Our heroines whose names at this point are: Glencora, Duchess of Omnium (Susan Hampshire) and Mrs Marie Finn (Barbara Murray)

Dear Friends,

I’ve put on this blog a summary of the episodes of this part (An Elegiac Culmination), prefaced by situating it in the whole series, and containing several transcripts of key scenes, quotations from others, and stills.

Tonight I add a commentary.

General remarks:

Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) salutes his sister, Mary (Kate Nicholls), Lady Mabel (Anna Carteret) and Mrs Finn on this cold sunny day (see the blanket)

When we get to Pallisers 12:24 and move finally out of the Prime Minister and into Duke’s Children, the mood of this series changes radically. It becomes idyllic-elegiac, and picturesque. This last book is the most changed by Raven for Raven does not kill off the Duchess until the final episode. He shows her sinking; she looks old and she is continually taking medicines, but she is there and very active. He changes the meaning of the book.

We saw in reading Trollope’s novel, The Duke’s Children, its weakness is its real backstory and passion about the Duke’s dissatisfaction with his marriage finally and this is not brought to the fore. Too painful for Trollope to make a front story because perhaps a parallel with his own marriage. In the book the Duchess’s use of Mary as a vicarious substitute which leads the Duke to reject Tregear passionately.

Here in the film we have instead a deeply loving couple, different no doubt, but sharing grief, loss, outlook. This Duke has no backstory. And the forefront is his struggle with Silverbridge. It is significant that people writing about Trollope’s book before the series write eloquently, movingly, and sentimentally about the Duke v Silverbridge as central to the novel. John Wiltshire says one thing movies often do is make visible how the average person wants to see a novel.

But Raven does more: The Duke’s Children is one of Trollope’s more Victorian novels in some of its attitudes and Raven to put this across uses a mood of bright comfort and high idealism. He has only a fragment of Tregear so he is turned into a poignant lover of Mary which is then contrasted to Lady Mabel Grex’s loss of Frank and her unwilling to marry the boy.

All the proto-feminism of Trollope is erased here: we haven’t a woman who is not given a choice she wants and therefore no place; instead she is made somewhat superficially cynical and wavering with a desire to become Tregear’s lover-mistress again, and we have pairs of young lovers contrasted, and it’s clear Silverbridge and Mabel are the mismatched pair against Frank and Mary’s deeply felt yearning and Silverbridge and Isabel’s bright young hope and energy. This lays the groundwork for the wet dream of the the American girl which takes over (and replaces the function of Madame Max as superfemale in the European movie style)

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Facing it (defeat, later life): Duke (Philip Latham) and Duchess in their bedroom suite late at night

The duke and Duchess’s story:

Raven sees the Duke as noble, but also someone who would be lost, vulnerable, and something of a butt because he’s no networker and is not complicit or corrupt himself; he lives in a way others regard as dull; watching him talk with Phineas Finn through a window, his son, Silverbridge tells Lady Mabel he looks far older than his age. The implication is Silverbridge wants to enjoy life more and thus look younger.

For Trollope the character is this way too: but Trollope also identifies with the Duke, recognizes himself in him and critiques society for more than its materialistic corruption. All along, as Raven once said in an interview, the central figure for Raven has been the Duchess: it’s paradoxical, as Raven in part turned the series in many stories of gentleman attempting to succeed in the world.

Silverbridge is contrasted to his father and Anthony Andrews as Silverbridge gains gravitas when he is contrasted to the Duke’s deep idealism and genuine thought on the one hand and Dolly Longstaffe’s disillusioned cynicism and insight on the other.

There are two scenes between Silverbridge and his father, in the first Silverbridge tells of his desire to marry Lady Mabel and the Duke approves; the second is a central linchpin of the episode — and a powerful dramatic one. The Duchess’s disapproval of her son’s choice (what happened to that idealistic young girl of 1:1? we are to ask) contrasts with his father’s approval; his father’s dismay at his lack of altruism and depth contrasts with his mother’s way of regarding politics as a matter of family sheerly and individuals.

All this is true to Trollope’s conception, only it’s not in the Duke’s Children as the Duchess dies in the book’s first paragraph.

