Political Life

In Slightly Foxed no. 73 I wrote about the solace I found, during the first year of the pandemic, in listening to Timothy West’s brilliant recordings of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. I couldn’t bear to stop listening when I reached the end of The Last Chronicle of Barset, so I followed Plantagenet Palliser and the Duke of Omnium out of Barsetshire and into the books in which they take up starring roles. Originally labelled collectively as Trollope’s ‘parliamentary novels’, today this series is more commonly known as ‘the Palliser novels’ after the family whose domestic and political fortunes form its connecting thread.

The shape of the Palliser series is slightly unwieldy. Trollope wrote of it as a quartet with two subsidiary titles, although he found it hard to believe that anyone would treat it as he intended. ‘Who will read Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister consecutively, in order that they may understand the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and of Lady Glencora?’ he wondered in his Autobiography. ‘Who will ever know that they should so be read?’ Two further novels – The Eustace Diamonds and The Duke’s Children – interweave themselves among this quartet chronologically. I organized my listening in accordance with Trollope’s scheme, skipping straight from Phineas Finn to Phineas Redux, and returning to The Eustace Diamonds and The Duke’s Children after I reached the end of The Prime Minister. The Palliser novels, published between 1864 and 1880, do not drop you in a specific place as do the Barsetshire chronicles. They immerse you instead in a particular moment in British history when, in the 1860s and 1870s, Liberal and Conservative parliamentary factions fought internecine battles over the structures of power in both Britain and Ireland. These are novels that cohere thematically rather than geographically, but, like Trollope’s earlier series, they also offer the reader – or, in my case, the listener – the pleasure of following the same characters in and out of other people’s stories, until they become as familiar as friends. The Palliser series opens with Can You Forgive Her?, first published in serial form between 1864 and 1865. Its central character is Alice Vavasor, whose vacillation between two suitors – her bounder cousin George and steady, dull John Grey – forms the crux of the story, and the topic of the title’s question. Trollope himself was proud of the novel, although he claimed that its heroine was not an attractive character. (Punch agreed, renaming the novel Can You Stand Her?) Alice’s quandary gives rise to a question that recurs throughout the Palliser series, namely ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ In Can You Forgive Her? Alice finds one answer to this question when, after much heartache, she chooses security over excitement in the person of John Grey. Ultimately John Grey leaves her ‘no alternative but to be happy’, but happiness comes for Alice at the cost of the independence of mind and spirit that rendered her so unlikeable in the eyes of both her creator and some of Trollope’s more censorious original readers. The romantic travails of her wealthy aunt, Mrs Greenow, form a second narrative strand, but there is one crucial difference: Mrs Greenow has money, and she therefore has the ability to make both her suitors dance to her tune. Lady Glencora also has money – lots of it – but in her case a great fortune has been the means of trapping her, as she is forced into a dynastic union with Plantagenet Palliser by scheming relatives from both families. Like Alice, Lady Glencora has given her love to a cad and a bounder, and at the centre of Can You Forgive Her? is her torment as she attempts to decide whether to stay in a comfortable, loveless marriage or whether to elope and break her husband’s heart. If Alice Vavasor’s story has a happy ending, the opposite is true of Lady Glencora’s. She stays in her marriage and makes the best of it, touched by her husband’s devotion and his willingness to sacrifice a political career in order to keep her. She finds an answer to the question ‘What should a woman do with her life?’ in building an existence that is full of friends and interests, becoming a political hostess whose success eventually rivals that achieved by her Prime Minister husband. Trollope himself recognized that one of the triumphs of the series is that, although their circumstances change, the Pallisers themselves remain recognizable throughout.

It was my study that these people, as they grew in years, should encounter the changes which come upon us all; and I think I have succeeded. The Duchess of Omnium, when she is playing the part of Prime Minister’s wife, is the same woman as that Lady Glencora who almost longs to go off with Burgo Fitzgerald, but yet knows that she will never do so; and the Prime Minister Duke, with his wounded pride and sore spirit, is he who, for his wife’s sake, left power and place when they were first offered to him; – but they have undergone the changes which a life so stirring as theirs would naturally produce.

