by Hugh Walpole
What fate but one could there be for such a man?
At first, indeed, the solicitors and clients did not apparently object to the bad manners and ill-temper. Business prospered so finely that a house at Harrow was chosen instead of the dusky, foggy, Bloomsbury lodging. Then the decadence began. Slowly his clients left him, seeking elsewhere for more courteous attention to their wants and weaknesses. It may be supposed also that already the Encyclopedia Ecclesiastica was raising its head over the Harrow garden wall and distracting the angry barrister’s attention. And seven children are no small burden on an unsteady income.
How could he improve diminishing means? Why, by surrendering the profession for which he was admirably accomplished and turning to a livelihood for which he had no accomplishment whatever! He would be a farmer. The country was pleasant, he would be free of these tiresome idiotic human beings who were for ever pestering him too frequently or not often enough, and he would be able to teach his boys Latin and Greek!
So that farm was purchased from Lord Northwick and the Trollope family was abundantly ruined. That ruin Anthony himself could, in later years, most admirably have traced. First the handsome modern dwelling-house Julians, then the smaller and grubbier Julians Farm, then a cottage. Ill-health, weak lungs, loss of title-deeds, money settled on Mrs. Trollope at her marriage in some fashion mismanaged, and at last, in March 1834, the final crash.
It is now that the buoyant, courageous, superb figure of Mrs. Trollope dominates the scene. A lady, Miss Frances Wright, the pioneer of the famous Bloomer dress, had appeared from time to time upon the Julians scene, and now, when the farm was tumbling to the ground, it occurred to Thomas Trollope that America, the country from which Miss Wright came, might do something for him. It seemed to him that a bazaar or store for fancy goods in some provincial American city might be the very thing for the crude and untutored Americans. Peering over the top of his writing table he saw those savages stretching out eager fingers for bead mats, coloured ribbons, and wax fruit under glass.
Mrs. Trollope and her son Henry departed on this hopeful mission. The bazaar was, of course, most ruinous of failures, but the journey had far-reaching results affecting permanently the lives of Mrs. Trollope and her son Anthony, and through them the whole bones and body of the English Novel.
Mrs. Trollope, whose gifts of fun, sarcastic observation, and lively spirits had been in no way damaged by her life with her erratic barrister, found the Americans so amusing that she wrote a book about them, Domestic Manners of the Americans, a book exaggerated and of its time, though it is yet to-day alive.
The crash came at Julians nevertheless. Anthony Trollope, who was then nearly nineteen years of age, describes the scene in one of the best passages of the Autobiography.
My father who, when he was well, lived a sad life among his monks and nuns, still kept a horse and gig. One day in March 1834, just as it had been decided that I should leave the school then instead of remaining as had been intended until midsummer, I was summoned very early in the morning, to drive him up to London. He had been ill, and must still have been very ill indeed when he submitted to be driven by anyone. It was not till we had started that he told me that I was to put him on board the Ostend boat. This I did, driving him through the City down to the docks. It was not within his nature to be communicative, and to the last be never told me why he was going to Ostend. Something of a general flitting abroad I had heard before, but why he should have flown the first, and flown so suddenly, I did not in the least know till I returned. When I got back with the gig, the house and furniture were all in the charge of the sheriff’s officers.
The gardener who had been with us in former days stopped me as I drove up the road, and with gestures, sighs, and whispered words gave me to understand that the whole affair — horse, gig, and harness — would be made prize of if I went but a few yards further. Why they should not have been made prize of I do not know. The little piece of dishonest business which I at once took in hand and carried through successfully was of no special service to any of us. I drove the gig into the village, and sold the entire equipage to the ironmonger for £17, the exact sum which he claimed as being due to himself. I was much complimented by the gardener, who seemed to think that so much had been rescued out of the fire. I fancy that the ironmonger was the only gainer by my smartness.
When I got back to the house a scene of devastation was in progress which was not without its amusement. My mother, through her various troubles, had contrived to keep a certain number of pretty-pretties which were dear to her heart. They were not much, for in those days the ornamentation of houses was not lavish as it is now; but there was some china, and a little glass, a few books, and a very moderate supply of household silver. These things, and the things like them, were being carried down surreptitiously, through a gap between the two gardens, on to the premises of our friend Colonel Grant. My two sisters, then sixteen and seventeen, and the Grant girls who were just younger, were the chief marauders. To such forces I was happy to add myself for any enterprise, and between us we cheated the creditors to the extent of our powers, amidst the anathemas but good-humoured abstinence from personal violence of the men in charge of the property. I still own a few books that were thus purloined.
For a few days the whole family bivouacked under the Colonel’s hospitable roof, cared for and comforted by that dearest of all women, his wife. Then we followed my father to Belgium and established ourselves in a large house just outside the walls of Bruges....
