Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

by Anthony Trollope

  Soon after I had been sent to Winchester my mother went to America,

  taking with her my brother Henry and my two sisters, who were then

  no more than children. This was, I think, in 1827. I have no clear

  knowledge of her object, or of my father's; but I believe that

  he had an idea that money might be made by sending goods,--little

  goods, such as pin-cushions, pepper-boxes, and pocket-knives,--out

  to the still unfurnished States; and that she conceived that an

  opening might be made for my brother Henry by erecting some bazaar

  or extended shop in one of the Western cities. Whence the money

  came I do not know, but the pocket-knives and the pepper-boxes were

  bought and the bazaar built. I have seen it since in the town of

  Cincinnati,--a sorry building! But I have been told that in those

  days it was an imposing edifice. My mother went first, with my

  sisters and second brother. Then my father followed them, taking my

  elder brother before he went to Oxford. But there was an interval

  of some year and a half during which he and I were in Winchester

  together.

  Over a period of forty years, since I began my manhood at a desk

  in the Post Office, I and my brother, Thomas Adolphus, have been

  fast friends. There have been hot words between us, for perfect

  friendship bears and allows hot words. Few brothers have had more

  of brotherhood. But in those schooldays he was, of all my foes,

  the worst. In accordance with the practice of the college, which

  submits, or did then submit, much of the tuition of the younger

  boys from the elder, he was my tutor; and in his capacity of teacher

  and ruler, he had studied the theories of Draco. I remember well

  how he used to exact obedience after the manner of that lawgiver.

  Hang a little boy for stealing apples, he used to say, and other

  little boys will not steal apples. The doctrine was already exploded

  elsewhere, but he stuck to it with conservative energy. The result

  was that, as a part of his daily exercise, he thrashed me with a big

  stick. That such thrashings should have been possible at a school

  as a continual part of one's daily life, seems to me to argue a

  very ill condition of school discipline.

  At this period I remember to have passed one set of holidays--the

  midsummer holidays--in my father's chambers in Lincoln's Inn. There

  was often a difficulty about the holidays,--as to what should be

  done with me. On this occasion my amusement consisted in wandering

  about among those old deserted buildings, and in reading Shakespeare

  out of a bi-columned edition, which is still among my books. It

  was not that I had chosen Shakespeare, but that there was nothing

  else to read.

  After a while my brother left Winchester and accompanied my father

  to America. Then another and a different horror fell to my fate.

  My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who

  administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their

  credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which,

  with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other

  scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course

  knew that it was so, and I became a Pariah. It is the nature of

  boys to be cruel. I have sometimes doubted whether among each other

  they do usually suffer much, one from the other's cruelty; but I

  suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend

  to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and

  ugly, and, I have no doubt, sulked about in a most unattractive

  manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But ah! how well

  I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered

  whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way

  up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to

  everything? And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies

  from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling a week pocket-money,

  which we called battels, and which was advanced to us out of the

  pocket of the second master. On one awful day the second master

  announced to me that my battels would be stopped. He told me the

  reason,--the battels for the last half-year had not been repaid; and

  he urged his own unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a

  shilling a week would not have been much,--even though pocket-money

  from other sources never reached me,--but that the other boys all

  knew it! Every now and again, perhaps three or four times in a

  half-year, these weekly shillings were given to certain servants

  of the college, in payment, it may be presumed, for some extra

  services. And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he

  received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy, and the cause

  of the defalcation was explained to him. I never saw one of those

  servants without feeling I had picked his pocket.

  When I had been at Winchester something over three years, my father

  returned to England and took me away. Whether this was done because

  of the expense, or because my chance of New College was supposed

  to have passed away, I do not know. As a fact, I should, I believe,

  have gained the prize, as there occurred in my year an exceptional

  number of vacancies. But it would have served me nothing, as there

  would have been no funds for my maintenance at the University

  till I should have entered in upon the fruition of the founder's

  endowment, and my career at Oxford must have been unfortunate.

