WHICH OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE'S novels, at the time of publication, was most widely translated into other languages?¹

The answer, Castle Richmond (1860), a novel that received, at best, a lukewarm reception in Britain and Ireland and was derided by one twentieth-century scholar as a “complete failure” (Walpole 123), may surprise many. As the gap between the translation history and the critical reception in Great Britain indicates, this novel about the Irish famine appealed more to Continental readers than British ones. What could be the source of this discrepancy? Trollope's Castle Richmond should have been a source of comfort to British readers since, as I will argue, its romantic allegory ultimately supports Ireland's union with England and the British management of the Irish potato famine. Trollope, however, delivers his logical reasons in the form of a romance, a vehicle whose underlying mechanisms are not logic but love. The emotional register of Trollope's novel frequently contradicts the pro-British arguments that he embeds in the allegory and explicitly articulates in authorial asides. The friction between the emotional and ideological responses to the text does not mar the novel on its own but does highlight the rationalizations that justify the British approach to Ireland, thus raising uncomfortable associations for a British audience.

It might seem strange to argue that Trollope, the great realist, wrote an allegorical novel. Indeed, at first glance the conventional nineteenth-century realism of Castle Richmond would lead a reader away from such a conclusion. Studies of allegory, however, suggest that allegory often entwines itself with other genres. Angus Fletcher in his seminal work on allegory warns readers not to hunt solely for pure forms of allegory as it “is never present as a pure modality” (312). Theresa Kelly explicitly argues that this blurring of boundaries must happen because post-Renaissance allegory has only been able to survive by “making border raids on the very categories that have been presented as its contraries: realism, mimesis, empiricism, and history” (2). Readers may also fail to recognize the allegory in Castle Richmond because they are unaware that Trollope bases his novel's love triangle on the allegorical romance, a structure common to nineteenth-century Irish novels. This device grew out of the national tale, a genre created mainly by Irish women novelists at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Trumpener details in Bardic Nationalism, one of the three main hallmarks of the national tale is a relationship between a British traveler and a Celtic guide that leads to a marriage symbolically uniting the two cultures. Trollope, who was well read in Irish literature,²

modifies this common plot device to make his own argument about the political situation in Ireland. Trumpener claims that this practice of adaptation was common between British and Irish nineteenth-century novelists. She argues that such “characters, set pieces, and plots are constantly borrowed back and forth … even among writers of sharply divergent political views who claim to disapprove of each other's work; in many cases, in fact, they mark their political differences in the way they order and recombine the same generic repertoire” (131).

In Castle Richmond, one of the two main plots revolves around a love triangle that allegorically depicts Ireland choosing between independence or enhanced ties with Great Britain. The broad outlines of this plot allegorically enact the political desires of Trollope, who personally disapproved of Ireland's bids for greater independence as his hard work improving and expanding the Irish mail service provided, to his mind, conclusive evidence that Ireland was well served by its connection to Great Britain. To depict the benefit of Ireland remaining within its union with Great Britain, Trollope has Ireland, represented by Lady Clara Desmond, decide between two suitors. Owen Fitzgerald, her earlier and more passionate attachment, represents the older, Gaelic Ireland, while his cousin, Herbert Fitzgerald, her second and more sensible suitor, represents Anglo-Ireland. Clara, more physically and emotionally attracted to Owen, decides, upon mature deliberation, to pick the practical benefits of a union with the richer, more powerful, and more stable Herbert.

Anthony Trollope's interest in Irish issues stems from his lengthy residence there. He lived in Ireland for eighteen years, almost a third of his life. In 1841 at the age of twenty-six he left behind a miserable life as a civil servant in London's General Post Office to become a clerk in the west coast of Ireland. He did well for himself, was promoted, and traveled and lived in various locations in Ireland. Even when his work took him abroad, he maintained his permanent residence in Ireland until he moved back to England at the age of forty-four. Because he believed that his time in Ireland allowed him to know “accurately the life of people” (Autobiography 80) there, he chose Irish subjects for his first two novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847) and The Kellys and the O'Kelly's; or Landlords and Tenants (1848). The novels did not do well, and despite being warned repeatedly by publishers, friends, and family “that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others” (Autobiography 78), writing on Ireland continued to interest him. As a farewell to Ireland, he wrote his third Irish novel, Castle Richmond, and at the time of his death in 1883 he was working on his fourth Irish novel, The Landleagers, an unfinished work that was published posthumously.