There is no contrast of the Duchess and Lady Mary. They seem to live in different universes. But then the film-makers are male and, except for Marie Finn and the Duchess, at no point in all the series do they show women’s friendships as central to their lives beyond the early courtship before marriage, not even their family ones – as a mother-daughter pair would be. Lady Mary seems only aware of her father: she worries lest Silverbridge upset him further; wants Tregear to appear to be serious and earnest before her father. No comment about her feelings about her mother occurs anywhere in the series — nor the Duchess about her after early on we see her preparing an album to read to the child with — except at first that Tregear is below them and therefore Mary should not marry him (she changes her mind when she learns to like him at Venice).

The culminating great scenes of the whole series are really the very long ones between the Duke and Duchess, which punctuate the series throughout. Sympathetically presented as they are, Phineas Finn and Madame Max (aka Marie) Goesler Finn are secondary hero and heroine. So their enjoyment of their park and grown children and the deeply felt scene at mid-point in the episode as the two learn to live with their loss of power are final moments in a 24 episode long story.

The film story began with a forced marriage between two very unlike people, deeply unsympathetic who had found people congenial to them, and we have experienced a long and rocky road with much estrangement and times of alienation, especially on the deep-feeling Duke’s part, and dogmatic uncomprehending insistence on his own way; for the Duchess it’s been frustration, deep and unending, at first an intense lack of fulfillment of her impulses and then when she had the chance for her ambition, and her desire to show off and have people admire her and feel on top and be ahead, she is thwarted, not appreciated, stopped, partly out of her own adequate judgement Trollope wants us to see, but also that (in the films this is there more unqualifiedly as the book’s anti-semitism and xenophobia has been cut) her protegee never had a chance. But now they are grown old together and have come to understand and appreciate one another.

Trollope’s critique of marriage becomes in the Raven team hands a reinforcement of submission and repression to family aggrandizement and social mores, for there are no such coming together loving scenes between the Duke and Duchess (and very moving they are) in either Phineas 2 or The Duke’s Children — for that matter 8:15 over the Duke’s death are invented and elaborated semi-original scenes too.

Phineas (Donal McCann) and Marie, secondary couple, standing out in the group of friends and family, and standing by

These scenes of Duke and Duchess are contextualized by three or four shorter between the Duke and Bungay, the Duke and Phineas and Bungay and Marie Finn and the Duchess. In all we see how the Duke has come to enjoy power and doesn’t want to let go because he wants to leave his mark on the society; he wants to have done something good and decent and far-reaching. Bungay says it was enough to hold on and provide peace. Phineas and Marie Finn’s views are simply that the Duke and Duchess have done what they could and now that their followers are tired of doing nothing exciting (bustle), nothing for war, for advancement of themselves, they have to let go and be glad they have escaped unscathed relatively, gotten what they could out of it.

The Duchess is as unwilling to let go as the Duke; and in their final long scene together she cries out more than he about their retirement which he has finally accepted before the scene begins.

It’s done in their bedroom with a mirror nearby and often we see her through the mirror — a device used repeatedly in films when women are at the center of the scene: it’s suggested in film studies that this shows how women judge themselves as they imagine society sees them, and invent an identity or assume one society imposes or wants them to enact, or they want to enact in order to be accepted.

Among these contextualizing scenes (for the Duke and Duchess) is the held-over the long scene in The Prime Minister (Chapter 68, “The Prime Minister’s Creed”), where Phineas and the Duke go for a walk in the park and talk politics. This is an important scene in PF2 and it is here too.

What is fascinating is how Trollope remains in generalities far more than the Raven team and how the Raven team update what’s said in Trollope to be a conservative message for the 1970s. In Trollope the Duke and Phineas remain in philosophical generalities like Monk does in his letter (the parallel moment in Phineas Finn when Monk defines what is meant by representative government and faces that it means government which includes the mediocre, the stupid, those who “represent” all the feelings and interests of their constituences. He does not think of lobbyists as we have them today ):

In Trollope the implications have to do with income and property redistribution finally, it’s never made explicit. The Duke is simply a staunch liberal who wants to see more justice, noble loving hearts, clear intellect and egalitarian feelings spread through the earth and then produce legislation. In Raven’s film this is made explicit; he felt he could not remain vague. Palliser is talking of something that would bring about or call for redistributing property and rights and advantages and privileges. It’s Phineas who in both book and film says he is not sure he wants to go beyond fairness. The Duke says as people born to such privilege do they dare argue they deserve this and argue the others don’t (are ontologically inferior is what is meant) and not try to help others and also argue for their rights too, and work towards it. The Duke says this will increase happiness for all, but admits especially those without advantages.

