Anthony Trollope's connection with Ireland is unique among the British major creative writers of the nineteenth century. For all of the many differences of their responses to Ireland, Trollope has one quality lacking in the rest of them. Britain made them. Every one of them saw Ireland as outsiders. Trollope did not. His view of Ireland from first to last was that of a participant: Ireland made him. Even Michael Sadleir, who saw Trollope as romanticizing his debt to Ireland at the expense of his debt to England, accepted that, although no more than that:

Ireland produced the man; but it was left to England to inspire the novelist. … Ireland, having by friendliness, sport and open air saved Trollope from himself, came near by her insane absorption in her own wrongs and thwarted hopes to choke the very genius that she had vitalised.¹

“How neat it sounds! But it won't do,” commented John Cronin over forty years after Sadleir.² The time interval is important: Sadleir wrote in the mid-1920s when the British had firmly and thankfully closed the door on the Irish nightmare, politically and intellectually. The firmness and thanks were the greater because of the repressed emotions of guilt that dogged British reflections about Ireland, and the act of repression in itself instilled a callousness in the form of dismissal of Ireland: it is at first glance a little cold-blooded to describe as “insane absorption in her own wrongs” the Irish response to the Great Famine of 1845-50 during which a million died and another million emigrated, many to die at sea or on landfall; and Trollope's first two novels, both with Irish themes, were written on the eve and during the height of the Famine, respectively, while his next Irish novel, Castle Richmond, describes the Famine in detail. But Sadleir's self-revelation is in the passage: Ireland seemed to him a self-obsessed society engaged in a largely incomprehensible set of conversations among its component parts alternating with shrill denunciation of the English, a process whence an Englishman felt rejected in all senses. Nevertheless, Anthony Trollope and his times were not Michael Sadleir and his.³

John Cronin, in contrast, speaks for the more realistic climate of today, farther away from Trollope in time yet paradoxically closer to his sense of complexity. Today the Irish nightmare is abroad once more. Neither British guilt nor Irish insanity will suffice as explanations of it. They certainly did not suffice for Trollope. The latest Trollopians are forcing reconsiderations of all Trollope's Irish writing with scant respect for Sadleir's dismissal of it. Great claims are being made for The Macdermots of Ballycloran; at long last The Landleaguers is finding its defenders; the historians at least acknowledge deep obligations to Castle Richmond; new editions of all Trollope's Irish novels are inviting fresh appraisals of their merits. Trollope's Irish writing is winning its place of honor in the canon. Oddly enough, its slightest contributions, the short stories “The O'Conors of Castle Conor County Mayo,” (Harper's, May 1860) and “Father Giles of Ballymoy” (Argosy, May 1866), were the first to gain it, being included in the splendid selection of the short stories made by Herbert Van Thal thirty-three years ago.⁴

Yet I wish here to go farther. Trollope, almost alone of all British-born writers on Ireland in the nineteenth century, reminds us of the twentieth-century error which assumes Irish and British separation to have been inevitable, an error gratifying to modern separatist nationalists and British conservative apologists alike. In arguing that Ireland could never be integrated into the United Kingdom, each of these groups has a stake, the Irish separatist to gain legitimacy for the highly novel solution from which he benefited, the British conservative to justify the loss of Ireland on the ground that, since it could never be held, no blame attaches for losing it. Nevertheless, in the nineteenth century Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, and it was possible for an Anthony Trollope, going from Britain to Ireland, or for a Phineas Finn, going from Ireland to Britain, to have a single as well as a dual identity. Being parts of a totality, they saw—or rather Trollope saw and made Finn see—a subordinate separation. They could and did experience both an Irish and a British identity, even as nineteenth-century Scottish writers could find a Scottish and an English identity. But Trollope was more than a mere sojourner in Ireland. He met Conor Cruise O'Brien's definition that to be an Irish writer is, in the end, to be possessed, obsessed, and in some way to be mauled by Ireland.⁵The Landleaguers becomes our great witness here. It is not, as with Tennyson or Stevenson, a bitter attack on what “those people” are doing:⁶ it is an attack on what “my people” are doing, and the sense that it is “my” values to which they are doing it. The anger is that of George Moore in Parnell and his Island (1887) or Edith Somerville and Martin Ross in Naboth's Vineyard (1891). Even though the warfare carried out by the Irish agrarian rebels on fox hunting seems a very frivolous symbol to our generation as a focal point for that sense of anger, yet the fox hunt existed for all four of them as proof of the humanity, fellowship, courage, and excitement which they proudly saw as Irish. Moore, apparently the least engaged in such things, makes his denunciation of the war against the fox hunt the climax of his narrative. As to Trollope, on one side of the divide of the 1880s, and to Somerville and Ross on the other, we have only to look to their most delightful passages, whether recording the first appearance of Burgo Fitzgerald in Can You Forgive Her? (ch. 17), the mishap of Lord Chiltern in Phineas Finn (ch. 24), or, in the case of Somerville and Ross, the many comedies of misadventure in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1899), to see how much love went into the celebration of the institution. And the Land Leaguers, in the practice exhibited by their blocking hunts as a protest, and in the theory conveyed by their teachings that the day of the hunt would be over when they came finally into their own, foretold the end of an institution and a society which Trollope had adored. Perhaps his clearest personal identification with it is shown in “The O'Conors of Castle Conor.” Unlike Moore, or Somerville and Ross, Trollope never saw himself as the representative of the fox-hunting landlord class, and because of that his anger was even keener than theirs. He has to be seen as an Irish writer, but one with more independence of Irish divisions than writers of Irish birth, until the final great division took place and left him in the usual position of Irish writers: a victim.

Yet his role as a victim was far from limited to Ireland tout court. She made him happy, and made him a writer, and transformed him from an incipient drop-out postal clerk into a shrewd, constructive, reputable, and far-sighted official, from a drifter in London low life to an honored guest in dignified if dilapidated stately homes of Ireland, and from child of disintegrating family into proud husband and father. He sketched that idyllic place of Ireland in his development in his Autobiography in 1876.⁷ And then he saw all transformed in the land war of 1879-82, and the fairy godmother of his youth become the hostile enchantress of his old age. But it was not Ireland alone but the tragedy of the Anglo-Irish Union which victimized Trollope the writer. He had exercised his rights as a child of the larger island to become thereby a child of the smaller; but few of his fellow Englishmen had made the leap in real terms, and there were not many more to make it in imagination. The Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh aspired to the sweets of English life and to acceptance by the English in equality of status. The zeal with which they pursued the first meant that the second was rendered more distant from them as a result of natural English defensiveness. It can be put in sociological terms (and is far from confined to the British Isles): politico-economic advance by the outsiders at the expense of the metropolitan elite results in the widening of social barriers between elite and outsiders. Trollope's first novels fell prey to this situation. Henry Colburn, in an understandably morose letter on his ill-starred publication The Kellys and the O'Kellys, told its author on 11 November 1848, “It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others,” and hence, that poor prospects for most novels are made poorer still by the use of that location (Autobiography, p. 78). The New Monthly Magazine's review in August 1848, which Colburn probably had in mind when he wrote, had put the point more sharply:

Truth to say … we cannot sympathize at the present moment with the whimsicalities of that strange, wild, imaginative people, herein so characteristically described, when these whims are exhausting themselves in disloyalty and rebellion, and threatening rapine and bloodshed. … The humour of the Emerald Isle has too often that which is sensual and repugnant even in its very joyousness, and among a class with whom poverty, pathos, and passion, are ever alternating with fun, frolic, and folly,—what that is temperate, chaste, and ennobling, can be expected?⁸

Trollope says he did not see that notice, but he remained convinced of Colburn's argument to the extent that he later stated he made a mistake in the nationality he gave to Phineas Finn. “It was certainly a blunder,” he declared,

to take him from Ireland. … There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded.

(Autobiography, p. 318).

It is possible to interpret the New Monthly Magazine literally and argue that Trollope was exceptionally unfortunate in going before the world in April 1847 and July 1848, respectively, with The Macdermots of Ballycloran and its successor: the latter date confronted Britain with the Young Ireland insurrection of 1848, 29 July being the one moment of armed confrontation when William Smith O'Brien confronted the police at Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, in the Widow MacCormack's cabbage patch. The episode was ludicrous and in retrospect appears an inevitable failure for the Young Irelanders, a failure made certain by bad leadership, intellectual limitations, uncertainty of intentions, and a countryside demoralized by famine. But at the time it was ominous in the extreme. The crackle of gunfire around the cabbage patch was the nearest the United Kingdom would come to the convulsions which shook thrones all over Europe in 1848, but nobody could be sure it was finale and not prelude. The Chartists, with strong Irish membership and links, had been expected to rise in London in June, and many of them were tried and convicted in the Old Bailey in late August. In fact, the Young Ireland rising was in one sense a precursor: the future Fenian leaders John O'Mahony and James Stephens took part in the rising and thereafter in exile began to set in motion their own, far more serious, revolutionary movement, the Fenians.⁹The Kellys and the O'Kellys hardly helped itself by a cool, vivid description of the trial of Daniel O'Connell and his followers in 1843 at its commencement, and in the climate of 1848 English readers were not likely to distinguish between the nonviolent leader and his former followers in Young Ireland who had broken from him on the issue of violence. The moment of the appearance of The Macdermots of Ballycloran was less politically inappropriate, but on a psychological level may have been even worse. It was the most dreadful year of the Irish Great Famine. With Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, Ireland had previously won popularity with an English readership as the jesters' nursery,¹⁰ and both its present situation and its latest literary image fashioned by Trollope's hand were too full of despair to be borne by a public in search of fiction for relaxation. “The Black '47” was not, as bitter Irish commentators would claim, a conscious British crime against Ireland—indeed Sir Robert Peel's government before it gave way to the laissez-faire Whigs in 1846 did more for famine relief than would have been undertaken by any other government in Europe—but it must have left in many minds the unspoken message of British failure to govern Ireland competently, in mockery of the confidence with which Britain had entered on that task under the Union of 1800.

Yet, like Sadleir's nice phrase on Trollope's debt to England and Ireland, it won't do. Certainly Trollope did not think it did. As the good master workman, he took heed of the lesson, and from The Warden onwards he showed how to give the public a packaging it would accept; as the writer of integrity, he insisted on writing Castle Richmond to give his literary witness to the horror of the Great Famine despite its previous effects, such as they were, in stifling his early reception. Sadleir's hostile reaction to the Irish novels may convey something of the attitudes of the 1840s, however much it led him to misunderstand the books themselves: he called the first two books “pamphlet[s] in fictional guise.”¹¹ On the face of it, the remark is absurd. Pamphlets are designed by their nature to advocate some cause; the only cause advocated in either novel is the author's desire that his readers get a sense of Irish realities. Perhaps Sadleir believed that any realistic treatment of Ireland in fictional form was ipso facto a “pamphlet”; the subject was so undesirable that talking about it seriously was artistic suicide. In this view Sadleir was not wholly representative for his own time. Hugh Walpole's study of Trollope has found few friends; but he does deserve credit for seeing the quality and importance of The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys.¹² After Trollope's death Ward, Lock found it advantageous to sell them alongside Charles Lever and William Carleton in cheap editions, and in the new century the audience responding to Somerville and Ross found something to please it in The Kellys and the O'Kellys.¹³ These would not have been exclusively Irish readers. But the critics from either island remained cold. The British scholars were not attracted to Irish writing by a novelist whom they identified as quintessentially English. Irish critics might have welcomed Trollope's compassion and appreciation for Ireland, but The Landleaguers reminded them that he was not to be recruited as an English witness on the “Irish Side.” His love and his anger were too intertwined to please them, especially in the heady years of the Irish renaissance and revolution. The English uncritical friend of Ireland (such as Tom Broadbent in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island) was welcome as a valuable, if not very highly regarded, crusader against Irish wrongs and British ignorance; the English enemy of Ireland, particularly James Anthony Froude, was also welcome, since he could so readily be quoted against his own side (Irish newspapers and magazines from the Nation to the Irish World quoted Froude, and were echoed by subsequent Irish apologists, when they were not belaboring him). Trollope knew far too much, and was too deeply involved and too independent about it for comfort.

