THE PRIME MINISTER
Page 3
This ambivalence about Lopez is clear in The Prime Minister. What remains undetermined is the question of the author’s prejudice against Jews. His biographer, N.J. Hall, finds plenty of evidence to show that neither in his life nor his fiction is he consistently unsympathetic towards Jews, though his fiction recognizes damaging racial stereotypes. Lopez summons up the traditional figure of the Jewish usurer with a reference to one of Shylock’s most famous speeches: ‘I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you’ (p. 401). Yet he is the man who Arthur Fletcher complains has too few taboos – ‘a sort of man whitewashed of all prejudices’. Elsewhere Lopez turns the tables on English prejudice and casts himself in the role of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice when he claims that his ‘caravels are out at sea’ (p. 395). Here he is the open-hearted, open-handed man seeking financial help from the miser. This certainly takes Lopez out of any literary stereotype, yet by doing this with conscious reference to Shylock, The Prime Minister simultaneously contradicts anti-semitic stereotypes and perpetuates them.
Although nobody doubts that The Prime Minister is one of Trollope’s important novels, there is less critical consensus about it than about any of his other works. From the first there has been difference of opinion as to the relative importance of the two major strands of the story – the political plot and the story of Ferdinand Lopez’s attempt to establish himself in the world. The author himself – never a reliable judge of his own work – expressed severe reservations about the Lopez plot when the novel was still coming out in parts: ‘[T] hough I myself am prepared to stand up for the character of the Prime Minister, and for all his surroundings, I acknowledge the story of the soi-disant hero, Lopez, and all that has to do with him, to be bad.’16 He is ready with the excuse that the political characters are ‘pure creations; and (as I think) the best I ever made. The Lopez part of the book has only been to me a shoe-horn for the other.’17 The reviewer in The Times agreed:
The Prime Minister is a novel that will be greatly enjoyed by people who can take an interest in its public personages, and who appreciate clever studies of political character; but we doubt whether it will ever be numbered among the favourites of those who delight in Mr Trollope for his love stories.
The Athenaeum on the other hand could scarcely maintain an interest in the politicians, while the Illustrated London News found the political parts of the novel the weakest.18
On one thing they almost all agreed: it was one of Trollope’s less readable novels – in Edward Fitzgerald’s words, ‘the only dull Novel I have read of Trollope’s’.19 The Saturday Review thought it showed that Trollope lacked ‘an independent invention’. Worst of all, Trollope believed an attack in the Spectator to be the work of the literary editor, Richard Holt Hutton, who had long been, in Trollope’s words, ‘inclined to be more than fair to me’. The critic in this case-was in fact not Hutton, but his colleague Meredith Townsend, who came down heavily against the novel’s ‘artistic vulgarity’, and accused the author of an ‘entire failure to perceive what relations are and are not possible among English political men’. This review, made worse by his misattribution, was deeply hurtful, and was one of those which ‘seemed to tell me that my work as a novelist should be brought to a close’.20 What a shame that Trollope should never have known of Tolstoy’s judgement that The Prime Minister was ‘Excellent’!21
Later critics generally prefer the politics to the love story. Yet when H. Oldfield Box came to serialize part of the novel for the BBC Home Service in the 1950s, he chose to omit most of Plantagenet and Glencora Palliser, Phineas Finn and the political action, and entitled his serial ‘Ferdinand Lopez’. It is a characteristic of major works that they are complex and can generate different meanings in different circumstances. Judged by this criterion, The Prime Minister is a major work, and is worthy of many readings.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Trollope wrote The Prime Minister from 2 April to 15 September 1874, spending eight weeks of this time in Switzerland with his wife, Rose. Under an agreement of 1 April 1874, Chapman & Hall acquired absolute copyright for £2,500, and Trollope was to deliver the manuscript within twelve months.1 In fact we find him sending the final sheets on 26 February 1875, and reminding Frederic Chapman of the understanding between them: ‘The work is to come out in 8 parts, and each part is to contain 10 chapters. The whole novel comprises 80 chapters. The first part is to appear in October.’2 The first book edition was due out in May 1876. As so often Trollope was well ahead of his schedule, but for their part the publishers were a month late in both the part issue, which ran from November 1875 to June 1876 at five shillings a part, and book publication in four volumes, which seems to have been in the June and not the May. Neither issue was illustrated. The text was not reset for the first book edition,3 and the novel was never reprinted in its original four-volume form. The first American edition was published by Harper in 1876 in one volume, and in the same year there was a four-volume edition from Tauchnitz, the original agreement having prevented Chapman & Hall from ‘selling the right of republication in Germany to any other firm than diat of Baron Tauchnitz of Leipzig’.4
The present edition follows the first-edition text, with obsolete spellings retained except where they may confuse the modern reader. Wherever possible problems in the first-edition text have been solved with reference to the manuscript, which is in the Arents Collection in the New York Public Library. I am grateful to the New York Public Library for access to the manuscript. A number of textual matters are mentioned in the Notes. A few minor changes – mainly of punctuation – have been made silently, and the following larger conjectural emendations carried out to passages in which the first edition accurately follows the manuscript:
p. 11 ‘considered’ has been inserted in ‘apt for work, but considered hardly trustworthy by employers’.