Phineas’ reply in the film is that even those without advantages may not want egalitarianism, and it won’t make them happy to get rid of distinctions, not at all. Raven and his team are careful not to have Phineas argue the conservative view itself, and the Duke turns to his beautiful landscape and we see his luxurious room and remember how lovely his lifestyle and he says he wouldn’t want to give what he has up and maybe has the luxury of hoping for egalitarianism while he knows it will not happen for a long time to come.

This may seem far away from the 1970s, but the costume drama hides the agenda here. Bungay in his scene with the Duke argues (as he’s done before in the film and again not so explicitly in Trollope’s book) that English people don’t want revolution; they want things to remain at peace and orderly. This is Raven’s 1970s Toryism, for he has taken no poll.

Beyond contextualizing our aging hero and heroine this way, their life and times, the relationship and types the Duke and Duchess represent are shown visually and comically. The Duchess is to go out riding in a carriage with Lady Mary and Marie Finn with her sons and Frank Tregear on horseback. She is late dressing herself exquisitely. She does don a beautiful (alluring to my eyes) hat. How she loves coming out and Silverbridge telling her how lovely she looks. Then she refuses her seat in the carriage and instead takes the reigns away from her footman servant and leads the band herself on the top seat.

It’s touching: the young Lady Glen is there yet; this is just the sort of thing she loved from the beginning. After their dialogue the Duke and Phineas walk out and see the group. The Duke hurries over to take his wife down from her perch (lovingly of course) and worries that the young men’s race will hurt them. It’s just the sort of way he has of fretting over her health when she was pregnant in the early episodes. In character still.

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The second generation of heroines: the deep feeling Mary and Lady Mabel (these are the center for Raven, and Isabel Boncassen, so delightful for Trollope to conjure up as an old man, is marginalized as exotic, foreign) talk of their heroes, Tregear and Silverbridge and Mary of her father

This is matched by the scene where Silverbridge tells Tregear he must give it up; this is chosen to be dramatized twice (much earlier when the Duchess objected we had a version of this) as befits a series about gentlemen coping:

Then there is the Duke’s Children, or second generation material. How are we asked to see this in the film? Early in the episode is the very moving scene with Frank where she implies she is offering herself to him sexually again, and he refuses not on the grounds he does not love her or could not again, but that he cannot tear himself between two women.

This romance is not in Trollope; Trollope’s Tregear is harder and would not sentimentalize this way; we are not sure about any sex, and he is now bound to and wants Mary for herself and also what she can bring. Trollope’s feminism is also gone; he really does have Mabel lament she has nothing to do with her life; this is a new motif with him; he shows her in a bleak gothic castle with Miss Cassewary at the end of DC. Here she is simply cut and dismissed by Silverbridge (I like that as in Trollope he is nowhere as likeable as he is in this series). Her need for money as central motivation is in both book and film.

About half-way through the episode we have the scene between Silverbridge where he asks Lady Mabel to marry him and she refuses; while short, it is strong and powerfully emotional. They play at courtship and it’s lyrical and sweet at moments (not hard in the way of Trollope); still, she tells him she cannot marry without love, yet at the end relents to say when he is grown up, harder, to come again. Alas, she does not in the film realize harder means he will not come again. In the book we are told of further proposals (not dramatized) which she refuses; they do not occur here. In the final scene she is regretting having said no because now Isabel will get him.

David Lean says most of the time don’t pay attention to the end of a movie or an episode. It’s a sop for the masses, an upbeat piece tacked on to please nervous backers and distributors. This episode shows that. It’s in the middle of the episode that the great moments arise. I think mini-series and soap opera don’t work in the way of commercial singleton films and the middles and endings are important.

Once again, in Trollope’s Duke’s Children as we have it together (only 3/4s of the original book) the books’ hero is the Duke and he stands alone at the center of the children the Duchess left him who have been brought up by and resemble her. In the book the Duchess is least linked to Lady Mary because she sympathized strongly with the love affair with Tregear remembering her own. That’s why in the book the Duke is against it.

