ANTHONY TROLLOPE HIS WORK, ASSOCIATES AND LITERARY ORIGINALS BY T. H. S. ESCOTT

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN. MCMXIII {iv} Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh {v} TO THOSE OF ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S NAME AND BLOOD NOW LIVING, AND TO THE FEW SURVIVORS AMONG HIS FRIENDS WHOSE MEMORY OF HIM IS FRESH AND DEAR, THIS MONOGRAPH IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED

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PREFACE

THE beginning of my very juvenile acquaintance with Anthony Trollope has been incidentally, but naturally, mentioned in the body of the present work. Some of my nearest relatives had been with him at Winchester, and had maintained their friendship with him till, during the sixties, there began my own mature knowledge of him and the personal connection, literary or social, that lasted till his death. In or about 1873, I was commissioned by its editor to write for a magazine—now no doubt defunct—“something full of actuality” about Trollope’s novels, how he came to write them and who sat to him for his characters. “Be sure,” were my editor’s instructions, “you put down nothing but what you get from Trollope, and he wishes to appear about himself.” Not only, to the best of my ability, did I do this; but, in the little writing-room at his Montagu Square house, he himself went through every word of the proof with me. So pleased did he seem to be with my performance that he supplemented his remarks on it with many personal and literary details

about himself and those with whom, at the successive stages of his career, he had to do. The material thus given covered indeed his whole life from his infancy in Keppel Street down to the settlement in Montagu Square, I think in 1873. “May I,” I asked, “make some notes to ensure my remembering correctly?” “Certainly,” was the answer. “They will be no good for what you have now sent to the printer, but some day, perhaps, you{viii} will have more to say about me, and then your memoranda will tell you as much as I know myself.” In 1882, partly through Trollope’s good offices, I succeeded the then Mr. John Morley in The Fortnightly Review editorship. During the short time then remaining to my friend, he more than once referred to the notes he had given me nearly ten years earlier, adding, “Be sure you take care of them.”

In this way I have been nearly spared all necessity of consulting for the present work Trollope’s own autobiography. Freshness therefore will, I think, be found a characteristic of this volume. At the same time, I have been greatly helped at many points by the oldest of Trollope’s, till recently, surviving intimates, the late Lord James of Hereford, and Trollope’s artistic colleague, to whom especially my obligations are infinite, Sir J. E. Millais, as well as by Mr. Henry Trollope, the novelist’s son. The account of Trollope’s earlier Post Office days owes a great deal to the good offices of the few now living who had to do with him at St. Martin’s-le-Grand: Mr. H. Buxton Forman, C.B., Mr. Lewin Hill, C.B., Colonel J. J. Cardin, C.B., and Mr. J. C. Badcock, C.B. To these names I must add that of Sir Charles Trevelyan, who could recall Trollope’s entrance in the public service, and who, before his death in 1886, talked to me more than once about The Three Clerks and the reputed portrait in it of himself. Similarly, Sir William Gregory of

Coole Park, Galway, the Harrow contemporary of Trollope and of Sidney Herbert, before his death in 1892 supplied me with much material illustrating Trollope’s earlier days in Irish and London society. I have also been greatly helped as regards Trollope’s postal services at home and abroad by Mr. Albert Hyamson of the General Post Office, as well as in respect of Trollope’s closing days by Dr. Squire Sprigge,{ix} and in his Sussex retirement by the Rev. A. J. Roberts, Vicar of Harting. The sketch of Trollope in the hunting-field is, I believe, true to the life. And this because its particulars, in the most obliging manner secured for me by the son of Trollope’s oldest sporting friend, Mr. Sydney Buxton, came from those of his family who had ridden by Trollope’s side with the Essex hounds, or from Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Trollope’s Garrick Club contemporary, my old friend Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, has, I believe, ensured accuracy for the account of his long connection with an institution dearer to him than any other of the kind.

T. H. S. ESCOTT.

West Brighton, May 1913.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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ANTHONY TROLLOPE

HARTING GRANGE. NORTH FRONT.

