The Last Chronicle of Barset Read Free Page A

or sensational novelist of the period and Trollope: it is not that there are never life-changing moments or crises in Trollope’s work, but that he shows how people have to live beyond those moments, in the everyday grind which is no longer sustained by the original inspiration of either epiphanic grief or joy. While Dickens does show this brilliantly in
Great Expectations
(serialized 1860–61) through the eyes of Pip – Miss Havisham’s determination to live a life of vengeful suffering has become absurdly repetitive and empty of its initial inspiration – Trollope reveals the tough, patient work ofthe uninspired life in the often monotonous days of Lily Dale. In a novel which professes to be the ‘last chronicle’ of a series which readers had almost come to rely upon as continuing with life itself, there is certainly a sombre and determined finality in Trollope’s words at the end of chapter 77 after she decisively rejects John Eames: ‘I can only ask the reader to believe that she was in earnest, and express my own opinion, in this last word that I shall ever write respecting her, that she will live and die as Lily Dale.’
    Trollope’s early life taught him the persistent and soul-destroying humiliations of impoverished gentility, and the real tragedy that can rest in the mundane repetitions of a disappointed life. Writing of his father in his autobiography he echoed Lily Dale’s assessment of herself that something had ‘gone wrong’ with her: ‘But everything went wrong with him. The touch of his hand seemed to create failure… His life as I knew it was one long tragedy.’ 5 Trollope’s father was an educated, intelligent and in many ways able man who failed as a barrister, invested in a farm which financially crippled his family, and battled with headaches, depression and despair through much of his life. Many critics have seen shades of Trollope’s father in the intelligent, principled but self-destructive central figure of
The Last Chronicle
, Reverend Josiah Crawley. Trollope would probably have denied that he derived Crawley from his father, or at least have insisted that any similarities were unintentional. Such direct correlations were ‘distasteful’ to him as he admitted in a letter to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes in which he criticized Dickens’s revelations that he had based incidents in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison and the character of Mr Micawber upon the life and character of his father. 6 Nevertheless, the degrading exposures of early life work their way into the novels of both these very different, contemporary writers. It is the experience of debt and its consequences which turned them into particularly driven exemplars of the Victorian obsession with work, within the literary sphere.
Labor omnia vincit improbus
(Persistent work overcomes everything), a phrase frequently intoned by Anthony Trollope, was a way to gain the ‘top brick of the chimney’ in a society enamoured of the self-made man. For Trollope as well as for Dickens, work fought the battle againstshame. Just as Dickens’s experiences of his father’s imprisonment for debt and his own labour as a child in Warren’s blacking warehouse are seminal to his tales of childhood suffering and neglect, so the cringing humiliation under ‘the angry eyes of tradesmen’ that Mr Crawley experiences, and the pain of bankruptcy, bailiffs in the house and flight from debt are extremely significant in Trollope’s writing, and very much so in
The Last Chronicle of Barset
.
    In an imaginative but rather desperate move to save the family from destitution, Trollope’s mother Frances left England for America in 1827 with three of his younger brothers and sisters. She went to the New World with an investment plan to establish a bazaar in a western US city (Cincinnati was chosen) that would provide small British goods to needy