I

PHINEAS FINN was published in March 1869 and quickly established itself as one of Trollope's most successful publications (Sadleir 89–91). The novel, however, was not well received by critics, and Phineas was particularly unpopular, as John Halperin explains:

The most comprehensive work on Phineas has been by Irish historians. Roy Foster has written about Phineas Finn in Paddy & Mr Punch and The Irish Story, FSL Lyons wrote an introduction to Phineas Redux for Oxford World's Classics, and Owen Dudley Edwards investigates the Irish qualities of Phineas Finn in “Anthony Trollope, The Irish Writer.” Notwithstanding the literary insight shown by these historians, their interpretations of Phineas are (understandably) concerned primarily with historical rather than artistic issues.

There's nothing wrong with any of these approaches, but it is disappointing that Phineas's nationality has been ignored or dismissed by literary critics. Shane Leslie represents an extreme but not unusual example of the literary treatment of Phineas in his preface to a 1937 edition of the novel, in which he writes that Phineas “was never a convincing Irish politician”:

It's clear from these comments that the dismissal of Phineas's nationality is based on a limited conception of how an Irish character ought to be presented. Leslie dismisses Phineas as insufficiently “Hibernian” because he has dark rather than red hair, because he doesn't use words like “Bedad,” and because he does not “[kill] a ruffian at Newmarket with his fists.” Robert Welch's Companion is also disappointing. “Although” Phineas is Irish, the novels focus on Westminster, we're told – implying that any Irish character who held a seat in the Houses of Parliament does not warrant inclusion in a Companion to Irish Literature. Both points of view are absurd – so why were they expressed?

One reason for the dominance of these views about Phineas is Trollope's discussion of the character in An Autobiography, written ten years after Phineas Finn. Trollope believed that, although he had made his hero interesting, it was:

One of the most interesting debates about Phineas concerns the source of his character. It is generally accepted that the Palliser novels' Daubeny represents Disraeli, and that Gresham represents Gladstone – but there has been little agreement about whether Phineas was based on a specific Irish politician. Many critics thought that Phineas had been based on John Sadleir, though this view is no longer widely held. Halperin suggests that Trollope based Phineas on Chichester Fortescue, but also mentions as possible sources Trollope's old school-friend, Sir William Gregory, as well as Colonel King-Harman, Joe Parkinson, and Joseph Pope-Hennesy (70, 71). W. J. McCormack suggests that Trollope based him on another of his Irish friends, Isaac Butt – a view that accounts for certain aspects of Phineas's character, but does little justice to his political beliefs. Roy Foster also suggests Gregory and Fortescue as possible sources and goes on to draw a parallel between the career of Phineas and:

This debate about the source of Phineas's character has never been resolved – and therein lies an interesting point. Phineas closely resembles at least six real Irish politicians, and is comparable to numerous others. This proves one thing conclusively: Phineas is similar to a large number of Irish people who actually existed during Trollope's time. It is therefore obviously incorrect to describe him as insufficiently “Hibernian.”

Why then did Trollope consider Phineas's nationality a blunder? To answer this question, we need to consider the decade between the composition of Phineas Finn and An Autobiography. Two things distinguish the periods. First, when Trollope wrote Phineas Finn, his reputation – and his sales – were at their peak; but when he wrote An Autobiography, both had so declined that “one rarely finds an important critic giving Trollope any serious or sustained attention” (Skilton 32). One explanation for Trollope's disappointment with Phineas is that, while his nationality may not have alienated Trollope's readers, it did little to maintain their loyalty. The second – and more important – difference between the two periods is that, when Trollope wrote An Autobiography, Home Rule had become the dominant ideology of political life, both in Ireland and Britain.

