21. (p. 122) Pottery Hamlets: Trollope seems to allude to Tower Hamlets, then a very large (population 29,000) and very radically inclined constituency. Its member at this time (1866) was A. S. Ayrton. Later (chapter 20) Trollope inconsistently makes Monk's constituency West Bromwich. There presumably he is thinking of Midland radicalism and Bright who sat for Birmingham.
22. (p. 124) telegraphed to Germany for advice: from force of habit, presumably. It had been Albert's practice to consult his German mentor Baron Stockmar on problems of state. This practice annoyed the patriot in Trollope and he jibes at it in the opening pages of his Palmerston which he was writing simultaneously with Phineas Finn. The MS shows that Trollope originally wrote ‘to her uncle’, rather than ‘to Germany’.
23. (p. 126) You know Orion: Phineas playfully, if somewhat immodestly, alludes to R. H. Horne's satirical poem Orion (1843), in which Orion represents the spirit of striving and energy; his brother giant Akinetos personifies apathy and is the enemy to all effort.
24. (p. 138) They have trains on purpose: the trains referred to are ‘hunting trains’ specially run to take sportsmen from London to the country. They were a source of constant amusement to Punch.
25. (p. 138) our grand New Zealand wars: the Maori Wars (1856–70) were coming to an end when Trollope wrote. His satirical tone here and some comments he made when visiting New Zealand imply that he did not altogether approve of them. Trollope originally wrote ‘killed in India’ but crossed it out and replaced it with something more topical.
26. (p. 141) the Monument: the 220-foot-high column in London, raised in 1670. R. Polhemus in his The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (1968) notes the preponderance of spectacularly phallic imagery surrounding Chiltern and Violet.
27. (p. 156) Lough: Scots may be irritated by Trollope's using the Irish spelling here and in Loughlinter. It should of course be Lochlinter: there is no Lough-anything in Scotland. Nor does it speak well for Trollope's originality that he should have introduced into the same novel an English Loughton and an Irish Loughshane. His social history is, however, better than his geographical terminology. The Scottish moors became increasingly popular in the mid nineteenth century as English shooting declined. Judging by the number of licensed gamekeepers, 1868 (i.e. the period of Phineas Finn) was the peak of Scotland's popularity. Here as in innumerable other places the topicality of Trollope's fiction must have impressed itself on the first readers. (See F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, 1963.)
28. (p. 161) Tom Moore was always false: Thomas Moore (1779–1852), romantic poet and friend of Byron. Laura's literary allusion is barbed: Moore was Irish and the author of numerous love ditties. The connection with Phineas is obvious and nettles him. One infers Laura has already made some important decisions about her future.
29. (p. 161) Gamaliels: Gamaliel was St Paul's tutor.
30. (p. 165) the trial of Mr Jefferson Davis: Davis, President of the Confederacy, was taken prisoner in May 1865 after the South's collapse in the American Civil War. Naturally for a few months afterward (this is August) it was expected that he would be tried. But although he was twice indicted he was never brought to trial and was, in fact, released in May 1867. The chronological precision and unmistakable nature of this allusion suggest that Trollope has sown it here deliberately for the guidance of his reader. This is somewhat confirmed by the MS: Trollope originally had ‘soldiering in India’ and later replaced it with the more topical issue, ‘the trial of Mr Jefferson Davis’.
31. (p. 186) the question of ballot: ‘The question of greatest moment in regard to modes of voting is that of secrecy or publicity,’ wrote John Stuart Mill in Representative Government (1861) and went on to discredit the ballot. Trollope agreed. When he stood at Beverley opposition to secret voting was a main object of his attack. He associated it with the worst aspects of extreme Liberalism and it becomes something of a King Charles's head in this novel, obscuring more important issues. The ballot was made law in 1872. Trollope attacked its working in The Way We Live Now (1875).