Trollope could not foresee this, but he followed the signs of his own times. Apart from important sojourns in England and in the West Indies, Trollope lived in Ireland throughout the 1840s and 1850s, but aside from his ill-chosen foray into historical fiction with La Vendée, and his commencement of Castle Richmond at the end of the 1850s, it was to England he turned for scenes. He had, in literary terms, been driven out of Ireland. But how absolute was that expulsion? Leaving aside his use of Irish location for An Eye for an Eye, written in the early 1870s, and his formal choice of an Irish political theme in The Landleaguers in the early 1880s, is it right to see a continuum from his Irish writing to his later work, and, if so, where?

If it is, the most obvious line of investigation comes from the first two novels themselves. But of these it is usually agreed that The Macdermots of Ballycloran is largely unlike anything else in Trollope, apart from some links with The Landleaguers. Hugh Walpole saw in Feemy “one of the finest of all Trollope's heroines and [a] true sister to Lily Dale, Clara Amedroz of The Belton Estate, Lucy Robarts, Ayala of Ayala's Angel, and, most human of them all, Trollope's own beloved Lady Glencora.” But he adds that Feemy “had something that none of the later heroines possess, a certain poetry and tragic inevitability that the popular novelist of after years would have found perhaps too darkly coloured for his serial purposes” (p. 27). And on the novel as a whole, Walpole writes:

He was never to be quite so starkly realistic again, never again so immediately and impressively to invite comparison with the great tragedies of English fiction—Wuthering Heights, Adam Bede, The Return of the Native; it does not seem to the reader when he closes this book that The Macdermots looks foolish in such company.

(p. 32)

The Macdermots of Ballycloran proved that Trollope was going to become a great novelist, The Kellys and the O'Kellys proved what kind he was going to become. It is here, not in the first book, that we can see the kind of character types he would polish, mature, subject to cunning variations, and learn to delay in their full revelation or push forward to the ideal moment of discovery as he increasingly mastered the economics of movement within the novel. We may begin, perhaps, with the lighthearted point that in Frank O'Kelly, Lord Ballindine, we encounter the first of that series of “Franks,” all of whom appear to be endowed with affection, unreliability, irresponsibility, and a capacity for finally pulling themselves together in response to the constancy of a good woman: Frank Gresham in Doctor Thorne, Frank Greystock in The Eustace Diamonds, Frank Tregear in The Duke's Children. (Frank Reckenthorpe in “The Two Generals” is an exception, but so slight a short story will hardly stand in the way of the argument.)¹⁴ There is, I think, no other name so declaratory of its type, save possibly Lucy. The master workman was far too professional to make them copies of one another, and indeed their interaction with other characters invariably affects the working-out of their natures and destinies. Frank Gresham, I think, should win a protective response from his reader which will hardly be extended to Greystock or Tregear: there is a genuine affection in his disposition which offsets the moral weakness from which he is rescued by Miss Dunstable, whereas the selfishness of Greystock and the obstinacy of Tregear repel. Frank Ballindine anticipates something of this quality in Frank Gresham, and each is driven by a desire to redeem his estates from the improvidence of a forebear. But Ballindine is both more and less: unlike Gresham, he is not beleaguered by relatives like the de Courcys, who excel in inducing sentiments of guilt and snobbery; he is head of the family as opposed to heir, and he is languid rather than impulsive. It is easy to see in Ballindine particular obligations to Charles Surface in Sheridan's School for Scandal (notably in having a cynical gamester friend as adviser of uncertain value) and to Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, two of the many Irish authors in whom Trollope saturated himself during his years of literary apprenticeship.¹⁵ Trollope had learned at first hand the implications of paternal improvidence, and thence observed with a peculiarly sympathetic eye its effects on the heirs of Irish landed families. The Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 proved a nemesis for many of them; he mentions such a case in Jack O'Conor in an aside entirely at variance with the light tone that otherwise pervades “The O'Conors of Castle Conor” (“Poor Jack! I fear that the Encumbered Estates Act sent him altogether adrift upon the world”). The first major literary fruit of this observation was in Doctor Thorne.

One important feature of Doctor Thorne arises partly from Ireland and partly from Trollope's ancestry: the superiority of women to men. With the exception of Dr. Thorne himself, all the main male characters are weakened by their vulnerability to various pressures—debt, drink, or status. Apart from the Doctor, it is the women who direct the course of the action. The Kellys and the O'Kellys anticipates this somewhat in the plot about Fanny Wyndham and Lord Ballindine; although her momentary indecision gives the Earl of Cashel his chance to capture her fortune for his family, it is her recovery of resolution which brings the collapse of his plans. But the real women of strength in that novel, Mrs. Kelly and Anty Lynch, are on a lower social level. Anty has hardly any successor in Trollope's later work. That pattern of female sanctity is peculiar to Irish Catholicism, however universal the stoicism that accompanies it (the nearest approach to it, Marie Clavert, in “La Mère Bauche,” significantly is also a figure from peasant Catholic culture, and Trollope's deep experience of a Catholic peasantry was limited to Ireland).¹⁶ He did go on to use the situation of a woman of fortune showing herself capable of holding her own against formidable pressures despite neither being in her first youth nor being by origin of socially high standing, two very different examples being Miss Dunstable and Madame Max Goesler. A further link between Anty, Miss Dunstable, and Madame Max is that they use their wealth ultimately for positive good, and while neither Miss Dunstable nor Madame Max could aspire to Anty's sanctity, nor would aspire to the way it is shown, their firmness of purpose has the same nobility of heart. It may seem a long way from Barry Lynch's attempts to coerce his sister by threats of murder to the de Courcys' use of social snobbery to capture Miss Dunstable's fortune, or to the younger Duke of Omnium's bullying of Madame Max (now Mrs. Finn) in The Duke's Children, but something of the same spirit of resistance to each of these attempts is present. (It is also present in Marie Clavert, but there its only means of self-expression is by suicide. Despite her suicide, however, Marie is clearly a Catholic; she pledges her troth to Adolphe Bauche before a statue of the Blessed Virgin.)

Mrs. Kelly is a very different figure. The structure of The Kellys and the O'Kellys results in some of the most important action taking place in very early chapters, and her strongest appearance takes place one-fifth of the way through, when, in chapter 7, she drives Barry Lynch from the shop. In passing, it also shows that Trollope's ear for the speech of an Irish countrywoman dominated by the Gaelic forms and intonations so recently lost is outstanding. In their different locations O'Casey, Synge, and Somerville and Ross might be able to better it, but only debatably and marginally; and in cumulative effect, measurement of argument, categorization of wrongs, and perfection of rhythms, it can hold its own for authenticity anywhere. After her Amazonian performance in chapter 7 Mrs. Kelly necessarily declines in force, but this splendid assertion of her credentials induces the danger of another aspect of her nature being overlooked, as revealed in her gradual souring on the problem of Anty Lynch, her complaints about the difficulties it involves, her lack of sustained altruism, her general delight in strategy and scheming (while loudly denouncing it) for the benefit of her family's interests, and her essential position as a power politician rather than a courageous benefactor. This is excellent reporting on Trollope's part. We might want to concede something in the making of it to the role of the indomitable Frances Trollope, his mother, who assailed the domestic manners of the Americans with greater elegance but equal force, to the way in which Mrs. Kelly says her word on the domestic manners of Barry Lynch. But as an assertion of the role of the Irish Catholic mother, building and scheming for her family and employing in its interests all of her arts in a male-dominant world, it is excellent. Mrs. Kelly's situation is simplified by her widowhood; but many an Irish Catholic household over the previous century had been held together and driven steadily upward by the resolution of a mother either wholly or partly deserted by a husband who found solace in drink, or in temporary or permanent migration. In the establishment of a small shopkeeper, matriarchy would be particularly evident, and the whole question of the mobility in status of the Kellys is intrinsically tied to the talents and powers of the mother.

The line of descent here is to Mrs. Proudie, specifically the Mrs. Proudie of Barchester Towers. Inevitably the (largely) comic figure of “the lady bishop” in that novel supplies the basis for the (largely) tragic role she plays in The Last Chronicle of Barset, but only through that development can Mrs. Kelly be seen as contributing to Mrs. Proudie in the later work. Yet in Barchester Towers there are innumerable, and hilarious, variations of that confrontation with Barry Lynch, whether in the “Unhand it, Sir!” to Bertie Stanhope or in the confrontations with Mr. Slope when they become enemies. The growth of mastery of mood is evident: Mrs. Kelly's attack on Barry Lynch is that of a courageous if comic figure holding at bay a really ugly individual who without her might accomplish stark tragedy. Mrs. Proudie's encounters with Bertie and ultimate war against Mr. Slope are entirely comedy, all the protagonists being “devils,” if you wish (for neither Stanhope nor Slope must win the heroine, though each must threaten a little convincingly so to do), but “devils” who move laughter or mild contempt far more than anger. It is noteworthy that the shadows of tragedy in Barchester Towers all relate to other works. Bishop Grantly's death and Mr. Harding's frustrated hopes for the Wardenship depend for their force on our knowledge from The Warden and of the character, achievements, and wishes of the Archdeacon and Mr. Harding as revealed there (and the important fact that neither the Archdeacon nor Mr. Harding is really seeking more than a new lease of the power they each actually held at the outset of The Warden, something which gives them a tactical advantage in the readers' sympathies; Mr. Harding would have those sympathies anyway, the Archdeacon might not). Eleanor Bold's widowhood, which is merely a tragic grace note, depends on The Warden for its force. Apart from the death of Bishop Grantly, a passage of realism and grandeur rather than tragedy, the strongest moment that is wholly alien from comedy in Barchester Towers is the two-sentence paragraph in chapter 20 in which we receive our only sight in the novel of the still unnamed Josiah Crawley. There could hardly be a better example of Trollope's ability to draw vast quantities of magnificent material from a passing aside in an earlier work than the relationship of that paragraph with Framley Parsonage and The Last Chronicle of Barset, save perhaps the three paragraphs at the close of The Small House at Allington describing the end of Plantagenet Palliser's story, which proved in the event the basis of six further novels about him. It is the same process as that employed in the continued reusage of themes from his Irish novels and days.¹⁷