We see 20th century attitudes again (as we did in earlier episodes when we saw the Duke misbehaving in front of his son and the Duchess trying to mediate and “spoiling” her sons0: the older folks Duke and Duchess are suffering badly over their loss of power but hide it from the children. It’s presented that adult parents hide all sorts of realities from their children. That’s a modern ideal or even norm perhaps in some places, but not then. Major Tifto is marginalized, not central in the early way of the book which weighs Silverbridge’s decisions about male friends as heavily as it does his relationship with his father and choice of Isabel over Lady Mab. Then both Duke and Duchess involve themselves in Silverbridge’s choice: is she presentable, they ask (as if he had to get a middle-management joy through giving dinner parties). It’s almost funny in the way the material lends itself to these anachronisms.

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As to technologies: how daring are the close-ups of Susan Hampshire and Philip Latham. Not until very recently did cameras come close to the faces of heroes and heroines (who we are to admire and want to be I suppose, identify with) to show their aging faces, slack skin, pock marks, blemishes of all sorts. This is also seen (a little farther off) for Phineas and Madame Max and Dolly to show them as aging, but not close up.

This is radical, an approach not seen until about 4 years ago.

Visuals have a logic of their own dependent on the particular actor/actress: they chose the yearning Nicholls for daughter of the originally brightly idealistic Lady Glencora; she is in dark green to deepen the pastoral green of the part. She contains in her a haunted spirit and is the visual genius loci of the part. This is why I began the first posting on this part with her

No it’s no Brideshead, The Jewel in the Crown, or Love for Lydia, 11-13 episodes of daring pictorialism and new techniques of various sorts, but I think the Pallisers is not written about in depth because (like the year-long Forsythe Saga), it was so ambitious, and is so difficult to remember, let alone apprehend precisely.

Onto Pallisers 12:25.

Ellen

In the afternoon, as we were driven rapidly along in the post chaise, he said to me, “Life has not many things better than this” (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Thursday, 21 March 1776)

Lady Mary (Kate Nicholls) drawing outside the Matching Priory ruins

Dear Readers and Movie-Lovers,

This is another of the great parts of this series. Previous extraordinarily good hours were 2:3, 5:10, 8:15 and 8:16. Episodes 31-33 takes us to the film’s close of The Prime Minister matter as well as a culminating moment of the whole series; Episodes 34-35 are pure Duke’s Children, with Silverbridge the last of our young heroes (here only momentarily) astray.

At the close of the previous four novels, we have had a transition of some sort: except for the ending of The Eustace Diamonds (7:14, it has been a return to the pleasure grounds of Matching envisaged as an Arcadia, where we began (1:1), e.g., the transition of Can You Forgive Her to Phineas Finn, 3:6. But now we are not transitioning so much as anticipating a final close and a death of a principal character: so we are asked to remember back to the beginning, the marriage of the Palliser pair, think of the price the winners we are seeing paid, and look at what they have won. The mood is one central to many of these sorts of series: the elegiac. It is a mood rarely available to modern so-called non-costume drama (all movies are in costume), and and one this particular part dwells within continually by repeatedly giving us picturesque and yearning scenes.

A central mode and mood of film adaptations of older books which are also older costume drama is the elegiac. Why is this is rarely available to modern contemporary films. You need the slow graceful pace for at least a few moments; you need the distance so that you can lend yourself to believing such sentiments can be uttered and at length; you need the beautiful surroundings ,the subtle long-drawn developing characterization in a seriously-taken story. The drawing room in this part of the series has become green as a meadow, lit with sunlight.

Now that Lopez (Stuart Wilson, very great in the role) is dead, and the Wharton story cut adrift (11:23),

1) the Duke and Duchess (Philip Latham and Susan Hampshire) are again to the fore; 2), the political themes important to the Phineas books brought back (e.g., the question of the possibility of a faire juster political system, or more equality in life and what this means) and made central once again (if only as a “fading dream”); and 3), the scenes of the Duke’s children are given more depth for themselves (not as contrasting to and defining the relationship and point of life for the Duke and Duchess).

The political theme unites the double-story of Duke and Duchess aging and the next generation replacing them, for Silverbridge’s (Anthony Andrews) stance as a Tory is (in effect, though he is too young to see this clearly) an attempt to change the family allegiance (as he will be the next Duke) to the Tories, and is thus a grave blow to all the Duke sees himself as having striven for when it came to legislative change.