And what of the young Anthony himself during these turbulent years? His life, to the interested observer, appears, at first view, to offer all the drama in these earlier schooldays. The Autobiography suggests this. It is no exaggeration to say that the earlier chapters of that work describing his school life are some of the most touching pages in the whole range of English Literature; they rank surely with the autobiographical part of David Copperfield in their picture of the helpless despair of a small child who feels that his misery is eternal.
Happily for Trollope life became with every year brighter and more hopeful, and in his book he looks back to those early forlorn days with some of the tender care of a grown man for a little child.
Trollope’s life divides, in fact, quite sharply into three distinct, periods — the first from the year of his birth, 1815, to the year of his admission into the Post Office, 1834; the second from 1834 through his Irish experiences to that day, the 29th July 1835, when he began The Warden; and the third period from 1853 to the 6th December 1882, the day of his death. He was seven years of age when he went first to school, and he was nineteen years of age when he entered the Post Office. It is true of most of us that the events and impressions of those twelve years are the determining events and impressions of our lives. How marvellous that the bullied, tortured, derided child should, out of that misery, have extracted the kindly, gentle, and tolerant philosophy that moves through all his books! In none of them is there anywhere a trace of selfish bitterness, in none of them a whine or a groan or a curse. —
And yet we cannot doubt but that those school days did leave their mark on the man: the shyness, the sensitiveness to blame, the desire to be loved, the awkwardness and gruffness, the avoidance of self advertisement and publicity unless some cause in which he believed demanded those things — these characteristics we cannot doubt came from those years.
He went first to Harrow as a day-boarder, and anyone who has been to a public school as a day-boarder will know the social ignominy that that term so frequently conveys, or did at any rate convey some years ago. Then, coming from the disturbed and mismanaged home that was then his, he was, of course, unkempt and uncared for.
No doubt [he says] my appearance was against me.
I remember well, when I was still the junior boy in the school, Dr. Butler, the headmaster, stopping me in the street, and asking me, with all the clouds of Jove upon his brow and all the thunder in his voice, whether it was possible that Harrow School was disg
raced by so disreputably dirty a little boy as I! Oh what I felt at that moment! But I could not look my feelings. I do not doubt that I was dirty — but I think that he was cruel. He must have known me had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognise me by my face.
And he was seven years of age!
Then, the world around him feeling that he was not prospering as he should at Harrow, he was sent to a private school at Sunbury. Here, although he “never had any pocket money, and seldom had much in the way of clothes”, he was more nearly on an equality with the other boys.
But hither also injustice pursued him. Four boys were selected as the perpetrators of some dreadful crime, and the small Trollope, apparently because he had been for three years at a public school and must, therefore, know more about crime in general than his companions, was one of the four.
Innocent, every sort of punishment was dealt out to him; the wife of the headmaster shook her head over him whenever she saw him; he was the pariah of that little world. Here a touch of vindictiveness creeps in, and I think it is to be forgiven.
What lily-livered curs those boys must have been Trollope writes] not to have told the truth! — at any rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well, and almost wish to write them here.
At twelve he went to Winchester College, and while he was there his father’s affairs crumbled to ruin. It was soon after his going to Winchester that his mother and brother, the bead mats, pin cushions and pepperboxes in their bags, started off to civilise the American people.
For the three years that followed young Trollope was one of the most completely neglected children in the United Kingdom. His brother, Thomas Adolphus, was at Winchester with him, but this was not apparently an unmixed blessing. Thomas Adolphus, afterwards the author of some of the gentlest works of fiction in the English tongue, evidently felt that his awkward, dirty, and clumsy young brother was no great credit to him, that he must be licked into shape, so, as part of his daily exercise, he thrashed young Anthony with a big stick. “That such thrashings,” remarks Anthony with astonishing mildness, “should have been possible at a school as a continual part or one’s daily life, seems to me to argue a very ill condition of school discipline.” After a while his father and brother departed to join his mother in America. And now I must quote from the Autobiography once more.
Then another, and a different horror fell to my fate. My college bills had not been paid, and the school tradesmen who administered to the wants of the boys were told not to extend their credit to me. Boots, waistcoats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, which, with some slight superveillance, were at the command of other scholars, were closed luxuries to me. My schoolfellows of course knew that it was so, and I became a Pariah. It is the nature of boys to be cruel. I have sometimes doubted whether among each other they do usually suffer much, one from the other’s cruelty; but I suffered horribly! I could make no stand against it. I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, and awkward, and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Of course I was ill-dressed and dirty. But ah! how well I remember all the agonies of my young heart; how I considered whether I should always be alone; whether I could not find my way up to the top of that college tower, and from thence put an end to everything? And a worse thing came than the stoppage of the supplies from the shopkeepers. Every boy had a shilling a week pocket money, which we called battels, and which was advanced to us out of the pocket of the second master. On one awful day the second master announced to me that my battels would be stopped. He told me the reason — the battels for the last half-year had not been repaid, and he urged his own unwillingness to advance the money. The loss of a shilling a week would not have been much — even though pocket money from other sources never readied me, — but that the other boys all knew it! Every now and again, perhaps three or four times in a half year, these weekly shillings were given to certain servants of the college, in payment, it may be presumed, for some extra services.
