[In the following essay, Johnston appraises Trollope's political philosophy, particularly his concern for the problems of the poor, as it is revealed in Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran.]

Anthony Trollope revealed his abiding interest in politics not only in his novels but also in his letters and his autobiography.¹ In the autobiography, he describes his political philosophy as “advanced Conservative-Liberal,” and explains it in a discussion of the ethical implications of the relative positions in society of the rich and the poor. While he sees the poor as having been placed in their unenviable position through divine ordinance, he also sees it as part of this ordinance that their situation should be improved. He is wary, however, of political liberals who want that situation to improve at a pace so rapid that a fundamental disruption in society might result; he is equally wary of the conservatives who, given their preëminent concern with social stability, want the poor to progress at what Trollope regards as an unconscionably slow rate. Trollope sees himself as sharing the best of the concerns of both liberal and conservative, as embodying the discordia concors of their disparate approaches to the problem of the poor, and thus regards himself as a progressive liberal who supports the alleviation of poverty and ignorance at as fast a rate as is socially safe.² This discussion examines the relationship between this political philosophy of Trollope's and the art of his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847).

The choice of The Macdermots seems highly appropriate, for the novel is set in a background of agrarian and political strife in the poverty-stricken Ireland of the 1830s, and it was Ireland that “first roused Trollope's interest in politics.”³ Finally, in Ireland, where he lived for most of the period 1841-1859 as an official of the British Post Office, the socially inept young Trollope felt himself to be “no longer an outcast, pleading for entrance to the club of ordinary men; [rather] he had become an ambassador of England, living in disputatious amity with one of the most race-conscious nations in the world.”⁴The Macdermots, then, is a novel rich in political material and written by a maiden novelist in the first flush of both his interest in politics and his repute as a political pundit. The Macdermots of Ballycloran provides a striking example of the interplay between Trollope's political philosophy and his art as a novelist. This Irish novel is, in effect, a fictional expression of Trollope's conservative liberalism, which generally controls the novel and sometimes outweighs the novelist's concern for his art.⁵

The Macdermots is located in the West of the Ireland of the 1830s, the poorest part of, in the words of a popular 19th-century ballad, a “most distressful country.” In the West, the large rural population consisted mainly of extremely poor tenant farmers who lived, with their families, on potatoes they grew on small patches of land rented from local landlords, who were often Protestants of Anglo-Irish descent and were generally antipathetic to the native, Roman Catholic peasantry.⁶ Conditions for the peasants were generally miserable. The rents they paid were extremely high: “In practice, most Irish landlords exacted the utmost the land would bear. …” In addition, “most Irish farmers had no security of tenure, and they had learned by experience that if they improved their holdings, the landlord was quite likely to put up the rent.” Nor did it look to the peasant as if the British government, which had ruled Ireland from London since the 1801 Act of Union, was going to help, for “the only land legislation of the early nineteenth century, three acts passed between 1816 and 1820, extended the landlords' powers still further by simplifying the process of eviction.”⁷ It is hardly surprising then, that “The Irish peasant saw himself as the victim of injustice in almost all the relations of his life; the landlord and the parson oppressed him; the magistrate refused him justice; his Protestant neighbour simply as a Protestant, had the advantage of him at every turn.”⁸ Neither is it surprising that the peasant had little respect for the prevailing system, nor that he should take to distilling illegal liquor to console himself. But the most dramatic reaction that he had to the conditions in which he lived was to organize in secret societies and take, at times, violent courses of action against both landlords and police.

The protagonist of The Macdermots is, however, not a peasant but a young Catholic landlord, Thady Macdermot, who attempts to save his financially and morally ailing family. Financially, he faces the problem of paying off the mortgage on rundown Ballycloran House, under threat of imminent foreclosure by the builder and the builder's rapacious lawyer, Hyacinth Keegan. Thady's only source of income is the hard-come-by rent that he receives irregularly from the extremely poor peasant farmers who rent small lots of bad land on Ballycloran Estate. Morally, he faces the problem of saving his credulous and romantically inclined sister Feemy by getting her lover, revenue police captain Myles Ussher, either to marry her or leave her in peace. Ussher also is a thorn in Thady's side in another way, since his main function is to prevent the distillation of “potheen,” a highly popular, illegal Irish whiskey. Thus, he perpetually harasses Thady's tenants, many of whom are enthusiastic distillers of the potent drink. Ussher, then, damages Thady in terms of both the financial and moral well-being of his family. The climax of the plot occurs when Thady, believing that Ussher is dragging Feemy away with him against her will, lashes out with his stick and kills the policeman. Thady, in panic, “goes on his keeping.” After some reflection on the matter he decides to give himself up to the law, as he had not intended to kill Ussher, and had done the deed under highly mitigating circumstances. As he surrenders, he feels some apprehension as to the justice of the prevailing legal system. His apprehension proves to be well founded. He is found guilty of murder and hanged. As his trial nears its end, Feemy, pregnant with Ussher's child, dies of Victoriana. Their senile, alcoholic father, Larry, goes totally insane and, thus, completes the downfall of the Macdermots of Ballycloran.

Several elements in the plot of The Macdermots merit discussion: in terms of the thesis of this essay. Among them are landlordism, tenant poverty, the law in both its enforcement and judicial capacities, the underground tenant organization known as the Ribbonmen, the Irish nationalist movement, and the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. Against a background comprised of these elements the fate of Thady Macdermot and his family is decided.

