Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

I hurried into the City, and had my first interview with Mr. George

Smith. When he heard that Castle Richmond was an Irish story, he

begged that I would endeavour to frame some other for his magazine.

He was sure that an Irish story would not do for a commencement;--and

he suggested the Church, as though it were my peculiar subject. I

told him that Castle Richmond would have to "come out" while any

other novel that I might write for him would be running through the

magazine;--but to that he expressed himself altogether indifferent.

He wanted an English tale, on English life, with a clerical flavour.

On these orders I went to work, and framed what I suppose I must

call the plot of Framley Parsonage.

On my journey back to Ireland, in the railway carriage, I wrote the

first few pages of that story. I had got into my head an idea of

what I meant to write,--a morsel of the biography of an English

clergyman who should not be a bad man, but one led into temptation

by his own youth and by the unclerical accidents of the life of

those around him. The love of his sister for the young lord was

an adjunct necessary, because there must be love in a novel. And

then by placing Framley Parsonage near Barchester, I was able to

fall back upon my old friends Mrs. Proudie and the archdeacon. Out

of these slight elements I fabricated a hodge-podge in which the

real plot consisted at last simply of a girl refusing to marry the

man she loved till the man's friends agreed to accept her lovingly.

Nothing could be less efficient or artistic. But the characters

were so well handled, that the work from the first to the last

was popular,--and was received as it went on with still increasing

favour by both editor and proprietor of the magazine. The story was

thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little

tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There

was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more

love-making. And it was downright honest love,--in which there was

no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to

be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the

man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of

them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so.

Consequently they in England who were living, or had lived, the

same sort of life, liked Framley Parsonage. I think myself that

Lucy Robarts is perhaps the most natural English girl that I ever

drew,--the most natural, at any rate, of those who have been good

girls. She was not as dear to me as Kate Woodward in The Three

Clerks, but I think she is more like real human life. Indeed

I doubt whether such a character could be made more lifelike than

Lucy Robarts.

And I will say also that in this novel there is no very weak part,--no

long succession of dull pages. The production of novels in serial

form forces upon the author the conviction that he should not allow

himself to be tedious in any single part. I hope no reader will

misunderstand me. In spite of that conviction, the writer of stories

in parts will often be tedious. That I have been so myself is a

fault that will lie heavy on my tombstone. But the writer when he

embarks in such a business should feel that he cannot afford to have

many pages skipped out of the few which are to meet the reader's

eye at the same time. Who can imagine the first half of the first

volume of Waverley coming out in shilling numbers? I had realised

this when I was writing Framley Parsonage; and working on the

conviction which had thus come home to me, I fell into no bathos

of dulness.

I subsequently came across a piece of criticism which was written

on me as a novelist by a brother novelist very much greater than

myself, and whose brilliant intellect and warm imagination led him

to a kind of work the very opposite of mine. This was Nathaniel

Hawthorne, the American, whom I did not then know, but whose works

I knew. Though it praises myself highly, I will insert it here,

because it certainly is true in its nature: "It is odd enough," he

says, "that my own individual taste is for quite another class of

works than those which I myself am able to write. If I were to meet

with such books as mine by another writer, I don't believe I should

be able to get through them. Have you ever read the novels of Anthony

Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,--solid and substantial,

written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of

ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of

the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants

going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they

were being made a show of. And these books are just as English as

a beef-steak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an

English residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still

I should think that human nature would give them success anywhere."

This was dated early in 1860, and could have had no reference to

Framley Parsonage; but it was as true of that work as of any that

I have written. And the criticism, whether just or unjust, describes

with wonderful accuracy the purport that I have ever had in view

in my writing. I have always desired to "hew out some lump of the

earth," and to make men and women walk upon it just as they do walk

here among us,--with not more of excellence, nor with exaggerated

baseness,--so that my readers might recognise human beings like to

themselves, and not feel themselves to be carried away among gods

or demons. If I could do this, then I thought I might succeed

in impregnating the mind of the novel-reader with a feeling that

honesty is the best policy; that truth prevails while falsehood

fails; that a girl will be loved as she is pure; and sweet, and

unselfish; that a man will be honoured as he is true, and honest,

and brave of heart; that things meanly done are ugly and odious,

and things nobly done beautiful and gracious. I do not say that

lessons such as these may not be more grandly taught by higher

flights than mine. Such lessons come to us from our greatest poets.

But there are so many who will read novels and understand them, who

either do not read the works of our great poets, or reading them

miss the lesson! And even in prose fiction the character whom

the fervid imagination of the writer has lifted somewhat into the

clouds, will hardly give so plain an example to the hasty normal

reader as the humbler personage whom that reader unconsciously feels

to resemble himself or herself. I do think that a girl would more

probably dress her own mind after Lucy Robarts than after Flora

Macdonald.

There are many who would laugh at the idea of a novelist teaching

either virtue or nobility,--those, for instance, who regard

the reading of novels as a sin, and those also who think it to be

simply an idle pastime. They look upon the tellers of stories as

among the tribe of those who pander to the wicked pleasures of a

wicked world. I have regarded my art from so different a point of

view that I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons,

and my pulpit as one which I could make both salutary and agreeable

to my audience. I do believe that no girl has risen from the reading

of my pages less modest than she was before, and that some may have

learned from them that modesty is a charm well worth preserving. I