It is not tragedy, but it is not wholly removed from it, however, where the antecedent of Mrs. Kelly for Mrs. Proudie is clearest in Barchester Towers. I do not think that Barchester Towers receives a satisfactory reading unless Mrs. Proudie wins admiration and affection for her championship of Mrs. Quiverful (chs. 25, 26), and the human sentiment she shows there has to be seen, as in Mrs. Kelly's case, as quite distinct from, although allied to, the power politics involved. The structure of Barchester Towers works more in favor of the dramatic than does that of its Irish precursor. Up to this point, Mrs. Proudie has shown herself obnoxious and, as in the Bertie Stanhope incident, ridiculous. The element of surprise, then, comes very forcefully into play when Trollope maneuvers the reader into suddenly wanting to give her a cheer. Mrs. Kelly we know to be a protector already; hence the confrontation with Barry Lynch is predictable in its quality, if devastating in its quantity. At the same time, both women are strongly alike in that their norm is to be dominated by considerations of power politics in a man's world, which they intend to control, come what may. Both are aware that the forces against which they are struggling are socially superior to them, and their use of unexpected weapons against them is one of their greatest strengths. Material self-interest rules them for much of the time, but it is a self-interest inextricably related to their families, never to themselves; hence there is never a question of Mrs. Proudie being on the same level as Mr. Slope, much less the Stanhopes, any more than there is of Mrs. Kelly being on that of Barry Lynch. And their ambitions are limited to the business of their families, Mrs. Kelly's to the Kellys' economic and social interests, Mrs. Proudie's to her husband's spiritual fief. Significantly, The Kellys and the O'Kellys has almost as its last words Mrs. Kelly's recognition of the limits of her sovereignty outside her immediate and traditional sphere of rule. Mrs. Proudie never admits that, and her failure to do so ultimately brings her repudiation by her husband, which immediately precedes her death in The Last Chronicle of Barset (ch. 66). But the last word on Mrs. Kelly reasserts her dominating nature, and the last sight of Mrs. Proudie reveals that she has died standing up.

Barry Lynch suggests another line of development. His difference in religion from his sister and from Mrs. Kelly, and his English public-school education, are used for an effective contrast between his received speech and Mrs. Kelly's and Anty's vernacular. This prefigures such contrasts as the moral superiority of Miss Dunstable against the birth, breeding, and elegance of the de Courcys, and still more the simplicity of the Tudors against the refinement, aristocracy, and utter treachery of the Hon. Undecimus Scott in The Three Clerks. But the real antecedent here is the murderous brutality of brother to sister, and that is worked out with even greater skill in Can You Forgive Her? Here a superior sense of economy comes into its own. Can You Forgive Her?, in its earliest version as the first draft of the play The Noble Jilt, was conceived very shortly after The Kellys and the O'Kellys, and the time of its actual production and its place as the first of the Palliser novels link it naturally to a major sequence of Trollope's works including The Way We Live Now (which contains Palliser locations, relatives, and minor characters without the Pallisers themselves); accordingly, its place as a conduit from the early Irish novels is exceptionally important. George Vavasor appears at first sight even more unattractive than Barry Lynch, certainly physically; but Trollope, by very shrewd play with the reader's emotions, manages to lure both reader and heroine into suspecting he may be more sinned against than sinning, may be his own worst enemy, is at least likely to prove a more interesting husband than John Grey, deserves to get a reasonable chance to redeem himself, and so forth. The advantage of surprise as to the depth of the villain's depravity, thrown away too early in The Kellys and the O'Kellys, is brilliantly timed here. The result is that when in chapter 56 Vavasor strikes down the sister who has throughout been characterized by single-minded devotion to him, breaking her arm, this reader at least feels a physical anger and hatred beyond anything in response to any other Trollope villain. Undy Scott is more intellectually detestable, Sir Hugh Clavering psychologically more despicable, Augustus Scarborough more repulsively cold-blooded, but nothing equals in violence the emotions elicited by Vavasor's savagery to Kate. “Showing how the Wild Beast got himself back from the Mountains” (ch. 57) sums it up: Vavasor has become something noxious and outside humanity.

But Phineas Finn, the next Palliser work, one in which Trollope is formally invoking his Irish background, uses the same material and makes entirely different work of it. Lord Chiltern contains many of the outward appearances of George Vavasor, and the basis for his appeal to the reader is that of Vavasor in the initial instance. On his first appearance Chiltern refuses to go to Regent's Park on the ground that he would be thought “the wildest beast in the whole collection”¹⁸—here is warning, indeed! Chiltern, like Vavasor, has a devoted sister, and while he exploits her in far less cruel fashion—indeed, with self-reproach at her generosity—the result of his having his debts paid by her is that she is led to marry Robert Kennedy, with ultimate disaster. To make matters better and better, Chiltern is to oppose his friend Phineas Finn on wildly unreasonable grounds and to fight a duel with him in rivalry for the hand of the woman Phineas, our hero, is pursuing through most of the book. And yet Chiltern, for all of his ferocity, never sacrifices an ounce of any of the considerable affection he accumulates from the reader as he goes along—at least not until Phineas Redux when domesticity has made him into a figure of fun, although even there his fidelity to Phineas over the murder becomes of great moral value at a time when more rational beings are doubtful of Phineas's innocence and thereby appear to him morally inadequate in their support of him. This last point, by the way, is one of the most Irish qualities of Phineas Finn himself: the Irish tradition of mutual faith and solidarity against an alien law regardless of the appearances of hostile evidence is well picked up in Phineas's anger at any of his supporters who suppose him to be guilty. The Irish origins of Chiltern work in very well with his evidence at Phineas's trial. The principle that a man may have an enemy and wish to kill him but that other than the specific reason for their enmity they can be friends and stand by one another in all else is succinctly expressed by what Chiltern tells the Court:

“I have … known Mr. Finn well, and have loved him dearly. I have eaten with him and drank with him, have ridden with him, have lived with him, and have quarrelled with him; and I know him as I do my own right hand. … I am quite sure from my knowledge of the man that he could not commit a murder … and I don't care what the evidence is.”¹⁹

It does not sound very English, does it? and yet it accords well with the idea of an adversary coming to the aid of his opponent when the latter's life is threatened, as does the Irish parish priest when the mob menaces the life of Archibald Green, who has knocked him downstairs, in “Father Giles of Ballymoy.”²⁰ Lord Chiltern seems to me very Irish here, and yet also—and this does not negate the point—very like that explosive, quarrelsome, affectionate, impulsive, honest man Anthony Trollope.

To turn back from Kellys to O'Kellys, let us look again at the far-reaching implications of Fanny Wyndham and her lovers. Her guardian, the Earl of Cashel, wishes her to marry his son Lord Kilcullen and not her chosen beloved Lord Ballindine. Lord Kilcullen is in fact horribly burdened with debt, which will swallow up her fortune. The line of descent here strikes right through to Mr. Scarborough's Family, one of the greatest of Trollope's late novels. Trollope certainly seems to have reread his earlier Irish work before starting The Landleaguers, or at least sampled it sufficiently to have it very much in mind, and Mr. Scarborough's Family was completed in 1882, while The Landleaguers probably had been taking shape in Trollope's mind at least as early as 1881.²¹ The triangle stands. Captain Mountjoy Scarborough, debt-encumbered, financially squalid, spendthrift, gambling-mad, is an enlarged and three-dimensioned Kilcullen, and, like Kilcullen, has a strange code of honor which asserts itself against his own interest. Yet he is spoken for by Florence Mountjoy's mother, as Kilcullen is by Fanny Wyndham's guardian, though Lord Cashel's dishonor in his intrigue is starker than Mrs. Mountjoy's. Henry Annesley is in the position, if unFranked, of Lord Ballindine. The strong point in the parallel is the dark honor Mountjoy Scarborough shares with Kilcullen, followed by a ruin as extreme. Cashel as a father has little in common with old Mr. Scarborough save in that Cashel's dishonest ethics are beautifully counterpointed by Mr. Scarborough's honest anti-ethics.

The triangle itself persists again and again in the Trollope canon. Can You Forgive Her? offers three cases, in all of which the worthy man really is worthy and the wild man actually wild; yet these themselves pose remarkable variations. Alice Vavasor's hesitation between John Grey and George Vavasor, Lady Glencora's between her husband Plantagenet Palliser and Burgo Fitzgerald, and Mrs. Greenow's between Mr. Cheesacre and Captain Bellfield are exactly congruent, it would seem. Alice Vavasor has been condemned by some critics as dull (“Can we forgive Miss Vavasor?” snarled Henry James. “Of course we can, and forget her, too, for that matter”),²² and Mrs. Greenow is allowed by all critics to be irredeemably vulgar and wearying. (In this they are not supported by her creator: “Mrs. Greenow, between Captain Bellfield and Mr. Cheeseacre [sic], is very good fun—as the fun of novels is”; Autobiography, p. 180). Yet their names have to be written in Trollope's song. Alice Vavasor goes back to John Grey, and on the evidence about George Vavasor, how right she was. The title question remains: had George Vavasor been Lord Chiltern, she might have been justified in maintaining her noble jilt; and so, on academic grounds, she stands forgiven. Friends may be wrong or may even be acting to the detriment of a woman by their self-interest, as The Kellys and the O'Kellys shows. It was not so in this case, but it could have been. Lady Glencora throws over the love of her life, Burgo Fitzgerald. She spends the rest of her existence causing chaos, mild and great, in her husband's chosen profession and forever taking up the cause of adventurers: Lizzie Eustace, Phineas Finn, Ferdinand Lopez. Her actions, discovered after her death, are in favor of linking her daughter with the man she loves without respect to its appropriateness to the Palliser family. Her dearest friendship proves to be with an adventuress, Madame Max Goesler, admittedly from gratitude in the initial instance because of Madame Max's rejection of the greatest adventure of all, that of becoming Duchess of Omnium. But her love for Madame Max goes beyond the grave; her love for Alice Vavasor hardly survives Can You Forgive Her? As far as Alice is concerned, the forgetting was not confined to Henry James. And the forgiving is certainly intended to be sought not only for Alice but even more for Glencora.²³

Mrs. Greenow is important because she, alone of the three, chooses the rake, and she does so because she controls her own fortune and can control him. It is not intended as a general prescription: it would have served Alice Vavasor very badly with George Vavasor, given his nature, and it would have served Lady Glencora equally badly with Burgo Fitzgerald, given her infatuation. When Lizzie Eustace tried it with the Rev. Mr. Emilius, she came to rue it more deeply than any other action of her appalling and hilarious life. All the same, Lizzie Eustace's obvious consort remains a rake, Lord George de Bruce Carruthers, and the later disappearance of the promise of that union, given at the end of Phineas Redux, is one of the disappointments, although not the greatest, of The Prime Minister.²⁴ (Still, in the latter novel Lizzie does deal more intelligently with another adventurer, Ferdinand Lopez, than had his wife in marrying him or had she in “marrying” Emilius.) Is it only the Mrs. Greenows who can set the wisdom of the world at defiance? In answer, Phineas Finn, in many ways more a counterpart than a sequel to Can You Forgive Her?, argues otherwise. Lady Laura Standish marries a worthy man, Robert Kennedy, in preference to an adventurer, Phineas Finn, and pays for it dearly in the remorseless pages of both Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux. Ironically, Violet Effingham also rejects Phineas Finn, who for all his adventurism is preferable to her guardian over Lord Chiltern, and Violet finds happiness. Madame Max Goesler declines the marriage which would win the admiration, if not the approval, of the world, and rejects the Duke of Omnium for the forlorn hope of Phineas Finn, which it takes a further novel, a murdered Bonteen, and a detective investigation across the length and breadth of Europe to realize (Phineas Finn, chs. 62, 63, and 72).