The stultifying poverty and vicious landlordism that surrounds Thady, himself a small and charitable landlord, is one of the most striking aspects of this novel, and bears ultimately on the fate of Trollope's protagonist. The novel contains many fine descriptions of the effects of poverty, but none so fine as the description of the country village of Mohill, near Ballycloran. In terms of its evocation of human squalor, the following passage recalls Dickens at his best. The village, with little exception, is a collection of

… hovels without chimneys, windows, doors, or signs of humanity, except the children playing in the collected filth in front of them. The very scraughs of which the roofs are comprised are germinating afresh, and sickly green with a new growth, look more like the tops of newly neglected dungheaps, than the only protection for Christian beings from the winds of heaven.⁹

Trollope draws our attention to a particular hovel and asks, “Can that be the habitation of any of the human race?” (125). He answers the question by describing what is happening inside:

Two or three dim children—their number is lost in the obscurity—are conversing around the dull, dark fire, atop of one another; and on one miserable pallet beyond—a few rotten boards, propped upon equally infirm supports, and covered only with a thin black quilt—is sitting the master of the mansion; his grisly unshorn beard, his lantern jaws and shaggy hair, are such as his home and family would lead one to expect. And now you have counted all that this man possesses. Other furniture has he none, except that low stool on which his wife is sitting. Squatting on the ground—from off the ground like pigs, only much more poorly fed, his children eat the scanty earnings of his continued labour.

And yet for this abode the man pays rent.

(126-127)

A vividly contrasting description of the elegant house on the hill, which belongs to the landlord's agent, follows this harrowing passage. We are then introduced to the landlord himself, the Englishman and member of the London Parliament, Lord Birmingham, who “was rarely in his life in Ireland, never in Mohill” (128). In England, it seems, he is a veritable philanthropist, giving generous aid to hospitals, artists, and Polish refugees. How, asks Trollope, in the deliberately adopted voice of an innocent, could Birmingham be expected to live in two countries at once? So, how could he be expected to take care of these dreadful Irish conditions, busy as he is with his English charities? Yet, asks the novelist, returning to his normal narrative voice,

Shall no one be blamed for the misery which belonged to him, for the squalid sources of the wealth from which Poles were fed, and literary paupers clothed? Was no none answerable for the grim look of that half-starved wretch, whom but now we saw looking down so sadly on the young sufferers to whom he had given life and poverty? That can hardly be. And if we feel the difficulty which, among his numerous philanthropic works, Lord Birmingham must experience in attending to the state of his numerous dependents, it only makes us reflect very often that from him to whom much is given, much will be required.

(128-29)

And Lord Birmingham is not the only landlord on whom Trollope vents his anger, for he describes the Browne family with a similar degree of asperity.

The establishment of Browne Hall consisted of Jonas Browne, the father—an irritable, overbearing magistrate … a greedy landlord, and an unprincipled father—whose two sons had been brought up to consider sport their only business … the estate … was all set at a rack rent. … Jonas had always lived beyond his income. … [He was] careful to see that he got the full twelve hours work from the unfortunate men whom he hired out at fivepence a day, and who out of that had to feed themselves and their families and pay their rent. We will not talk about clothing them. It would be mockery to call the rags with which the labouring poor in that part of the country are partially covered, clothes. …

(333-37)

These three excerpts reveal much about Trollope's conservative liberalism. The liberal Trollope is so outraged at the widely differing fates of landlord and tenant in Ireland that, in the passages quoted above, he certainly does not imply that these differences between rich and poor are God-ordained, as he does in his theoretical discussions of rich and poor in his Autobiography.¹⁰ The clear implication of the tone in these passages is that there must be a change, but, like the Duke of St. Bungay, Trollope has “never been a friend of great measures, knowing that when they come fast, one after another, more is broken in the rattle than is repaired by the reform.”¹¹ Trollope had a horror of the type of radical change that the Irish situation seemed to demand.¹² And a clear perception of the Irish landlord-tenant problem would have shown most people, who were not willfully blind, that radical change was necessary. Trollope, I believe, had too much integrity to be willfully blind. Rather, in the case of the Irish landlord-tenant problem, both as he dealt with it in The Macdermots and in real life, his liberal outrage is inhibited by his conservative sense of caution, and this prevents him from facing up to the situation in the glaringly uncomfortable light of historical fact. I am not here denying a novelist's right to be less than accurate about historical fact—and politics too, for that matter. But I do not believe that Trollope should be accorded this license, nor do I believe he would accept it very graciously, deeply interested as he was in the history and politics of Ireland,¹³ and frank as he was about using his novels to express his own political ideas. Further, he locates The Macdermots in a milieu clearly recognizable in terms of the history and politics of Ireland. So, attention should be paid to any blurring of the historical or political facts in The Macdermots.

One of the facts obscured by Trollope is that, in the period of which he is writing, at least 85 percent of the landlords in Ireland were British or of British descent. They were Anglo-Saxon Protestant planters with little or no sympathy for the mostly Gaelic, Roman Catholic natives who rented the land from them,¹⁴ land that had been taken from their forebears by conquest. The landlords, many of them absentees like Birmingham, were loyal, not to an Irish government, that government having been abolished by the Act of Union, but to the British government. Irish Protestants in general were in a numerical minority, and maintained their struggle, according to Irish historian J. C. Beckett, “against domination by the Roman Catholic majority … only by standing openly as an ‘English garrison’”¹⁵ in 19th-century Ireland. Now these facts, and not merely 19th-century laissez faire attitudes about private property, make a considerable contribution to the type of landlord-tenant tension which Trollope portrays in The Macdermots. Thus, there are serious imperialistic connotations of the landlord-tenant relationships in this novel, connotations to which, I contend, the author fails to pay due attention. To pay them the attention that they merited would be tantamount to admitting that drastic, even violent change was a viable answer to the problem of tenant poverty in Ireland.

