Framley Parsonage Read Free

qualities whichmade
Framley Parsonage
popular on its first appearance and which still retain their appeal today: the fluent and expressive style, the humour, the intelligent absorption in the essentially everyday, the tolerant analysis of conduct in the commonplace business of life; and, in addition, the moderate suspense, the ordinary and almost ‘approachable’ characters, and the comforting sense of life goingon, which made it a successful serial then, and once again, almost a century later, on the radio in the 1950s. For Trollope’s contemporaries, though, there were still other attractions. In particular they received a strong impression of life as it was lived at that very time. On his death one of his best critics was to go so far as to claim that his novels ‘picture the society of our day witha fidelity with which society has never been pictured before in the history of the world’. 14 There was, too, a special sense of topicality about Trollope’s fiction. For various reasons Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot usually set their novels about their own age back a few decades – often to the period of their own childhood or youth – and hence costumes and customs were dated, and referencesto up-to-the-minute ideas and events had to be rather carefullyencoded to avoid damaging the chronology. Trollope’s procedure was quite different. He wrote with an eye to the very moment of composition, incorporating numerous references to current affairs calculated to give the reader the impression that the characters of the novel inhabited the same world and read the same newspapers as he did.Among the topics of the day alluded to in
Framley Parsonage
, apart from clear references to the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, are the new divorce court, established in 1858, the abolition of the Paper Duties in 1860, the Reverend Bryan King and the ritualism riots in East London in 1859–60, the Reverend Charles Spurgeon and his Metropolitan Tabernacle, opened in 1861, and even the introductionof a new invalid’s food in the eighteen fifties under the name ‘Revalenta Arabica’. Other topical matters can be less precisely dated, such as the public debate on clerical incomes, with particular reference to curates’ stipends, or the change from
service à la française
to
service à la russe
at the dinner-table, which the historian of nineteenth-century French food, Jean-Paul Aron, places inthe eighteen fifties and sixties. 15 These things, which are identified and explained in the notes to this edition, give an exceptional feeling of actuality to the novel. Indeed readers seem actively to have expected the novelist to deal with topical issues of the day, and Lord Carlisle, the Viceroy of Ireland, wrote to say that he was ‘curious to know what effect the Essays and Reviews may produceupon the Barchester Society’. 16 At one point John Everett Millais, who was illustrating the novel, was even more up-to-the-minute than Trollope, and pictured a dress in the latest fashion which, the author protested to George Smith, would be thought ‘simply ludicrous’. If proof is needed of Trollope’s consciousness of the topical appearance of his fiction, it can be found in a letter of 21 July1860 in which he withdraws his objection: ‘I will now consent to forget the flounced dress. I saw the
very pattern of that dress
some time after the picture came out.’ 17 Actuality was the final arbiter of the question – though we shall never knowwhether Millais’s plate had been the original model for the dress in question.
    Framley Parsonage
is the fourth in Trollope’s first series of novels,the
Chronicles of Barsetshire
, which are nowadays read as though they belong to an undisturbed, idyllic past but which in their day were seen to relate the impact on an old-fashioned part of the country of the latest pressures and changes of the modern world. For the readers of the eighteen fifties and sixties the subject-matter was at once quaint