The Repeal movement, which sought to abolish the Act of Union of 1800, brought the question of Ireland's fidelity to England to Trollope's attention. Daniel O'Connell started the drive for greater Irish independence soon after Trollope moved to Ireland, but by the mid-1840s, internal divisions in the Repeal organization, O'Connell's death, and the more pressing problem of the Great Famine crushed the political drive. The drama of the movement so captured Trollope that he set the start of his second novel, The Kellys and the O'Kelly's; or Landlords and Tenants, at O'Connell's sedition trial. While Trollope makes no explicit comments about the worthiness of the Repeal movement, he characterized its later reincarnation, Parnell's Home Rule movement of 1870-90, as “a nuisance” (Autobiography 73) and in a letter to his wife in the spring of 1882 says his “own idea [is] that we ought to see the Parnell set put down” (Letters 963).

Trollope's choice to have Ireland's fidelity to England be tested by an old Gaelic love reflects some of the rhetoric of the cultural and political movements in nineteenth-century Ireland. Contradictory impulses beset the Irish quest for nationalism. Constitutional nationalists argued for Ireland's independence in legal terms. The United Irelanders and Young Irishmen by and large envisioned an Ireland where the concept of the Irish nation could unite the disparate strands of society. To define exactly what it meant to be Irish, however, intellectuals looked to old Irish folktales, legends, songs, archeology, and history, aspects of the culture that by and large sprung from the heritage of the Gaelic, Catholic population. This tendency to define Irishness in terms of a past legacy eventually grew into the cultural nationalist movement, which argued that this past and Ireland's inherent cultural difference from England were in themselves grounds for Irish independence.

In Castle Richmond, Trollope assigns distinctive traits to his characters so that they can allegorically represent components of the debate regarding Irish independence, particularly the issues raised by the cultural nationalists. Clara Desmond, who represents Ireland, is female, the most common marker of the symbolic Irish character. She is descended from the ancient kings of Ireland (5), and, like many nineteenth-century representations of Ireland, comes from a once wealthy aristocratic family now of greatly reduced means. Her family home occupies a suitably wild environment, “a bleak, unadorned region, almost among the mountains” (5), and her family name, Desmond, recalls the historical Earls of Desmond, a family of Hibernicized Normans who became more Irish than the Irish themselves (Wittig 107). Clara's mother, Mary, the Countess of Desmond, is incongruously “English to the backbone” (9), but while this mixed Gaelic/Norman/English background is not typical for a representative of Ireland, it does accurately represent the hybrid nature of Ireland and suggests Trollope's desire for an Ireland closely tied to England, a position he advocates in his non-fiction writings.

The two distantly related cousins who fight for Lady Clara's love, Sir Herbert Fitzgerald and Owen Fitzgerald, also have markers that allow them to function on an allegorical level. While related and thus possessing a rough degree of parity, Herbert represents a newer Ireland more closely aligned with its British neighbor, and Owen represents an older Ireland more closely aligned with its Gaelic past. Herbert's Oxford education and desire to stand as a member of Parliament connect him with the members of England's ruling class. He is wealthy and landed, and his family's well-maintained property, the eponymous Castle, is “a good, substantial, modern family residence” that looks like it “might have been in Hampshire or Essex” (3). Even his first name bespeaks his British sensibility. Likewise, Owen's ancient Irish name suggests his allegiances. While a gentleman, he is only a small squire with an income of eight hundred pounds a year. Spending his time hunting and entertaining, he lives as an old-fashioned Gaelic lord at Hap House with his servant named Thady, thus reminding readers of the rowdy lords of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.