What Raven has done is defer a good deal of the material about the fall of the Duke from The Prime Minister to work it out at more length (especially focusing on the Duchess) and interwoven this with material from The Duke’s Children — which had begun in the previous episodes, here and there:

1) the grown Mary (Kate Nicholls) and Silverbridge first introduced at the end of 10:20

2) Mary’s and Tregear’s (Jeremy Irons) attraction, the duchess’s objections to this and Silverbridge’s backing his mother are woven into 10:21;

3) Silverbridge’s having been thrown out of Oxford, the duke’s distress, and the son’s being sent to Venice which occasions the duchess and Duke’s visit; a slow motion interweaving of Lady Mabel Grex (Anna Carteret), seen first in Venice with Miss Cassewary (Josie Kid) and Treager with Silverbridge: Lady Mabel and Frank look very strained in Silverbridge’s apartment in Venice where enigmatic pregnant words about knowing one another already are passed. All found in 11:22;

4) at Matching we see Tregear attracted to Lady Mary and she to him by looks: 11:23).

So a careful look at the previous 4 episodes shows material developed or adapted from The Duke’s Children threaded into The Prime Minister and contrasted with the Wharton story matter; this enabled Raven to hold off on some of the PM matter, its half-defeated close, until now.

The important thing was to string out Lady Glen or the Duchess’s presence so that she would die in the very last episode and not before. The point of the filmic The Duke’s Children is not (as in Trollope’s book) to show a disillusioned lonely man refusing to allow his daughter to have what his wife wanted for her; Trollope’s duke reacts with a refusal out of vicarious imagined emotional losses. The point of the filmic Prime Minister, and filmic Duke’s Children is to show us how a companionate marriage emerged after much compromise and pain. The series began with that magnificent visually symbolic scene in the park of a forced match, and it ends in understanding and compromise, and beautiful children too (that matters). In the films, The Duke’s Children also the most truncated of the books is as foreshortened as The Eustace Diamonds (which to my taste lingered on too long but it had to for Mr Emilius was the murderer in Trollope’s Phineas Redux. Really we have 2 and one-quarter to one-third episodes at the most for this sixth novel; a tiny bit more if you count stray episodes looking forward to this from 10:20; see thumbnail outline.

I will do as I have done in earlier postings on the series, both summarize the episodes and comment on themes, mood, and individual scenes.

Episode 31: Changing Times

The first scene occurs between an aging Barrington Erle (Moray Watson) and Dolly Longestaffe (Donald Pickering) at the club discussing Lopez’s ejection and the probable coming defeat of the present government. They are chorus once again and provide a frame; at the same time, Silverbridge brings Major Tifto (John Ringham) to the club; thus a major figure in The Duke’s Children is introduced, and (as in the novel) Dolly swiftly sees Tifto is, and exposes him as, a liar. Tifto insinuates he has had an affair with an opera singer, and Dolly (knowing far more her far more than Tifto) asks if Tifto isn’t afraid of her husband. Tifto becomes nervous and anxious about spreading these stories suddenly (source: Duke’s Children, Chapter 7, 1995 Penguin, pp 41-42). Changing times is seen in the aging of Erle and Longestaffe; their preference to sit in a private room, the open talk of sex (which Erle looks embarrassed at) and gambling. There is also a foreshadowing: when Dolly says to Erle “Lady Glen would have made a better Prime Minister,” Erle replies: “I daresay. He’d certainly be lost without her.” The Tifto material comes from The Duke’s Children, Ch 6 (“Major Tifto”), in the Penguin, pp. 41-42.

The second scene is a moving one between the Duchess and Duke of St Bungay (Roger Livesey). It is a semi-original replay of scenes from The Prime Minister, Chs 63, pp. 543-45 and 66, 563-64. Much changed in detail but the basis of the affectionate relationship between the two and their determined attempt to shield the Duke is taken from Trollope; the difference is while Trollope admires the duke for his ethics, he does not sympathize with what he calls “coddling.” In Raven’s scene, the duchess wants to know if the government can last and he gives her answer she doesn’t like: it can’t. She blames herself for Lopez and Bungay exonerates her by saying if it hadn’t been Lopez, it would have been something else. In the novel the last straw is the Duke’s giving the garter to a good man whose virtue deserves it, Lord Earlybird. Raven provides mouth-to-mouth kissing at the end, by visuals suggesting the Duke’s attraction to this woman, but the last still shows her face worn, distressed, unhappy. She kissed to please him, not herself.

