The Small House at Allington, Page 4
Anthony Trollope
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION
1 David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries (Longman, 1972), p. 20.
2 Quoted in Donald Smalley, ed., Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 202, 194, 199.
3 James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthoony Trollope (Oxford, 1977), p. 96.
4 R. C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (Macmillan, 1977), p. 230.
5 See J.B. Priestley, ‘In Barsetahire’, Saturday Review, 12 November 1927, and especially V. S. Pritchett, ‘Books in General’, New Statesman and Nation, 8 June 1946.
6 Quoted in T. Bareham, ed., The Barsetshire Novels: A Casebook (Macmillan, 1983), p. 188.
7 Quoted in Smalley , p. 197.
8 Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (Faber, 1988), p. 76.
9 Quoted in Bareham, p. 197.
10 Quoted in Smalley, p. 206.
11 Wall, p. 57
12 N. John Hall, ed., The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Standford University Press, 1983), I, p. 265.
13 Hugh Walpole, Anthony Trollope (Macmillan, 1928), pp. 60–61.
14 A. O. J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Criticical Study (Collins, 1955), p. 152.
15 Anthony Trollope, ‘Usurers and Clerks in Public Offices’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 23 March 1865, p. 2.
16 Terry, p. 230.
17 Walpole, p. 62.
18 Terry, p. 104.
CHRONOLOGY
1815 Battle of Waterloo
Lord George Gordon Byron, Hebrew Melodies
Anthony Trollope born 24 April at 16 Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, the fourth son of Thomas and Frances Trollope. Family moves shortly after to Harrow-on-the-Hill
1823 Attends Harrow as a day-boy (–1825)
1825 First public steam railway opened
Sir Walter Scott, The Betrothed and The Talisman
Sent as a boarder to a private school in Sunbury, Middlesex
1827 Greek War of Independence won in the battle of Navarino
Sent to school at Winchester College. His mother sets sail for the USA on 4 November with three of her children
1830 George IV dies; his brother ascends the throne as William IV
William Cobbett, Rural Rides
Removed from Winchester. Sent again to Harrow until 1834.
1832 Controversial First Reform Act extends the right to vote to approximately one man in five
Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans
1834 Slavery abolished in the British Empire. Poor Law Act introduces workhouses to England.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Last Days of Pompeii
Trollope family migrates to Bruges to escape creditors. Anthony returns to London to take up a junior clerkship in the General Post Office.
1835 Halley’s Comet appears. ‘Railway mania’ in Britain
Robert Browning, Paracelsus
His father dies in Bruges
1840 Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Penny Post introduced
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop(–1841)
Dangerously ill in May and June
1841 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Appointed Postal Surveyor’s Clerk for Central District of Ireland. Mvoes to Banagher, King’s County (now Co. Offaly)
1843 John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. I)
Begins to write his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballyloran
1844 Daniel O’Connell, campaigner for Catholic Emancicpation, imprisoned for conspiracy; later released
William Thackeray, The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Marries Rose Heseltine in June. Transferred to Clonmel, Co. Tipperary
1846 Famine rages in Ireland. Repeal of the Corn Laws
Dickens, Dombey and Son (–1848)
First son, Henry Merivale, born in March
1847 Charlotte Brontë, Fane Eyre, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
A second son, Frederic James Anthony, born in September
The Macdermots of Ballycloran
1848 Revolution in France; re-establishment of the Republic. The ‘Cabbage Patch Rebellion’ in Tipperary fails
Trollopes move to Mallow, Co. Cork
The Kellys and the O’Kellys
1850 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memorium
La Vendée. Writes The Noble Filt, a play and the source of his later novel Can You Forgive Her?