These life situations begin to align the two men with their respective Anglo and Gaelic identities, but in their opposing temperaments the two competing cousins most come to represent the two nations. They typify the dichotomy articulated by Declan Kiberd: “if John Bull was industrious and reliable, Paddy was held to be indolent and contrary; if the former was mature and rational, the latter must be unstable and emotional” (30). Strikingly handsome and athletic, Owen is “generous and high-spirited” (323) in his thoughts and actions. His manner “was chivalrous and bold, his language full of poetry, and his manner of loving eager, impetuous, and of a kin to worship” (118). His extreme charisma attracts not only people but even animals, causing horses and dogs to follow at his heels. Even his faults run along such dramatic lines: he is “reckless, passionate, prone to depreciate the opinion of others, extravagant in his thoughts and habits, ever ready to fight, both morally and physically, those who did not at a moment's notice agree with him” (272-73). At his worst, his penchant for hunting, card playing, and drinking makes him appear “idle, dissipated, and extravagant” (119). Herbert's qualities are of a different sort. He is all “virtues and … goodness” (182). He stands out for “his domestic virtues, his industry and thorough respectability” (298). People like him because “he is so thoroughly well educated, so thoroughly well conducted, … so warm-hearted, so advantageously situated in all his circumstances” (123). His faults, if they can be called such, stem from the fact that the members of his family are such “humdrum, quiet-going people” (15) who are “not very gay” (17). Herbert's steady and rational character represents the influence of England, while Owen's passionate and heroic temperament represents the influence of Ireland's Gaelic past. And the central question of the novel is, which side will Lady Clara, the representative of Ireland, choose?

The reasons why Clara eventually comes to choose Herbert over Owen enact allegorically why Trollope feels Ireland should choose to stay in its “union” with England instead of choosing a more autonomous state. Ireland's financial position and political influence on the world stage would be lessened were it not part of the United Kingdom. In a parallel fashion, Clara selects Herbert because, as her mother warns her, marrying Owen would dramatically lower her status. While Owen is a gentleman, he is only a small squire with an income of eight hundred pounds a year. As Clara's mother maintains “Wealth and position are necessary to the station in which she has been born. She is an earl's daughter, penniless as she is” (166).

Trollope also argues that Ireland does not have the moral character necessary for independence,³

as witnessed by the failings of Owen. Even though his disappointment over the loss of Clara's love exacerbates his misbehavior, his reputation as a “rake and roué, gambler and spendthrift” (178) makes him an unsuitable candidate as a marriage partner. As Owen represents Gaelic Ireland, this argument reiterates uncomfortable myths about the native Irish; Trollope, however, complicates these stereotypes by suggesting that the “rumors” of Owen's misbehavior are exaggerated and raising the possibility that “his misdoings arose from his unhappiness; that he drank and gambled only because the gates of Desmond Court were no longer open to him” (119). This last characterization carries insight into the psychological price of colonialism as it portrays the colonized group's misbehavior arising not from an inherent temperament but from the trauma resulting from loss. This maneuver interrogates the English assumption that Irish problems stem solely from essential Irish flaws and makes Owen sympathetic despite his reported failings, thus maintaining him as a plausible romantic partner.

While the decision of Clara and her family rests on issues of finances, rank and behavior, Clara also feels justified in throwing aside Owen because when she had pledged herself to Owen “she had been almost a child” (162). Herbert, who knows of her past, realizes “that she had once accepted Owen's love, … but since that, in a soberer mood, and with maturer judgment, she had accepted his” (333). As he says to his fiancée, “at the age you were then, it was impossible that you should know your own mind” (186). It is hard to imagine that Clara at seventeen would be much more mature than the “innocent, young, and ignorant” (25) girl of sixteen, but Trollope must incorporate this argument as to her relative youth at the time of her vow to invalidate one of Owen's more pressing claims: that he should be her husband not simply because of the intensity but the length of his passion. As he argues to Herbert, she “was my own before you had ever known her” (333) and on the basis of that fact refuses to relinquish his suit. Owen's appeal to history parallels a persistent tendency in Irish politics. According to D. George Boyce in Nationalism in Ireland:

This line of reasoning appears in the famous refrain of a ballad composed by Thomas Davis, one of the leading cultural nationalists of the 1840's. His poem does not cry out for Ireland to become a nation but to be “a nation once again.” This phrase accomplishes two tasks: it declares that Ireland was once an independent state and argues that Ireland deserves independence from England based on this prior, original claim. Likewise Owen argues for the existence of the original bond between him and Clara and that it should have precedence over the later one solidified between her and Herbert.