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CHAPTER I APPRENTICESHIP TO LIFE

A “tally-ho” story—Anthony Trollope’s ancestry, historical and apocryphal—Among the Hampshire novelists—Frances Milton’s girlhood—Acquaintance with Thomas Anthony Trollope—Marriage and settlement in Keppel Street—Bright prospects soon clouded—Deep in the mire of misfortune—The American experiment and its consequence—Sold up—Mrs. Trollope becomes a popular authoress—Anthony at school—A battle-royal and its sequel—Rough customs at Harrow—“Leg-bail”—A family flight to Bruges—The future novelist as usher and prospective soldier—Friendly influences at the Post Office—Autobiographical touches in famous novels.

THE Norman Tallyhosier, who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, when hunting with his royal master in the New Forest, happened to kill three wolves; the King at once dubbed him “Troisloup.” The changes and corruptions of successive centuries left the word Trollope. Such at least was the traditional account of the patronymic volunteered by Anthony Trollope, when at Harrow, to his school-fellow, Sidney Herbert, and afterwards forcibly extracted from him upon many different occasions by the boys, whose fancy it tickled or whose incredulity it provoked. Such scepticism was the more pardonable, because the earliest Trollope of any distinction, Sir Andrew, in the fifteenth century, rose to knighthood during the Wars of the Roses from beginnings more humble than would be expected in the case of one whose forefathers were personages at the Norman Court. However that may be, the Trollope stock can claim description{4} as ancient, honourable, and of high degree. Amid many changes of employment and fortune, Anthony Trollope’s bearing and

conduct were those of one who, while modestly proud of his ancestral honours, yet always saw in them a Sparta given him by birth to adorn a social capital entrusted to him by nature for laying out at intellectual interest. Throughout all his trials and vicissitudes he lived with men distinguished by their position or achievements. Comparing himself with these, he might well be satisfied, not only with his power of transmuting manuscript into money, but with having done as little as any, and less than some, to bring discredit upon family antecedents and an historic name.

When Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography appeared in 1883, much of its contents was already familiar outside the limit of his personal intimates. No man so largely preoccupied, as his temperament and pursuits made him, with himself, ever talked less about his interests and affairs except with a few particular friends in the privacy of home life. In the year of his death, 1882, mentioning to the present writer the sheets of self-record whose preparation he had several years before finished, he described them as a series of pegs. “On them,” he added, “may be hung those materials about my life and work which may be gathered by those who, like yourself, may be disposed to say something about me.”

For several reasons presently to appear, nothing could better match later associations of the Trollope family than for its mythical founder first to have been heard of in the county where much of his mother’s girlhood was passed, and where Anthony sometimes found a retreat for his declining years. Troisloup’s descendants—to assume that there existed some foundation in fact for the story which, without having thought much about it, young Anthony presaged the novelist’s inventiveness by telling his Harrow schoolmates—made no further contributions to Hampshire history, but gradually identified themselves with the north-midland or the northern counties. When the family baronetcy was created in 1641 the{5} Trollopes had settled near Stamford, and soon supplied Lincolnshire with one of its great territorial magnates in Sir John Trollope, who for more than a quarter of a century represented the southern division of the county. He belonged to those “men of metal and large-acred squires” mentioned by Disraeli as forming Lord George Bentinck’s chief bodyguard

of the Tory revolt against Sir Robert Peel in 1846. This was that typical county member who, during the full-dress debates on the Bill for opening the ports, agreed with Sir Charles Burrell, Sir William Jolliffe, and Sir Charles Knightley not to follow their leader. Under protection, it had been repeatedly said during the debate and on other occasions, the land failed to provide food for the people; Sir John Trollope declared there was not in his own neighbourhood a single acre lying waste, that from 1828 to 1841 Lincoln county had enlarged its wheat produce by 70 per cent., while the population had only increased 20 per cent. Thus, argued Sir John, there was a large surplus available to feed the manufacturing districts.