So much does Trollope play down any suggestion of imperialism as a factor in the novel, that, despite his pointing to Birmingham as an Englishman, he clearly implies that the landlord-tenant dispute in Ireland was a dispute between Irishmen. For example, take this passage from the opening chapter of The Macdermots. The narrator is looking at the ruins of Ballycloran. “The usual story, thought I, of Connaught [the West of Ireland] gentlemen; an extravagant landlord, reckless tenants, debt, embarrassment, despair and ruin” (3). This impression of the landlords as mostly native Irish is strengthened in the tenth chapter when the reader learns that Keegan, the lawyer, “earned his bread by performing the legal acts to which Irish landlords are so often obliged to have resort in obtaining the rent from their tenants” (146). When one adds to this the fact that, despite the historical statistics quoted above, Trollope makes the main family of the novel Irish Catholic landlords, one can see the degree to which his conservative myopia was at work. Thus, in the matter of the landlord-tenant conflict in this novel, the liberal Trollope's desire for the betterment of the situation of the Irish tenantry is obviously checked by the “drags and holdfasts”¹⁶ of his conservatism. Thus, too, it makes sense to say that once Thady has taken the radical step of killing Myles Ussher, the fall of the Macdermots becomes as inevitable as that of the house of Thebes, though in the former case the fall owes less to Fate than to the political opinion of Anthony Trollope.

The opposite point of the compass to the landlords is the tenant underground organization known as the Ribbonmen. The Ribbonmen are not only bitterly opposed to the rackrenting landlords—though not to the Macdermots, who have a tradition of fairness—but also to Myles Ussher and his revenue police, who prosecute them ruthlessly for distilling “potheen.” As in the case of the landlords, a comparison of Trollope's Ribbonmen with the Ribbonmen of history leads to some interesting conclusions. According to Trollope,

Ribbonism about 1830 was again becoming very prevalent in parts of Ireland. … County Leitrim was full of Ribbonmen, and no town so full as Mohill. … Joe [Reynolds, a local cottier and potheen maker] was aware that he was a marked man, and consequently, if not actually a Ribbonman, was very well inclined to that or anything else which might be inimical to jails, policemen, inspectors, gaugers, or any other recognized authority; in fact, he was a reckless man rendered so by inability to pay high rent for miserably bad land, and afterwards becoming doubly so from having recourse to illegal means to ease him of his difficulties.

He and many others in the neighbourhood of Mohill somewhat similarly situated, had joined together, bound themselves by oaths, and determined to become Ribbonmen. Their chief objects however at present were to free themselves from the terrors of Captains Ussher and Greenhough¹⁷ and to prevent the landlords ejecting them for non-payment of rent.

(19)

Then, in reference to a specific Ribbon meeting, Trollope says:

All these things were fully talked about at Mulready's that night. The indignities offered to humanity by police of every kind; the inequities of all Protestants, the benefits likely to accrue to mankind from an unlimited manufacture of potheen and the injustice of rents were fully discussed.

(20)

The historical Ribbonmen were rather different from those portrayed by Trollope. According to American historian Galen Broeker, the Ribbon Society was “a Catholic protection organization” which on occasion “might turn away from its major concerns and pursue economic goals. …”¹⁸ British historian Cornewall Lewis, writing in the late 1830s, described the Ribbonmen and other such secret societies as a “vast trades union for the protection of the Irish peasantry.”¹⁹ Irish historian R. B. McDowell characterizes the Ribbonmen's efforts as “a crude form of politics by which the will of the community was enforced, and the evils ignored by the legislature redressed.”²⁰ And, to quote Broeker again, one of the purposes of the Ribbonmen in 1821 was “far more sophisticated than that of the average secret society: the exclusion of foreign produce in order to provide ample work for the population and stop emigration.”²¹ In addition, the new Ribbon societies of 1820 were suspected by the authorities of preparing for “a Catholic revolution.”²²

Like any underground organization dedicated to effecting social and political change by violence, if necessary, the Ribbonmen had those in their ranks to whom the crudest forms of violence were acceptable. My point in making the contrast between Trollope's Ribbonmen and those of historical fact, is to show that the novelist depicts only the crudely violent minority of that secret society. Never does he show any awareness of any other type of Ribbonman.²³ One wonders whether those depicted by Trollope could even comprehend a social or political ideal. Before I suggest a possible reason for the disparity between historical fact and Trollope's fiction, I should like to point to a curious inconsistency in his own novelistic handling of the secret society's attitudes to certain issues.

In the passage from the novel quoted above, the author uses irony to mock the Ribbonmen's ideas on rent, policemen, and on Protestants in general. Yet, a clear note of sympathy sounds in his description of Joe Reynolds as a man driven to desperation by having to pay high rent for hopeless land and finally driven to illegal means as a way of seeking redress. Nowhere in the novel, incidentally, does Trollope point to any legal means that the peasantry could have adopted in order to obtain justice. One can see why: as J. C. Beckett points out, “in every department of government, central and local, the Protestant landlords, their allies and dependents, remained in control.”²⁴ Further, Trollope has already expressed disgust, in the moving Mohill passage, at the idea that people should pay any rent for such appalling conditions. He has also expressed disapproval of Captain Ussher's ruthlessness, and of the policeman's attitude to the poverty-stricken peasants for whom he had “an overwhelming contempt” (28). Finally, Trollope has made it clear that landlords Birmingham and Browne, and policeman Ussher, are Protestants.