The most ambiguous reason why Clara feels justified in throwing over Owen, however, critiques the nature of this original contract. When Owen originally declares his love and asks Clara, “Can you, will you love me?” (27), the timid girl can only let a

The closest she comes to binding herself is to promise that she will always remember that Owen will be true to her. However, while it is clear to the reader in this scene that Clara has indeed not agreed to marry Owen, this is less than clear in the rest of the text as the initial ambiguous declaration of love grows to become something it was not. Soon after this scene, Clara “acknowledged to herself that she had given him a pledge, although she had given it in silence” (36). Later she thinks, “It was true that she had promised her love to this man, as far as such promise could be conveyed by one word of assent” (162). Clara's mother also believes in this version of events, and she scolds Owen, saying “you extracted from her one word of folly; and now you would take advantage of that foolish word” (164). Owen himself also clearly believes that she bound herself to him on that day: as he writes in a letter to Clara, “I have pledged myself to you; and as that pledge has been accepted, I am entitled to some consideration” (158). Even the narrator distorts the original proceedings, commenting that “when those earlier vows were made, what had she cared for prudence” (118). The characters' various interpretations of that moment and the reader's own faulty memory (unless he or she goes back to find the exact scene) make what actually happened between the two characters ambiguous by the middle of the text. While demonstrating the oddly powerful and tenacious belief in the original promise, the ambiguity also suggests that Ireland actually has no binding contract with its Gaelic side.

While the text explicitly discusses these reasons not to marry Owen, another sub-plot, the legitimacy conspiracy, implicitly comments on Owen's claims. In this sub-plot two scoundrels, Matthew and Abraham Mollett, raise questions as to the legitimacy of the marriage of Sir Thomas and Lady Mary Fitzgerald, Herbert's parents. When this problem is exposed, Herbert relinquishes his rights to Castle Richmond and lets them fall to his closest kin, his cousin Owen. By the end of the novel, however, it becomes clear that indeed the marriage is legitimate and Herbert is the rightful heir. This questioning of legitimacy is a common plot in Victorian literature, but it bears extra weight in this novel as Trollope's allegory explores if England or Gaelic Ireland is the legitimate mate for Ireland. The plot performs the opinion that although it may appear, as the cultural nationalists argue, that Gaelic Ireland is the rightful inheritor of the land, time will eventually reveal that this supposition is based on lies and deceit, leaving England as the rightful claimant and possessor of the territory. Corbett rightfully maintains that while the subplot's conclusion demonstrates that the legitimacy menace is merely a “phantom threat” (144), its inclusion “suggests Trollope's ongoing consciousness of the problem within colonial authority” (145) in Ireland.

The weight of these accumulated factors allows Clara to forget her earlier love and remain faithful to her new one. By the end of the novel she can think:

In her maturity her passion for Owen dissolves, and she consigns her recent history to the distant past. She marries Herbert and will live a life of wealth and privilege. The novel ends on a nostalgic note with Owen's self-imposed exile from Ireland, a move recalling the Flight of the Wild Geese⁴ and representing the banishment of the country's Gaelic past from Ireland's union with England.

***

THE REASONS the text provides for Clara's ultimate choice of Herbert can be summed up in one word: pragmatism. Owen's lack of status and wealth plus his misbehavior make him, in the eyes of the text, an unsuitable beau. Any promises made between Clara and her old lover cannot be considered binding due to Clara's age and the ambiguity of the original vow. The problem with the novel is that Trollope uses romance, a form that celebrates not pragmatism but passion. The need for romantic narrative tension to propel the plot forces Trollope to deny closure to Herbert and Clara's relationship and maintain Owen as a legitimate romantic threat. In doing so, Trollope ultimately validates the intense attachment between Clara and Owen. Furthermore, Owen and Herbert, to work as allegorical characters that fit with Trollope's argument, must have certain specific characteristics, but the qualities Trollope selects to identify Herbert as Anglo and Owen as old Irish make Owen the much more appealing love interest. In a final blow, Trollope's use of a romance plot and the reader's resulting expectation regarding the triumph of true love clashes with Trollope's conclusion. These narrative concerns combine to make an argument at cross-purposes with Trollope's allegory, thus sabotaging the power of Trollope's political argument in Castle Richmond.

As in most nineteenth-century novels, Castle Richmond must maintain a degree of narrative tension to propel the plot forward and keep the reader interested, so Trollope maintains Owen as a romantic threat to Clara and Herbert's relationship. The problem is that this strategy validates the original attraction between the two lovers and puts the eventual marriage in a poor light. Trollope begins the novel with the romance between Owen and Clara. As early as the third chapter the reader finds Owen professing “I love you with all my heart and soul” (25) and Clara reflects that “she dearly loved the man” (35). Soon she meets Herbert. He proposes and she accepts, but the narrator states:

For such phlegmatic reasons Herbert becomes her fiancée. Once Herbert's proposal has been accepted, however, Owen does not recede from the text but continues to haunt it. Even on Herbert's first leave-taking after winning Clara's hand, the newly betrothed girl: She spends much time trying to rationalize her engagement to Herbert, but her justifications only reinforce for the reader the strength of her earlier attachment and make Herbert appear bland and boring. The greatest pleasure she anticipates from her marriage, having Herbert's sisters as sisters-in-law (125), exposes her lack of interest in Herbert himself, as does her thoughts of his “broad acres.” Her rationalizations are coupled with repeated moments when her thoughts turn to Owen, as when she attempts to convince herself that she has made the right choice: The end of this passage, with its atypically lyrical, touching charm emphasizing the power of their love, is one example of how again and again in the text, her love for Owen reasserts itself and forces the reader to acknowledge the powerful underlying attraction between the two characters. This haunting of her thoughts by Owen acknowledges the intensity of her bond with him and thus Ireland's original bond with its Gaelic past. This weakens Trollope's argument by making Clara's dismissal of Owen and Ireland's rejection of its past seem more like a betrayal than a mature decision. Trollope attempts to redeem Clara's mercenary behavior through the legitimacy sub-plot. When Herbert loses his property, Clara decides to remain true to him. Before she had merely accepted him, but now that he must earn his own bread his “misfortune had given him a charm in her eyes which was not all his own” (377–78), making her finally grow to love him. However, this later example of faithfulness and affection in the face of financial ruin does not compensate for the betrayal of her first true love for financial gain.

In constructing an allegorical argument, Trollope must assign markers to his competing male love interests, and he chooses characteristics that reflect prevailing British beliefs regarding essential Celtic and Anglo temperaments. Unfortunately for Trollope, these markers align Owen closer to the requirements of the romantic hero and thus interfere with the realism of the plot. While Owen's charisma and raw sexual power articulate the strong pull of the romantic, heroic Gaelic past, he appears as the more engaging and appealing romantic interest, which may lead a reader to believe that Clara has made a poor choice in abandoning her true love for the hum-drum Herbert. On an allegorical level, readers will feel as well that Ireland would also be making a poor decision to choose the staid, respectable England over passionate nationalism.

Furthermore, the trend in English novels during the eighteenth and nineteenth century was, as Nancy Armstrong argues in Desire and Domestic Fiction, “to contest the reigning notion of kinship relations that attached most power and privilege to certain family lines” (5). Most novels endorse characters who ultimately make marriage decisions more on the basis of personal worth than class and pecuniary distinctions. While British authors often uphold class distinctions by making personal worth concomitant with wealth and privilege, here the alignment is not so clear as Owen, despite his failings, ultimately comes across as a good, noble man. Thus Clara's decision to choose Herbert, a decision based more on financial and class distinctions than on personal worth, runs counter to this trend in English novels and ultimately makes her appear mercenary. Herbert, likewise, appears more motivated by pragmatic class concerns than passion. Owen worries that Herbert is “of a calibre too cold for love” (340) and frets that his cousin does not truly love Clara but only values her “for her beauty, for her rank, for her grace and peerless manner” (340). Indeed, the narrator's revelation that Herbert desired a woman of “gentle blood, a good heart, a sweet temper, and … attraction of person and manners” (127) hints that he loves her at least as much for her qualifications as herself. Even Lady Desmond believes that Herbert loves Clara “with a quiet, gentleman-like, everyday attachment” but that Owen loves her “with the old, true, passionate love of which she had read in books” (297). For readers who, like Lady Desmond, value the narrative of true love found in novels, the ultimate union of Herbert and Clara, with its endorsement of marriage based on class and financial standing, can be unsettling.

The pragmatic arguments for Clara's choice of Herbert over Owen articulate an argument for Ireland's continued union with England, but the narrative structure undermines the reasoning and by default ultimately validates Owen's arguments for his suit. An anonymous review, entitled “The Novels of Mr. Anthony Trollope,” published in the Dublin Review of October 1872, states the case:

An unsigned review in the Athenaeum of May of 1860 puts the issue even more pointedly: This problem disrupts the novel not only realistically but allegorically as well. If the reader believes Clara has made a poor choice and should really be with Owen, allegorically that means that Ireland would make a poor choice to remain in the United Kingdom instead of returning to its Gaelic past. The power of Owen's character undercuts Trollope's intended argument that Ireland would be better off choosing stronger ties with England, thus creating a disjunction between the text's ideological and emotional message.