The counterpart status of Phineas Finn must not blind us to the clever mixing by the master workman. Although Phineas is industrious, sympathetic, honest, and capable, his antecedent is Burgo Fitzgerald, who bears a name as Irish as could be asked. Both men are what the women's liberationists have sensibly taught us to call sex objects. There is nothing to Burgo beyond his beauty and a certain feckless kindliness where his own interests are not involved. Phineas is extremely valuable in the candor and detail of his witness into politics, but he is infinitely less intelligent than any of the three women with whom he falls in love in England—Lady Laura, Violet Effingham, and Madame Max. There is not one of them, before their marriages (or second marriage in Madame Max's case), who would not be more interesting to know than he. Even after marriage, it is not without point that Phineas's second wife retains much more interest for the reader than he does: in The Duke's Children she is the most sympathetic person in the novel, and he is a cipher. And in moral terms, Mary Flood Jones is far beyond the poor wretch who trembles constantly on the brink of deserting her when their troth is plighted, and wantonly ignores her fidelity when it is not. Yet his appeal to the ladies is unending. It is evident in Mrs. Bunce, his landlady; it is evident in Lady Glencora, for her passion in his cause is decidedly more than a product of her friendship with Madame Max. Mrs. Low obviously responds to it to the extent of expressing such animus against him when he embarks on a political career against her husband's advice; she is emotionally involved in a way deeper than is warranted by wifely reprobation of an unsatisfactory pupil of her husband. Lady Cantrip feels something of it, Lady Baldock seems a little swayed by it, and in a strange, warped, gnarled way Miss Aspasia Fitzgibbon seems to feel it too. (That tough Irish spinster is a little gem of a portrait, and is eminently relevant to the situation of the moneyed woman in a society which can only respect a woman when she is in the position of a matriarch, obviously serving the needs of men by her intrigues.) Phineas also seems attractive to men, and again his lack of concrete talents implies that this is something more than the normal business of politics: Robert Kennedy's obsession about him grows in part independently of jealousy over Lady Laura; Quintus Slide, either in ingratiation or in hatred, is far too interested in him for his lowly situation; Mr. Low prolongs his pedagogic function beyond the norm; Mr. Monk is flattered by his discipleship but also encourages it to a degree surprising in such a solitary figure; Lord Chiltern (undoubtedly the great positive brooding sexual presence in Phineas Finn) cannot respond to him other than with the utmost vehemence. The least trustworthy of his friends is that supremely party politician Barrington Erle. But why should Barrington Erle bother with him at all? Yet he does to the extent of being the agent for the recalling of Phineas, in the teeth of all the Ratlers and Bonteens.

Phineas's Irishness, for all of Trollope's remark in the Autobiography that it was unnecessary (p. 318), seems to me to be essential in the whole business. He is preeminently the beautiful savage, straight from the frontier. And Trollope, who had read and pondered his James Fenimore Cooper (“In the old house were the two first volumes of Cooper's novel, called The Prairie. … I wonder how many dozen times I read those two first volumes”; Autobiography, p. 15), recognized that in Ireland he had the exaggerations and the verities of the frontier. Such a frontier meant very different things to Trollope, its student, and to Phineas, its product; Trollope was of course its product too, which explains how well he understood the follies of Phineas. The immigrant trying to find his way has seldom been better captured in his eager blundering:

“And what then?” said Phineas to his friend Fitzgibbon.

“Why, then there will be a choice out of three. There is the Duke, who is the most incompetent man in England; there is Monk, who is the most unfit; and there is Gresham, who is the most unpopular. I can't conceive it possible to find a worse Prime Minister than either of the three;—but the country affords no other.”

(Phineas Finn, I, 85)

“With a majority of nineteen against him!” said Phineas. “Surely Mr. Mildmay is not the only man in the country. There is the Duke, and there is Mr. Gresham,—and there is Mr. Monk.” Phineas had at his tongue's end all the lesson that he had been able to learn at the Reform Club.

“I should hardly think the Duke would venture,” said Mr. Kennedy.

“Nothing venture, nothing have,” said Phineas. “It is all very well to say that the Duke is incompetent, but I do not know that anything very wonderful is required in the way of genius. The Duke has held his own in both Houses successfully, and he is both honest and popular. I quite agree that a Prime Minister at the present day should be commonly honest, and more than commonly popular.”

“So you are all for the Duke, are you?” said Lady Laura, again smiling as she spoke to him.

“Certainly;—if we are deserted by Mr. Mildmay. Don't you think so?”

“I don't find it quite so easy to make up my mind as you do. I am inclined to think that Mr. Mildmay will form a government; and as long as there is that prospect, I need hardly commit myself to an opinion as to his probable successor.” Then the objectionable Mr. Kennedy took his leave.

(Phineas Finn, I, 88)

And with suitable delays a place in the Cabinet is made for Mr. Kennedy, for reasons partly indicated by the contrast between him and Phineas in the above conversation.

The other side of the immigrant factor lies in Phineas's utter devotion to Mr. Monk, once he has come to know him, a devotion decidedly transcending concern about the measure on which first one and then the other resigns. Trollope had studied his Irish politics, and knew the contest in which the search for a chieftain exists. Nearly a decade after Trollope's death the more sophisticated members of Parnell's party would repudiate him, and the less sophisticated would cling to the “uncrowned King” with utter disregard for the O'Shea divorce trial and the subsequent conduct of Parnell for which he was being rejected by their colleagues. The charm of Phineas's idiotic if fleeting championship of the Duke of St. Bungay, in which zeal for conversational effect drives the Irishman far beyond his understanding, is that it already shows that search for a hero. If Mr. Monk had not existed, Phineas would have had to invent him. An early draft of the novel suggests a darker, less worthy, and significantly Irish Monk, which would give a nice antecedent for Phineas among the more gentlemanly votaries of Daniel O'Connell. It would not be hard to find a Phineas or two in the crowd in the courtroom at the commencement of The Kellys and the O'Kellys, though one suspects he would have differed from the brothers Kelly in his ability to charm his way to a chair.²⁵

The Irish motif in the Phineas novels amounts to much more than the use of an Irish background and Irish attitudes for their hero. It is evident in the choice of names: Standish is a noteworthy Irish Christian name, Barrington a famous Irish surname—Trollope simply reverses their status.²⁶ Trollope, with his hostility to Disraeli in mind, produced Ratler and Bonteen as his answer to Tadpole and Taper, though he made them much more fleshed-out creations. “Ratler,” I would suggest, derives from “rat” to imply a little rat, and “Bonteen” from the Irish “bainbhín,” a little pig. There may be a further elaboration of this in the Duke of St. Bungay, a suitable polar opposite to Bonteen: St. Bungay suggests “Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,” and bacon is the final stage of what starts out as a little pig. You might care to imagine Trollope in the snug of a country pub (but presumably not in the commercial room—see Orley Farm) having the word “bainbhín” explained to him with a countryman's joke about its starting that way and finding its ultimate end in bacon. He produced less recondite jokes himself, resulting in his having to live for much longer than he had foreseen with “Dr. Fillgrave”²⁷ or the Duke of Omnium of Castle Gatherum. Certainly that sort of joke was commonplace, as may be seen from Dickens, Disraeli, and Thackeray; it also reflects the Irish vision of the British aristocracy and gentry as a pantomime put on for its especial benefit. As to Trollope's other uses of Gaelic roots, Phineas may be one. The more traditionally minded Irish had and have a particular enthusiasm for patronymics; the eminent Irish statesman of today, Garret FitzGerald, owes his nomenclature to that. “Phineas Finn” seems an effort in the same direction, from an Englishman's attempt to translate “Finghín Mac Fhinn.” Actually, “Finghín,” in the usual fashion of absurd English translations of Irish names, has customarily been rendered as “Florence,” a male name in Ireland, but, in an Irish word, mattheradamn.

Then the question arises of Phineas's status, and of its acceptability:

He made no attempt to sit at the feet of anybody, and would stand aloof when bigger men than himself were talking, and was content to be less,—as indeed he was less,—than Mr. Bonteen or Mr. Ratler. But at the end of a week he found that, without any effort on his part,—almost in opposition to efforts on his part,—he had fallen into an easy pleasant way with these men which was very delightful to him. He had killed a stag in company with Mr. Palliser, and had stopped beneath a crag to discuss with him a question as to the duty on Irish malt. He had played chess with Mr. Gresham, and had been told that gentleman's opinion on the trial of Mr. Jefferson Davis.

(Phineas Finn, I, 155-56)

(This last is a nice clue in favor of an identification of Mr. Gresham with Gladstone, and it sounds like a pointedly planted one: Gladstone had infuriated the supporters of the American Union during the Civil War by stating that Jefferson Davis looked as if he would succeed in creating a nation. Trollope in writing Phineas Finn corrected his original choice of conversation over the chess game to the topic of the Davis trial.²⁸ As against this there must be set Gresham's lack of interest in history, a critical contrast to Gladstone's rhetorical frame of reference. This either argues for a composite portrait, or else is a curious and interesting judgment by Trollope against the weight of other evidence.)

Later, Phineas reflects: “Phineas, who had his eyes about him, thought that he could perceive that Mr. Palliser did not shoot a deer with Mr. Ratler, and that Mr. Gresham played no chess with Mr. Bonteen” (Phineas Finn, I, 157).²⁹ In part this is clear enough. Mr. Ratler would have appeared too ready to consider the merits of deerstalking as conversation fodder to win future votes on the estimates, and Mr. Bonteen would have weighed the virtue of a bishop's move as showing undue partiality for the Church if disestablishment was likely to come to the fore. Phineas was evidently a gentleman, and they were not. But why was he? He was but a County Clare doctor's son, and his father, while estimable, was no Dr. Thorne; and even so, a British country doctor's son would hardly have been so naturally honored, particularly by Whig society.

