A Post in which Barnes & Noble, Target, and Kicking All Make an Appearance

I’ve written several times now about Anthony Trollope. I don’t want to pass him by on the blog this year, but I don’t know what to add about him in general. He is, as far as I know, the best Victorian novelist that readers don’t read these days. (I base my notion that readers don’t read him on the very unscientific observation that he generally doesn’t join Dickens and Eliot and Stevenson and Thackeray on the table of cheap editions at Barnes & Noble. Also, I’m 99% sure he never made it into Classic Illustrated comic books. This is the kind of high-level literary criticism you get here, folks.) And I love his habit of talking to the reader in the narration about his craft, the reader’s expectations, and the obligation he senses to develop the plot satisfactorily; it’s as if he occasionally dismantles all the housing of the puppet theater and shows himself holding the sticks that animate his characters.

But I’ve said all that before. So I guess I’ll just respond to some details of the plot of He Knew He Was Right, a plan that decidedly does not meet my obligation to develop this post satisfactorily for you, since you almost certainly don’t know the plot of He Knew He Was Right and don’t know what to think about my response to it.

The book actually has about three plots. Concerning sublot no. 1, I can only say here that Dorothy Stanbury and her aunt are everything the Victorian housewife in me needs. Aunt Stanbury (I confess I can’t remember her first name!) is funny when she’s prickly, and charming when she’s in better humor, and Dolly is that most difficult of Victorian literary achievements: a good girl with actual depth.

And about subplot no. 2, I can only say that Nora Rowley is everything the Victorian feminist in me needs. She’s willing to be married, she’s willing not to be married, and she’s willing to live on her own no matter what people think of it.

This is a long novel, and I found myself picking it up sometimes during the month it took me to finish it and forgetting whether I was reading about Dorothy or Nora. Both are younger sisters who turn down their first proposals, so they were easy to confuse. I decided I needed to use a trick that has helped sometimes before: I picked out two young women I saw in passing one day (one in Target and one on the sidewalk), each having a distinctive face, and I made them the “actresses” for the characters in my head. Is that weird? In any case, it worked.

The main plot, the one indicated by the title, involves Nora’s older sister, Emily, who marries Louis Trevelyan and then gets several visits from an old family friend, Colonel Osborne. And we must say here that Colonel Osborne enjoys the dangerous excitement of getting slightly too familiar with married women, knowing he can (usually) get away with it because of his advanced age. But in spite of Osborne’s gray hair, Louis becomes literally mad with jealousy and tells Emily that she must not see the Colonel again. Emily refuses to obey what she believes to be an inappropriate command. (I think the Victorian housewives that bought and devoured Trollope’s books must have enjoyed staging a minor vicarious rebellion through Emily.) Louis begins to believe his wife to have been unfaithful in the unspeakable way – unspeakable for a Victorian, that is – and sends his wife out of the house. Trust me, one reason I enjoyed the subplots so much is that they provided much needed relief from the thoroughly unlikeable Louis. For a whole month I kept yelling at him in my mind: “Why don’t you quit accusing and exiling your wife and start kicking Colonel Osborne? Problem solved.”

This high-level literary critic gives He Knew He Was Right a big thumbs up. But don’t start here if you, like the editors of Classics Illustrated, haven’t read any Anthony Trollope. I recommend beginning with The Warden and Barchester Towers.

Will and Ariel Durant, What Do You Really Think?

It took Will and Ariel Durant a lifetime to write The Story of Civilization, and it’s taking me nearly a lifetime to read it. I didn’t start the massive work until I was about 30 and didn’t start reading it in earnest until I was 40, but I had fairly salivated over the prospect since I first saw the set in my church library when I was about 14. The landscape of history has changed, of course, over the course of my decades-long journey; ancient Rome and medieval Paris have very different histories, and the Reformation and the Enlightenment are worlds apart in spite of everything they have in common. But the carriage the Durants provide changes, too. For the ancient times, they convey the reader along the road in a sense of wonder. During medieval times, the rough wagon is driven by a teamster with profound respect for the church he doesn’t agree with. And the highway through the sunny hills of Renaissance art and the birth of modern science is enjoyed in an open-air barouche that rattles along merrily with giddy excitement.

I’ve blessed the Durants with encomiums before (especially while I was reading that very respectful volume about the Middle Ages), and I’ve scolded them a bit, especially when they couldn’t stop talking about Rousseau’s dalliances with women, as if the greatest boon of the Enlightenment’s new-found freedom was the right to air publicly one’s desire to be spanked by strange women. But I’m sticking with them for the entire tour, which will end for me in 2026.

This year, my visit with the Durants (I’ve had enough of the traveling metaphor!) was quite pleasant. Gone are the bloody, depressing theological disputes of the Reformation. Gone are the long chapters about Rousseau and his indulgent chaos. The 390 pages for 2024 covered Goethe, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, the art and drama and literature of Johnson’s England, and the Great Man himself: Dr. Johnson. So interesting! So insightful!

But, boy! did I receive a shock when they got to Johnson’s biographer. Apparently, Boswell’s private journals were published in the twentieth century and revealed a man quite different from the respectable, orthodox character he portrays himself to be in the Life. My first reaction was one of bewilderment. Are we talking about the same Boswell?! My second reaction to the revelation of his persistent sexual incontinence centered on acceptance: OK, we all have our skeletons, and I’ve discovered that Boswell wasn’t sinless. I can live with that. My third and final reaction found me arguing on Boswell’s behalf: would Johnson have talked with him, dined with him, traveled with him, shared personal documents with him if the upright, pious persona wasn’t real and sincere?

Now I could have experienced all three of those reactions with little more information than I’ve given you here. But the Durants love a philanderer’s story. Page after page they revel in quoting the confessions in Boswell’s journals and in retelling story after story of affairs and visits with prostitutes. But why? Seriously, what is the significance of James Boswell to the “story of civilization"? The fact that he had a sex drive that overpowered him at times (which is almost the same as simply saying that he was human)? Or his ability and drive to write a monumental book read, loved, and hailed as a classic by students of history for 250 years – a masterpiece that simultaneously begins a literary genre and is unlike any other book in – or ever likely to be in – that genre?

The Durants finish the section on Boswell with this reasonable, charitable, eloquent, and historically relevant statement: “He made amends for his defects by worshiping in others the excellence that he could not achieve for himself.” And when they finally get around to telling about Dr. Johnson himself (strangely, not in the same chapter), they recap Boswell by saying, “[Boswell’s] sins are at present in the public mind, but we shall forget them when we read again the greatest of all biographies.” But if these two sentences truly represent their final judgment on the man, why dwell so long on those amended defects? Why not take their own advice and forget the sins? I know I’ll be following that advice the next time I read the greatest of all biographies.