Dr Thorne Read Free Page B

over in her mind injuries of a much graver description than her sister-in-law had ever suffered’. Later on, in
The Small House at Allington
, her eldest son describes the likelihood of her husband’s murdering her.
    It is another son who, when his cousin Frank says of his own parent, ‘His father, you know, died when he was very young,’ replies, ‘Yes; I know he had a stroke of luck that doesn’t fall to everyone…’, thus incurring Frank’s disgust. By contrast Squire Gresham is one of the nice people of the novel, a man who married in youthful haste and repented during a long, increasingly penurious leisure. Having the hounds at Greshamsbury – ‘those nasty dogs!’ – has impoverished him, along with political aspirations and keeping up the Gresham town house in Portman Square. His weaknesses, his enfeeblement under the cold winds that have blown upon him from the Courcy Castle quarter, are for Trollope a contrast to Dr Thorne’s strength, the iron will and stubborn pride that have so influenced and affected Mary, forming her own character. The great difference between a balanced, generous and imaginative nature and de Courcy' shallowness is never more admirably shown than in the relative attitudes towards Mary Thorne of Squire Gresham and his daughter Beatrice on the one hand and those of Lady Arabella and her relatives on the other. The Squire and Beatrice are equally fixed in their belief thatFrank cannot marry a poor woman, but, while holding these views as to the impossibility of the proposed marriage, they never waver in their love and admiration of Mary. But those lesser minds, corrupted by a vapid idolization of blood and by greed for other people’s money, from another de Courcy daughter’s early encomium, ‘… what little I have seen of her I highly approve’, rapidly come to loathe her for no greater fault than that of falling in love with the heir. An earlier toleration is subsumed in a hatred born of fear that youth, beauty and character may invade their ranks without comprehending the inflated price of an entrance ticket.
    Martha Dunstable makes her first appearance in
Doctor Thorne
. She will reappear again and again. For his models Trollope looked to the new prosperous manufacturing class, the captains of industry whose sons and daughters were getting themselves an education and assuming the manners and graces of the gentry, with funds to back up their pretensions. Miss Dunstable is the heiress to a pharmaceutical king, the now deceased purveyor of a panacea called the Ointment of Lebanon. We are told that he has left his huge fortune of two hundred thousand pounds – millions today – to his daughter.
    Another such parvenu is Mr Moffat, the tailor’s son who crudely breaks his engagement to Augusta Gresham, thus giving Frank the opportunity to horsewhip him as he leaves his club. It is a thorough trouncing that Frank gives the man who has jilted his sister in a far more successful attack than that made by Johnny Eames on Adolphus Crosbie in a similar situation. Mr Moffat is a self-seeking, callous opportunist, and if we feel scant sympathy for Augusta, this is Only because she has cared for him no more than he cared for her. We suffer with her eventually, but not until we see her duped by her deceitful cousin. Miss Dunstable is a very different example of the second-generation
nouveaux riches
. If presumptuous in the reader, it is none the less natural to see her as one of those characters whom Trollope (the least constructive and calculating of writers) invented primarily as a distraction for Frank and a foil to Mary Thorne but who got out of hand and assumed a status among the principals, just as Mrs Proudie did.
    Perhaps, then, it is no accident that these two women later become friends (or are described as friends by Miss Dunstablewith her tongue in her cheek). In a later chronicle she is mentioned as referring to