1851 The Great Exhibition
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Sent to survey and reorganize postal system in southwest England and Wales (–1852)
1852 First pillar box in the British Isles introduced in St Helier, Jersey, on Trollope’s recommendation
1853 Thackeray, The Newcomes (–1855)
Moves to Belfast to take post as Acting Surveyor for the Post Office
1854 Britain becomes involved in the Crimen War (–1856)
Appointed Surveyor of the Northern District of Ireland
1855 David Livingstone discovers Victoria Falls, Zambia (Zimbabwe)
Dickens, Little Dorrit (–1857)
Moves to Donnybrook, Co. Dublin
The Warden. Writes The New Zealander (published 1972)
1857 Indian Mutiny (–1858)
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays Barchester Towers
1858 Irish Republican Brotherhood founded in Dublin
George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life
Travels to Egypt, England and the West Indies on postal business
Doctor Thorme
1859 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
Leaves Ireland to settle in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, after being appointed Surveyor of the Eastern District of England
The Bertrams and The west Indies and the Spanish Main
1860 Dickens, Great Expectations (–1861)
Framley Parsonage (–1861, his first serialized fiction) and Castle Richmond
1861 American Civil War (–1865)
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. Mrs Beeton, Book of Household Management
Travels to USA to research a travel book
Orley Farm (–1862)
1862 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Last Poems
Elected to the Garrick Club
Small House at Allington (–1864) and North America
1863 His mother dies in Florence
Rachel Ray
1864 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (–1866)
Elected to the Athenaeum Club
Can You Forgive Her? (–1865)
1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Fortnightly Review founded by Trollope (among other)
Miss Mackenzie, The Belton Estate (–1866)
1866 Eliot, Felix Holt the Radical
The Claverings (–1867), Nina Balatka (–1867) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (–1867)
1867 Second Reform Act extends the franchise further, enlarging the electorate to almost two million.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Song of Italy
Resings from the GPO and assumes editorship of St Paul’s Magazine
Phiness Finn (–1869)
1868 Last public execution in London
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Visits the USA on a postal mission; returns to England to stand unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Beverley, Yorkshire
He Knew He Was Right (–1869)
1869 Suez Canal opened
Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Lorna Doone
The Vicaz of Bullhampton (–1870)
1870 Married Women’s Property Act passed
Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Resigns editorship of St Paul’s Magazine
Ralph the Heir (–1871), Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite, and a translation of The Commentaries of Caesar
1871 Eliot, Middlemarch (–1872)
Gives up house at Waltham Cross and sails to Australia with Rose to visit his son Frede
ric
The Eustace Diamonds (–1873)
1872 Thomas Hardy, Under the Greewood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes (–1873)
Travels in Australia and New Zealand and returns to England via the USA
The Golden Lion of Granpere
1873 Mill, Autobiography
Settles in Montagu Square, London
Lady Anna (–1874), Phineus Redux (–1874); Australia and New Zealand and Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Budh Life
1874 The first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris
Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
The Way We Live Now (–1875)
1875 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone
Travels to Australia, via Brindisi, Suez and Ceylon
Beings writing An Autobiography on his return. The Prime Minister (–1876)
1876 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
Finishes writing An Autobiography. The American Senator (–1877)
1877 Henry James, The American
Visits South Africa
Is He Popenjoy? (–1878)
1878 Hardy, The Return of the Native
Sails to Iceland
John Caldigate (–1879), The Lady of Launay, An Eye for an Eye (–1879) and South Africa
1879 George Meredith, The Egoist
Cousin Henry, The Duke’s Children (–1880) and Thackeray
1880 Greenwich Mean Time made the legal standard in Britain. First Anglo-Boer War (–1881)
Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion
Settles in South Harting, W. Sussex
Dr Wortle’s School and The Life of Cicero
1881 In Ireland, Parnell is arrested for conspiracy and the Land League is outlawed.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (–1882)
Ayala’s Angel, The Fixed Period (–1882) and Marion Fay (–1882)
1882 Phoenix Park murders in Dublin
Visits Ireland twice to research a new Irish novel, and returns to spend the winter in London. Dies on 6 December
Kept in the Dark, Mr Scarborough’s Family (–1883) and The Landleaguers (–1883, unfinished)
1883 An Autobiography is published under the supervision of Trollope’s son Henry
1884 An Old Man’s Love
1923 The Noble Jilt
1927 London Tradesmen (reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette, 1880)
1972 The New Zealander
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE ‘WORKING DIARY’ for The Small House at Allington is kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, under the call-mark MSS. Don c. 9. George Smith, of Smith, Elder & Co., and the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine, wrote to Trollope on 24 June 1861, asking for a novel ‘equal in length to four volumes of Framley Parsonage’. He offered a fee of £3500 to but the novel’s copyright outright, but his was not acceptable to Trollope, who settled (by publisher’s agreement dated 6 July 1861) for £2500 for a novel in 20 numbers of 24 pages per number, with £500 to be paid by Smith to the author for an eighteenmonth licence to issue two kinds of book editions.