Third scene, Bungay, Erle and Phineas discuss coming dissolution. This is reinforcing what is dramatized in more scattered passages in the novel and includes Monk.

Fourth scene, the Duchess and Mrs Finn (Barbara Murray). This is analogous to Prime Minister, Ch 76, pp. 657-59. The duchess expresses her bitter regret the government has to go, and Mrs Finn says she does not mind that her husband will not be in office; does not care about such things unless he does. He’ll be back; but, says the Duchess, her husband will never be PM again. This scene segues into a culminating of the series whose textual basis is a short paragraph in PM where as Phineas and the Duke come to the end of their talk we are told they see the Duchess, Mrs Finn and the Pallisers’ eldest daughter in the carriage (PM, Ch 68, p 586).

Her hat a weapon, a barrier and guard

Scene 5, front room, Matching now this beautifully pastorally-colored place where greens and yellows and sunlight predominate.

This is an extraordinary scene between Frank Tregear Jeremy Irons) and Lady Mabel. This is our first complete true DC and yet it is wholly re-imagined by Raven from the narrator’s allusive references (DC, Ch 9, “In Media Res,” pp. 56-61, a scene in DC, Ch 10, pp. 63-68). Now the original scene far more subversive and disquieting than this one of reproach, Frank in Trollope’s original conception a ruthless riser, not this melancholy remorseful partly yearning young man of Raven.

In Raven’s scene it’s clear Frank and Mabel were once physical lovers and they could be so again were she to have time and space to get to him. [It is a man's view where the man's being trapped and woman the aggressor -- which coheres with an introduction by Raven to Trollope's An Eye for an Eye.] It’s fascinating how a number of the key lines occur in Trollope and the feel is utterly transformed into something less complex yet at once far more poignant and far more bitter. (Life does not yield such strong stuff and Trollope ever tries to imitate life.)

The coloring and tone of the mise-en-scene here is elegiac; she is pleading with him not to forget her and there are lines which suggestively insinuate she would be willing (again) to have sex with him if he would break it off with Lady Mary. It’s a beautifully picturesque and yearning, melancholy scene between Jeremy Irons as noble, well-meaning Frank Tregear, and Anna Carteret, as Lady Mabel Grex who is now wrenchingly regretful that she had given up Tregear two years ago now that she sees him at Matching and taking up with Lady Mary (played winsomely by Kate Nicholls), a few lines delivered by Irons had the tone, the very accents of Ronald Colman when he makes one of his poignant rueful appeals.

Establishment shot: Lady Mabel about to walk upstairs; we see Frank Tregear from the back inside the room. She turns to see him as she goes up; she walks back and into the room and over to him.

Lady Mabel: “Frank.”
Frank: “Good afternoon, Lady Mabel. Is the carriage ready?”
Mabel: “They’re not all there yet. Frank … (her face open to him)”
Frank looks down and then up; he avoids eye contact at the same time looking sensitively pained.
Mabel: “I wonder when we were last alone together.”
Frank: “Two years and more I suppose” (so also in 11:22 and the visit of Duke and Duchess to Venice was supposed to be after this)
Mabel (her lips tight): “[?] that summer at Lady Cantripp’s. Does not it make you yearn a little when you remember it?”
Frank: “What’s the good, Lady Mabel? We both agreed we should give it up because neither of us had the money. Let’s just stick to that.”
Mabel; “That you once swore that you should love me forever.”
Frank: “And you swore some things to me and yet it was you who said we should drop it.”
Mabel: “So I did. But I think the wrench has been greater for me. Your love has been transferred very quickly and very advantageously … [?] Lady Mary.”
Frank: “Yours has not been so very abiding. You do not, I notice, discourage Lord Silverbridge.
Mabel: “That is unkind, Frank. You know very well with such a father as Grex and such a brother as Perceval and the years going all very quickly, I must soon find a husband.”
Frank breathes deep, looks down.
Mabel: “There need be no such haste for you, Frank (her hand is now on his and the camera rests there). You might have been faithful to me for some while yet and you would not have gone wholly unrewarded.”