II

WRITING ABOUT TROLLOPE's earlier Irish novel Castle Richmond (1860) Margaret Kelleher points out Trollope's:

However, as the series progressed and Irish politics changed, Trollope found it increasingly difficult to maintain Phineas's objective stance without compromising the realism of the series. Indeed, the changes in Irish politics caused problems for Trollope even before he had completed Phineas Finn. Trollope had planned the novel during 1866–67, but made significant alterations as the novel progressed. He signaled the most important of these in a public lecture given shortly before its serialization concluded. “There is at the moment” he said “a great question forward as to the tenure of land in Ireland. I may have my ideas upon it, and may desire to promulgate them in a novel” (Four Lectures 113). The final chapters of Phineas Finn were an attempt to achieve this aim.

Trollope's desire to deal with Land Tenure caused him to send Phineas to Ireland in the company of his mentor, Mr Monk, to investigate the Land Question at first hand. Trollope clearly wishes to have Phineas act as a mouthpiece for the views he had formed and desired to “promulgate in a novel.” The problem with this is that Trollope had already stated in the novel that the Liberal party, to which Phineas belongs, wished to vote contrary to these views; and so Trollope is forced to solve the inconsistency hastily. He does this by having Phineas resign from office and marry Mary Flood Jones.

The way the marriage and resignation are brought about is interesting. Phineas speaks publicly in Limerick and Dublin about Tenant Right – not so much from conviction as the “delights of [a] wild irresponsible oratory” (PF 263; bk. 2, ch. 66) which Phineas indulges precisely because he is in Ireland. His ill-judged public declarations on the issue make it impossible for him to vote in accordance with the wishes of his party and, as a result, he resigns from office and returns to Clare. Phineas's career had before that point been progressing well, and his marriage to Marie Goesler had seemed imminent – but his return to Ireland destroys both. It is interesting that Trollope explicitly represents Ireland as the cause of Phineas's resignation: in doing so, he signifies that the country has a seductive edge that lures its inhabitants into irresponsible and reckless behavior. This is a very unsatisfying conclusion to the novel.

That Trollope believed it unsatisfying is implied by the speed with which he returned to Phineas in Phineas Redux, which he said ought to be seen as the second part of one narrative about the character. That book largely ignores Irish politics, and Phineas spends little time in Ireland. This seems a sensible decision: Irish politics after 1870 was moving toward Home Rule, and any treatment of this volatile issue risked a repeat of the problems Trollope faced with the Land Question.

Trollope's problems with Phineas did not return until the general election of 1874, when the issue of Home Rule became unavoidable. As Lyons states:

Trollope dealt with the dominance of the Irish Parliamentary Party by making Palliser the head of a coalition rather than a minority government. That this decision was forced on him by Irish politics is clear from an early point in the novel:

The second problem for Trollope was that he had created in the late 1860s an Irish politician of a kind disappearing by the mid-1870s. This forced him into an awkward maneuver: Phineas must oppose Home Rule. When asked if he would give the Irish Home Rule, he replies:

Although The Prime Minister focuses primarily on Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser, it is clear that Trollope's sympathy for Phineas remains consistent in this novel. Phineas defends Palliser against a charge of electoral malpractice, and is asked to take a case of libel on his behalf. He is presented therefore as a trustworthy and respected member of Palliser's political circle. Yet Trollope knew that his character was becoming increasingly unrealistic and so, by the series' sixth installment, The Duke's Children (1880), Phineas is no more than a “cipher” (Edwards 20). Although introduced as “our old friend” (202; ch. 26), Phineas plays little part of consequence in the novel: there is a running joke about his “bellicose” parliamentary attacks on the Conservative Prime Minister, but one feels that Phineas is mentioned only because Trollope had married him to Marie Goesler, who plays an important role in this part of the series. The result of this is that, as the Palliser novels progress, Phineas is pushed to the series' margins, implying to Trollope's English readers that such an Irish character really is too good to be true.

III

IT SHOULD BY NOW be somewhat easier to understand why, when he considered the character in 1880, Trollope thought of Phineas's nationality as a blunder: the alteration in Irish politics that occurred while the series was progressing made Phineas's position in the novels untenable. However, the main problem with the Irish element of the Palliser series is that Trollope attempted to include Ireland in the series' thematic consideration of marriage.