***

AS A HANDFUL of critics such as E. W. Wittig have noted, Trollope “draws an analogy between the misfortunes of Ireland and those of the Fitzgeralds, particularly Herbert” (106).⁵

Herbert's struggle to come to terms with this disinheritance, which he views as “heavy sorrows which God in his mercy and wisdom had now thought fit to lay upon them,” (256) parallels the struggle the population of Ireland has with the famine, an economic disaster that Trollope portrays as yet another act of God. Trollope thus hints that the Irish should endure the famine in the same noble way that Herbert comes to terms with his own personal crisis and explicitly argues that the end results will ultimately reward them, just as it has for Herbert. A connection exists as well between the famine and the love story in Castle Richmond. While the text's romantic allegory argues why Ireland should stay in the Union, Trollope's argument about the famine provides concrete proof of how Ireland is well served by this Union, thus providing factual evidence for his political position. A survey of the collected criticism on the novel suggests that most critics read the love story realistically, not allegorically, and thus overlook this connection between the famine and the romance.⁶ I believe that this lacunae has occurred because most readers are either unaware of the sub-genre of the allegorical romance, a novel form familiar to nineteenth-century Irish readers, or do not recognize an Irish form when it springs from the pen of a British writer. This inability to identify the trope and thus decode the political argument behind the romantic triangle erases an important dimension of the text and makes the connection between the plot and the setting opaque. Furthermore, the passion and horror of the famine scenes derail the attempted message, the good governing of England, that Trollope hopes to communicate there, just as the passion of the original love derails the attempted message in the romantic triangle, the benefits of union with England. Thus again, emotions intervene to destroy the ideological argument in Trollope's novel.

The famine setting allows Trollope to expand his discussion of the benefits of union with England by providing specific examples that demonstrate how the British government was “prompt, wise, and beneficent” and that “the efforts of those who managed the poor were, as a rule, unremitting, honest, impartial, and successful” (69). The author intrudes into the text and with his confident tone reflects that “it is in such emergencies as these that the watching and the wisdom of a government are necessary; and I shall always think – as I did think then – that the wisdom of its action and the wisdom of its abstinence from action were very good” (346). The novel shows how the government decided that to discourage indolence, food should not be given away but earned (200, 205). To discourage the black market, meal was not sold at reduced rates but at its market price (84). Those people who could not avail themselves of the work programs to earn money for food were to go straight to the workhouse. The narrator relates how “the Government had fully recognised the necessity of taking the whole matter into its own hands. They were responsible for the preservation of the people, and they acknowledged their responsibility” (200), yet the actual obligation for dispersing the food or assistance was “left to private competition” (200). Some characters, responding emotionally to the horror of the famine, want to break these rational regulations, but logical reasons, couched in various scientific terminologies such as economics or medicine, stop them. For example, Clara and Herbert's sisters want to sweeten the Indian pudding the peasants receive with milk and sugar, but they learn “the deep principles of political economy, which soon taught them not to waste on the comforts of a few that which was so necessary for the life of many” (77). Officials all over the country could make hard choices “without express compassion for the individuals that met their eyes” because they were like surgeons who did not fear “the cutting off of maimed limbs, and wrenching out from their sockets of smashed bones” (413). Indeed, in their decisions they needed to make a few suffer to profit many, so they became “the hardest of hearts, and most obdurate in their denials” (413).

The narrator not only compliments the government's actions but also deflects potential criticism by disabusing the idea, held in the novel by the peasantry, “that the rich men of the land could stay the famine if they would; that the fault was with them; that the famine could be put down if the rich would but stir themselves to do it” (83). In a section where the author directly breaks into the text, Trollope refutes such ideas by presenting an explanation of the causes of the famine. He places the blame on the subletters, an “idle, genteel class” (68) that “underlet their land in small patches” (67) and thus made a profit without “the work of their brain, or … the sweat of their brow” (67). Trollope contends that the evils of this tenant system:

However, it is not the stresses of this situation itself that caused the famine; rather, this imbalance in society needed a corrective, so “a merciful God sent the remedy which might avail to arrest it” (68). God launched this famine “not in anger, but in mercy” (66) to weed out the bad in the society and improve the good. This cleansing natural disaster decimates the parasitic class, making the famine, which initially appears to be a problem, into a blessing. While he does admit that “The poor cotter suffered sorely under the famine, and under the pestilence which followed the famine;” Trollope adds “he, as a class, has risen from his bed of suffering a better man” (68). Likewise, the “land that had been brought to the dust by man's folly is once more prosperous and happy” (66). While God had sent the famine to correct the country's dreadful wrongs, the narrator relates that “few could recognize as yet with how much mercy God's hand was stretched out over the country” (345) as only “thinking minds … saw that good would come out of this great evil” (346). This Malthusian argument⁷ with its emphasis on natural population checks and their connection to the wisdom of a perfect God surreptitiously suggests that attempts to mitigate the disaster would cause harm, thereby freeing the rich and the government from any call to action.