  When I left Winchester, I had three more years of school before me,

  having as yet endured nine. My father at this time having left my

  mother and sisters with my younger brother in America, took himself

  to live at a wretched tumble-down farmhouse on the second farm

  he had hired! And I was taken there with him. It was nearly three

  miles from Harrow, at Harrow Weald, but in the parish; and from

  this house I was again sent to that school as a day-boarder. Let

  those who know what is the usual appearance and what the usual

  appurtenances of a boy at such a school, consider what must have

  been my condition among them, with a daily walk of twelve miles

  through the lanes, added to the other little troubles and labours

  of a school life!

  Perhaps the eighteen months which I passed in this condition,

  walking to and fro on those miserably dirty lanes, was the worst

  period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age

  at which I could appreciate at its full the misery of expulsion

  from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was

  despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more

  than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always

  to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it

  crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from

  barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dungheaps, one could hardly

  tell where one began and the other ended! There was a parlour in

  which my father lived, shut up among big books; but I passed my most

  jocund hours in the kit
chen, making innocent love to the bailiff's

  daughter. The farm kitchen might be very well through the evening,

  when the horrors of the school were over; but it all added to the

  cruelty of the days. A sizar at a Cambridge college, or a Bible-clerk

  at Oxford, has not pleasant days, or used not to have them half a

  century ago; but his position was recognised, and the misery was

  measured. I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never

  premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from

  a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers,--or much worse still,

  next to the sons of big tradesmen who made their ten thousand a

  year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look

  back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me,--those

  of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor

  did I learn anything,--for I was taught nothing. The only expense,

  except that of books, to which a house-boarder was then subject,

  was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My

  tutor took me without the fee; but when I heard him declare the fact

  in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the

  charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little

  as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of

  three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time

  I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes

  of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion,

  and there came a great fight,--at the end of which my opponent

  had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed,

  I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be left alive

  who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of

  my school-days, I am not making a false boast.

  I wish I could give some adequate picture of the gloom of that

  farmhouse. My elder brother--Tom as I must call him in my narrative,

  though the world, I think, knows him best as Adolphus--was at Oxford.

  My father and I lived together, he having no means of living except

  what came from the farm. My memory tells me that he was always

  in debt to his landlord and to the tradesmen he employed. Of

  self-indulgence no one could accuse him. Our table was poorer, I

  think, than that of the bailiff who still hung on to our shattered

  fortunes. The furniture was mean and scanty. There was a large

  rambling kitchen-garden, but no gardener; and many times verbal

  incentives were made to me,--generally, I fear, in vain,--to

  get me to lend a hand at digging and planting. Into the hayfields

  on holidays I was often compelled to go,--not, I fear, with much

  profit. My father's health was very bad. During the last ten years

  of his life, he spent nearly the half of his time in bed, suffering

  agony from sick headaches. But he was never idle unless when

  suffering. He had at this time commenced a work,--an Encyclopedia

  Ecclesiastica, as he called it,--on which he laboured to the moment

  of his death. It was his ambition to describe all ecclesiastical

  terms, including the denominations of every fraternity of monks

  and every convent of nuns, with all their orders and subdivisions.

  Under crushing disadvantages, with few or no books of reference,

  with immediate access to no library, he worked at his most ungrateful

  task with unflagging industry. When he died, three numbers out

  of eight had been published by subscription; and are now, I fear,

  unknown, and buried in the midst of that huge pile of futile

  literature, the building up of which has broken so many hearts.

  And my father, though he would try, as it were by a side wind, to

  get a useful spurt of work out of me, either in the garden or in

  the hay-field, had constantly an eye to my scholastic improvement.

  From my very babyhood, before those first days at Harrow, I had to

  take my place alongside of him as he shaved at six o'clock in the

  morning, and say my early rules from the Latin Grammar, or repeat

  the Greek alphabet; and was obliged at these early lessons to hold

  my head inclined towards him, so that in the event of guilty fault,

  he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor or

  dropping his shaving-brush. No father was ever more anxious for

  the education of his children, though I think none ever knew less

  how to go about the work. Of amusement, as far as I can remember,

  he never recognised the need. He allowed himself no distraction,

  and did not seem to think it was necessary to a child. I cannot

  bethink me of aught that he ever did for my gratification; but for

  my welfare,--for the welfare of us all,--he was willing to make

  any sacrifice. At this time, in the farmhouse at Harrow Weald,

  he could not give his time to teach me, for every hour that he was

  not in the fields was devoted to his monks and nuns; but he would

  require me to sit at a table with Lexicon and Gradus before me.