I suggest, then, that the reasons for the inconsistency here, and for Trollope's failure to describe the Ribbonmen as they actually were, are one and the same. We come back once again to the author's political philosophy. The liberal Trollope is angered by poverty and rackrenting, and displeased by the failure of the police to be more compassionate to the poor. Even the conservative side of his nature—he saw his conservatism as “conscientious”—would like to see some amelioration in the dreadful situation of the Irish poor. But his perennial fear that rapid and sweeping change might cause the destruction of fundamental social and political structures asserts itself yet again. Thus, Trollope will at all costs obviate any suggestion that there might be a radical solution to the problems he is describing in The Macdermots. The existence of the Ribbonmen clearly implies the possibility of such a solution: thus, they are attacked at the expense of historical accuracy, and ironically mocked at the expense of novelistic consistency.

Callous landlords, poverty-stricken tenants, and a militant underground organization form part of the background to The Macdermots, of which another important part is the law, in both its enforcement and judicial aspects. According to Trollope,

Everyone knows that Ireland, for her sins, maintains two distinct, regularly organized bodies of police; the duties of the one being to prevent the distillation of potheen or illegal whiskey, those of the other to check the riots caused by its consumption. These forces, for they are in fact military forces, have each their officers, sub-officers, and privates as the army has; their dress, full-dress and half-dress; their arms, field-arms and house-arms; their captains, colonels, and commanders-in-chief, but called by other names, and in fact each body is a regularly disciplined force, only differing from the standing army by being carried on in a more expensive manner.

(25)

This passage deserves close analysis. In the first place, the large amount of repetition used to describe the organization of the two police forces gives a clear indication that Trollope thinks there is a lot of silly redundancy in the arrangement. But Trollope strongly implies that the reader, like everyone else, should know that Ireland, peculiar country, merits this situation—“for her sins.” Apparently, the wily natives actually circumvent the activities of the revenue police, and then get beastly drunk; thus, Ireland obviously needs two police forces to keep them in check. Trollope lays complete responsibility for this Gilbertian situation at the feet or, rather, the overexercised elbows of the Irish.

The passage is also remarkable for what it obscures, and for the manner in which it obscures. For the first and, I believe, only time in the novel, Trollope's voice becomes that of a total outsider: the distance of comedy separates him from the Irish. As he looks on, he puts his hand on the reader's shoulder in chummy English fashion, and expresses the need for the two police forces in the throwaway colloquial phrase “for her [Ireland's] sins.” The reader is, thus, tempted to smile indulgently, and not look any deeper into this “native” problem. Obscured in this passage is the historical fact that, as “everyone knows,” the police forces in question were, in effect, British colonial police. While those forces certainly numbered many Irish Catholics in the rank and file, they were generally officered by Dublin Castle appointees who were often Protestant, very hostile to the local Catholic peasantry, and loyal not to Ireland but to the British crown.²⁵ What Trollope further obscures or, at least, ignores is the fact that the maintenance of two such heavily armed and pervasive police forces, in addition to the regular standing British army, could result only in a police state in which the ordinary people were hardly likely to trust the law. Ultimately, the passage obscures the fact that Irish hostility to the police was based on more than alcohol consumption. This overall obscuration conceals the radical potential inherent in the conflict between organized peasants and police. If the interaction between these two groups merely merits gentle satire, as they both indulge in a 19th-century version of the Prohibition merry-go-round, then the bogey man of revolutionary violence can simply be chuckled back into the dark shadows whence he came. And our conservative-liberal author can settle back behind the newspaper at his club and hope for a gradual amelioration of those unfortunate Irish problems.

A more simply expressed revolutionary sentiment existed in the Ireland of the 1830s than that of the Ribbonmen, though the sentiment in itself was not hugely different. It was expressed by the Repealers who believed that none of Ireland's problems could be properly resolved until the Act of Union with Great Britain was repealed. As in the case of the Ribbonmen, the manner in which Trollope portrays the Repeal issue is both a function and expression of his political philosophy. Even if this proposed repeal were to be achieved peacefully—the Repeal movement was peaceful and constitutional in the 1830s—it would involve the type of major, rapid change that was anathema to Trollope's view of the world. So, Trollope gives the Repeal, or nationalist, movement short shrift. If we look at the movement in the perspective of history, we see that it merits somewhat more attention.

What acted as a catalyst for the advocates of Repeal was the recent success of the constitutional effort to have the many laws discriminating against Catholics abolished. The effort had culminated in the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Yet, Trollope does little more than make a brief reference to this milestone in Irish history, which had been reached as the result of the vast popular movement led by Daniel O'Connell. Nor does he pay more than passing attention to O'Connell himself, despite the fact that the Irish leader was, at the time the action of The Macdermots takes place, not only a highly successful member of Parliament in London, winning “a steady trickle of [further] reforms for Ireland,”²⁶ but also so prominent that “there is probably no other half century of Irish history which is so dominated by the personality of one man.”²⁷ Now, the charismatic O'Connell “had always hoped someday to restore to Ireland her own parliament.”²⁸ Trollope's main tribute to the nationalist cause, however, is to parody it in the person of one of the least attractive characters in The Macdermots, Fr. Cullen, curate to Fr. John McGrath, the parish priest of Mohill. Paradoxically, one possible reason for Trollope's failure to deal more extensively with O'Connell in the novel was that, apart from his tremendous constitutional influence, O'Connell did not like Ribbonmen. He was “alarmed at their strength and hostile to their methods.”²⁹ Thus, Trollope could hardly tar him with the brush of extremism, and might have to listen seriously to his radical viewpoint.