Trollope, however, tempers his endorsement of the government's logical measures by allowing that England must also dispense some pure charity in order to avert a revolution in Ireland. Trollope makes this argument in an allegorical scene between Herbert and Bridget, a starving peasant woman who represents the general peasantry. Herbert, who “had learned deep lessons of political economy, and was by no means disposed to give promiscuous charity on the road-side” (190), refuses to give charity to the beggar woman. Instead, he interrogates her and suggests that to find relief she “go into the Union” (191) and seek assistance there. While union here and in other places in the text is shorthand for the “Irish poor-law unions” (Famine 13), the use of the word instead of the more commonly used synonym workhouse reinforces his argument that the Irish should find refuge in the Union between Ireland and England. In response to his rebuff, the starving woman threatens to walk to Hap House and ask Owen for help, as he, unlike Herbert, would not “be after sending me to the Kanturk union” (191) and because of that, she wishes Owen “good luck with his love, in spite of all that's come and gone yet” (191). This endorsement of the union of Clara and Owen and its implied disparagement of the union of Herbert and Clara symbolizes that if the peasantry is unable to find succor with the English government, they will seek it from the nationalists, thus threatening the union of England and Ireland. This risk causes Herbert to give the starving woman the money his logic had just denied her. Appeased, she reverses her position and blesses Herbert, praying “May yer wife clave to you all her days” (192). The woman's fickleness, synecdochically representing the fickleness of all Irish peasantry, mirrors Trollope's opinion of the capriciousness of Irish political leaders, whose “duties” Trollope argues in his letters to the Examiner, “have so often [been] assumed without conviction, performed without principles, and abandoned” (Famine 27). As Trollope also believes that “the Irish … are a passive, long-suffering people personally indifferent to those principles to which the English attach so much importance; they are on that account more inclined to follow implicitly the guidance of a master” (Famine 27), Herbert's final authoritarian reassertion of his original argument, that she must “go to the Union” (192), seals off this averted menace and reestablishes the government's position.

The peasant woman's potential threat allegorically demonstrates the limits of the government's perfect adherence to its logical stance towards the famine, a position Trollope endorses in his authorial interjections. The emotional force behind the powerful descriptions of the famine further works against the text's endorsement of the government's actions, thus undercutting the text's explicit message. These moments of emotional intensity break through the smooth surface of Trollope's rationalizations to expose the limits of his logical evidence. The longest famine scene best illustrates this dynamic. Herbert, entering a hovel to seek shelter from the rain, stumbles across a dying woman and her two starved children. The text turns the scene into a spectacle and lingers over the dying women, her terrible position, her listlessness, her nakedness, and her hopelessness. The horror is oddly disturbing and riveting, like a gory accident. Herbert knows “he could not go and leave them without succour” (373), so once he “overcame his disgust” (373), he responds by covering the naked corpse of the toddler with his silk pocket handkerchief, giving the mother “a silver coin or twO” (374), and promising he would send someone to transport them to the workhouse. The help finally does arrive to find all the inhabitants dead.

Herbert's actions, particularity the covering of the grubby dead child with the silk handkerchief, appear simultaneously superfluous and inadequate. He does respond with generous material help, but it proves to be ultimately unhelpful. Except for his offers of physical assistance, he proffers no words of comfort to ease the woman's last day on earth. This inadequate emotional response stems from the class and gender issues that divide them, but the intimacy of their meeting and the extremity of her situation breach these superficial boundaries. The pathos of the woman's situation invites an emotional response from a reader that Herbert's actions are unable to match. In one of his authorial interjections, Trollope attempts to justify Herbert's response, arguing that “there was no hope left in this world for the poor creature whom he saw before him” (370), but this rationalization ultimately fails to validate his reaction. Instead, Herbert's actions symbolize how the response of the government, while financially generous, was emotionally stingy and ultimately useless.