The point is evidently meant to turn on Phineas's self-image. To do him justice, its grandeur clearly relates to his family rather than to himself. The same episode, his first visit to Loughlinter, includes his ill-fated proposal to Lady Laura Standish for which he assigns justification:

And there was, too, a look of breeding about him which had come to him, no doubt, from the royal Finns of old, which ever served him in great stead. He was, indeed, only Phineas Finn, and was known by the world to be no more; but he looked as though he might have been anybody,—a royal Finn himself.³⁰

(Phineas Finn, I, 166)

Now it is absurd to assume the Pallisers and Greshams would think in this way. And from what we know of them it is equally impossible to assume they would personally be attracted to Phineas in the way I have ascribed to Slide, Low, Kennedy, Chiltern, Monk, and Barrington Erle. But the manners of a royal Finn, suitably transported into Babylon, carried weight with them. The “royalty” of the Finns may appear in one sense a joke: the Finns are not named among the famous ancient Irish kingly families, even if Phineas thinks they are. But the name does directly imply descent from the hero of ancient Gaelic saga, Fionn Mac Cumhaill, whose son Oisín is correctly styled Oisín Mac Fhinn. In its Scottish variant, that saga was famous in romantic literature through Macpherson's Ossian. And this early scene at Loughlinter, though not its successors, seems to carry with it a little of the atmosphere of the visual romanticism associated with the beneficiary of romantic enthusiasm for the cult of Ossian, Sir Walter Scott, especially by artists (Millais conveys a touch of it in his illustration on Phineas's ill-fated proposal to Lady Laura). Underneath the romantic note, however, is Trollope's evident consciousness of the alibi of Irish Catholics in destitution—that however low they might be, their ancestors had been kings of Ireland. In fact he had penetrated the real social divide in Ireland: caste as opposed to class. It had its effects in his judgment of class in England as well as of status in Ireland.³¹

The significance of caste in nineteenth-century Irish life can only be appreciated by recalling the anti-Catholic and somewhat milder anti-Dissenter penal legislation of the eighteenth century under which religious labels effected the deepest social cleavage. Even after the piecemeal repeal of the penal laws, which finally vanished for all practical purposes in 1829, the memory of former degradation remained very strong. Church-building priests in the nineteenth century chose their locations so that their new steeples would be higher than those of the Protestant established church, the Church of Ireland, which had previously domineered over them and which had continued to collect tithes, directly and later vicariously, from Catholics and Dissenters until the Disestablishment of 1869. One of the effects of so serious a caste division was that class became subordinate in Ireland to the dictates of caste. Yet simultaneously, mixed marriages between the religions were easier and more common in Trollope's time than in the first half of the twentieth century after the Vatican issued the Ne Temere decree (1908). Up to that point the boys followed the father's religion and the girls, the mother's; after that, all children of such a marriage had to be brought up Catholics. Trollope makes much of such households, partly for ecumenical reasons (in his own way he was very anxious to do his bit to alleviate religious tension in Ireland), partly for artistic fidelity arising from his observations. The latter is evidently of some importance in Phineas Finn. Trollope not only, as he says in his rueful self-criticism, took his hero “from Ireland,” he took him from Irish Catholicism, which made him much less likely to succeed. And he gave him that origin peculiarly detested by defenders of a caste system: he is the child of a woman of upper caste (Protestant) having married a man of lower (Catholic). The converse is accepted as far more natural. Because his mother comes from upper caste, Phineas will nevertheless have a knowledge of upper-caste attitudes and priorities; he is not, nor can he be, a wholly untutored savage sent forth by the electors of Loughshane to a brave new world. But for all his search for acceptance in it, he retains his Catholic identity, whereas Disraeli's Judaism was ancestral and not confessional. Phineas's self-confidence as to his own status partly arises from his adherence to the older religion as well as to the older aristocracy: nineteenth-century Irish Catholics might ape the ways of Dublin Protestant ascendancy or London aristocracy, but they fervently believed themselves the spiritual and moral superiors of both. Phineas Finn would hardly articulate a view such as that, but he would feel it in his bones. Hence his anxiety to rise is balanced by an insistence on holding fast to his own identity, which reaches its height after he has plumbed the lowest depths of despair, in Phineas Redux.³²

Phineas's Catholicism as product of a mixed marriage is important for the establishment of his identity but plays no part in the stories. (How many of Trollope's Protestant contemporaries chose an Irish Catholic hero? That dismissive sentence in the Autobiography is in part a very modest statement of his own courage and of his love for Irish votaries of a religion which was not his.) The mixed marriage in The Kellys and the O'Kellys is fundamental to the plot, although here it is much more in keeping with the norm: Simeon Lynch had been a Protestant and his wife a Catholic, with Barry Lynch following his father's religion and Anty her mother's. The importance of the mixed marriage here underlines the fact that Phineas's origins are no casual matter in Trollope's mind when he comes to conceive them. He is also very precise about the realities in The Kellys and the O'Kellys. The Kellys are Catholic; their relatives the O'Kellys, standing decidedly higher in the world, are Protestant. The shrewd author was acknowledging that the apparent indication of extreme Celticism, the “O'” prefix, has an original aristocratic connotation and might be retained by persons who valued the retention of aristocracy above religion.³³ The dispossessed Catholics symbolically lose the “O'” (partly because they would not have had the education to insist on its retention when their names were first recorded in English by some official). Trollope was of course fully conscious of prominent Protestant Irish leaders of ancient descent from Gaelic chieftains: in 1880 Parnell's most formidable enemy among the Protestant landlords was the lineal descendant of the ancient kings of Leinster, Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh, MP. (Daniel O'Connell was a scion of an old Catholic family, one of the seven percent of Irish landowners in 1800 who had held to the old religion.) The notion of clan across the chasm of caste still vaguely existed, and was from time to time asserted either by pushing Catholics or by the apologetics of Protestant landlords under attack; but it amounted to very little. The Kellys give themselves a little imaginary status from their relationship with the O'Kellys, the O'Kellys vaguely acknowledge right of access and support. What it amounts to is that the advance of the Catholics into commercial wealth coincident with the decline of Protestant landownership in monetary value results in the Kellys being drawn on by the O'Kellys for necessary loans. The rise of commercial wealth and the decline of the agrarian aristocracy is not a new theme: Trollope owed something to its significance in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, a work half a century senior to The Kellys and the O'Kellys. But the real parallel between the two works on that score is not one of caste but class. The Rackrents are bought out by the steward's son; Simeon Lynch has built up his fortune at the expense of his employers, the O'Kellys. Trollope certainly documents the role of Catholic commercial self-improvement, but the Catholic middle class, unlike the Protestant, were not so anxious to risk capital in acquiring extensive land. Caste prevented their gaining the social returns from such an investment. That situation changed when many old estates came on the market after the Encumbered Estates Act in 1849, but The Macdermots of Ballycloran and The Kellys and the O'Kellys preceded it in publication, while Castle Richmond and “The O'Conors of Castle Conor” are set largely before it in time.

Trollope's own emphases on caste within the family play a much more fundamental role in The Kellys and the O'Kellys in which the ugly and ultimately almost lethal division between Barry and Anty Lynch is wholly dominated by it. So, too, are Anty's allies in Catholic commerce. Barry by his nature repels allies, and the origins of his fortune, based on Protestant looting from Protestants, also weaken him. Yet his status as Protestant is not an empty thing for him to raise against the Catholic doctor (“I suppose my word's as good as Colligan's, gentlemen? I suppose my character as a Protestant gentleman stands higher than his—a dirty Papist apothecary”; p. 457). The Protestant landlord wavers in a final confrontation with him, the doctor himself is very uneasy, and Barry Lynch is demolished only by the symbolic representative of the established religion itself, the Rev. Joseph Armstrong. There is a line, although not a perfect one, between his relations with Dr. Colligan and Mr. Armstrong; Colligan, in fury when he realizes Barry is inciting him to murder Anty, leaps the barrier of caste and half-throttles him, but the coup de grace is given by the clergyman (chs. 27, 34, 35). This brings us forward to the terrible moment in Is He Popenjoy? when the Dean of Brotherton hurls the Marquis into the fireplace, after his vile remark on the Dean's daughter (ch. 41). In Is He Popenjoy? the violence is all the stronger, both in its impact on the Marquis and in that on the reader, because two men of the same order of society (and one whereof the Dean values his membership to the disservice of his cloth) are thus embattled. In The Kellys and the O'Kellys the doctor is of a lesser caste, but thereby needs to ingratiate himself with the caste above him; and he similarly does potential violence to his interests and to the career by which he has built himself up, in doing actual violence to Barry. But it is the clergyman's moral overthrow of Barry which most strongly prefigures the Dean's conduct. The whole episode is a very fine reshaping of Irish material for an English context; in addition, the Marquis of Brotherton may owe something to the evil landlords whom Trollope regarded as disgracing their status, however much he opposed interference with the land system. On a lighter level, Trollope takes the Irish phenomenon of the absentee landlord to hilarious lengths by translating it into clerical garb for the Hon. and Rev. Dr. Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers; it is not a simple case of transition, given the memory of absentee Church of Ireland Bishops who flourished so prominently in the eighteenth century.³⁴ There is a very formal invocation of Irish antecedents at the beginning of Is He Popenjoy?, what with the Germains having their honeymoon beside the River Blackwater; it would seem that Trollope deliberately turned back to his Irish sources when he decided to turn them to dark and almost misanthropic uses in a strange and sinister Barsetshire as opposed to the shire that is home to the comedy of Barchester Towers and the heroic dimensions of The Last Chronicle of Barset. There is a very ugly reworking of the old Barcastrian themes in Is He Popenjoy?: Mr. Harding's utter indifference to being the grandfather of the Marchioness of Hartletop is now countered by the Dean of Brotherton's obsession about becoming the grandfather of the future Marquis of Brotherton. The amusement in the Italianate Stanhopes and the mysterious child called the last of the Neros becomes the horror of the Italianate Marquis and his supposed child, the uncertain Popenjoy. The revelation in the third volume that Brotherton is in Barsetshire seems an additionally cruel profanation. And to call up the forces of darkness, mockery, pessimism, and human imperfection Trollope looks back to Ireland's tragedies which he had transmuted to Barchester comedy in the first instance.³⁵

One of the effects of Irish caste division was that of blunting class distinction in normal modes of address, even of those of differing castes. Where fixed rules such as caste existed, class might seem less important. The results of this on Trollope's English novels is complex. It may lead him to allow the de Courcys in Doctor Thorne to be overpromiscuous in seeking matrimonial alliance with the son of the tailor and the daughter of the Oil of Lebanon; but Sir Roger Scatcherd's isolation may be prompted by cases of Irish Catholics making money and finding themselves cut off from those of their own caste by social status and from those of their own status by caste. It is not, I think, a flaw but a peculiarity that Moffat and Miss Dunstable should be so much courted by the aristocracy while Scatcherd is ostracized. If the Irish germ of the story has meaning, such a situation might make sense were Moffat and Miss Dunstable Protestant and Scatcherd Catholic: caste would account for the difference in the treatment they receive from the elite. In any case, the Roger Scatcherd passages, among the most powerful in the novel, appear very Irish, including such things as the resort to alcohol, the devotion beyond all wisdom to the unworthy son, and above all the election meeting. We should bear in mind that this is long before the personal experiences of English elections on which Trollope would draw for Ralph the Heir. Scatcherd before the crowds has the easy rapport of a Catholic leader of the O'Connell type, although without O'Connell's aristocratic origins. The quick use of heckling and turning it to his own interest is very characteristic of that kind of rising Irish Catholic popular politician. And is it really possible to think of the crowd responses as English at all?³⁶

“Hurrah! Hur-r-r-rah! more power to you—we all know who you are, Roger. You're the boy! When did you get drunk last?”

(p. 229)

“No more you don't, Roger: a little drop's very good, ain't it, Roger? Keeps the cold from the stomach, eh, Roger?”

(p. 231)

“Hurrah! more power. That's true, too, Roger; may you never be without a drop to wet your whistle.”

(p. 231)

And the whole nature of O'Connellite attack on Protestant landlord electoral power comes out with the vehemence of Scatcherd's peroration:

“Now the question is, do you want to send the son of a London tailor up to parliament to represent you?”

“No, we don't; nor yet we won't neither.”