And now, when it came to the turn of any servant, he received sixty-nine shillings instead of seventy, and the cause of the defalcation was explained to him. I never saw one of those servants without feeling that I had picked his pocket....
There were yet three years of schooling in front of him. His father returned from America, and Anthony was removed from Winchester, taken to live with his unfortunate parent on a wretched tumbling-to-pieces farmhouse, and sent once more to the loathed and ill-omened Harrow! And now under even worse conditions than he had known before, because, utterly uncared for and neglected at home, he had to walk every day from the farm to the school through miry lanes and dirty mud-thick roads. This is the critical point of his misery! Had he been able to foresee the future it might have cheered him to know that never again was he to experience such hopeless unhappiness.
This [he says] was the worst period of my life. I was now over fifteen, and had come to an age at which I could appreciate to its full the misery of expulsion from all social intercourse. I had not only no friends, but was despised by all my companions. The farmhouse was not only no more than a farmhouse, but was one of those farmhouses which seem always to be in danger of falling into the neighbouring horse-pond. As it crept downwards from house to stables, from stables to barns, from barns to cowsheds, and from cowsheds to dung-heaps, one could hardly tell where one began and the other ended!... I was a sizar at a fashionable school, a condition never premeditated. What right had a wretched farmer’s boy, reeking from a dunghill, to sit next to the sons of peers — or worse still, next to the sons of big tradesmen who had made their ten thousand a year? The indignities I endured are not to be described. As I look back it seems to me that all hands were turned against me — those of masters as well as boys. I was allowed to join in no plays. Nor did I learn anything — for I was taught nothing. The only expense, except that of books, to which a house boarder was then subject, was the fee to a tutor, amounting, I think, to ten guineas. My tutor took me without the fee: but when I heard him declare the fact in the pupil-room before the boys, I hardly felt grateful for the charity. I was never a coward, and cared for a thrashing as little as any boy, but one cannot make a stand against the acerbities of three hundred tyrants without a moral courage of which at that time I possessed none. I know that I skulked, and was odious to the eyes of those I admired and envied. At last I was driven to rebellion and then came a great fight — at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home for a while. If these words be ever printed, I trust that some schoolfellow of those days may still be alive who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my schooldays, I am not making a false boast.
The memory of Dr. Butler’s scorn of his unkempt disorder, the swell of satisfaction at his solitary school victory, above all the picture of that tumbling farmhouse— “my father teaching me Greek and Latin in the morning, my head inclined towards him so that in the event of guilty fault he might be able to pull my hair without stopping his razor; the two first volumes of Cooper’s novel called The Prairie — other books of the kind there were none” — these things crowd around him, as in the midst of those later prosperous years he writes about them, dragged from his very heart.
His school sufferings were nearly ended. In the autumn of 1831 his mother, with the rest of the family, returned from America. Mrs. Trollope’s books were selling, and in consequence the Trollope family moved up once more in the world. A better house (afterwards the Orley Farm of the novel) was found, nearer to the school, Anthony’s wardrobe was improved, and he had now the society of his mother and sisters.
It was even proposed that he should go to Cambridge, but unluck was still at his elbow and he failed twice for a sizarship at Clare Hall and once for a scholarship at Trinity, Oxford. He thus sums up his school career:
When I left Harrow I was all but nineteen, and I had first gone there at seven. During the whole of those twelve years no attem
pt had been made to teach me anything but Latin and Greek, and very little attempt to teach me those languages. I do not remember any lessons either in writing or arithmetic. French and German I certainly was not taught.... I feel convinced in my mind that I have been flogged offener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all. Looking back over half a century I am not quite sure whether the boast is true; but if I did not, nobody ever did....
From the first to the last there was nothing satisfactory in my school career — except the way in which I licked the boy who had to be taken home to be cured.
There now came the complete collapse of the Trollope fortunes and the flight to Bruges, to which allusion has already been made. Here in Belgium he was comparatively happy. But disease — consumption — attacked the unfortunate family. The heroic Mrs. Trollope wrote her novels and nursed her dying children with glorious courage and an undefeated spirit. Anthony, desperately anxious to do something to help, clutched at an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment, and then in order to learn French and German, knowledge of which was essential for the commission, became classical usher in a school at Brussels. How much French and German he knew at this time he has already confessed, but catastrophe was prevented by the offer of a clerkship in the General Post Office, and so, accepting it, he reached the real turning-point of his life.