get college scholarships,’ said Matilda Finn, the second daughter. ‘But papa always snubs Phinny,’ said Barbara, the youngest. ‘I'll snub you, if you don't take care,’ said the doctor, taking Barbara tenderly by the ear; – for his youngest daughter was the doctor's pet.

  The doctor certainly did not snub his son, for he allowed him to go over to London when he was twenty-two years of age, in order that he might read with an English barrister. It was the doctor's wish that his son might be called to the Irish Bar, and the young man's desire that he might go to the English Bar. The doctor so far gave way, under the influence of Phineas himself, and of all the young women of the family, as to pay the usual fee to a very competent and learned gentleman in the Middle Temple, and to allow his son one hundred and fifty pounds per annum for three years. Dr Finn, however, was still firm in his intention that his son should settle in Dublin, and take the Munster Circuit, – believing that Phineas might come to want home influences and home connections, in spite of the swanhood which was attributed to him.

  Phineas eat1 his terms for three years, and was duly called to the Bar; but no evidence came home as to the acquirement of any considerable amount of law lore, or even as to much law study, on the part of the young aspirant. The learned pundit at whose feet he had been sitting was not especially loud in praise of his pupil's industry, though he did say a pleasant word or two as to his pupil's intelligence. Phineas himself did not boast much of his own hard work when at home during the long vacation. No rumours of expected successes, – of expected professional successes, – reached the ears of any of the Finn family at Killaloe. But, nevertheless, there came tidings which maintained those high ideas in the maternal bosom of which mention has been made, and which were of such sufficient strength to induce the doctor, in opposition to his own judgement, to consent to the continued residence of his son in London. Phineas belonged to an excellent club, – the Reform Club,2 – and went into very good society. He was hand and glove with the Hon. Laurence Fitzgibbon, the eldest son of Lord Claddagh. He was intimate with Barrington Erle, who had been private secretary, – one of the private secretaries, – to the great Whig Prime Minister who was lately in but was now out. He had dined three or four times with that great Whig nobleman, the Earl of Brentford. And he had been assured that if he stuck to the English Bar he would certainly do well. Though he might fail to succeed in court or in chambers, he would doubtless have given to him some one of those numerous appointments for which none but clever young barristers are supposed to be fitting candidates. The old doctor yielded for another year, although at the end of the second year he was called upon to pay a sum of three hundred pounds, which was then due by Phineas to creditors in London. When the doctor's male friends in and about Killaloe heard that he had done so, they said that he was doting. Not one of the Miss Finns was as yet married; and, after all that had been said about the doctor's wealth, it was supposed that there would not be above five hundred pounds a year among them all, were he to give up his profession. But the doctor, when he paid that three hundred pounds for his son, buckled to his work again, though he had for twelve months talked of giving up the midwifery. He buckled to again, to the great disgust of Dr Duggin, who at this time said very ill-natured things about young Phin
eas.

  At the end of the three years Phineas was called to the Bar, and immediately received a letter from his father asking minutely as to his professional intentions. His father recommended him to settle in Dublin, and promised the one hundred and fifty pounds for three more years, on condition that this advice was followed. He did not absolutely say that the allowance would be stopped if the advice were not followed, but that was plainly to be implied. That letter came at the moment of a dissolution of Parliament. Lord de Terrier, the Conservative Prime Minister, who had now been in office for the almost unprecedentedly long period of fifteen months, had found that he could not face continued majorities against him in the House of Commons, and had dissolved the House. Rumour declared that he would have much preferred to resign, and betake himself once again to the easy glories of opposition; but his party had naturally been obdurate with him, and he had resolved to appeal to the country. When Phineas received his father's letter, it had just been suggested to him at the Reform Club that he should stand for the Irish borough of Loughshane.

  This proposition had taken Phineas Finn so much by surprise, that when first made to him by Barrington Erle it took his breath away. What! he stand for Parliament, twenty-four years old, with no vestige of property belonging to him, without a penny in his purse, as completely dependent on his father as he was when he first went to school at eleven years of age! And for Loughshane, a little borough in the county Galway, for which a brother of that fine old Irish peer, the Earl of Tulla, had been sitting for the last twenty years, – a fine, high-minded representative of the thorough-going Orange Protestant feeling of Ireland! And the Earl of Tulla, to whom almost all Loughshane belonged, – or at any rate the land about Loughshane, – was one of his father's staunchest friends! Loughshane is in county Galway, but the Earl of Tulla usually lived at his seat in county Clare, not more than ten miles from Killaloe, and always confided his gouty feet, and the weak nerves of the old countess, and the stomachs of all his domestics, to the care of Dr Finn. How was it possible that Phineas should stand for Loughshane? From whence was the money to come for such a. contest? It was a beautiful dream, a grand idea, lifting Phineas almost off the earth by its glory. When the proposition was first made to him in the smoking-room at the Reform Club by his friend Erle, he was aware that he blushed like a girl, and that he was unable at the moment to express himself plainly, – so great was his astonishment and so great his gratification. But before ten minutes had passed by, while Barrington Erle was still sitting over his shoulder on the club sofa, and before the blushes had altogether vanished, he had seen the improbability of the scheme, and had explained to his friend that the thing could not be done. But to his increased astonishment, his friend made nothing of the difficulties. Loughshane, according to Barrington Erle, was so small a place, that the expense would be very little. There were altogether no more than 307 registered electors. The inhabitants were so far removed from the world, and were so ignorant of the world's good things, that they knew nothing about bribery.3 The Hon. George Morris, who had sat for the last twenty years, was very unpopular. He had not been near the borough since the last election, he had hardly done more than show himself in Parliament, and had neither given a shilling in the town nor got a place under Government for a single son of Loughshane. ‘And he has quarrelled with his brother,’ said Barrington Erle. ‘The devil he has!’ said Phineas. ‘I thought they always swore by each other.’ ‘It's at each other they swear now,’ said Barrington; ‘George has asked the Earl for more money, and the Earl has cut up rusty.’ Then the negotiator went on to explain that the expenses of the election would be defrayed out of a certain fund collected for such purposes, that Loughshane had been chosen as a cheap place, and that Phineas Finn had been chosen as a safe and promising young man. As for qualification, if any question were raised, that should be made all right. An Irish candidate was wanted, and a Roman Catholic. So much the Loughshaners would require on their own account when instigated to dismiss from their service that thorough-going Protestant, the Hon. George Morris. Then ‘the party,’ – by which Barrington Erle probably meant the great man in whose service he himself had become a politician, – required that the candidate should be a safe man, one who would support ‘the party,’ – not a cantankerous, red-hot semi-Fenian,4 running about to meetings at the Rotunda, and such like, with views of his own about tenant-right and the Irish Church. ‘But I have views of my own,’ said Phineas, blushing again. ‘Of course you have, my dear boy,’ said Barrington, clapping him on the back. ‘I shouldn't come to you unless you had views. But your views and ours are the same, and you're just the lad for Galway. You mightn't have such an opening again in your life, and of course you'll stand for Loughshane.’ Then the conversation was over, the private secretary went away to arrange some other little matter of the kind, and Phineas Finn was left alone to consider the proposition that had been made to him.