“I rather think not. You've had him once, and what has he done for you? Has he said much for you in the House of Commons? Why, he's so dumb a dog that he can't bark even for a bone. I'm told it's quite painful to hear him fumbling and mumbling and trying to get up a speech there over at the White Horse. He doesn't belong to the city; he hasn't done anything for the city; and he hasn't the power to do anything for the city. Then, why on earth does he come here? I'll tell you. The Earl de Courcy brings him. He's going to marry the Earl de Courcy's niece; for they say he's very rich—this tailor's son—only they do say also that he doesn't much like to spend his money. He's going to marry Lord de Courcy's niece, and Lord de Courcy wishes that his nephew should be in Parliament. There, that's the claim which Mr. Moffat has here on the people of Barchester. He's Lord de Courcy's nominee, and those who feel themselves bound hand and foot, heart and soul, to Lord de Courcy, had better vote for him. Such men have my leave. If there are enough of such at Barchester to send him to Parliament, the city in which I was born must be very much altered since I was a young man.”

(p. 232)

The periods in this are emphatically Irish. The Irish language itself often involves the principle of an emphatic being asserted by repetition rather than by superlative. The fondness for internal rhyme for purposes of ridicule is well served. The litany, to which Irish Catholics were well accustomed from pious devotions, is recruited in the sentence where all clauses end with “the city,” and Irish Catholic politicians well knew how to employ the device. Finally the identification of the Earl with oppression and his opponents as pledged to liberty had become a characteristic of Irish politics during the thirty years that preceded the writing of Doctor Thorne, as the power of the landlord was slowly broken and that of the priest advanced. It is not at all an inappropriate transposition: Feargus O'Connor took the methods and demagoguery of the O'Connell movement into English radicalism. But the whole speech of the passage and the liveliness are Irish. An English rural audience is supposed to have been much less enthusiastic about high-flown oratory. The election petition may also be founded on an Irish story, either involving an actual unseating or simply a threat of petition feared or rumored. The close relationship of voting to business transactions certainly recalls Irish political management at home and beyond the seas.³⁷ The final charming irony is that the name Scatcherd is certainly English; but de Courcy is one of the oldest Norman-Irish aristocratic names.

I fear I am leaving that supposedly quintessential English county, Barsetshire, with a Celtic hairy heel. After all, Doctor Thorne was the fruit of Trollope's Irish years (albeit during its actual writing he was on a journey to Egypt). And Scatcherd and the crowd are not the only telltale signs. In the same novel, the Duke of Omnium's method of entertainment seems to have more in common with a caste-conscious Irish aristocrat than with any obvious English exemplar. The whole episode really is peculiar from an English standpoint, and the fact that nobody but Frank Gresham objects to being utterly ignored by the host seems to argue an absence of spirit somewhat incompatible with all we have learned of the rights and manners of freeborn Englishmen. But if a Protestant magnate, from whom nothing better is to be expected in this world or the next, offers a multitude of claret and a paucity of conversation, why should Irish Catholics climbing the professional and commercial ladder object? In status terms it offered a little payment down with some expectation of more to be obtained. Otherwise the drink rather than the Duke is the object of the exercise (Doctor Thorne, ch. 19). In like manner Framley Parsonage, begun before Trollope left Ireland and concluded in 1860 when he had taken up residence in England, also exhibits touches of the Irish landlord, very notably in the person, conduct, and ethics of Mr. Sowerby of Chaldicotes, who would undoubtedly have found congenial company and not too distant relatives in Castle Rackrent.

The one notable invasion of caste division in Ireland lay in the realm of evangelicalism. Now in one sense Trollope himself clearly disliked the caste division. He became fond of Irish Catholics and Protestants. “Father Giles of Ballymoy” and a multitude of other references to priests should be taken as a very serious personal statement. He records his disgust at early exposure to caste hostility:

Soon after I reached Banagher in 1841, I dined one evening with a Roman Catholic. I was informed next day by a Protestant gentleman who had been very hospitable to me that I must choose my party. I could not sit both at Protestant and Catholic tables.

(Autobiography, pp. 72-73)

The Kellys and the O'Kellys goes very much out of its way to assert his hatred of Protestant bigotry in the O'Joscelyn episode brought in after Mr. Armstrong has discovered that all is now set fair for the nuptials of Ballindine and Fanny Wyndham. It plays no part in the story at all. It is agreeable to notice that Mr. Armstrong, good Protestant that he is, is disgusted by the O'Joscelyns' hatred and paranoiac fears of insurrection; but it adds nothing to his own work in the story, from which immediately afterwards he fades without even a farewell in the Conclusion. Trollope simply had to say it. It too had a remarkable child, much more satisfactorily in context, in The Way We Live Now, and it does so in a perfect converse. Trollope, the friend of Catholic priests, found himself also disgusted by bigotry in their ranks. He wrote to Mary Holmes on 6 July 1874:

The parish priest I knew myself, & loved, & opened my house to him, and fed him when he was fearfully, horribly, hungry, from sheer want,—and he was a gentleman at all points; but I could not go on with him, not because he was intent on converting me, for which I did not care; but because he would say nasty things of my religion which could only be answered by nasty things as to his, which I could not say to any guest, or to any sincere Christian. But yet he was a man who will certainly go to heaven, if a mortal may presume to say so much of any man.

(Letters, p. 321)

In the context of The Way We Live Now the realization of this figure through the character of Father Barham is a fine means of showing yet another example of the crass greed of the age. Trollope had been impressed by the Irish Catholic priests' choice of life among the poor rather than with the fleshpots which characterized so many (though, remembering Mr. Armstrong, far from all) of the Church of Ireland clergy. He is kindly to the Grantlys, if not to their daughter, but his greatest admiration is reserved for the impoverished Crawleys. (The moment when Dr. Grantly really wins the reader's love is when, in his interview with Grace Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset, he touches at the close the Crawley level of nobility of character [ch. 57].) Thinking, then, of Catholic priests as friends to be respected, Father Barham becomes yet another betrayal. He seeks no financial reward, as do almost all the other characters of The Way We Live Now; but his spiritual greed, counting the souls he can snatch into his basket, is as unworthy of the true sanctity of his profession and religion as is the greed of the Grendalls for money, of Lady Carbury for literary adulation, of Felix Carbury for dissipation, and of Melmotte for power (chs. 16, 55, 56).

The Protestant evangelicals in Ireland were an anticipation of Barham much as O'Joscelyn is, and the joke on all of them in being tied up together serves them right. They were in a sense making war on caste, as O'Joscelyn certainly is not. They were ready to convert as many Irish Catholics as they could, and, in places like Achill Island, did. That their effort would be to smash the all-important domination of society by caste bothered them very little, though it repelled the resident, socially significant leaders of the Church of Ireland. Many a Grantly recoiled with horror from many a Slope in such a context; it was not only the quarrel between ritual and zealotry, it was the sense of social disruption which was felt likely to follow the zealots. By liberating Barchester Towers from Irish antecedents, Trollope maintained the controversy in the realm of pure comedy, but the violence of the Archdeacon's reaction has even more relevance to such an Irish origin. Were the evangelicals to triumph, the elite status of the Church of Ireland would be at an end. It might hold more power, even more money, but it would lose all the advantages of exclusiveness. Trollope had his own personal reasons for disliking evangelicals, as Arthur Pollard has shown,³⁸ and he had no sympathy with an operation rooted in hatred however much its converts might personally benefit from their apostasy. Because Trollope was so conscious of the English hostility to Irish themes, this sort of Irish antecedent is difficult to pinpoint and, still more, to weigh against directly English origins. In any case, many of the Bible Society clergy who descended on the remoter parts of Ireland were English, even if some of them went to the length of learning Irish. The Rev. Jeremiah Maguire, in Miss Mackenzie, may be a kind remembrance of one of the Irish-born variety, possibly intended to suggest a convert from Catholicism. Mr. Slope, of course, has a formal Irish antecedent in his supposed descent from Sterne's Slop: “slop” and “slob” are pleasing terms of abuse in rural Ireland, and the contemptuous diminutive “slopeen” is noted by Somerville and Ross.³⁹

In a larger context, Trollope's turning to religion as a theme after his acceptance of Colburn's analysis seems suggestive enough. The thing was omnipresent in Ireland. On the other hand, it would not be sensible to see the Barchester controversies as conditioned by Irish disputes between Protestant and Catholic clergy. Such intersectarian clerical disputes as there were took highly formal terms, however vituperative. (Eleanor Bold's distaste for controversies among the clergy in chapters 21 and 30 of Barchester Towers could relate to the author's dislike of Catholic-Protestant bickering in Ireland.) Observations of Protestant in-fighting were probably not limited to the evangelicals and the elite. The poverty of Mr. Armstrong is an anticipation of that of Mr. Crawley, and it should be remembered that just as Mr. Armstrong's mission depends on the gift of £20, Mr. Crawley's tragedy in The Last Chronicle of Barset turns on precisely the same sum. At least Trollope seems to have noted the divergence between the wealthy pillars of Irish Protestant clerical society and certain poverty-stricken remote clergy, and while he may have noted no clash, the divergence left a seed which could sprout into the grand confrontation of the Proudies and Mr. Crawley, and the mutual suspicions of Mr. Crawley and Dr. Grantly. Mr. Quiverful presents an earlier version of the same phenomenon, this time gaining more sympathy from the Bishop's Palace, limited though it is. It is the poverty of the Quiverfuls which fixes Mrs. Proudie's support for them, and it is Mrs. Quiverful who speaks Mrs. Proudie's most generous obituary (ch. 67).

And the antecedents of Trollope's interest in politics also are Irish. It is not alone the Scatcherd election but, in more general terms, that he offers an Irish perception. The opening chapter of Phineas Redux, for instance, is so classically Irish in its concentration on jobs for the boys that Barrington Erle's mind turns most appropriately and automatically to Phineas Finn. The Irish concept of politics, brought into being by Daniel O'Connell, turned on the sense of politics as a means for socioeconomic advantage, rather than the inherited English idea of a responsible elite acting in theory for altruistic reasons, in practice for large special interests. To the Irish Catholics the use of the boss as broker, of party as means for advancement and reward, became the hallmark of Irish immigrant advance in the United States and the Empire. Individual crusades such as O'Connell's Repeal movement in the early 1840s might interrupt the normal process, but it quickly resumed. O'Connell himself had brilliantly set it on foot in the 1830s. It was no mere vulgar matter of material grabbing at that stage: the appointment of critical figures in key situations saved Catholic communities from bigoted Orange magistrates, curbed the ruthlessness of rack-renting landlords, and gave men of talents chances denied them by their caste. It was largely a matter of jobbery, for high or low motives, in the mid-nineteenth century, and even after the Parnell movement raised Irish political eyes to greater heights, the early twentieth century brought jobbery into the ascendant once more. Certainly the British were no slouches where jobbery was concerned, but the matter-of-fact way in which Trollope discusses the primacy of jobbery savors of Irish frankness on the point instead of English delicacy. More brutal still is the passage in The Prime Minister in which Glencora, Duchess of Omnium, produces as almost her first reaction to the choice of her husband as premier a request (to his intense horror) for the post of Mistress of the Robes; it offers a paradigm of the practical Irish against the elitist English formal view of politics. Glencora herself is not Irish (she is supposedly Scots, though showing very little sign of it) but the whole manner of her conversation, notably in ironic jokes about her husband, has a strong ring of the clever Irish society lady far outstripping her husband in wit, conversation, and enthusiasm. Despite all of the Irish political crusades, it is arguable that the Irish thought of men, whereas the English liked to believe they thought of measures (the Scots and Welsh are less easily classified). It certainly is the distinction between the politics of Glencora and of her husband, and in this context her cultivation of adventurers is also appropriate to an Irish approach. Even her name seems founded on Brian Boru's Kincora.⁴⁰

