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Trollope’s Ireland

I have been reading Trollope’s fiction over several decades, but it was not until this year that I embarked upon his three principal Irish novels. They have not been his most popular works, and I, like many others, was deterred by the heavy use of dialect which slows the reader down and makes the page look unwelcoming. But when I decided to overcome this prejudice, I was rewarded.

It didn’t take long to convert me: the first paragraphs of his very first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), have a peculiar magic. The narrator Trollope (who is soon subsumed into his tale) tells us, in what was to become his characteristically intimate tone, that he found himself at a loss for after-dinner entertainment when stranded by business (in the author’s case this would have been Post Office business) in the ‘quiet little village of Drumsna’, on a bend in the Shannon, about seventy miles north-west of Dublin. ‘Now, in such a situation, to take a walk is all the brightest man can do, and the dullest always does the same. There is a kind of gratification in seeing what one has never seen before, be it ever so little worth seeing; and the gratification is the greater if the chances be that one will never see it again.’ This is a wonderfully inviting opening. This is a man for whom life is an adventure, a perpetual exploration.

By chance and through ignorance of the neighbourhood he walks in the wrong direction, away from the pretty picturesque bridge and woods and along ‘as dusty, ugly and disagreeable a road as is to be found in any county in Ireland’, but this unpromising beginning brings him to the subject that inspired him: the immensely decayed but once grand house of a Connaught gentleman. The building, into which he makes his way, is open to the elements, and the effects of Time and Ruin are described with a poetic intensity

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I have been reading Trollope’s fiction over several decades, but it was not until this year that I embarked upon his three principal Irish novels. They have not been his most popular works, and I, like many others, was deterred by the heavy use of dialect which slows the reader down and makes the page look unwelcoming. But when I decided to overcome this prejudice, I was rewarded.

