Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Dates
- 1 Introduction: Trollope's Late Modernity
- 2 ‘Getting and Spending’: The Aesthetic Economist
- 3 ‘A Bond of Discord’: Colonialism and Allegory
- 4 ‘Convivial in a Cadaverous Fashion’: Satires on Sovereignty
- 5 ‘Active Citizens of a Free State’: Hellenising the History of Rome
- 6 ‘The Tone of Today’: Pedagogical Paraphrases
- 7 ‘An Admirable Shrewdness’: Character and the Law
- 8 ‘A Poise So Perfect’: Tact as Love
- 9 ‘Affectionate Reserve’: Tact as Comedy
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - ‘Affectionate Reserve’: Tact as Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Dates
- 1 Introduction: Trollope's Late Modernity
- 2 ‘Getting and Spending’: The Aesthetic Economist
- 3 ‘A Bond of Discord’: Colonialism and Allegory
- 4 ‘Convivial in a Cadaverous Fashion’: Satires on Sovereignty
- 5 ‘Active Citizens of a Free State’: Hellenising the History of Rome
- 6 ‘The Tone of Today’: Pedagogical Paraphrases
- 7 ‘An Admirable Shrewdness’: Character and the Law
- 8 ‘A Poise So Perfect’: Tact as Love
- 9 ‘Affectionate Reserve’: Tact as Comedy
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
No doubt the cause of that fear which did exist as to novels arose from an idea that this matter of love would be treated in an inflammatory and generally unwholesome manner. ‘Madam’, says Sir Anthony in the play, ‘a circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the year; and, depend on it, Mrs Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last’. (Trollope 1999a: 225)
Trollope's narratives, this final chapter suggests, attain a measure of reserve by embedding the depiction of love within the framework of comedy. Trollope hints at the imbrication of these two concerns when, after having proposed that to teach wholesome lessons novelists must know how to handle love, he backs up this theory with an allusion to The Rivals (I, ii, 235–9), a comedy by the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1775). This passage can be read as a spun-out metaphor: handling love is like handling pages. Love has morphed into a book, the novelist has morphed into ‘they’. At first sight, this comparison may seem nothing more than the logic of courtship fiction: it is a cultural orthodoxy that novels are the means with which men and (especially) women are to be taught the meaning of love – wholesome lessons, in short. Although this theory is one of Trollope's hobby-horses in his non-fiction, in his fiction novels serve a more sinister purpose: Leah Price has argued that in ‘coding the handling of books as authentic and the reading of texts as a front Trollope's comedies of manners upstage textually occasioned absorption by bibliographically assisted repulsion’ (2012: 71). She illustrates this argument with a notorious scene from The Small House at Allington, Adolphus Crosbie and Lady Alexandrina's train ride towards their not-so- romantic honeymoon destination, Folkestone. Crosbie has with a small bribe secured a railway carriage for the two of them. When the train comes to a tunnel, Crosbie ‘had half intended to put out his hand again, under some mistaken idea that the tunnel afforded him an opportunity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Anthony Trollope's Late StyleVictorian Liberalism and Literary Form, pp. 142 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016