For the reader who follows these characters through the novels the reward is immense, and the complexities of Lady Glencora’s compromised but nevertheless rich happiness in later life are far more interesting than Alice Vavasor’s tidy happy ending. One of the motifs running through all the Palliser novels is that young women are much better off avoiding dashing, mysterious men. Emily Wharton, one of the sub-heroines of The Prime Minister, marries her cad with disastrous effects, and is only saved from her mistake when the cad destroys himself courtesy of the trains at Clapham Junction. Women don’t always do better, though, if they settle for the safe bet. In Phineas Finn Lady Laura Standish marries dour, rich Robert Kennedy of her own volition but is then trapped in a nightmare as the extent of Kennedy’s mad Presbyterianism becomes apparent. It was while I was listening to Phineas Finn, and subsequently to Phineas Redux, that the Palliser novels took an iron hold on my attention. The hero of these paired titles is an Irishman of modest means who attempts to make his way in the world of British politics. Like the women whose uncertain futures Trollope depicts so thoughtfully, Phineas is entirely dependent on others for political and personal success, because he is both poor and an outsider. He retires from London life buffeted by his experiences at the end of Phineas Finn but returns in the sequel to fight for his political career and, after some dramatic plot twists, for his liberty and his life. Phineas Redux unfolds the slow tragedy of Lady Laura’s loveless marriage, but it counterbalances this with the evolving relationship between Phineas and Madame Max Goesler, the beautiful, wealthy widow of a Jewish financier whose bravery saves both Phineas’s neck and the house of the Duke of Omnium. Phineas Redux is a truly wonderful novel, indeed the standout discovery of my hours with the Pallisers. It has plenty of drama to keep you turning the pages, or in my case pressing play on the audiobook, but it is also a fascinating portrait of a world in which fake news, malicious reporting, gossip and rumour can break reputations over the course of a single day. In the unlikely alliance of Lady Glencora and Madame Max it has one of Trollope’s most brilliant representations of female friendship, and it nimbly combines politics with romance. Trollope was always mindful of the need to balance political set-pieces with domestic drama: ‘If I write politics for my own sake, I must put in love and intrigue, social incidents, with perhaps a dash of sport, for the benefit of my readers.’ His view was that he had succeeded in making this balance work in the Phineas novels, although he later wrote that it had been a mistake to make his hero Irish, earning him only ‘an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England’. Phineas gets his happy ending when he marries Madame Max Goesler, and when another cad – the soi disant Reverend Mr Emilius – is proved by the exertions of Madame Max to have committed the murder for which Phineas himself has been imprisoned. Mr Emilius’s story is told at greater length in the first of the two titles that sit between the parliamentary stories to complete the Palliser series. His novel is The Eustace Diamonds, a police-detective caper in which pretty, shallow Lizzie Eustace outwits the outraged society matrons who comment, like a Greek chorus, on her determination to retain possession of a valuable necklace that she maintains (untruthfully) has been left to her under the terms of the late Sir Eustace’s will. By the time of the final parliamentary novel, The Prime Minister, however, Lady Eustace has been reduced to a life lived on the fringes of London society, alongside the cads and the bounders of whom she is a female equivalent. The Trollope cad, whether male or female, moves through the world of the Palliser series untroubled by morality, motivated only by personal gain. At various points it appears as if the cad is on the ascendant, threatening the status quo as preserved by the Pallisers and their friends. In the end, though, it is a version of pragmatic continuity that triumphs. In the final novel of the series, The Duke’s Children, Lady Glencora has died and Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium himself, is left alone to confront a world in which his children appear to hold very different values to his. His heir, Lord Silverbridge, wishes to marry an American heiress; his younger son loses money at cards and gets himself expelled from Cambridge following an illicit trip to the Derby. His daughter, meanwhile, will not accept for herself the sacrifice forced upon her mother, and eventually the Duke is persuaded to let her have her way and marry the man she loves. Ultimately it is another outsider, Madame Max (now happily married to Phineas Finn), who helps him to see that his family’s name need not be upheld only at the cost of his children’s happiness. So as the series closes the Pallisers themselves have ‘no alternative but to be happy’, but they find their happiness when they are collectively willing to compromise in accordance with the reality of the changing times in which they live. Now that some time has passed since I listened to the Palliser novels, however, I realize it’s not the happy endings that have stayed with me. Instead it’s the stories of the women – Alice Vavasor, Lady Glencora, Madame Max, Mrs Greenow, Lady Eustace, Emily Wharton, Lady Laura Kennedy and many others – that remain in my mind. All of them are constrained to answer the question posed in Can You Forgive Her? What is a woman to do with her life? For none is the answer to that question straightforward. Yet these characters are never merely vehicles through which an argument about the position of women is mounted. Trollope lived with and through his characters, and to him their lives mattered because of who they were, and not just because of what they represented. That is why they make such ideal companions for listening, because they live alongside the reader in the imagination of their creator. ‘They have been as real to me as free trade was to Mr Cobden, or the dominion of a party to Mr Disraeli,’ Trollope wrote, as he considered the series. ‘As I have not been able to speak from the benches of the House of Commons, or to thunder from platforms, or to be efficacious as a lecturer, they have served me as safety-valves by which to deliver my soul.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 ©  Daisy Hay 2023 The illustrations in this article are by Gwen Raverat from The Bedside Barsetshire (1949).