  As I look back on my resolute idleness and fixed determination to

  make no use whatever of the books thus thrust upon me, or of the

  hours, and as I bear in mind the consciousness of great energy in

  after-life, I am in doubt whether my nature is wholly altered, or

  whether his plan was wholly bad. In those days he never punished

  me, though I think I grieved him much by my idleness; but in passion

  he knew not what he did, and he has knocked me down with the great

  folio Bible which he always used. In the old house were the two first

  volumes of Cooper's novel, called The Prairie, a relic--probably a

  dishonest relic--of some subscription to Hookham's library. Other

  books of the kind there was none. I wonder how many dozen times I

  read those two first volumes.

  It was the horror of those dreadful walks backwards and forwards

  which made my life so bad. What so pleasant, what so sweet, as a

  walk along an English lane, when the air is sweet and the weather

  fine, and when there is a charm in walking? But here were the same

  lanes four times a day, in wet and dry, in heat and summer, with

  all the accompanying mud and dust, and with disordered clothes. I

  might have been known among all the boys at a hundred yards' distance

  by my boots and trousers,--and was conscious at all times that I

  was so known. I remembered constantly that address from Dr. Butler

  when I was a little boy. Dr. Longley might with equal justice have

  said the same thing any day,--only that Dr. Longley never in his

  life was able to say an ill-natured word. Dr. Butler only became

  Dean of Peterborough, but his successor lived to be Archbishop of

  Canterbury.

  I think it was in the autumn of 1831 that my mother, with the rest

  of the family, returned from America. She lived at first at the

  farmhouse, but it was only for a short time. She came back with a

  book written about the United States, and the immediate pecuniary

  success which that work obtained enabled her to take us all back to

  the house at Harrow,--not to the first house, which would still have

  been beyond her means, but to that which ha
s since been called

  Orley Farm, and which was an Eden as compared to our abode at

  Harrow Weald. Here my schooling went on under somewhat improved

  circumstances. The three miles became half a mile, and probably

  some salutary changes were made in my wardrobe. My mother and

  my sisters, too, were there. And a great element of happiness was

  added to us all in the affectionate and life-enduring friendship

  of the family of our close neighbour Colonel Grant. But I was never

  able to overcome--or even to attempt to overcome--the absolute

  isolation of my school position. Of the cricket-ground or racket-court

  I was allowed to know nothing. And yet I longed for these things

  with an exceeding longing. I coveted popularity with a covetousness

  that was almost mean. It seemed to me that there would be an

  Elysium in the intimacy of those very boys whom I was bound to hate

  because they hated me. Something of the disgrace of my school-days

  has clung to me all through life. Not that I have ever shunned to

  speak of them as openly as I am writing now, but that when I have

  been claimed as schoolfellow by some of those many hundreds who

  were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that

  I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in

  estrangement.

  Through all my father's troubles he still desired to send me either

  to Oxford or Cambridge. My elder brother went to Oxford, and Henry

  to Cambridge. It all depended on my ability to get some scholarship

  that would help me to live at the University. I had many chances.

  There were exhibitions from Harrow--which I never got. Twice I tried

  for a sizarship at Clare Hall,--but in vain. Once I made a futile

  attempt for a scholarship at Trinity, Oxford,--but failed again. Then

  the idea of a university career was abandoned. And very fortunate

  it was that I did not succeed, for my career with such assistance

  only as a scholarship would have given me, would have ended in debt

  and ignominy.

  When I left Harrow I was all but nineteen, and I had at first gone

  there at seven. During the whole of those twelve years no attempt

  had been made to teach me anything but Latin and Greek, and very

  little attempt to teach me those languages. I do not remember

  any lessons either in writing or arithmetic. French and German I