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Shape and Theme: Determinants of Trollope's Forms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
The endeavor of the pioneer critics—in what has somewhat exaggeratedly been called the Trollope revival—was to define a Trollopian oneness, like the oneness which Geoffrey Tillotson discerns in Thackeray. The attempt was healthy and beneficial, and its impetus not unreasonable. The sheer bulk of the novels had hindered assessment, and, despite his charming frankness and efforts at objectivity “from the further shore,” Trollope's own attachment to everything he wrote only charms us to his sense of evenness. Moreover, the Trollope canon itself fosters assumptions of unity based on similarity. The pioneer critics, by defining a unity of Trollopian flow and direction, sought to lead us through a maze deceptively landmarked with clergymen, barristers, and MP's; Franks, Harrys, and Lucys; London, Barchester, and manor houses.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963
References
1 The pioneer work is Michael Sadleir's Trollope: A Commentary (London, 1927), which began the modern interest, and which was followed closely by Hugh Walpole's Anthony Trollope, English Men of Letters (London, 1928). Of the more recent works seeking to define a oneness, certainly the most perspicacious and scholarly is Bradford A. Booth's Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art (Bloomington, 1958).
2 A. O. J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope: A Critical Study (London, 1955), and John E. Dustin, “Thematic Alternation in Trollope,” PMLA, lxxvii (June 1962), 280–288, espouse this view.
3 Dustin, p. 280.
4 Ibid.
5 The two novels represent Mr. Dustin's second “theme,” which is “the career of the bright young man of the city who early in the novel commits an error in moral judgment” (p. 281).
6 Henry James has deftly described the “inveterate system” of Tollope's love story: “There is a young lady who has two lovers, or a young man who has two sweethearts; we are treated to the innumerable forms in which the predicament may present itself and the consequences, sometimes pathetic, sometimes grotesque, which spring from such false situations.” “Anthony Trollope, 1883,” in The House of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (London, 1957), p. 97.
7 Dustin, pp. 280, 281, et passim.
8 See, for example, Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
9 Trollope's own criticism would seem to support the view that he feels such establishment the primary aim of fiction. Proof is everywhere in his critical writings, but see particularly “On English Prose Fiction as a Rational Amusement,” in Four Lectures, ed. Morris L. Parrish (London, 1938), pp. 110–111; Thackeray, English Men of Letters (New York, n.d.; first published London, Macmillan, 1879), p. 202; and Autobiography, The World's Classics (London, 1953), p. 190. Moreover, the whole of the essay “Novel-Reading,” Nineteenth Century, v (1879), 24–43, is devoted to proof that novels may give worthy precepts.
10 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives, Meridian Books (Cleveland, 1962), pp. 707 ff., explains very neatly the way that the dialectics of politics is used to create a workable society.
11 For a further explanation of the type, see my forthcoming article in NCF, “The Uses of the Village—Form and Theme in Trollope's The Vicar of Bulihampton.”
12 To demonstrate that the classification here proposed may be used for evaluation as well as for the making of lists, we can note that both He Knew He Was Right and The Last Chronicle of Barset have shapes like the other expanding novels, but deal in their main plots with concerns most typical of intensive novels. Since Trollope seems to have mistaken the shape to give his themes, the nature of the world presented in both cases distorts the tone of the primary plot.