p. 76 ‘oldest’ has been substituted for ‘old’ in ‘The oldest Mr Roby of all’.
p. 585 Following the Oxford Trollope, edited by Michael Sadleir
and Frederick Page (1952), the second ‘left’ has been changed to ‘right’ in the sentence: ‘His left hand was clenched, and from time to time with his left he rubbed the thin hairs on his brow.’
p. 601 Again following Sadleir and Page, the first ‘not’ has been omitted from ‘As a woman not utterly disgraced it could not become her again to laugh…’
FURTHER READING
General works on Trollope, many of them now rather dated, include Bradford A. Booth, Anthony Trollope: Aspects of His Life and Art (London, 1958), A. O. J. Cockshut, Anthony Trollope (London, 1955), Robert M. Polhemus, The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), P. D. Edwards, Anthony Trollope: His Art and Scope (St Lucia, Queensland, 1977); Geoffrey Harvey, The Art of Anthony Trollope (London, 1980), Arthur Pollard, Anthony Trollope (London, 1978), Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Commentary (London, 1927), L P. and R. P. Stebbins, The Trollopes: The Chronicle of a Writing Family (London, 1946), R C. Terry, Anthony Trollope: The Artist in Hiding (London, 1977), Robert Tracy, Trollope’s Later Novels (Berkeley, 1978), and Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (London, 1988).
Despite a number of serious bibliographical errors, Donald Smalley (ed.), Anthony Trollope: The Critical Heritage (London, 1969), contains a useful collection of Victorian criticism of Trollope’s fiction. Trollope’s contemporary reception is analysed in David Skilton, Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries: A Study in the Theory and Conventions of Mid-Victorian Fiction (London, 1972,1996). An annotated bibliography of later criticism is found in J. C. Olmsted and J. E. Welch, The Reputation of Trollope: An Annotated Bibliography 1925–1975 (New York, 1978), and a fuller listing of Trollope editions as well as selected secondary works is found in Anthony Trollope: A Collector’s Catalogue 1847–1990 (London: the Trollope Society, 1992). The standard descriptive bibliography of Trollope’s works in their original editions is Micha
el Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography (London, 1928).
The best reference work on Trollope, his life and work is the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Trollope, edited by R. C. Terry (Oxford, 1999), while the most scholarly biographies are N. John Hall, Trollope: A Biography (Oxford, 1991), and R. H. Super, The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope (Ann Arbor, 1988). Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in His World (London, 1990) gives a more opinionated account, and Victoria Glendinning’s Anthony Trollope (London, 1992) is fascinating and exceptionally readable, containing very plausible speculations about unknown aspects of the author’s life, including his marriage. Trollope’s letters are admirably collected in N.John Hall (ed.), The Letters of Anthony Trollope (Stanford, CA, 1983). Also useful in the study of Trollope as a public and private figure is R. C. Terry (ed.), Trollope: Interviews and Recollections (London, 1987).
THE PRIME MINISTER
CONTENTS
Volume I
1 Ferdinand Lopez
2 Everett Wharton
3 Mr Abel Wharton, Q.C.
4 Mrs Roby
5 ‘No one knows anything about him’
6 An Old Friend Goes to Windsor
7 Another Old Friend
8 The Beginning of a New Career
9 Mrs Dick’s Dinner Party–No. 1
10 Mrs Dick’s Dinner Party–No. 2
11 Carlton Terrace
12 The Gathering of Clouds
13 Mr Wharton Complains
14 A Lover’s Perseverance
15 Arthur Fletcher
16 Never Run Away!
17 Good-bye
18 The Duke of Omnium Thinks of Himself
19 Vulgarity
20 Sir Orlando’s Policy
Volume II
21 The Duchess’s New Swan
22 St James’s Park
23 Surrender
24 The Marriage
25 The Beginning of the Honeymoon
26 The End of the Honeymoon
27 The Duke’s Misery
28 The Duchess Is Much Troubled
29 The Two Candidates for Silverbridge
30 ‘Yes; – a lie!’
31 ‘Yes; – with a horsewhip in my band’
32 ‘What business is it of yours?’
33 Showing that a Man Should Not Howl
34 The Silverbridge Election
35 Lopez Back in London
36 The Jolly Blackbird
37 The Horns
38 Sir Orlando Retires
39 ‘Get round him’
40 ‘Come and try it’
Volume III
41 The Value of a Thick Skin
42 Retribution
43 Kauri Gum
44 Mr Wharton Thinks of a New Will
45 Mrs Sexty Parker
46 He wants to get rich too quick’
47 As for Love!
48 ‘Has he ill-treated you?’
49 Where is Guatemala?
50 Mr Slide’s Revenge
51 Coddling the Prime Minister
52 ‘I can sleep here to-night, I suppose?