This scene as well as other famine descriptions overpower Trollope's exposition, exposing a gap between what Bill Overton characterizes as Trollope's “ideological view” and his “human response” (23–24). Overton's observation from his book, The Unofficial Trollope, is worth quoting in length:

I agree with Overton that the text's presentation of two different arguments, an ideological and a human one, partially demonstrates Trollope's conflicted personal response to Ireland and the famine. I would however, fine-tune Overton's observation. It is not so much that the text “presents not only the ideological view … but also the human response” as that the text presents an ideological view but elicits a human response. The schism lies between the ideological freight the novel's allegory and authorial interjections represent, and the emotional reaction the text is likely to evoke from a reader. This clash stems from his choice of genre, which circles back to Overton's statements about the “facts” and the form, the allegorical romance novel, that Trollope uses to communicate his ideas. The emotional response instigated by the novel conflicts with Trollope's intended pro-imperial argument, a clash that highlights rather than hides flaws in the logic of the imperial project. This clash would be particularly grating for an audience that wants the cracks in the ideology of the imperial project to be hidden rather than exposed. In their biography of the Trollope family, the Stebbinses discuss how British readers' allegiances help explain why Castle Richmond met with such a chilly reception with the British reading public: They go on to reason that “Victorians disliked depressing novels based on truths which pricked at conscience” (172). I maintain that it was not the choice of subject matter but the friction between the novel's ideological stance and the audience's emotional response, a friction that heightens the disparity and ironically raises questions about the very positions that Trollope attempts to justify, that “pricked at [the] conscience,” of its British audience.

But while the emotional register of Castle Richmond mutes the pro-imperial argument, Trollope still launches an effective critique of Irish nationalism. His most effective idea lies not in the reasons developed in the allegorical romance (Ireland's lack of wealth, status, and moral principles, as well as the premature and ambiguous nature of any original commitment) but in the text's handling of memory and its close cousin, nostalgia. Much of the story displays the power of memory, especially when thoughts of Owen haunt Clara. By the end of the novel Clara, an individual character, can suppress her memory of Owen, but the power of his personality infects the rest of the text, leaving the novel to close on his absent presence. In the penultimate sentences of the novel, the narrator relates that “the place that Owen left vacant has been filled. The hounds of Duhallow would not recognize his voice, nor would the steed in the stable follow gently at his heels” (492). This attempt to negate Owen's spirit only reintroduces it, and he lingers even as the text attempts to expel him. The beauty of the prose and the elegiac tone here emphasize the power of nostalgia. Owen's tenacious presence demonstrates the difficulty both the text and the country have in erasing its Gaelic past. The novel closes on the thought that “there is yet one left who thinks of him, hoping that she may yet see him before she dies” (492). While the “she” implies Clara Desmond's mother, the decidedly ambiguous pronoun leaves the identity open. Is it indeed the mother, the daughter, or the country itself? The location of the nostalgia is difficult to pinpoint, making it even more difficult to eradicate.

Yet while the text demonstrates the power of memory, it also deconstructs it. The key matter concerns the inaccuracy regarding what originally occurred when Clara “promises” her love to Owen. No one, not even the two characters who were involved, can accurately remember what happened, and competing interpretations of the event result. Trollope's handling of the recollection of this scene throughout the text enacts the instability of memory and the resulting construction of history. As the cultural nationalists were basing much of their argument on the Irish past, the novel demonstrates that there is no past, simply competing interpretations of it. Thus, Trollope's treatment of memory in the text attacks the very basis of the cultural nationalist movement. This attack on nostalgia and memory combined with the mishandling of his pro-imperial argument leaves him in a precarious position. Castle Richmond provides little comfort for those who support British policy in Ireland, but it also gives little succor to those wishing to fight it, leaving the novel without much of a potential audience in the British Isles.

Castle Richmond is rife with such tensions. Whether due to ambivalence, carelessness, or an unexpected subversiveness, Trollope fills his novel with conflicts that deprive his text of a single overarching message, thus troubling readers searching for a soothing, unambiguous account of nineteenth-century Ireland and its problems. While most critics argue that the friction between the famine setting and the romantic plot most harms the novel, I argue that other tensions, particularly the ones between the text's ideology and the reader's emotional response, ultimately unsettle most of Castle Richmond's readers. The lack of a wide audience sympathetic to the novel's conflicted ideology has more to do with the novel's disappointing reception in the United Kingdom than the novel's intrinsic worth.