Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

literary work. From day to day I thought of it, still purporting

to make another effort, and often turning over in my head some

fragment of a plot which had occurred to me. But the day did not

come in which I could sit down with my pen and paper and begin

another novel. For, after all, what could it be but a novel? The

play had failed more absolutely than the novels, for the novels

had attained the honour of print. The cause of this pressure of

official work lay, not in the demands of the General Post Office,

which more than once expressed itself as astonished by my celerity,

but in the necessity which was incumbent on me to travel miles

enough to pay for my horses, and upon the amount of correspondence,

returns, figures, and reports which such an amount of daily travelling

brought with it. I may boast that the work was done very quickly

and very thoroughly,--with no fault but an over-eagerness to extend

postal arrangements far and wide.

In the course of the job I visited Salisbury, and whilst wandering

there one mid-summer evening round the purlieus of the cathedral I

conceived the story of The Warden,--from whence came that series of

novels of which Barchester, with its bishops, deans, and archdeacon,

was the central site. I may as well declare at once that no one

at their commencement could have had less reason than myself to

presume himself to be able to write about clergymen. I have been

often asked in what period of my early life I had lived so long

in a cathedral city as to have become intimate with the ways of a

Close. I never lived in any cathedral city,--except London, never

knew anything of any Close, and at that time had enjoyed no peculiar

intimacy with any clergyman. My archdeacon, who has been said to be

life-like, and for whom I confess that I have all a parent's fond

affection, was, I think, the simple result of an effort of my moral

consciousness. It was such as that, in my opinion, that an archdeacon

should be,--or, at any rate, would be with such advantages as

an archdeacon might have; and lo! an archdeacon was produced, who

has been declared by competent authorities to be a real archdeacon

down to the very ground. And yet, as far as I can remember, I had

not then even spoken to an archdeacon. I have felt the compliment

to be very great. The archdeacon came whole from my brain after

this fashion;--but in writing about clergymen generally, I had to

pick up as I went whatever I might know or pretend to know about

them. But my first idea had no reference to clergymen in general.

I had been struck by two opposite evils,--or what seemed to me to

be evils,--and with an absence of all art-judgment in such matters, I

thought that I might be able to expose them, or rather to describe

them, both in one and the same tale. The first evil was the

possession by the Church of certain funds and endowments which had

been intended for charitable purposes, but which had been allowed

to become incomes for idle Church dignitaries. There had been more

than one such case brought to public notice at the time, in which

there seemed to have been an egregious malversation of charitable

purposes. The second evil was its very opposite. Though I had been

much struck by the injustice above described, I had also often

been angered by the undeserved severity of the newspapers towards

the recipients of such incomes, who could hardly be considered

to be the chief sinners in the matter. When a man is appointed to

a place, it is natural that he should accept the income allotted

to that place without much inquiry. It is seldom that he will be

the first to find out that his services are overpaid. Though he be

called upon only to look beautiful and to be dignified upon State

occasions, he will think (pounds)2000 a year little enough for such beauty

and dignity as he brings to the task. I felt that there had been

some tearing to pieces which might have been spared. But I was

altogether wrong in supposing that the two things could be combined.

Any writer in advocating a cause must do so after the fashion of

an advocate,--or his writing will be ineffective. He should take up

one side and cling to that, and then he may be powerful. There should

be no scruples of conscience. Such scruples make a man impotent for

such work. It was open to me to have described a bloated parson,

with a red nose and all other iniquities, openly neglecting every

duty required from him, and living riotously on funds purloined

from the poor,--defying as he did do so the moderate remonstrances

of a virtuous press. Or I might have painted a man as good, as sweet,

and as mild as my warden, who should also have been a hard-working,

ill-paid minister of God's word, and might have subjected him to the

rancorous venom of some daily Jupiter, who, without a leg to stand

on, without any true case, might have been induced, by personal

spite, to tear to rags the poor clergyman with poisonous, anonymous,

and ferocious leading articles. But neither of these programmes

recommended itself to my honesty. Satire, though it may exaggerate

the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that

it may be lashed. Caricature may too easily become a slander, and

satire a libel. I believed in the existence neither of the red-nosed

clerical cormorant, nor in that of the venomous assassin of the

journals. I did believe that through want of care and the natural

tendency of every class to take care of itself, money had slipped

into the pockets of certain clergymen which should have gone

elsewhere; and I believed also that through the equally natural

propensity of men to be as strong as they know how to be, certain

writers of the press had allowed themselves to use language which

was cruel, though it was in a good cause. But the two objects

should not have been combined--and I now know myself well enough

to be aware that I was not the man to have carried out either of

them.

Nevertheless I thought much about it, and on the 29th of July,

1853,--having been then two years without having made any literary

effort,--I began The Warden, at Tenbury in Worcestershire. It was

then more than twelve months since I had stood for an hour on the

little bridge in Salisbury, and had made out to my own satisfaction

the spot on which Hiram's hospital should stand. Certainly no work

that I ever did took up so much of my thoughts. On this occasion

I did no more than write the first chapter, even if so much. I had

determined that my official work should be moderated, so as to allow

me some time for writing; but then, just at this time, I was sent

to take the postal charge of the northern counties in Ireland,--of

Ulster, and the counties Meath and Louth. Hitherto in official

language I had been a surveyor's clerk,--now I was to be a surveyor.

The difference consisted mainly in an increase of income from about

(pounds)450 to about (pounds)800;--for at that time the sum netted still depended

on the number of miles travelled. Of course that English work

to which I had become so warmly wedded had to be abandoned. Other

parts of England were being done by other men, and I had nearly

finished the area which had been entrusted to me. I should have

liked to ride over the whole country, and to have sent a rural

post letter-carrier to every parish, every village, every hamlet,

and every grange in England.