Fr. Cullen, however, proves easier for Trollope to handle. Cullen was “educated at Maynooth … and was perfectly illiterate.” In his characterization of Cullen Trollope is being very selective for his own political purposes. J. C. Beckett observes that while 19th-century Maynooth did produce priests who were accused, with some justification, of having “the bitterest feelings of the partisan and the grossest habits of a peasant,” there is “a good deal of exaggeration”³⁰ in the accusation. In addition, if Cullen were indeed “perfectly illiterate,” he would have had severe difficulty being accepted for ordination in the Catholic church. Trollope also describes Cullen as a “violent politician”:

… the Catholic emancipation had become law; and therefore he no longer had that grievance to complain of; but he still had national grievances, repeating which he zealously declaimed when he could find a hearer. Repeal of the Union was not at that time a common topic morning and night, at the table and even at the altar, as it afterwards became, but there were, even then, some who maintained that Ireland would never be herself, 'til the Union was repealed, and among them was Fr. Cullen.

(44)

The reader immediately comes to the following conclusions about Irish nationalists: they are, as politicians, violent; they are obsessive whiners; they are bores. Trollope's reader also comes to feel that the topic of Irish nationalism should be avoided in polite conversation. The only specific issue on which Trollope permits Cullen to speak in the realm of nationalist politics has interest for its banality. The priest complains about the redistribution of parishes, which has led to some traveling inconvenience for him.

And bad manners to the Commissioners and people they sent over, bothering and altering the people! Couldn't we have our own parishes as we like, and fix them ourselves, but they must be sending English people to give us English parishes, altering the meerings just to be doing something?

(89)

Of course, Cullen leaves himself wide open to the good-natured, wryly humorous deprecation of his parish priest, Fr. McGrath, who suggests that Cullen would be quite happy to do the extra traveling if he were going to officiate at a lucrative wedding. Thus, the nationalistic aspirations of the Irish are reduced to a level of triviality by the firm but benign establishment.

In this manner, Trollope refuses to take the Irish nationalist movement seriously, even though Daniel O'Connell had, by the time Trollope was writing this novel, already launched the campaign for repeal of the Union, and even though he could “count on the sympathy of the bulk of the people of Ireland.”³¹ Not for the first time in The Macdermots is the author's weapon gentle mockery. Who, after all, could take Irish nationalism as a serious threat to the United Kingdom when the nationalist spokesman is a Fr. Cullen?

Cullen, then, is for Trollope a conveniently silly symbol of Irish nationalism. It is, on the other hand, noteworthy that, when certain events could be symbolically construed in a manner that might evoke sympathy for the Irish radical cause, the author refrains from setting these events on a symbolic level. For example, to Trollope, the carrying off of Feemy by Ussher constitutes a dastardly act by an ungentlemanly fellow. Correspondingly, while Thady's killing of Ussher is, for Trollope, partly understandable, he sees it as a crime that must be dealt with in the courts. Now, to anyone at all as familiar with Irish history as Trollope was, the carrying off of Feemy, a descendant of the ancient Irish Macdermot family, by the Anglo-Saxon Ussher, would be a potential symbol, at least, of the continual exploitation of Ireland by England. Again, to anyone likewise familiar with Irish history, the blow with which Thady lays Ussher low could be seen as a symbolic attack on that exploitation. Finally, Thady's broken-hearted cry at the end of the novel—“Oh why, Fr. John, could [Ussher] not leave us alone?” (615)—could surely symbolize Ireland's grief that England, for seven hundred years, had not left her alone. It is, however, eminently clear from the manner in which Trollope handles these scenes that they are not meant to be read as symbolic, for such a reading would carry both the tone and significance of The Macdermots outside the parameters of the author's philosophy, which allowed Trollope, while he admitted to British “mistakes” in Ireland, cheerfully to defend—implicitly in The Macdermots, and explicitly in his Autobiography³² and letters to The Examiner³³—British good intentions.

I have now described in detail the situation, as Trollope has portrayed it, in which Thady Macdermot must work out his own and his family's fate. Using Thackerayan analogy for a moment, the setting of The Macdermots is defined by the Manager of the performance, who has established strict boundaries within which his Puppets must act. The boundaries are those of the Manager's political ideology, and the Manager will not tolerate any action that might result in a drastic change in the social and political situation which the show presents. I suggest that, despite the degree of sensitivity with which it is portrayed, Thady's fate represents the Manager's reaction when one of his Puppets acts in a politically inappropriate manner.

When we meet Thady at the beginning of The Macdermots, he seems a petit bourgeois landowner far removed from any thought of political radicalism. But he does seem to have a visceral sense that something is drastically wrong with the whole situation in which he and his fellow Irish Catholics live. In chapter three of the novel, Thady says of the poor: “[Ussher] is persecuting them too far,” and: “What with the revenue police, constabulary police, and magistrates' warrants, they won't let them walk to mass quietly next” (43). In chapter five he says, desperately, “[If it weren't for Feemy] I'd strike one blow for the country, and then if I were hung, or shot, or murdered anyway, devil a care” (62). By chapter ten, under the increasing pressures of poverty and the growing abuse of his sister by Ussher, Thady's feelings become even more intense:

In his misery, and half-broken hearted as he was, Thady all but made up his mind to join the Ribbonmen, who, he knew, were meeting with some secret plans for proposed deliverance from their superiors. Better at any rate join them now, thought he, than be driven to do it when he was no better than them—as would soon be the case. And if he was to perish, better first strike a blow at those who had pressed him so low.