It is fitting, therefore, that Trollope's first approach to the political scene in his English novels should have been on an Irish question, and that like so much of his finest work it should have been partly caricature. Political caricature was a very Irish approach to English politics: the whole modern science of it had been established by John Doyle (“HB”). Trollope, in prose as graphic as Doyle's cartoons, captured many famous scenes, and in Trollope can be found the Irish enthusiasm for satire by means of slight disguise, pantomime whereby the great grow small yet may receive affection, and above all fascination with what seemed a weird game imposed on them from outside and yet a delight to master and exploit. The classic instance is perhaps the portrait of Disraeli as Daubeny (accent presumably on the second syllable in deference to the first name of the original), especially in the caricature in Phineas Redux where his maneuvering on the Second Reform Bill is made the disestablishment of the Church of England, an only slightly more grotesque ideological somersault. The kind of literary imagery John Doyle loved to bring to political caricature is splendidly realized in the prose of Doctor Thorne when the horsewhipping of Mr. Moffat is introduced in words deliberately purloined from Milton's Lycidas, and the political status of Mr. Moffat is mockingly stressed throughout; the assignment to the police of the role of the water nymphs in the original is pure “HB.”⁴¹ It is a precursor of devices Joyce brought to a fine art in the next century.

But the first example of political caricature in Trollope related to the independent Irish party of 1850-52 when what Charles Gavan Duffy called “The League of the North and South” sought to unite Protestant and Catholic in favor of Tenant Right, and which was badly, possibly mortally, wounded by the no-Popery agitation when Pius IX restored the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales. Gavan Duffy's version was an optimistic view of the matter in any case, but Irish Protestants certainly lost some enthusiasm for associates who became known as “The Pope's Brass Band” as they tried to act as a Catholic voice in the midst of Protestant vituperation. Trollope himself was contemptuous of Lord John Russell's use of the no-Popery issue, and wrote to his mother on 7 May 1851 from Limerick: “Touching the ‘Papal Agression,’ my opinion is that nothing at all should have been done. I would have let the whole thing sink by its own weight” (Letters, p. 12). But by the time he wrote The Warden, in late 1852 and 1853, the political effects of no-Popery on the Irish Protestant-Catholic alliance were evident, and he had come to interpret Russell's move as a clever and cynical ruse:

Sir Abraham Haphazard was deeply engaged in preparing a bill for the mortification of papists, to be called the “Convent Custody Bill,” the purport of which was to enable any Protestant clergyman over fifty years of age to search any nun whom he suspected of being in possession of treasonable papers or jesuitical symbols; and as there were to be a hundred and thirty-seven clauses in the bill, each clause containing a separate thorn for the side of the papist, and as it was known the bill would be fought inch by inch, by fifty maddened Irishmen, the due construction and adequate dovetailing of it did consume much of Sir Abraham's time. The bill had all its desired effect. Of course it never passed into law; but it so completely divided the ranks of the Irish members, who had bound themselves together to force on the ministry a bill for compelling all men to drink Irish whisky, and all women to wear Irish poplins, that for the remainder of the session the Great Poplin and Whisky League was utterly harmless.⁴²

It is hardly surprising that, in Trollope's view, the Irish were to become conspicuous in the future for men rather than measures, and that in place of the Great Poplin and Whiskey League there would be job seekers ranging from the Phineas Finns who tried to learn their trade and serve their passage to the Laurence Fitzgibbons who substituted political epigram for political education and deemed it outrageous that the acceptance of any job involved the performance of a stroke of work.

The Warden has been formally viewed as the commencement of Trollope's mature work and the end of his Irish (and supposedly adolescent) phase as a novelist. Yet in form it is perhaps the most Irish of all Trollope's works. There is a sense of the artist at play in it, in part pantomime, in part very light, gentle, and miniature Swift and Sterne. Archdeacon Grantly's sons are brought on stage to reveal themselves as pocket imitations of the Bishop of London, the Bishop of Exeter, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (chs. 8, 12).⁴³ The figure of a leader-writer in the Times is called into flesh and blood from behind his own print with such success that the fiction was taken as a particular portrait, although Trollope was only deducing a person from his literary source. The novel is virtually stopped in its own tracks to show how Carlyle and Dickens would have written it and what a mess each would have made of it. The Irish literary wars still running in Trollope's day had everything to do with the contestants' views of their own superiority to their more successful contemporaries (chs. 14, 15). Trollope had tapped a strain in Irish attitudes to literature, one blending apprenticeship and mockery, that this great thing called English literature in which they intended to participate and triumph could only be understood as in part a great game. Their work would not be placing brick upon existing brick but joyfully pulling the bricks apart and rebuilding them in appreciative satire of the English edifice. It puts him directly in an Irish tradition which flows from Swift and Steele to Joyce and Flann O'Brien. Trollope retained this element of play thereafter, although he normally controlled it more carefully, and it greatly irritated his English critics.⁴⁴ He liked to talk to his reader about the business of playing with the bricks and amuse himself by arguing with his critics on his alleged solecisms.⁴⁵ He would give mock apologies for the business of scene setting, which were fairly open invitations to admire the skill of the painting he had just executed on his backdrop (see, for example, the close of chapter 4 of The Eustace Diamonds). The pantomime element became more muted, although he restored the element of literary satire in The Three Clerks in a form much employed in Irish satire, where the play suddenly becomes possessed of a grimness of purpose: the comparison of Bill Sikes and Undy Scott, showing how his villain had natural advantages in society and Dickens's never had a chance, is a passionate essay in social protest, none the worse because he insists his own social criticism is founded on greater realism and compassion than that of Dickens.⁴⁶ His greatest satire, The Way We Live Now, begins its ferocious work by doing dreadful execution on the venality of fashionable critics (ch. 1), an explicit declaration of war on the public arbiters of taste who had pronounced so long and so judicially on his works; it is as bitter as anything in the novel, yet it is pantomime, the audience being warmed up by judicious and hard blows against the presenter's obvious real-life bêtes noires. The master stroke is analogous to the fourth Tempter in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral; granted that Lady Carbury's Criminal Queens is a wretched book, the critic who demolishes it is savaged even more brutally than its venal supporters for having done the right thing for the wrong reason (ch. 11). Yet here Trollope shows how he had learned to blend his pantomime directly into his story: the critics' manifest lack of integrity is made to be the overture to the theme of abandonment of integrity throughout the book as a whole.

Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (1950) produced a brilliant demonstration that the myth of the American West was largely created in the East for consumption in the East. Trollope's situation is rather the reverse of this. He went to the frontier, for in a linguistic, religious, political, social, and economic sense Ireland was one. He learned his literary trade on the frontier. He discovered that frontier-made goods were not good selling material in the metropolis. Hence he began to build his literary achievement in forms acceptable to England and apparently English. But the tools and perceptions were Irish in the initial instance, and much of the workmanship after his return to England was still based on the rough designs he had initially executed on Irish soil, with Irish themes, about Irish characters, and with Irish insights. He had even made his small but impressive contribution to creation in the Anglo-Irish frontier form of speech. Ultimately, he won sufficient strength to bring in a frontier figure as a means by which his own observations from outside could be sharpened even more. As a character Phineas Finn may not have pleased the critics;⁴⁷ as an observer he was invaluable in the presentation of the business of politics, above all in the shallows only an outsider could really see and diagnose, and do so with unfailing interest. Phineas's early lessons come from the perspective of another outsider: Lady Laura Standish, within the power elite by birth and associations, but outside the power by sex. But here that second observer becomes herself observed, and the frustrations and self-destruction induced by her ambitions become a critical part of the story. Trollope, seeing the strength and power of a Mrs. Kelly operating in her own milieu, where at the end she feels most secure, chronicled the tragedies of women who seemed to have larger worlds at their feet, seemed capable of controlling them, and finally failed—Mrs. Proudie, Lady Laura, Glencora Palliser. The debate on whether or not Trollope is adequately feminist seems to miss the point of what he was doing, which is to say, recounting the potentialities and limitations of women behind the open scenes of public life. The acceptance of limitation by women such as Violet Effingham, Madame Max Goesler, even Mrs. Greenow, is not so much Trollope insisting that women should restrict themselves to marriage (quite a few of his female characters who so restrict themselves find their own tragedies) as a statement of what the situation actually was.

The paradox remains that he observed England and described it, but while in part his description was true, in part it was an imposition on England of Irish experiences and people, in part a deployment of qualities common to both islands. Nor is it possible fully to separate the reality he saw and the myth he created. Time offers some clues: early Barsetshire is more Irish than later Barsetshire. Old models, specifically in The Kellys and the O'Kellys, offer more, although they prove to have startlingly long shadows. But he returned to his Irish wellsprings not only for Phineas Finn but for Castle Richmond, An Eye for an Eye, and The Landleaguers, roughly at ten-year intervals; and these are stories I have not the space to consider here, raising as they do very different problems. Phineas Finn, the Irish Member demanded its sequel; so too must “Anthony Trollope, the Irish Writer.”

Notes

1. Trollope: A Commentary (London: Constable, 1927), p. 136.

2. “Trollope and the Matter of Ireland,” in Anthony Trollope, ed. Tony Bareham (London: Vision Press, 1980), pp. 24-25.

3. R. C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (London: Macmillan; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), p. 175-200, surveys the rather higher critical standing of the Irish novels before Sadleir's work and notes that his earlier estimates were also more favorable (p. 176). Sadleir has important material on Trollope's life in Ireland, and James Pope Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), has some new insights, but apart from Trollope's autobiography and letters I have benefited most on the question from R. H. Super, Trollope in the Post Office (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1981), pp. 16-45.

4. Trollope, The Spotted Dog, and Other Stories, ed. Herbert Van Thal (London: Pan Books, 1950). “The O'Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo” also appears in Tales of All Countries, first series (1861; rpt. with introd. by Donald D. Stone, New York: Arno Press, 1981); and “Father Giles of Ballymoy” appears in Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories (1867; rpt. with introd. by R. C. Terry, New York: Arno Press, 1981). See also Donald D. Stone, “Trollope as a Short Story Writer,” NCF, 31 (1976), 26-47.

5. “Irishness,” in Writers and Politics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 97-100.

6. Owen Dudley Edwards, “Tennyson and Ireland,” New Edinburgh Review, Nos. 38-39 (Summer-Autumn 1977), pp. 43-54; this issue of the Review is on “History and Humanism: Essays in Honour of V. G. Kiernan,” ed. Owen Dudley Edwards. The notable attack is in Tennyson, “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.”

7. An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, World's Classics (1950; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 60-79; subsequent citations in my text are to this edition.

8. Review of The Kellys and the O'Kellys, rpt. in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge; New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1969), p. 555. Smalley's conduct in relegating the first two Irish novels to the end of his collection testifies to the influence of Sadleir's judgment.

