Trollope’s Understanding of Human Variety

OK, what am I supposed to write about when I open Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now in 2020 and read about a very rich man who decides to enter politics. At least, everyone believes Mr Augustus Melmotte is richer than Croesus, although he never actually pays for houses and the contractors who improve them. But no one believes in Mr Melmotte more than Mr Melmotte himself. When the newspapers disagree on their suspicions, the contradiction is taken by Mr Melmotte’s followers as a sign not only that the papers are lying but that their champion is as pure as snow. He makes some gestures toward blocks of Christians in order to court their vote. He’s fascinated with the leader of China. Really! What am I supposed to write about?

Well, I won’t write about it. Instead, I’ll focus on Trollope’s amazing ability to write well about all sorts and conditions of characters. Poor and rich. Female and male. Rural and Urban. Virtuous and vicious. Pious and profane. Indigent and opulent. Common and aristocratic. Somber and hilarious. Trollope portrays them all so well!

My first experiences with the great postal clerk turned novelist were all set in small towns and rural estates. The old porter in Orley Farm, the dissenting minister in The Vicar of Bullhampton, and Mr Harding, the title character in The Warden – all are such wholesome, charming characters, and their stories evoke fully dimensional, five-senses pictures of a simpler time when being a good Christian was, if not easier, at least a more straightforward proposition. God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world when these characters are in the scene.

But then in the fifth number of the Barsetshire Series, Trollope introduces us to the marvelous Johnny Eames, who finds himself engaged to two girls at once. Yes, Johnny is deeply flawed, though he remains sympathetic. But my point is that this kind of scrape doesn’t happen in a rural English village; no, Johnny takes the story to London. The subsequent series, centering on the Palliser family and Parliamentary politics, takes place mostly in London, and here, life is not so straightforward. Political activity leads to financial scandal, lies in the newspapers, gun violence, bitter resentment by lonely wives, and much, much more. The salt of the earth is so hard to find on the streets of the city, the creator of the angelic Mr Harding finds himself in later books giving outright deplorable characters the starring roles at times.

It seems Trollope wrote The Way We Live Now upon returning to England after an absence of two years and noticing a decline in public morality. Instead of beginning with a good girl in the village who takes an entire novel to reconcile herself (or not!) to the idea of moving “above her station” by marrying the local baronet, Trollope starts off this tale with Lady Carbury. Lady Carbury is a widow with a definite preference for one of her two children and is also an author who flirts with newspaper editors in order to persuade them to write positive reviews of her terrible books. But Trollope is just as familiar with and faithful to this narcissist as he is with (and to) the altruistic Doctor Thorne from Barsetshire. TWWLN is Trollope’s longest novel, and in its many hundreds of pages, he finds the time to unfold two love pentagons. Pentagons. And yet our author treats the whole cornucopia of motives, intrigues, doubts, insincerities, jealousies, and deceptions involved in these complicated webs with as much understanding as he brings to the wholesome courting of a good country girl by the village vicar.

Some people wonder how Shakespeare became so proficient at portraying both royals and ruffians. (I don’t suppose it could have anything to do with being a member of a dramatic troupe that both ate at dives and performed for a certain queen?) Their doubts sometimes reach the level of claiming that the Bard’s plays actually came from the pen of Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere. Trollope’s achievement in displaying the broad spectrum of human character seems just as monumental as Shakespeare’s, and yet no one that I’m aware of has ever proposed a theory that his novels were actually written by Benjamin Disraeli.