It didn’t take long to convert me: the first paragraphs of his very first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), have a peculiar magic. The narrator Trollope (who is soon subsumed into his tale) tells us, in what was to become his characteristically intimate tone, that he found himself at a loss for after-dinner entertainment when stranded by business (in the author’s case this would have been Post Office business) in the ‘quiet little village of Drumsna’, on a bend in the Shannon, about seventy miles north-west of Dublin. ‘Now, in such a situation, to take a walk is all the brightest man can do, and the dullest always does the same. There is a kind of gratification in seeing what one has never seen before, be it ever so little worth seeing; and the gratification is the greater if the chances be that one will never see it again.’ This is a wonderfully inviting opening. This is a man for whom life is an adventure, a perpetual exploration. By chance and through ignorance of the neighbourhood he walks in the wrong direction, away from the pretty picturesque bridge and woods and along ‘as dusty, ugly and disagreeable a road as is to be found in any county in Ireland’, but this unpromising beginning brings him to the subject that inspired him: the immensely decayed but once grand house of a Connaught gentleman. The building, into which he makes his way, is open to the elements, and the effects of Time and Ruin are described with a poetic intensity – the roof was off, the windows and window frames and ‘everything that wanted keeping had gone’: the joists and beams were ‘ready to fall, like the skeleton of a felon left to rot on an open gibbet’, and the gardens were half covered with potato heaps. The story of the tragic fall of the house of Ballycloran is told to the narrator by the guard of the coach that drives him away from Drumsna to Boyle. It is a tale of a family descending inevitably towards disaster, set in the 1830s against a background of political agitation, religious strife, heavy drinking and poverty. This was the time of Ribbonism, when Catholic working men formed illegal secret societies to bind themselves by oath to resist their landlords and to protest against ejection for non-payment of rent, and ribbon men feature in the plot. The principal characters are Thaddeus (Thady) Macdermot and his sister Euphemia, known as Feemy. They are the children of ageing and impotent Larry Macdermot, who is unable to manage his dwindling estate and finds himself at the mercy of unscrupulous lawyers and agents. Feemy, a romantic girl of 20, is in love with the enemy, in the person of the dashing but untrustworthy revenue officer, the Protestant Captain Ussher, who courts her and takes liberties with her but has no fixed intention of marrying her. Despite her slatternly dress, her hair ‘fastened up with a bit of old black ribbon and a comb boasting only two teeth’, her idleness, her thumb-worn novels and her down-at-heel shoes and her habit of sitting all morning with her feet on the fender, she is a sympathetic as well as a vulnerable figure. Her brother, the well-meaning but not very resourceful Thady, is also drawn with compassion, and the reader follows him with mounting anxiety as he becomes compromised by his association with a group of local rebels, conspiring to overthrow the hated Ussher. Trollope’s depiction of the wedding scene at which the drunken Thady makes a fatal error is masterly; all the Irish ingredients are there – the boiling cabbages and smoking potatoes, the ‘huge lumps of blood-red mutton’, the sweating bride-cum-cook, the wise and kindly priest, the bashful village lads, the piper playing Irish tunes. There is an authenticity and vigour here that surpass many of Trollope’s later English comic low-life passages. Trollope, who spent nearly twenty years there, knew his Ireland. The denouement is violent and tragic. Feemy dies of a broken heart when Ussher betrays her, and Thady’s end is foreshadowed by the image of the gibbet at Ballycloran. I was shocked by the outcome, as I had been expecting some more Trollopian compromise. I admired it, but his early readers did not. Had the book been more successful, might its author have travelled in a different direction? As it was, he apologized for it at the end of Barchester Towers (1857), the second novel in his more pleasing clerical saga, telling us that ‘A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The consequence was that no one would read his novel.’ He had not arrived at this worldly wisdom when he wrote The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848) which, again, is set uncompromisingly in Ireland, at the time of the Repealers and the Dublin trial of John O’Connell in 1843. Again, the political backdrop is vividly realized, but in the foreground are the fortunes of two starkly contrasted heiresses, the simple-minded and domestically oppressed Anastasia ‘Anty’ Lynch and the strong-willed upper-class beauty Fanny Wyndham. Their social spheres, although poles apart, intersect, and Trollope skilfully analyses the subtleties of class and conduct on a much broader canvas than he attempted with the Macdermots. He takes us from court rooms to castles, from the racecourse to the hunting field, from Morrison’s Hotel in Dublin to Mrs Kelly’s humble inn in Dunmore. He makes his first attempt to distinguish between the very bad young man and the bad but redeemable young man, telling us confidently that ‘Lord Kilcullen was a heartless roué, whereas Lord Ballindine was only a thoughtless rake . . .’ The hospitable but ugly inn, with its large drinking room and rickety chairs, its earthen floor and its dingy, dark kitchen, plays an important role in the novel. ‘An Irish kitchen is devoted to hospitality in every sense of the word. Its doors are open to almost all loungers and idlers, and the chances are that Billy Bawn, the cripple, or Judy Molloy, the deaf old hag, are more likely to find the required utensil than the cook herself . . .’ It is here that Anty takes refuge when attacked by her violent and bullying brother, who is trying to cheat her out of her modest inheritance. And although Trollope is already showing himself at home with the landed gentry, with titled absentee landlords and rakes and roués, it is Anty’s fate that we follow with the greatest interest: will she get to marry the handsome Frank Kelly, younger than she is, eager for her money, but kind at heart, or will she too, like the helpless Feemy, meet a tragic end? It takes great skill to make so unpromising a heroine as Anty hold our attention, and Trollope keeps us guessing to the end. The plot of his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond (1860), is more melodramatic and predictable, again turning on inheritance and disinheritance, and its most powerful scenes are evocations of the Irish famine, which Trollope and his wife witnessed at first hand. He opens his narrative by telling the reader that he knows that Irish novels have gone out of fashion, but he does not make clear why he has returned to this theme: perhaps it was agitated memories of the famine that drew him back. His views on what caused the famine, and why God permitted it, are at best confused, but nonetheless compelling. He is at times satirical about the Irish character and Irish traits, but he is not frivolous or flippant. Had he stayed there, he might have continued to work out this tragic theme. But he came to England, and to worldly success, as did the later hero of his Palliser novels, Phineas Finn. Trollope was to admit that he had been wrong to make the aspiring politician Phineas an Irish Catholic, and that he had thus voluntarily presented himself with a host of problems, not all of which could be resolved as easily as the question of Phineas’s marriage to his first sweetheart, the very Irish Mary Flood Jones. Phineas is true to Mary, despite the odds, but she shortly dies, most conveniently, in childbirth. She is reborn, more tragically, in the protagonist of An Eye for an Eye (1879), Kate O’Hara, whose fate echoes that of poor Feemy. Much of this novel is set in Dorset, but the scenes set on the Irish coast where Kate is wooed and won by the handsome English officer Fred Neville have a dramatic intensity. The impossibility of marriage between the daughter of a Catholic widow and the heir to an English earldom becomes increasingly and remorselessly apparent, despite the interventions of the attractively drawn ‘wise priest’ Father Marty, and all ends badly for everybody. Those were not Trollope’s final thoughts on the country he knew so well. His last novel, like his first, was set in Ireland. The Landleaguers was written during his last illness and published posthumously in 1883. He had come full circle. Those years as an English civil servant in a not-quite-foreign land had left an indelible mark. And one cannot help but wonder whether the tenor of his entire output might have been slightly different had The Macdermots sold all of the 400 copies that were printed, and been more respectfully received. It is, as he always maintained, a very good book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Margaret Drabble 2018


About the contributor

After a brief and inglorious career as an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company Margaret Drabble DBE became a full-time writer, and has written nineteen novels, most recently The Dark Flood Rises (2016). She has also written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and edited the fifth and sixth editions of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.

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