The central relationship in the Palliser series is between Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser, and each book re-interprets their relationship from a different perspective. The series opens with Can You Forgive Her? which describes Glencora's decision to suppress her love for Burgo Fitzgerald, and to marry Palliser because it is her duty to do so. The marriage is shown to be relatively successful: an heir is produced, Palliser disciplines Glencora, Glencora humanizes Palliser, and they learn to love each other. Other kinds of marriage are examined in the series. There is the loveless marriage for money of Kennedy and Laura in Phineas Finn and Lopez and Emily in The Prime Minister. There is the marriage based on mutual respect and love, as of Phineas and Marie in Phineas Redux and Lucy and Frank in The Eustace Diamonds. And there are numerous other explorations of this theme. One of these is the relationship of Ireland with England, constructed by Trollope as a marriage of convenience between a masculine England and a feminine Ireland.

Trollope's use of allegory and imagery has, particularly in relation to Ireland, tended to be overlooked. As Juliet McMaster points out, this is because critics have unquestioningly accepted Trollope's dismissive comments in An Autobiography about the composition of Phineas Finn. This clearly is a mistake: there is no basis for mistaking Trollope's frankness in An Autobiography as honesty or critical accuracy. Trollope, writes McMaster:

Trollope, particularly in Phineas Finn, shows a similar attitude to the Irish. For example, Phineas requires the intervention of Aspasia Fitzgibbon, an Irishwoman living in London, to solve his financial difficulties. “Everybody knew Aspasia Fitzgibbon,” writes Trollope:

This leads to an interesting treatment of Phineas's sexuality, which is spoken of by the novels' characters in the same way as the sexuality of Victorian women was: with suspicion. As Mr Bonteen says of Phineas's reluctance to vote, “There's nothing like being a little coy to set off a girl's charms” (PF 296; bk. 2, ch. 69), suggesting that he sees Phineas's politics as some kind of flirtatious, feminine wile. Furthermore, his sexual appetite is consistently described in promiscuous terms. During the two novels, Phineas proposes to four different women and charms numerous others. Interestingly, the only character comparable to Phineas in this respect is Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of The Eustace Diamonds.

A further consequence of this feminization of Phineas is that he is – particularly in England – remarkably silent. His first experience of speech at parliament is disastrous; he can respond to the advances of Marie Goesler only with silence; and it is Phineas who takes the role of listener to Palliser in the celebrated scene at the end of The Prime Minister in which Palliser expounds his political credo. This silence in England is interesting when compared with Phineas's eloquence in Ireland, discussed above.

This passivity is not just one of speech but also occasionally one of action: Marie Goesler travels to Europe to uncover the secret that proves Phineas's innocence in Phineas Redux; he simply languishes in prison. This reverses the male/female roles that persist throughout the Victorian novel, where the hero usually proves the heroine's right to legitimacy or frees her from incarceration.

This use of Phineas did not simply demonstrate Trollope's political convictions: it also solved a formal problem. Trollope wished to use his novels to express the views he could not express in parliament, yet in doing so he had to make some compromises for the sake of his readers. Palliser acts throughout the series as Trollope's ideal statesman, who expresses the politics Trollope himself held. Precisely because he is an ideal statesman – committed to such issues as the decimalization of British coinage – he cannot be a conventional Victorian hero, as Trollope indicates in Can You Forgive Her?:

One further point must be made about this representation: it is an exact portrayal of an Irish politician at Westminster before Parnell. As W. E. Vaughan explains:

The dominant feature of this symbolism of Phineas as feminine is a characterization of Ireland as wife to England's husband, which allowed both countries to fit into a metaphor for the Act of Union whereby the feminine Irish would be united with – though inferior to – the English. Trollope expounds his theory as follows:

The use of marriage as a metaphor that would allow writers to explore the consequences of the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain had been well established by the time Trollope began the Palliser series. As early as 1812, Maria Edgeworth was using the marriage of Colambre and Agnes in The Absentee as a way of exploring the relationship between Ireland and England, but the clearest example of this occurs in Gerald Griffin's The Collegians (1829), a novel Trollope knew well. But the metaphor was widely used, and Trollope returned to it himself in An Eye for An Eye, his short novel about the relationship between the English Fred Neville and the Irish Kate O'Hara. Interestingly, An Eye for an Eye was composed while the final installments of Phineas Finn were being serialized (though it was not published until nine years later, in 1879), which offers strong evidence that Trollope knew exactly what he was doing with the Act of Union in the Palliser series – regardless of his own comments to the contrary in An Autobiography.