32. (p. 189) a pity that he should be in trouble: the Pope had a deal of trouble in the 1860s but I would guess this refers to the Encyclical of January 1865 (it is the New Year in the novel), which declared Liberalism irreligious. There was an uproar about this papal aggression which lasted for weeks in the English press. Punch's comment of 7 January 1865 is typical:
The Pope's Prize Bull
By a telegram from the Eternal City we are informed that ‘the POPE has issued a Bull condemning all moral, religious and political errors having a tendency hostile to the Catholic Church.’ This Bull is not tied by the tail. It has a long tether and an extensive range, if, indeed, it is tied at all. If all the conclusions of philosophy, science, and statesmanship are figured as crockeries, the last great Bull, let loose among them by his Holiness, may be pictured as the Pope's Bull in a China Shop.
This apparently casual reference reminds us of one of the many small inhibitions on Phineas's freedom of action.
33. (p. 195) hopelessly in love, with Lady Laura Kennedy: the MS continues ‘But his love was of such a nature that he trusted that he might be able to keep it from the eyes of the world.’ Presumably this was deleted because of the implication that Phineas will follow up his love even after Laura is married.
34. (p. 198) Mr Turnbull's political catalogue: although Trollope publicly denied it Turnbull was widely taken to be a malicious portrait of John Bright. The descriptive catalogue he gives in this chapter supports the identification. Bright was rich, leader of the Manchester school, an admirer of the American republic, and stood for the measures Trollope lists. (The ‘free trade in everything except malt’ is a sneer against his famous temperance.) There is added evidence in the generally hostile tone of establishment commentary on Bright at the time Trollope was writing. In Culture and Anarchy, for example, Arnold describes him thus: ‘he leads his disciples to believe, what the Englishman is always too ready to believe – that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large business or large muscles, has in itself some edifying or perfecting effect upon human nature'. In 1866 it was widely believed that Bright had been offered and turned down a place in the cabinet: this doctrinaire refusal to serve features prominently in Trollope's account of Turnbull. Since Trollope and Arnold were Liberals it might be wondered at that they should have wanted to attack Bright who stood by the party in 1866. It can be explained by the fact that Bright's radical vigour scared the less advanced Liberals ‘frightening the Whigs into absolute Tories’. Hence Trollope presents Turnbull here and later as a purely negative political force.
35. (p. 201) all the counties in Scotland: in 1865 the Fortnightly (a journal Trollope helped edit) commented on the general election of that year ‘for many years now no Tory has sat for a Scotch borough and now the counties are being invaded and conquered by the Liberals’. It is this (for Trollope) happy trend which is alluded to here.
36. (p. 221) Fair Maid of Perth: Scott's novel. Conachar, the Celtic clan chieftain is a racially appropriate comparison for Phineas to choose. But presumably Trollope wants us to notice the extravagantly romantic cast of the hero's mind and how Laura cold-bloodedly deflates her protégé's self-dramatization.
37. (p. 222) your silence in the house: the MS continues: ‘tonight. Then she remembered how much her words might be supposed to mean [del.] imply, and she blushed and apologised, “you know what I mean Mr Finn. I mean that my esteem for you [del.] regard [del.] strong belief in your success…”’ On second thoughts Trollope must have felt that this was advancing things too fast.
38. (p. 223) a new iron fleet built: a controversial issue at the time Trollope was writing. In the 60s the Navy undertook a drastic modernization of its vessels. In 1860 the first English ironclad (i.e. of wood construction with armour plating) was launched. Ten or so of these were built, though after 1866 there was a progression to all-metal ships. It is this later phase presumably which Violet re
fers to as a ‘new iron fleet’. There was a heated correspondence on the subject in The Times in autumn 1866, which may have put it in Trollope's mind.
39. (p. 224) for economy: since 1861 The Times had cost 3d. The Telegraph was the most famous 1d. newspaper. The excessive price of The Times was one of Trollope's crotchets. In Palmerston he writes ‘To us it seems that a penny is, and ever has been, the normal price of a daily newspaper, – unless when The Times, or some other daily journal, if there be another, chooses on behalf of old gentlemen and ladies to be absurdly luxurious at threepence.’
40. (p. 226) anything for you: an illustration of how he used personal experience in his novels is afforded by comparing this scene with the description in the Autobiography of the young Trollope's embarrassing involvement with a money-lender: ‘the peculiarity of this man was that he became so attached to me as to visit me every day at my office. For a long period he found it to be worth his while to walk up those stone steps daily, and come and stand behind my chair, whispering to me always the same words: “Now I wish you would be punctual. If you only would be punctual, I would like you to have anything you want.” He was a little, clean, old man, who always wore a high starched white cravat, inside which he had a habit of twisting his chin as he uttered his caution… Those visits were very terrible, and can hardly have been of service to me in the office’ (chapter 3).
