Why a load of Trollope?
Dear Friends,
I’m grateful to Trollope for many things among them, Trollope taught me how to binge watch tv.
Before I read a lot of my favorite books (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Can You Forgive Her, Our Mutual Friend) I watched them on DVDs borrowed from my aunt. She watched BBC, ITV, Acorn, and Masterpiece Theater in the evenings when her children were asleep and when I visited she sent me home with stacks of Merchant Ivory, Simon Raven, and Brideshead Revisited. The biggest longest series always came from a Trollope novel.
It was the 2000s and I was homeschooled, desperately bored, and stranded in a rural Maryland with no friends and no real state guidelines on what I was supposed to do every day. The homeschool advisor provided by the county told us two things 1. I should consider using footnote citations in my response papers and 2. as long as we showed improvement over the year they didn’t really care what the improvement was in: it could be in bricklaying (they literally said that).
Well, it wasn’t going to be bricklaying it was going to be reading biographies of Marie Antionette, George Eliot, and all the wives of Henry the Eighth and then watching hours of Masterpiece Theater. Eventually, I realized there were books behind some of my favorite programs.
Trollope occasionally makes it onto the Masterpiece Theater calendar. In 2005 they showed He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now, both solid standalone novels in the Trollope canon. In 1982 they aired an adaptation of Barchester Towers. But my ultimate favorite Trollope adaptation is the BBC’s The Pallisers (1974). Broadcast over six months this 26 episode behemoth dips into Trollope’s astonishing Palliser novels which have everything from a missing diamond necklace, to long debates about the Irish Question, to cousins engaging with cousins, and then unengaging themselves. At one point a man is in love with two widows. Two! For true crime lovers there’s even a murder trial. There’s a charming Jewish-Viennese widow, there’s a railroad scandal, and a couple of elections. Really it’d be hard not to find something in them. (With the caveat that Trollope’s world is incredibly white and aristocratic… which we’ll talk about soon.)
I borrowed the Pallisers on the understanding that my Aunt didn’t like it and if I liked it I could just keep the boxed set. Of course: I still own it to this day.
I fell in love, in perhaps one of my first strong Victorian crushes1, with Glencora Palliser who was married in a marriage of convenience (not hers) of her family and his family to Plantagenant Palliser (who I also sort of adored because at the time I wanted so badly to be an English gentleman with a study and a pile of boring books). Glencora reminded me of myself: constantly getting into trouble, staging little rebellions and Plantagenant reminded me of what I wanted to be (an illusion I’ve grown out of both in watching the miniseries and in planning my future). When I got a kindle I discovered all of the Trollope books on Project Gutenberg and downloaded them. I read the Palliser novels first and then again and when I was 26 or so I decided to try and read all of Trollope before I was 30. Under consideration, I revised this goal to 30 Trollope by 30, and partially thanks to the total shut down of the world I made my goal.
Which doesn’t exactly answer why.
Perhaps I fell in love with Trollope because he needed defending. I liked his miniseries because I knew someone else hadn’t. I think we under-rate what parts of our personality come from responding, reacting, against the world around us. Everyone wants to be original but that’s sort of the point: in striving to be original don’t we end up locked in a long conversation with what we’re reacting against? And I don’t think this is derivative. Ideas, even new ones, exist in context. The idea of a Eureka moment is maybe a glamorized-white-male concept of genius that could use some unpacking. The idea of a stand-alone independent genius has a lot in common with the fierce individual Byronic hero (looking at you Manfred) who is too fantastic to survive in reality; it makes sense that Trollope— a plodding Victorian sort of anti-Byron— is a useful figure to interrogate this stereotype with… especially since so many of his readers consider him not-really-a-genius.
When I thought about this blog I thought that probably I was going to have to sell readers on the concept of Trollope as a subject. Not that I don’t intend to cast a wide net: I’m hoping to read relevant and semi-relevant books, work with other authors and bring some diversity to the representation of the Victorian Era. But expect a lot of Trollope. I want to look at the Irish Famine and Trollope’s treatment of Irish political, religious, and romantic issues. I want to read The Fixed Period as the radical science fiction book it is: nothing written before 1900 comes closer to an away-episode of Star Trek TNG than The Fixed Period. 2 Trollope had a long career as part of the British post office, there are novels his mother wrote and his brothers to examine, his own marriage and relationship with women and other writers. Also, to be frank, he left behind a lot of material. That’s one of the things I love about Trollope: he leaves so much to work with. As a verbose person… I like working with another over-communicator.
When I was younger and just starting college my advisor found out I liked Trollope and laughed at me: when I want English majors to become Comparative Literature majors, she said, I tell them the English department will make them read Trollope. I laughed along with her.
I like to think I would stick up for Trollope now. I’m 30, still in college, and I don’t care as much what other people think. I like to imagine Trollope would have come to that consensus too. Reading Trollope taught me that what I read and what I wrote didn’t have to always be perfect to be good or enjoyable. Sometimes a novel is mostly about enthusiasm (I’m looking at you Ayala’s Angel). In my attempt to be a little Critical I want an author who pushes back against my more abstract influences and held onto the joy of reading and writing. This could have been a blog about the cow-narration in The Hamlet by William Faulkner but it’s not and to a large degree that’s because of the influence reading novels not everyone thinks are that great, has had on my own appreciation for my taste.
(But if you want to talk about cow-narration in the Hamlet, please send me a message)
more Trollope to come,
Aya
we’ll also talk about the queer-ness of some of Trollope’s characters and the experience of reading “straight” Victorian romance as a queer reader.
Imagine if Data were obsessed with Trollope instead of Sherlock Holmes. Just imagine Riker as Phineas Phinn and Troi as Madame Max