9. I have not supplied detailed references to Irish history: F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) is a masterly and very comprehensive account, the opening chapters forming an excellent introduction to Ireland in the time of Trollope's residence. My remarks on Young Ireland derive partly from Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief (Dublin and Sydney: Gill, 1967).

10. Charles Lever (1806-1872) was most famous for the novels Harry Lorrequer (1837) and Charles O'Malley (1840); Samuel Lover (1797-1868) for Handy Andy (1842). On Lever, see An Autobiography, pp. 251-52.

11. Trollope: A Commentary, p. 139. R. C. Terry is so understandably bewildered by the judgment that he assigns the description to Castle Richmond and The Landleaguers (Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding, p. 175). This would make more sense although it is still somewhat unjustifiable.

12. Anthony Trollope, English Men of Letters (London and New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 25-38; further citations in my text are to this edition. Given Walpole's pioneer work on the two novels, it seems odd in Terry to list him as one of those concentrating on “the major works” (Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding, p. 59).

13. Trollope titles constituted the first 29 of 877 books in Ward, Lock and Company's “The Select Library of Fiction,” The Macdermots being number 2 and The Kellys and the O'Kellys number 4 (from advertisements bound in with Is He Popenjoy?; though undated, they must certainly have been published after Trollope's death. Ward, Lock also published the 29 books in both cloth and half-bound in their “Library Editions”). See also N. John Hall, introd., The Trollope Critics, ed. N. John Hall (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981), pp. x-xiii, which finds three more titles in the Ward, Lock list, notes New Pocket Library reprints by John Lane of Trollope's first two novels, in 1905 and 1906, and a Lupton reprint of The Macdermots, probably in 1894. Both Ward, Lock and John Lane also reprinted Castle Richmond and Ward, Lock An Eye for an Eye.

14. “The Two Generals” appears in Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories. It was first published in Good Words, December 1863, and was set in the American Civil War.

15. Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary, p. 137, lists John Banim, Gerald Griffin, Lady Morgan, Charles Robert Maturin, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, and Charles Lever. See Robert Tracy, “‘The Unnatural Ruin’: Trollope and Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction,” NCF, 37 (1982), 358-82. For critical discussion of some of these novelists, see also Thomas Flanagan, The Irish Novelists: 1800-1850 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959). Flanagan is the foremost authority on Irish novelists in the early nineteenth century.

16. La Mère Bauche” appears in Tales of All Countries, first series, and is perhaps Trollope's finest short story, though “The Spotted Dog,” in An Editor's Tales (London: Strahan, 1870), and, on a happier level, “Malachi's Cove,” in Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories, run it close.

17. Mrs. Proudie is jocularly described as the “female devil” of the novel in Barchester Towers (ch. 26). The Small House at Allington closes with Plantagenet Palliser's marriage to Lady Glencora (ch. 55).

18. Phineas Finn: The Irish Member, introd. Shane Leslie (1937; rpt. 2 vols. in 1, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), I, 126; hereafter citations in my text are to this edition.

19. Phineas Redux, introd. R. W. Chapman (1937; rpt. 2 vols. in 1, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), II, 253.

20. Archibald Green is taken to be Trollope himself (Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary, pp. 176-77). In An Autobiography, p. 63, Trollope writes: “Some adventures I had;—two of which I told … under the names of ‘The O'Conors of Castle Conor,’ and ‘Father Giles of Ballymoy.’ I will not swear to every detail in these stories, but the main purport of each is true.”

21. Hennessy, Anthony Trollope, p. 386, quotes from the letter of Trollope to his son Henry, 19 February 1882, in which mention is made of a proposed journey to Ireland for research for what would prove to be The Landleaguers; see The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. Bradford Allen Booth (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 474-75. At least two months seem reasonable as a time for the idea to develop that far.

22. Review of Can You Forgive Her? in the Nation, 28 Sept. 1865; rpt. in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, p. 249.

23. In An Autobiography, p. 180, Trollope writes, “The character of the girl [Alice] is carried through with considerable strength, but is not attractive.”

24. Lizzie Eustace's reappearance in The Prime Minister involves no indication of future marriage with Carruthers. Trollope often did violence to the fates meted out to his characters in the conclusion of one novel when he reintroduced them in another. Quintus Slide is finished at The People's Banner in the conclusion of Phineas Redux but is firmly in the saddle there in The Prime Minister.

25. John Sutherland, ed., Phineas Finn, Penguin ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 728-29, n. 17, comments of “Monk who is the most unfit” (ch. 7), “Trollope originally wrote ‘most dishonest.’” He adds: “The novelist seems to have changed his notion of Monk somewhat; in chapter 9 the term ‘violent’ was dropped from the description ‘Mr. Monk was a violent radical,’ and in chapter 22 a comment in MS about Monk's Irishness was removed. As he finally emerges Mr. Monk is, of course, a scrupulously honest, English and moderate radical.” Too much should not be read into the first emendation: the author of the statement is Laurence Fitzgibbon, who is hardly intended for a suitable arbiter of honesty, but the note in general reminds us that in the germination of Monk faint shades of Daniel O'Connell and perhaps Feargus O'Connor should be added to the impression of Cobden commonly associated with it. In a note annotating the first chapter, Sutherland comments, “The heavy stress in these early pages on the undeserved wealth of the Protestant clergy in Ireland, Fenianism, Phineas's Catholicism and even his excessively Irish name suggest to me that Trollope may originally have intended more of a social-problem novel than Phineas Finn in fact turns out to be” (p. 726, n. 4). I welcome the observation, but doubt the deduction: it is, I believe, Phineas's deep Irishness which is being stressed for reasons I assign in my text, and that Trollope did not greatly alter his intentions.

26. Standish is a particularly favored Christian name in the O'Grady family: Standish O'Grady, first Viscount Guillamore (1766-1840), and his homonymous son, the second Viscount (1792-1848), were famous as Lord Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer (1805-1831) and hero at Waterloo, respectively; the father's position as Protestant placeman bearing an ancient and illustrious Gaelic name is analogous to the O'Kelly situation. Sir Jonah Barrington (1760-1834), as judge of the admiralty, was famous for his dismissal for corruption in 1830 and his uninhibited if unreliable historical writing. In the Irish House of Commons, abolished in the Union of 1800, he was the last MP for Banagher, where Trollope later had his first Irish residence.

27. “Dr. Fillgrave” was modified in The Last Chronicle of Barset to “Dr. Filgrave.” Trollope was wayward even with the spelling of his leading characters: the Grantlys become Grantleys in Doctor Thorne (ch. 47). In The Last Chronicle of Barset, however, I suspect the change to be deliberate: Trollope's tragic material is too sensitive to be belabored by his joke, and the doctor has to play his part in connection with the death of Mrs. Proudie, and with the more tender if less tragic passages on that of Mr. Harding.

28. Sutherland notes from the MS: “Trollope originally had ‘soldiering in India’ and later replaced it with the more topical issue, ‘the trial of Mr. Jefferson Davis’” (Sutherland, ed., Phineas Finn, p. 730, n. 30). He does not mention Gladstone.

29. J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London: Longmans, Green, 1938), pp. 354-55, finds an analogy between Chamberlain's standing in the eyes of the old Whigs and that of Bonteen, as is stressed by R. F. Foster, “Political Novels and Nineteenth-Century History,” in Contexts and Connections, Winchester Research Papers in the Humanities, 10 (Winchester: King Alfred's College, 1981), p. 36, n. 36, an essay of the utmost value on Trollope. Foster's Lord Randolph Churchill: A Political Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) is a fascinating revelation of how Trollopian British politics became in the wake of the Palliser novels; attention may be particularly drawn to the use of epigraphs from Trollope and their relation to the text in chapters 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11.

30. Sutherland, ed., Phineas Finn, p. 732, n. 36, notes “the extravagantly romantic cast of the hero's mind” a little later when Phineas, after his return from London, quotes The Fair Maid of Perth at Lady Laura and receives a kindly squelching (ch. 20).

31. See N. John Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators (New York: St. Martin's; London: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 77, 80, and plate 45, who notes Phineas's “Scottish garb” (not, fortunately, to the extent of kilts).

32. Ironically, for both my text and for Trollope's dislike of Disraeli, there is an interesting parallel in Disraeli's reply to Daniel O'Connell in 1835: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon” (John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 13th ed. rev. [Boston: Little, Brown, 1955], p. 511 b).

33. In The Kellys and the O'Kellys, World's Classics (1929; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), there is a strong implication that the Protestantism of the O'Kellys arose from motives of self-interest, and the acid statement that “the government, in consideration of past services, in the year 1800, converted ‘the O'Kelly’ into Viscount Ballindine” (p. 18) simply means that Frank's great-grandfather won his peerage as the price of his vote for the extinction of the Irish Parliament in the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Nobody among Trollope's contemporary Irish readers would have required elaboration on the point, and presumably he felt, perhaps wrongly, that English readers would be equally well informed.

34. An antiquary captures the point neatly: “The Bishop of Kilmore … unlike a good many of the Irish Bishops of his day, had visited his see” (“The Ash-Tree,” in The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James [London: Arnold; New York: Longmans, Green, 1931], p. 69).

35. Is He Popenjoy? reveals the rural settings are “down in Barsetshire” (ch. 50), and the close of The Last Chronicle of Barset is thereby belied.

36. Doctor Thorne, introd. David Skilton, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 219-36; further citations in the text are to this edition.

37. I witnessed vote-buying in an Irish public-house by a member of the Irish Dáil in 1958.

38. “Trollope and the Evangelicals,” NCF, 37 (1982), 329-39.

39. In fairness to Trollope, he couples the jibe at Slope's name with a piece of self-mockery: “in early years he added an ‘e’ to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him” (Barchester Towers, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, introd. James R. Kincaid, World's Classics [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980], p. 25). See also E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross, “The Boat's Share,” in The Irish R. M. and His Experiences (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), p. 328.

40. See Foster, “Political Novels and Nineteenth-Century History,” in Contexts and Connections, pp. 13-14.

41. The relevant passages commence: “Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep / Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas?” (lines 50-51), and in Doctor Thorne: “Where were ye, men, when that savage whip fell about the ears of the poor ex-legislator? In Scotland Yard …” (p. 286). The rescue of Paris by Aphrodite from his combat with Menelaus in the Iliad is also invoked.

42. The Warden, World's Classics (1918; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), pp. 87-88. The theme receives further elaboration in chapter 16.

43. Nevertheless, for all the fidelity of the caricature of Henry Phillpotts of Exeter, the boy makes a highly credible father of the man, Major Henry Grantly, who woos and wins Grace Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

44. Review of Doctor Thorne in the Saturday Review, 12 June 1858, rpt. in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, pp. 75-78, is a good reaction in point (see p. 77).

45. To the fury of the Saturday Review, chapter 45 of Doctor Thorne fences with the critics on legal problems (see the above note).

46. See chapter 44 of The Three Clerks in which Sikes is constantly spelled “Sykes.”

47. Review of Phineas Finn, in Spectator, 20 Mar. 1869, rpt. in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, pp. 309-13; see esp. pp. 310-11.

This essay was originally delivered at the Trollope Centenary Conference, University College London, June 1982.