41. (p. 242) to meddle with high politics: the phrase is an allusion to Canning's satirical dialogue in verse between ‘The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder’. After being subjected to a philanthropic tirade the needy knife-grinder answers ‘for my part, I never love to meddle with politics sir’ and begs sixpence. The friend of humanity kicks him over. Trollope alludes to the poem more directly in chapter 59.
42. (p. 245) is a pain to me: the germ of this chapter and Trollope's whole characterization of Kennedy is interesting. In 1863 Trollope submitted a novel for serialization to Norman Macleod, the Glasgow minister, whose magazine Good Words was designed to provide fiction fit for Sunday reading. Macleod rejected Trollope's novel because, the novelist later alleged, it contained a scene of dancing. From published correspondence it seems that Macleod was more upset by the novel's anti-clerical satire. But whatever the reason Trollope was furious with what he felt was Scottish prudery. He was not, however, a man to bear grudges and when in 1865 Macleod was brutally pilloried by his more severe co-religionists for declaring that he could not subscribe to strict Sabbatarian doctrines Trollope rallied to his defence. In the Fortnightly of January 1866 he published a polemical article ‘The Fourth Commandment’ which began: ‘We have all heard much of the Sabbatarian rigour of Scotland and many of us have thoroughly taken it home to ourselves; but we have been brought to believe that Sabbatarian rigour in Glasgow has been more ceremonial… than in any other part of Scotland.’ Mr Kennedy's father and more importantly his mother are, it will be remembered, Glaswegian. Trollope's concurrent indignation at Kirk Sabbatarianism and its pharisaical objection to fiction on Sunday clearly helped form the rigid character of Kennedy in his imagination.
43. (p. 263) the stones that were thrown: in this chapter Trollope is thinking of the Hyde Park riots instigated by a resentful Reform League in late July 1866. These are the disturbances made famous by Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and Carlyle's Shooting Niagara. As well as damaging the Park fences the mob went on to smash the town-house windows of Lord Elcho, a statesman who followed Lowe in the successful Adullamite obstruction to reform. It is this outrage which, presumably, Trollope alludes to here. Bright in fact was not, as Trollope implies, instrumental in organizing the riots, though he did offer some support by letter of the people's right to assemble. Nonetheless he was widely considered to have been the inspiration of the disorders. The Saturday Review of 31 March 1866, for example, talks of ‘Mr Bright's proposal that a mob should, as in the days of Lord George Gordon, meet in Palace Yard to intimidate the House of Commons’. Trollope's casting Bright in the role of provocateur is, therefore, slightly malicious, but nonetheless grounded in popular misapprehension. One interesting feature in Trollope's version of the riots is that they do not seem to have frightened him as they did Arnold and Carlyle. Intimidation does not work in Phineas Finn. In this Trollope would seem to confirm the modern view expressed by M. Cowling that ‘the passage of the Reform Act of 1867 was effected in a context of public agitation: it cannot be explained as a simple consequence’ (see M. Cowling, 1867: Disraeli, Gladstone and Revolution, 1967).
44. (p. 272) the Ballot Box: Trollope satirizes the artisans' newspapers which were especially active during the reform period. Unlike The Times or Phineas's paper the Telegraph, these conceived themselves ‘horgans’ as Slide calls them, of a particular interest. Two typical examples are The Commonwealth, the Organ of the Reform Movement and The Bee Hive Newspaper, the Organ of Industrial Interests and the Reform Movement. Their common programme as declared by the Commonwealth indicates the source of Trollope's not very brilliant pseudonyms: ‘Manhood Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, Representation based upon Numbers, Direct Taxation, a Reform of Laws relating to Land, Co-operative Self-Employment, Reduction of the Hours of Labour.’