So long as he could persuade himself of a protectionist reaction being even remotely possible, Sir John Trollope stuck to the House of Commons, and took an active part in its business. Not indeed till some time after his leaders had suddenly acquiesced in free trade did he, in 1868, become Lord Kesteven. The exact place of Anthony Trollope in the family to which he belonged may be best described by saying that the high Tory, protectionist M.P. just mentioned, the seventh baronet, and the novelist were descended from a common ancestor, Sir Thomas Trollope, the fourth baronet. Between these two cousins of the Trollope name may be traced, as will appear hereafter, certain affinities of character and temperament as well as of blood. At each successive stage of his career Anthony Trollope was what circumstances made him. Few courses in an entirely new direction have ever shown more clearly and more perceptibly than Trollope’s the impress of hereditary influences. These, however, were less on the paternal than on his mother’s side.{6}

The Hampshire, whose hunting-ground may or may not have witnessed the Norman lupicide’s threefold feat, began in the early eighteenth century to be the nursing mother of novelists. First, in order of time as well as of fame, comes Jane Austen, born at Steventon Rectory in 1775. Miss Austen’s works are as severely undenominational and as studiedly secular as those of Maria Edgeworth, or as the educational system of Thomas Day. Elsewhere in the same county, towards the close of the Georgian era, appeared an author possessing little in common with the woman of genius who opened her series with Sense and Sensibility. Charlotte Mary Yonge’s best known works of fiction are still The Heir of Redclyffe and The Daisy Chain. These, with Heartsease and The Monthly Packet, formed the most popular manuals in High Church households throughout the first half of the Victorian age. Five years after Jane Austen’s birth, her parents brought with them to Heckfield Vicarage, from their earlier home at Stapleton, near Bristol, the girl who, as

Thomas Anthony Trollope’s future wife, was to become Anthony Trollope’s mother. To her third son, while yet a boy, she imparted the desire of emulating the industry and skill by which she was then supporting the household. The living at Heckfield had come to Frances Milton’s father from New College, of which he had been a Fellow; it provided him with leisure for intellectual pastimes, always praised but seldom remunerated, and provided his vividly imaginative, keen-witted, and sarcastic daughter with opportunities for her earliest studies of provincial character and life. The Rev. William Milton was a mathematician with a turn for practical mechanics. He had elaborated a patent that for some time he hoped might make his fortune; he had given proof of real ability in his favourite pursuit by submitting, during his stay at Stapleton, a scheme to the authorities of the town for improving Bristol port. Some merit these suggestions must have had, for the lines they indicated were afterwards followed in the actual development of the

land and sea approaches to the harbour. The city corporation{7} voted their thanks to the author of the design, but gave him nothing more.

Meanwhile the unsuccessful inventor’s daughter Frances Milton, by her personal endowments of a pleasant face, a bright manner, and a clever, sarcastic tongue, was attracting admirers. Amongst these was a young Chancery barrister, like Miss Milton’s father a Wykehamist and a Fellow of New College.

One of Mr. Milton’s sons, Henry Milton, obtained an appointment in a branch of the Civil Service afterwards ornamented by one of the Milton name,[1] and was frequently visited by his sisters at his London rooms. In this way Frances Milton and her lover contrived to see a good deal of each other. The street where Frances Milton now kept house for her brother was the same, Keppel Street, as that in which, though at a different number, the Chancery barrister, with his wife, was afterwards to live, and his children, amongst them his third son Anthony, were to be born. Thomas Anthony Trollope’s Lincoln’s Inn chambers were within a few minutes’ walk. When the two lovers were not billing and cooing together in Bloomsbury, they were exchanging letters dealing with many other subjects besides their own mutual attachment. In the earlier days of courtship the swain addressed his epistles to Henry Milton on the understanding that his sister was to see them. Sometimes on both sides these epistles ran into elaborate and rather pedantic essays, while on

