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Trollope and the Fixity of the Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Christopher Herbert
Christopher Herbert*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
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Abstract

At the heart of much Victorian fiction is a moral ideology based on the assumption that human nature is essentially flexible, always at least potentially capable of change and renewal. Anthony Trollope devotes much of his own fiction to a systematic critique of such an assumption, arguing that individual character is at bottom irrevocably fixed. Three important novels in particular are built around progressive discoveries by major characters that they are, by their natures, incapable of change: Orley Farm, He Knew He Was Right, and The Duke’s Children. In books like these we discover a skeptical and somber vein in Trollope’s imagination that critics of his work have typically failed to recognize.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 2 , March 1978 , pp. 228 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Phineas Redux, Ch. lviii. The multiplicity of available editions of Trollope makes it hard to establish a system of reference for quoted passages that is uniform, useful, and not unwieldy. In this essay quotations from Trollope's novels are identified simply by chapter number in parentheses. In certain double-volume editions of Trollope's novels the chapters are numbered separately in each volume, but my references are based on continuous numbering from beginning to end.

2 Letter to George Eliot, 18 Oct. 1863, The Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. Bradford Allen Booth (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), p. 138. Trollope is referring in particular to Rachel Ray.

3 Bradford Allen Booth, Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958), p. 41.

4 Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (London: Routledge; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969), p. 174.

5 Trollope long regarded Pride and Prejudice as “the best novel in the English language” (Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography [London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950], p. 41). The Small House at Allington, among other Trollope novels, is modeled quite directly upon Jane Austen.

6 Trollope: Artist and Moralist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), p. 52.

7 In An Old Man's Love (Ch. ii) Trollope insists at some length that faces are in fact reliable signs of character.

8 Arthur Mizener, “Anthony Trollope: The Palliser Novels,” From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 161.

9 “It was my study that these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes which come upon us all; and I think that I have succeeded” (p. 184). See also pp. 318–20.

10 The Mayor of Cast abridge (Ch. xvii). The phrase is quoted from Novalis.

11 “The Duke's Children: Trollope's Psychological Masterpiece,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (1958), 1–21. At the end of the novel, Hagan argues, the Duke soars into “the broad sunlight of justice, good sense, rationality, love, and intellectual conviction” (p. 20).

12 See Trollope: The Critical Heritage, pp. 469, 471. “The story ends happily, in the conventional sense,” observes a sensitive reviewer in the Spectator, “but the total impression upon the reader's mind is somewhat depressing” (p. 471).