(170)

Then, in chapter thirteen, at the McGovery wedding, Thady, in his drunkenness, half commits himself to joining the Ribbonmen. Finally, in the twentieth chapter of the novel, driven to desperation by the sight of Ussher, a representative of the civil power, dragging Feemy away apparently against her will, Thady strikes the blow with which he puts himself beyond the Pale. We see here, in classical political terms, the gestation of a radical. Thady, a middle-of-the-road capitalist, has moved closer and closer to the philosophy of a radical revolutionary as a result of the oppressiveness of the prevailing system.

In another Irish novel something similar happens. Liam O'Flaherty's Famine³⁴ occurs during the Irish Potato Famine, about ten to fifteen years after the action of The Macdermots takes place. The protagonist, Martin Kilmartin, is a quiet young farmer, intent on nothing more than earning a living for his wife, baby and himself. The blight strikes the potatoes, Kilmartin and his fellow cottiers are starving, and they cannot pay their rent to the British landlord. As the callousness of the landlord, and the various injustices perpetrated in Ireland by the British become more and more apparent to Kilmartin, he gets progressively angrier. During a peasant demonstration for an extension of their rental period, a violent confrontation develops with the police. The basically peaceful Kilmartin goes to the rescue of one of his neighbors, who is being savagely beaten by a couple of policemen. Kilmartin seriously injures one of the police. Aware that he will get no justice under the British legal system, he goes “on the run.” Sure enough, a warrant is issued for his capture, dead or alive. But, at the end of the novel, Kilmartin, in company with his wife and child, is spirited aboard an America-bound ship by the anti-British revolutionary organization, the Young Irelanders. As the rebel who delivers Kilmartin on board ship leaves him, he adjures the exile-to-be not to forget the old cause in the new land. Given the whole thrust of Famine, there is no reason to believe that Kilmartin will forget.

The contrast between the fate of Kilmartin and that of Thady Macdermot deserves note. For one thing, the underground depicted in The Macdermots is, suitably for Trollope's purposes, anything but the disciplined and efficient force depicted in Famine. Its leader, Dan Kennedy, is, in terms of brutality, greed, and clumsiness, probably the nearest thing to Dickens's Bill Sykes that Trollope ever created. Further, Kennedy and company prove stupidly insensitive to the discomfort their potential new recruit feels at having placed himself outside the law, and they take care of him so badly that he experiences feelings of boredom and hopelessness of the sort O'Flaherty's protagonist never suffers. Finally, as soon as Thady made a move to escape the law, Trollope started a countermovement in the novel on the part of one of the most important elements—the Roman Catholic church—in the person of Fr. John McGrath. Trollope, apparently, will tolerate the gestation, but not the birth, of a radical, and hence the countermovement against Thady.

In fact, one could say that the countermovement has been there from the moment Thady began even to move in a revolutionary direction, and that at least part of the time, this countermovement takes the form of an establishment chorus, comprising McGrath and Trollope. Take, for example, the author's remark about Thady's having dealings with the Ribbonmen at McGovery's wedding: “It was a sign of the great degradation to which Macdermot had submitted in joining these men” (229). On the following day, Fr. McGrath, who is tenant of, friend of, and spiritual director to Thady, joins with the author when he gives it to the young protagonist in the neck. The priest upbraids Thady for having anything to do with “the boys,” whom he calls

… infamous characters … men never or seldom seen at mass … makers of potheen … strongly suspected to be Ribbonmen or Terryalts, or to call themselves by some infernal name or sect by belonging to which they render themselves liable to death or transportation. …

(292-93)

The strength of the countermovement in the plot of The Macdermots appears not only in the choric element, but also in the strength of Fr. McGrath's personality and in the decisive action he takes. Since McGrath personifies Trollope's conservative-liberalism, in this novel, it is no accident that he is such an attractive character. He is, indeed, far more than “that essential figure of Irish romance, the genial warm-hearted soggarth,”³⁵ as an English critic, a contemporary of Trollope, calls him. Like his creator, McGrath has a deep, liberal humanitarian concern for the welfare of his parishioners, whom he sees as innocent victims: “Driven from their cabins and small-holdings, their crops and cattle taken from them, they were everywhere around desperate with poverty and the restraints put upon them by government” (91-92). The government in question is, of course, the British government. Despite the fact that this government “suffered from an ignorance of Irish conditions so great that it might, by itself, almost justify the contention that Ireland could never be satisfactorily ruled from Westminster,”³⁶ the propriety or otherwise of British rule in Ireland is not even an issue for McGrath. Like Trollope, the conservative side of his nature is too strong for him to question the actual basis of things; he is, in addition, a priest of the Roman Catholic church, which has a traditional reluctance to buck the status quo. So, and one can imagine the author's nodding his head in approval, the parish priest scarifies the rebellious Ribbonmen, good-humoredly mocks the nationalistic Fr. Cullen, and when Thady makes the remark quoted above, about striking a blow for his country, McGrath kindly expostulates “Oh, nonsense, Thady, about blows for your country and getting hung and murdered” (63).

The decisive action that McGrath takes follows the inquest on Ussher's death. The priest is aware that the magistrate's verdict of murder is a miscarriage of justice. He cannot but have been aware of the overt hostility of the judicial system in Victorian Ireland to anything that smacked of sedition, and that “legislation was directed rather to the suppression of Agrarian crime than to the amelioration of the conditions that produced it.”³⁷ Yet, to suggest to Thady that he do anything but surrender to the authorities and stand trial would be completely outside the priest's, and Trollope's, range of vision. So, with Thady's acquiescence, Fr. McGrath brings him to a magistrate's house, from whence the young landlord is conveyed to jail to await trial. Then McGrath confers with the governor of the jail to make sure that Thady will be comfortable. He visits the prisoner regularly during his six months of confinement before the trial, and is a constant source of strength and support to him and his family during that period. He makes sure that Thady has proper legal representation. He sits right with him throughout the trial. When Thady is found guilty, the horrified priest rushes to Dublin to petition the lord lieutenant for clemency. When the petition is refused, he is a profound source of comfort to Thady in his final days. All of these admirable actions lie strictly within the bounds of a conservative-liberal view of society.