the gentleman’s they were couched in carefully thought out and even precious language natural to a clever, reflective, well-read, and rather{8} supercilious young college don. Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads were coming out in 1798. Not less conservative in his taste than in his politics, Thomas Anthony Trollope had only a sneer for the fearful and wonderful products of the new romantic school: if Miss Milton wished to see some new poems that were at least good literature, let her read what had just been given to the world by two Wykehamist bards. One of these was named Jones, the other Crowe. Both were Fellows of New College, and both had won the highest praise of experts like Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers. When he deals with other subjects, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s epistolary style undergoes a portentous change. Both the gentleman and the lady are equally business-like, precise, and severely the reverse of ornate in the forecasts of their united future. Read with the intervening reminiscence of David

Copperfield, Thomas Anthony Trollope’s summary of his present, and estimate of his prospective circumstances, curiously remind one of the language in which Wilkins Micawber described his obligations to “my friend” Traddles, as well as of the complete arrangements he had made for discharging these claims in full. The sum and substance of the Milton-Trollope calculations is that at their marriage the husband—his fellowship of course given up—would, from his Lincoln’s Inn practice and his patrimony, be able to count on something like nine hundred a year. On the other side the wife would bring a dowry of thirteen hundred pounds, independently of any resources provided by her father. As a fact, however, she was to receive a paternal allowance of fifty pounds a year, as well as occasional additions for clothes or other specific purposes.

On the strength of these figures there seemed nothing rash in encountering the risk of an early union. Accordingly, on the twenty-third of the proverbially unlucky month of May 1809, the marriage was celebrated at the bride’s home, Heckfield. Then came the settlement at 16 Keppel Street; there they remained almost uninterruptedly until their migration to Harrow. There too were born their first{9} five children; while two daughters came in Harrow Weald. Of this family, five died before they were sixty, the eldest son, Thomas Adolphus, and the third, Anthony, dealt with in these pages, reached the threshold of old age, though Anthony fell short by fifteen years of his elder brother’s term. As soon as the Keppel Street children could, in nursery phrase, take notice, they must have found themselves observed by interesting and distinguished company. The father was known among solicitors for a man quite as able as he was queer-tempered, and for a thoroughly sound lawyer. He had also just chanced upon one of those little personal

advertisements sometimes useful at the Bar. His friend the artist Hayter was then, on the Duke of Bedford’s commission, painting the picture that speedily became famous, Lord William Russell’s trial; in Thomas Anthony Trollope he found the original for a foremost member of the legal group of spectators in the court.

Forensic success, however well won by brains, knowledge, and industry, sometimes suddenly, sometimes by faintly observed degrees, is apt to melt away. The head of the Keppel Street household could found, and to some extent build up, a valuable practice, but he was without the temper or tact which would ensure a politic or even a civil answer to a fool. And to him, especially in the legal world, most people seemed fools. The attorneys who brought briefs to his chambers, if their replies to his questions did not exactly suit his phraseological whim, found themselves as browbeaten as if they had been refractory or prevaricating witnesses badgered by a cross-examining counsel. For a long time Thomas Anthony Trollope’s clients meekly submitted to their fate, and, notwithstanding his ill-temper and unpopularity, the bitter-tongued lawyer made so handsome an income as to exchange the fogs of the Bloomsbury home for the clear air and fine views of a bracing suburb. Harrow, as within an easy drive of the law courts, was the spot selected. The residence,

substantially built after its owner’s designs, and comfortably furnished, received the name of Julians. But though from one point of view a monument of Thomas{10} Anthony Trollope’s legal triumphs, it proved a forerunner of his fall. As if under the breath of some evil genius, who could have been none other than himself, the rising fabric of his professional prosperity, by slow but sure degrees, crumbled into dust. Once having discovered that they could get their work done practically as well elsewhere by counsel not superior to the common courtesies of life, the long-enduring solicitors brought their papers to Trollope no more. Every week ruin, crushing and complete, drew visibly nearer. At last there was decided on a move of the whole family from Keppel Street to Julians.