Crucially, the relationship of Ireland and England is an exact analogy of the relationship between Palliser and Glencora. Glencora, like Phineas, provides the novel with color; and, like Ireland, is treated with respect because she has been forced into a marriage of convenience. Glencora humanizes Palliser just as Phineas adds color to English politics; Palliser disciplines Glencora, just as Ireland is to be “taught” that Home Rule is not to its benefit. Finally, and most importantly, the Pallisers learn to love each other although they do not always understand each other, just as Trollope suggests Ireland and England must have a “good understanding.”

Having achieved this uniformity of the theme of marriage through the five Palliser novels, Trollope had to bring the series to a satisfactory conclusion with The Duke's Children. In this novel, he finally tackles the question posed throughout the series: was it right that Glencora married from duty and not love? This question is occasioned by the desire of Palliser's children to marry “beneath themselves” for love: Silverbridge wishes to marry the American Isabel Boncassen, and Mary, the penniless commoner Frank Tregear, both ignoring what their father sees as their “duty” as members of the aristocracy. Instead, they make the choice their mother had lacked the courage to make: Glencora had loved Fitzgerald, but married Palliser. The plot is movingly dramatized by Palliser's conflicting feelings of affection for his children and love for his now dead wife. If Palliser permits his children to marry from love and contrary to their “duty,” as they both desire to do, he is admitting that his marriage to Glencora ought never to have taken place. Palliser eventually capitulates, and this represents both a beginning and an end, as Hermione Lee articulates:

This is a satisfactory and moving conclusion to the series, and its power is that it forces the reader to re-evaluate all that has come before it. To do so must eventually lead to a re-evaluation of the symbolism of the Union between Ireland and England. The logic is clear. The Pallisers' marriage resulted in many good things, but marriage from duty now seems undesirable. It follows that the Union may also have resulted in good things, but that the marriage of convenience belongs to an age that had passed. The formal conclusion of the series in this way undermines the symbolical construction that Trollope had earlier forged – showing the de-stabilizing effect not only of Phineas, but also of the entire Irish element of the Palliser series. It is therefore clear that Trollope's decision to include Ireland and an Irish character in his political novels was in many ways a blunder – but a very interesting and important one.

IV

PHINEAS FINN was a financial success, but it was the peak of a career that thereafter declined. Nonetheless, Trollope had always been aware that Irish subjects would be unpopular with his readers, and had continued to write about them anyway. He returned to Phineas in Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister because he believed the character to be a success. I would suggest that the reason for Trollope's calling Phineas a blunder was that the Irish element of the series, combined with the volatility of the Irish influence on politics, meant that the structure of Trollope's Palliser series was thoroughly de-stabilized by his inclusion of an Irish character, just as its realism was compromised. This shows how important Phineas's Irishness is – it had a major impact on the concluding parts of the Palliser series.

Trollope's “blunder” cannot justify ignoring Phineas's nationality, as too many scholars of Trollope have done. On the contrary, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux are sympathetic treatments of Ireland that deserve closer attention. In the Palliser series, we have a portrait of an Irish character that seems strange to readers today, but who was so commonplace to contemporary readers that his nationality was not considered remarkable. This shows the value of the Palliser series to scholars of Irish writing.

Trollope deserves respect for his treatment of Ireland, Irish politics, and the Irish themselves. His commitment to the Union was clearly based on an affection for all three, and not from a desire to exploit or oppress the country in the stereotypical imperialistic fashion. It therefore seems appropriate to conclude that Trollope's work reveals a great deal about the representations of the Irish in Britain – but he is also someone who might refute some of the stereotypical representations of the Victorian Englishman in Irish culture.