Yet, Trollope's attitude to the courts seems curious. Like Dickens, he could not tolerate the cant, hypocrisy, and frequent lack of concern for justice that often characterized the 19th-century British court system. So, as the assizes at which Thady is to be tried begin, he takes a whole chapter, “The Carrick-on-Shannon Assizes,” to satirize the shortcomings of the legal system. However, two chapters later, Trollope observes that Thady is better off awaiting trial at the assizes than “at Aughnacashel among the lawless associates with whom he had so foolishly looked for safety” (526). Then, when Thady's trial takes place, conducted with dignity and flair, Trollope records brilliant speeches on behalf of both prosecution and defense. The pompous legal clowns of the satiric chapter have either disappeared or have been, in great part, metamorphosed. Trollope is fully prepared to satirize establishment shortcomings under certain circumstances, but those circumstances, however, do not include occasions in which the establishment falls under fundamental attack. He clearly felt that it was under such attack when policemen were killed and when tenant groups could savagely avenge themselves on their enemies—as the Ribbonmen did, for example, when they cut Hyacinth Keegan's foot off. On such occasions, Trollope got frankly scared and moved to a defense of the status quo. Thus, when Thady is sentenced to death, it seems that, although Trollope feels the sentence is a bit harsh, he also feels that such harshness is a price worth paying for the stability of society.

There are then, in The Macdermots, with its agrarian and political conflicts, the makings of a typical revolutionary situation. But, much as Trollope looks to the betterment of the condition of the Irish people, he will not countenance radical change as an answer to any problem. So, the forces that win out in this novel are those of conservative-liberalism, most strongly expressed in the benign voices of Trollope and of Fr. McGrath.

I previously pointed to the manner in which Trollope appears blind to the symbolic potential of some of the scenes in the novel. In this context, one should note the final scene of The Macdermots. Out of respect for Thady, no one comes to watch his execution outside the town jail:

Not one form appeared before the gaol that morning. Not even a passenger crossed over the bridge from half-past seven till after eight, as from there one just might catch a glimpse of the front of the prison. At the end of the bridge stood three or four men guarding the street, and cautioning those who came that they could not pass by; and as their behests were quietly obeyed the police did not interfere with them. Among them were [the Ribbonmen] Joe Reynolds and Corney Dolan, and they did not leave their post till they were aware that the body of him to whom they showed this last respect had been removed.

(623)

Once again, we have here, at least in potential, a classic symbol of revolution. Thady had never actually become a Ribbonman, but the Ribbonmen clearly felt that he was on their side, and that he had struck his “one blow for the country.” In countless colonial situations, when rebels bury their dead, one sees the type of tribute that the Ribbonmen pay Thady. In countless such situations, the authorities turn a blind eye to a mild show of force on the part of the mourning revolutionaries. They know it would be unwise to interfere at such an emotionally charged moment. That there are theoretical grounds for interference, there is no doubt, for the scene described is a paramilitary one. Note Trollope's choice of words: “three of four men guarding the street”; “cautioning those who came that they could not pass by”; “their behests were quietly obeyed”; “they did not leave their post.” And, curiously, Trollope himself seems to have temporarily lost his sense of hostility to the Ribbonmen and to be empathizing with them.

Had Trollope ended The Macdermots precisely as the Ribbonmen leave their posts, their funeral tribute completed, he would have closed his novel with a revolutionary symbol. The reader would have felt that the Ribbonmen were withdrawing to continue the struggle, and that somehow Thady's death would be avenged. Such an ending would, however, run entirely counter to the author's political philosophy. The humane Trollope has paid his tribute to Thady in the paramilitary scene, but now the full force of his conservative-liberalism asserts itself. He, indeed, wants to see an amelioration of the conditions that forced Thady and the Ballycloran peasants to live in such misery, but he greatly fears fundamental social disruption. So, he stifles the potential revolutionary symbolism of the dramatic closing scene—and, thus, diminishes the quality of the novel's ending—by adding on, to close the story of The Macdermots of Ballycloran, one apolitical, sentimental, Victorian sentence: “The shops were closed during the whole day; but it was many days before the sad melancholy which attended the execution of Thady Macdermot wore away from the little town of Carrick-on-Shannon” (623).

Notes

1. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947). Trollope states that he wishes “any who knew aught” of him to understand his political theories (243). He also admits that he frequently used Plantaganet Palliser and Lady Glencora “for the expression of [his] political and social convictions” (151). Further, he says “as I have not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons, or to be efficacious as a lecturer, [Palliser and Glencora] have served me as safety valves by which to deliver my soul” (151). For an epistolary expression of Trollope's political interests, see his seven letters, in which he defends British conduct towards Ireland during and after the Famine, to the London paper The Examiner. These were published between August, 1849, and June, 1850.

2. An Autobiography, pp. 244-245.

3. According to Michael Sadlier, Trollope: A Commentary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1947), p. 143.

