Dr Thorne Read Free Page A

her is ever shaken, it is only by wonder that the ‘little chit of a girl’ who comes home from school to be the mistress of Dr Thorne’s establishment at the age of twelve can grow so apparently effortlessly into the beautiful, gracious and astonishingly self-possessed young woman who loves Frank and is loved by him.
    Much of Mary’s charm lies in her ability to endear herself to usin spite of her unshakeable poise. Very self-possessed people are often repellent; they provoke shyness in others and a sense of inferiority. But it must be Mary’s modesty – a quality highly valued by Trollope in women – her ready wit and her affection for her uncle, touching to behold, that, far from keeping us in awe of her, make us feel as easy and companionable a liking for her as we have for the doctor himself. Mary and her uncle love each other, but it is an equal and entirely reciprocal love unusual in Victorian fiction. Certainly Mary is respectful. She is respectful to all her elders, even to Lady Arabella who has treated her cruelly. Asking Lady Scatcherd to call her by her first name, she kneels at the old woman’s feet and takes her hand. But with the doctor she is an equal. Their relationship is nearer that of a close brother and sister than an avuncular one. It is as if Trollope has taken a leap forward into the next century, fifty years and more.
    â€˜We are in the same boat,’ [says Mary] ‘and you shan’t turn me overboard.’
    â€˜But if I were to the, what would you do then?’
    â€˜And if I were to the, what would you do? People must be bound together. They must depend on each other. Of course, misfortunes may come; but it is cowardly to be afraid of them beforehand. You and I are bound together, uncle; and though you say these things to tease me, I know you do not wish to get rid of me.’
    Perhaps she owes her self-confidence and good manners to the education she has received in the Gresham schoolroom – and her pride. It is unlikely that her modesty and generosity of spirit derive from the same source. Beatrice Gresham, it is true, the second daughter and Mary’s best friend, is a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, but Augusta, the eldest, has all the hauteur and slavish devotion of her cousins, the de Courcys, to rank and blood. Indeed, Lady Amelia de Courcy is her mentor as well as her cousin, a treacherous adviser who finally grabs for herself the suitor she has bidden Augusta reject on grounds of disparity of class. Lady Amelia, Trollope tells us, would have rejected heaven itself unless she could have had prior assurance of a seat in the Upper House. All the de Courcy women, with Lady Arabella Gresham and Augusta, are in alliance against Mary Thorne. She is (apparently) poor. No one knows where she comes from, and therefore they believe the worst. They are the sort of people whogenerally do believe the worst and do not balk at expressing it aloud. Trollope brought this aristocratic family back again in
The Small House at Allington
and
The Last Chronicle
. Like many authors, he was captivated by his own minor portraits and unable to resist re-encountering them, their conversation and their manners.
    â€˜A great deal of Mr Trollope’s popularity is perhaps attributable to the care he has generally taken to fill his stories with nice people,’ wrote one reviewer in 1865. The de Courcys are not nice. Some of the utterances of the Countess probably shock us today more than they shocked contemporary readers. ‘Is it not a waste of time?’ she says briskly of Frank’s proposal to complete his education at Cambridge, and, of his matrimonial prospects, ‘Frank must marry money. I hope he will understand this early… When a man thoroughly understands this, when he knows what his circumstances require, why, the matter becomes easy to him.’ To be fair to the Countess, she has had a terrible time of it at home. She ‘thought