45. (p. 275) the Corn Laws in 1846: the honorific ‘gallant few’ indicates that Trollope felt strongly about this episode. In The Three Clerks (1858) he devotes a large part of chapter 29 to a diatribe against this signal act of treachery and the ‘Expediency’ which motivated it. Readers of the Autobiography who find a reference in chapter 20 to this same Repeal of the Corn Laws as ‘glorious’ and ‘great’ may be perplexed. The explanation of the apparent contradiction is evident in the series of letters from Ireland which Trollope wrote to the Examiner in 1849–50. He expresses satisfaction at the consequences of the act in relieving Irish famine but clearly objected to the betrayal of principle (i.e. Conservatism) which the Government's conduct revealed. Politicians, Trollope seems to imply, should stick to their guns even if they are pointing in the wrong direction.
46. (p. 288) of the Government: Trollope is presumably thinking of the sensational defeat of reform by one vote in 1831. On that occasion defeat was turned into victory a year later, a consequence Trollope may have expected to be repeated in 1867.
47. (p. 298) of his age: Trollope seems to be thinking of a particular cabinet in this chapter, Palmerston's of 1865. It would clutter the narrative to suggest all the originals, but the unpleasantly named Weazeling is interesting as is the sarcastic ‘supposed to be the best lawyer’ and the indication that he has made a fortune from his official position. Trollope is presumably referring to Lord Westbury (1800–75), the Lord Chancellor until 1865 when he was forced to resign. The cause was his alleged nepotism, promoting his relatives to lucrative civil service posts. It was an offence which Trollope, who had passionate opinions on professional integrity, was moved to attack in an article which he wrote in the Pall Mall Gazette of that year. He fell foul of Westbury personally and although he was much later reconciled with him, in 1866, he still felt strongly on the subject as this spiteful sketch in Phineas Finn shows.
48. (p. 298) Sir Harry Coldfoot: this seems to be a friendlier sketch of Sir George Grey (1799–1882) who was called to the bar in 1826 but never practised. In 1865 he was at the Home Office and concerned with police reform. The D.N.B. description of his political character confirms Trollope's: ‘He was singularly free from personal ambition, and gave himself entirely to the work of carrying on the business of his department. His moral qualities made him a valuable member of a cabinet where he was skilled in resolving differences. He is a rare example of a man who retired from politics without bitterness.’
49. (p. 299) cleansing the dockyards: the Navy was in a state of rapid modernization and rationalization. At this date Admiral Thrift's ironclad fleet (begun in 1859) would number eleven ships with five under construction. The reorganization of the navy into a more professionally skilled fighting force went with the need to bring down the estimates to an acceptable peacetime level (hen
ce ‘Thrift’). The subject was much discussed. In 1865, for example, the Fortnightly devoted an article to showing how five millions could be saved. The comparison of the dockyards with the Augean stables was, incidentally, a commonplace in journalism of the period.
50. (p. 310) garrotted: there was an epidemic of garrotting in London in the early 1860s. The Annual Register of 1862 describes how the crimes were committed: ‘a method of highway plunder, which consists in one ruffian seizing an unsuspecting traveller by the neck and crushing in his throat, while another simultaneously rifles his pockets: the scoundrels then decamp, leaving their victim on the ground, writhing in agony, with tongue protruding and eyes starting from their sockets, unable to give an alarm or to attempt pursuit’. It goes on to describe a garrotte attack on an M.P. going from the House to the Reform Club. This mode of crime seems to have had a short vogue, partly because of the deterrent sentences given garrotters in 1862–3.
51. (p. 319) by similar influence: there follows deleted in the MS ‘Did not the great Adullamite hold his seat in a like tenure?’ The reference is to Robert Lowe, leader of the Adullamite ‘cave’ which sabotaged the Liberal reform bill of 1866. In 1859 Lowe was forced by violence at the hustings to stand down from Kidderminster and became member for Calne through Lord Lansdowne's influence. Calne was swept away by the 1867 bill: in this Trollope's obseration was prophetic and, he seems to have thought, rather too close to the mark.
52. (p. 325) Alison: Archibald Alison's many volumed History of England completed in 1859.
53. (p. 329) Sancho the Governor: in chapter 45 of the second part of Don Quixote Sancho Panza as governor of the island of Baratria is tantalized by not being allowed to eat the good things set before him.
Phineas Finn, the Irish Member Page 81