Work began on the novel on 20 May 1862, after Trollope’s tour of the Northern United States in 1861–2 (which provided material for his travel book, North America). Between 20 May and 27 May Trollope worked steadily, producing 6 MS pages per day. Between 30 May Trollope worked steadily, producing 6 MS pages per day. Between 30 May and 11 June progress was more erratic, and between 12 June and 23 June there was only one working day as Trollope’s brother Tom had come over from Florence on a month’s visit. Trollope put in a good week’s work between 24 June and 30 June, finishing the third number of the novel, but tended to work only one day in two in July. From 29 July to 10 September work proceeded steadily until the half-way point in the composition of the novel was reached, with weekly aggregates of 48, 30, 31, 40, 43 and 35 pages, and very few missed days. Between 11 September and 22 September Trollope toured Holland (producing an article for ther Athenaeum). 23–29 September is marked as a blank week. On 30 September he started the eleventh number, and composed steadily until 17 November, with weekly aggregates of 35–40 pages (though between 21 and 27 October he managed only 25). The sixteenth number was begun on 17 November, but Trollope then broke off until Christmas Day, filling the intervening weeks with ‘a hunting campaign in Oxfordshire’, the entertainment of a houseful of hunting guests, the composition of a short story (‘The Widow’s Mite’) for the Christmas number of Good Words, and with the assembly of a lecture on ‘The Present Condition of the Northern States of the American Union’. The sixteenth number of The Small House was resumed on Boxing Day 1862, and steady progress (around 35 pages per week) was made until Trollope finished the last chapter on 11 February 1863, sending the MS to Smith the same day for fear of ‘having it burned’ while it remained on his hands. The legend ‘Ohe, Ohe, Ohe!’ (‘holloa!’ ‘soho!’ ‘ho there!’) appears in the last column of the Working Diary.
Gordon Ray (Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 31, 1968, Appendix B) lists the MS of The Small House at Allington as among the holdings of the Henry E. Huntingdon Library, San Marino, California. Trollope himself had made a gift of it to his friend Frederick Locker-Lampson. In ‘Trollope Revises Trollope’ (Trollope Centenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Macmillan, 1982)), p. 119, Andrew Wright describes the manuscript as ‘remarkably clean’, the work of ‘a confident and unhesitating author’. Of the sixty chapters of the novel only eight (9, 16, 20, 29, 31, 41, 43 and 53) show considerable alteration. Three weeks after completing The Small House, Trollope began writing his next novel, Rachel Ray.
The Small House at Allington was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine between September 1862 and April 1864, in 20 numbers of 3 chapters each number, appearing alongside George Eliot’s Romola for the first eleven months of its run. Trollope’s original choice of title, now the title of the book’s second chapter, was The Two Pearls of Allington. This was withdrawn, apparently reluctantly, in order to avoid possible confusion with another current serial, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr’s Island. As a novel beginning its serial publication before its composition was completed, The Small House is unusual in Trollope’s œuvre, but not unique. Framley Parsonage, Orley Farm, Can You Forgive Her? and The Belton Estate also appeared in this way – though Trollope boasted in As Autobiography (p. 140) that it was only with Framley Parsonage that he had broken his unofficial rule.
This Penguin Classics edition uses as copy-text the first book edition issued in two volumes by Smith, Elder & Co. in March 1864. Between the original serial edition and the first book edition, the text, apart from minor changes in punctuation, remained unaltered. In this edition, in keeping with Penguin house style, the point has been omitted after Mr, Mrs, Dr and St, and the comma dash and the semicolon dash have been replaced with plain dashes. Certain usages have been modernized – ‘nowadays’ for ‘now-a-days’, for example, and ‘someone’ for ‘some one’ – and inconsistencies in spelling and capitalization have been regularized. On p. 314 I have amended ‘Mrs Todgers’ in the first edition to ‘Mrs Todgers’, following the Everyman edition (reprinted 1976).