53 Mr Hartlepod
54 Lizzie
55 Mrs Parker’s Sorrows
56 What the Duchess Thought of her Husband
57 The Explanation
58 ‘Quite settled’
59 The First and the Last
60 The Tenway function
Volume IV
61 The Widow and her Friends
62 Phineas Finn Has a Book to Read
63 The Duchess and her Friend
64 The New K.G.
65 There Must Be Time
66 The End of the Session
67 Mrs Lopez Prepares to Move
68 The Prime Minister’s Political Creed
69 Mrs Parker’s Fate
70 At Wharton
71 The Ladies at Long barns Doubt
72 ‘He thinks that our days are numbered’
72 Only the Duke of Omnium
74 ‘I am disgraced and shamed’
75 The Great Wharton Alliance
76 Who Will It Be?
77 The Duchess in Manchester Square
78 The New Ministry
79 The Wharton Wedding
80 The Last Meeting at Matching
VOLUME I
CHAPTER I
Ferdinand Lopez
It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society, and also of service to be able to speak of them as of persons who were themselves somebodies in their time. No doubt we all entertain great respect for those who by their own energies have raised themselves in the world; and when we hear that the son of a washerwoman has become Lord Chancellor or Archbishop of Canterbury we do, theoretically and abstractedly, feel a higher reverence for such self-made magnate than for one who has been as it were born into forensic or ecclesiastical purple. But not the less must the offspring of the washerwoman have had very much trouble on the subject of his birth, unless he has been, when young as well as when old, a very great man indeed. After the goal has been absolutely reached, and the honour and the titles and the wealth actually won, a man may talk with some humour, even with some affection, of the maternal tub; – but while the struggle is going on, with the conviction strong upon the straggler that he cannot be altogether successful unless he be esteemed a gentleman, not to be ashamed, not to conceal the old family circumstances, not at any rate to be silent, is difficult And the difficulty is certainly not less if fortunate circumstances rather than hard work and intrinsic merit have raised above his natural place an aspirant to high social position. Can it be expected that such a one when dining with a duchess shall speak of his father’s small shop, or bring into the light of day his grandfather’s cobbler’s awl? And yet it is so difficult to be altogether silent! It may not be necessary for any of us to be always talking of our own parentage. We may be generally reticent as to our uncles and aunts, and may drop even our brothers and sisters in our ordinary conversation. But if a man never mentions his belongings among those with whom he lives, he becomes mysterious, and almost open to suspicion. It begins to be known that nobody knows anything of such a man, and even friends become afraid. It is certainly convenient to be able to allude, if it be but once in a year, to some blood relation.
Ferdinand Lopez, who in other respects had much in his circumstances on which to congratulate himself, suffered trouble in his mind respecting his ancestors such as I have endeavoured to describe. He did not know very much himself, but what little he did know he kept altogether to himself. He had no father or mother, no uncle, aunt, brother or sister, no cousin even whom he could mention in a cursory way to his dearest friend. He suffered, no doubt; – but with Spartan consistency he so hid his trouble from the world that no one knew that he suffered. Those with whom he lived, and who speculated often and wondered much as to who he was never dreamed that the silent man’s reticence was a burden to himself. At no special conjuncture of his life, at no period which could be marked with the finger of the observer, did he glaringly abstain from any statement which at the moment might be natural. He never hesitated, blushed, or palpably laboured at concealment; but the fact remained that though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none of them knew whence he had come, or what was his family.
He was a man, however, naturally reticent, who never alluded to his own affairs unless in pursuit of some object the way to which was clear before his eyes. Silence therefore on a matter which is common in the mouths of most men was less difficult to him than to another, and the result less embarrassing. Dear old Jones, who tells his friends at the club of every pound that he loses or wins at the races, who boasts of Mary’s favours and mourns over Lucy’s coldness almost in public, who issues bulletins on the state of his purse, his stomach, his stable, and his debts, could not with any amount of care keep from us the fact that his father was an attorne
y’s clerk, and made his first money by discounting small bills. Everybody knows it, and Jones, who likes popularity, grieves at the unfortunate publicity. But Jones is relieved from a burden which would have broken his poor shoulders, and which even Ferdinand Lopez, who is a strong man, often finds it hard to bear without wincing.
It was admitted on all sides that Ferdinand Lopez was a ‘gentleman’. Johnson says that any other derivation of this difficult word than that which causes it to signify ‘a man of ancestry’ is whimsical. There are many who, in defining the term for their own use, still adhere to Johnson’s dictum; – but they adhere to it with certain unexpressed allowances for possible exceptions. The chances are very much in favour of the well-born man, but exceptions may exist. It was not generally believed that Ferdinand Lopez was well born; – but he was a gentleman. And this most precious rank was acceded to him although he was employed, – or at least had been employed, – on business which does not of itself give such a warrant of position as is supposed to be afforded by the bar and the church, by the military services and by physic. He had been on the Stock Exchange, and still in some manner, not clearly understood by his friends, did business in the City.