4. Sadlier, pp. 140-141.

5. The relationship between Trollope's political philosophy and The Macdermots of Ballycloran has not previously been studied in any depth. For example, there is no reference in Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969) to such a relationship. Nor is that relationship accorded any importance in John Halperin's Trollope and Politics: A Study of the Pallisers and Others (London: Macmillan Press, 1977). In the most recent work done on The Macdermots, contained in a piece called “The Irish Novels of Anthony Trollope” (Robert Lee Wolff, Introd. The Macdermots of Ballycloran by Anthony Trollope [New York: Garland Publishing, 1979]), Wolff lists the major critical studies of Trollope and points out that “In none of these works is there very much attention directed to Trollope's view of Ireland or his Irish novels” (xxvii). Wolff himself makes no reference to Trollope's political theories. Neither E. M. West's “The Irish Experience in Trollope's Fiction,” DA, 31 (1970, 408A [Cornell]), nor E. W. Wittig's “Trollope's Irish Fiction,” Éire-Ireland 9, 3, (1974), 97-118, sees Trollope's political philosophy as having any significant role in The Macdermots. The nearest we have to a comprehensive study of the connection between Trollope's politics and The Macdermots dates back several years. Wilson B. Gragg in “An Advanced Conservative-Liberal: A Study of the Politics in the Novels of Anthony Trollope” (Diss. Northwestern University, 1948) devotes one of his six chapters to a study of the politics in the Irish novels, but does not pay due attention to the controlling role of the author's political philosophy in The Macdermots, nor to the complexity of that philosophy.

6. Maureen Wall in “The Age of the Penal Laws (1691-1778),” in The Course of Irish History, ed. T. W. Moody, F. X. Martin (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967), p. 220, points out that “by 1778 scarcely 5٪ of Irish land was left in catholic hands. [In addition], for one reason or another most of the catholic landlords—Viscount Fitzwilliam, Browne of Neale, the Earl of Antrim, Martin of Ballinahinch, French of Monivea, Lord Kingsland, Lord Mountgarret, Lord Dunsany and many others—had gone over to the established church, so that by 1778 catholic proprietors owned but £60,000 a year of the total rental of Ireland, then calculated at £4,000,000.”

7. For the three comments in this paragraph on landlord-tenant relations, I am indebted, respectively, to J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 295; J. H. Whyte, “The Age of Daniel O'Connell,” in The Course of Irish History, p. 249; and Beckett, pp. 293-294.

8. Beckett, p. 300.

9. Anthony Trollope, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (New York: John Lane, 1906), pp. 125-127. All further references to this work appear parenthetically in the text.

10. An Autobiography, pp. 243-245.

11. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), II, 306.

12. On the subject of Victorian and Trollopian fears of rapid change, see Bradford A. Booth, Introd., An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope, pp. vii-viii. According to Booth, “Politically and socially, Trollope was of his time, not before it … Like Ibsen, Trollope believed the world would not be better until men are better. This is the point of view of the Victorian ‘liberal conservative’ as Trollope described himself. An ameliorist skeptical of the efficacy of revolutionary processes, he says through one of his characters 'till we become divine we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.'” In addition note that Halperin (20), points out that Trollope “favored individual progress and advancement—but not at the cost of altering or destroying the social fabric.”

13. Sadlier, p. 141.

14. According to Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh, associate professor of Irish and Modern History at University College, Galway, in lecture, “The Irish Land Question in the Nineteenth Century,” delivered at Brandeis University, April 4, 1978. In addition, for a discussion of the conduct of the 19th-century Anglo-Irish landlords, see Nicholas Mansergh, Ireland in the Age of Reform and Revolution (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940), pp. 28-37.

15. Beckett, p. 287.

16. An Autobiography, p. 245.

17. Greenhough was a member of the regular police.

18. Galen Broeker, Rural Disorder and Police Reform in Ireland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), p. 7.

19. Quoted in Broeker, p. 8.

20. Quoted in Broeker, p. 10.

21. Broeker, p. 13.

22. Broeker, p. 110.

23. On this issue, see also John E. Pomfret, The Struggle for Land in Ireland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930), p. 25. Pomfret quotes Poulet Scrope, an English Radical M.P., who, in 1834, made the following comment on the Whiteboy Association, a Ribbonman group: “But for the salutary dread of the Whiteboy Association, ejectment would desolate Ireland, and decimate her population, casting forth thousands of families like noxious weeds rooted out of the soil on which they have hitherto grown, perhaps too luxuriantly, and flung them away to perish in roadside ditches. Yes, the Whiteboy system is the only check on the ejectment system; and weighing one against the other, horror against horror, and crime against crime, is perhaps the lesser of the two.”

24. Beckett, p. 286.

25. F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1973), p. 76. Lyons points out that while “the rank and file [of the police] were recruited from the people among whom they lived … officers were specially commissioned, the inspectorate having considerable social cachet.” In terms of 19th-century Ireland, this means that the officers were generally Anglo-Irish Protestants. The “otherness” of the police officers, insofar as Irish Catholics were concerned, is also pointed to by Stephen Gwynn in “Trollope and Ireland,” The Contemporary Review, 129, 721 (1926), 75. Having discussed the “dualism” in Irish life, by which he means the division between native Irish Catholics and Anglo-Irish Protestants, Gwynn says that the connecting link between the two Irelands of the 19th century was the Protestant police officers.

26. J. H. Whyte in The Course of Irish History, p. 255.

27. Whyte, p. 256.

28. Whyte, p. 258.

29. Beckett, p. 324.

30. Beckett, p. 306.

31. Whyte, p. 256.

32. An Autobiography, pp. 68-69.

33. See ftn. 1.

34. Liam O'Flaherty, Famine. (New York: Literary Guild, 1937).

35. Algar Thorold, Introd., The Macdermots of Ballycloran, p. vi. Soggarth is a version of the Gaelic—sogart—for “priest.”

36. Beckett, p. 340.

37. Beckett, p. 293.