In December 1875 Trollope dashed off a six hundred word parody of the novel to raise funds for the Massachusetts Infant Asylum. The jeu d’esprit is entitled Never, Never – Never. A Condensed Novel, in Three Volumes, after the Manner of Bret Harte. It was privately reprinted in 1971, with a preface by Lance O. Tingay.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
THERE IS no collected edition of the works. A facsimile edition of thirty-six titles (62 vols.), Selected Works of Anthony Trollope, has been published by the Arno Press (1981; General Editor, N. John Hall). Works by Trollope are also available in the Oxford World’s Classics series; in Penguin, Dover, Alan Sutton, Encore and Granville reprints; in the Harting Grange Library Series (mostly the shorter works), published by the Caledonia Press; and in Anthony Trollope: The Complete Short Stories (forty-two stories in 5 vols.), ed. Betty Jane Slemp Breyer (1979–83). The standard bibliography of the works is Michael
Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography (1928; reprinted 1977). The Letters of Anthony Trollope, 2 vols., ed. N. John Hall (1983), is now the standard edition.
R. H. Super’s long-awaited life of Trollope, The Chronicler of Barsetshire, appeared in 1988. Among the more useful of the other biographical volumes are Bradford A. Booth, Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Work (1958); James Pope Hennessy, Anthony Trollope (1971); Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (1927); C. P. Snow, Trollope (1975); L. P. and R. P. Stebbins, The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family (1945); R. C. Terry, ed., Anthony Trollope: Interviews and Recollections (1987), and Trollope: A Chronology (1988). The best sources of information about Trollope’s life remains T. H. S. Escott’s memoir, Anthony Trollope: His Public Services, Private Friends and Literary Originals (1913; reprinted 1967), and the novelist’s Autobiography (1883). Useful reference books are W. and J. Gerould, A Guide to Trollope (1948; reprinted by the Trollope Society, London, in 1987), and N. John Hall, Trollope and His Illustrators (1980), which is especially valuable on Millais’s illustrations for The Small House as Allington.
The best bibliographies of criticism are Rafael Helling, A Century of Trollope Criticism (1956), and The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–75, ed. John Charles Olmsted and Jeffrey Welch (1978); but see also Ruth apRoberts, ‘Anthony Trollope’ in George H. Ford, ed., Victorian Fiction; a Second Guide to Research (1978), and the bibliographies published annually in Victorian Studies. A selection of contemporary criticism is reprinted in Trollope: The Critical Heritage, ed. Donald Smalley (1969), and contemporary responses are very fully discussed in David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and his Contemporaries (1972).
Of the many general studies of Trollope, the most useful are: Henry James. ‘Anthony Trollope’, in Partial Portraits (1888); A. O. J. Cock-shut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (1955); G. N. Ray, ‘Trollope at Full Length’ Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 31 (1967–8); Ruth apRoberts, Trollope: Artist and Moralist (1971; The Moral Trollope in U S A); James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope (1977); and Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (1988).
Most of the full-length studies devote some space to The Small House at Allington. Of the more interesting discussions, Cockshut explores in depth the moral and thematic importance of Crosbie’s visit to Barchester Cathedral in Chapter 16 (Cockshut, pp. 152–3). Kincaid (pp. 125–32), in discussing its relationship with Pastoral, perhaps overstresses the darker aspects of the novel, and is too keen to make it adhere to his ideals of comic form. P. D. Edwards in Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (1978), pp. 44–7, oddly undervalues the book, but he matches the novel’s time-scheme with history in an interesting appendix, concluding that the novel is set in 1860–61 (Edwards, pp. 224–5). Andrew Wright reflects on the novel’s relationship with the sentimental tradition and with early Jane Austen in Anthony Trollope: Dream and Art (1983), pp. 60–70. Stephen Wall provides the most sensitive discussion of the book (Wall, pp. 54–71).