It’s here they come close, his face twitches and he shakes his head. (We may see she is asking him to be her lover while she gets herself a husband unscrupulously to pay the bills. This is very Henry James kind of couple — anticipating The Wings of the Dove had it been written by Trollope, but it wasn’t this.)
Frank: “You bad me take my love elsewhere and that I’ve done” (sad melancholy soft tone).
Lady Mabel’s voice much louder: “Yes. With the greatest ease” (bitter tone, hurt eyes).
Frank (now he walks off); “I cannot tear my heart and my life to pieces for the sake of an old love” (this is not Trollope’s much harder character).
They are on different sides of the room and then they swiftly walk to one another and are close: “Let’s go and join the others.” (They look as if they are about to kiss.)
Mabel: “Oh Frank I wish … “
And then the interruption; as she is looking up to him, Silverbridge comes in and sees them. He does not register something is happening in front of him that matters (as he later does on DC about these two as lovers).
Silverbridge (opening door): “There you are, you two, come on, the carriage is waiting.”
Look on Frank’s face picked up by camera.
Mabel; “Yes, we were just coming (in an excited high emotional voice) as you see” (hurried tone, steps over towards Silverbridge)
Silverbridge put his amr out and she takes it.
Mabel: “Thank you, Silverbridge (they go out the door together). How well that coat becomes you …”
Frank follows looking grave (an ideal face for this character).
Mabel (loud voice still): “Which of your horses do you ride today?” [he has so many]
Scene of room over and we see it empty now and that is a meaningful chord. It’s the possession or not of such a room that makes Silverbridge what he is and the other two what they are not.

The poignancy of this deceptive ending (Lady Mabel deceiving SIlverbridge) then segues into a glorious elegiac moment — embodying the ambiguity of experience.

Scene 6: Just outside Matching, beautiful sunny day. Silverbridge and Mabel come out and hurry over to carriage, she climbs into carriage with Mrs Finn (waiting from Scene 4) and Lady Mary who has a blanket she puts over Lady Mabel’s lap. Tregar and Gerald (Michael Cochrane). Gerald has first eager lines of “Come on, come on, ” also showing he has less brains and self-consciousness than the others, ) on horses waiting and Duchess emerges in the sun.

The Duchess looks about (wonderful moment as she is beneath great hat and puts on gloves) and is in command; comes over but decides she will be the leader of the horses and take the reigns. Memories of 2:3 where she came in with Alice Vavasour (Caroline Mortimer) and said how she loved to ride and loved to be the driver of a carriage too but the Duke frowned on it.

Episode 32: Fading Dreams

Scene 7: Establishment shot: Phineas (Donal McCann) and Duke seen at medium distance in Duke’s study, Duke behind desk, Phineas in chair, talking intently. From PM, Vol 4, Ch 68, pp 582-86.

Duke: “Do you think it will soon go against us, Finn?”
Finn: “Yes, Duke, soon.”
Duke: “Ah, how so? (shaking finger) surely we could hold on to the beginning of the next season.”

We hear clopping of horses outside (we know it’s Duchess and family and friends in carriage and riding in beautiful place on fine day)

Finn: “I’m very doubtful of that.”
Duke: (Bitter now) “To have done so little, hmmm . . . In fact I would fain carry on. No. I . . . I’m dermined to carry on, Finn, so long as there is any hope that we may be of service.”
Finn: “There comes a time for any government when it’s best service is to be gone.

[Elegiac tone suffused dialogue]

Duke (looks down sad.) “Well, I do not think it’s come to that yet. In fact, I pray not. (Gets up and walks over to another area.) No I would like to do at least some one thing before we go (apparently picked up and now waving blue books).”
Finn: “What is it your Grace would do if you could?”
Duke: (walking back, rueful tone): “If I could, Finn, hmmm, if I could . . . I would spread justice over the entire earth. I would lead chosen friends loving hearts, clear intellect, noble instinct whose one great aim was to abolish the distance between men.”
Finn: “Do men really want that?”
Duke: (Exasperated slight noise, sound like “Finn!”, walks a little): “How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think otherwise?
Finn: “But that which we have been given which if distributed equally would dwindle so pitifully that no man would get anything worth the having.”
Duke: “At least we would be all alike and there’d be justice. Oh Finn (shaking fits) you’re a liberal because you now that all is not what it should be. Because you’d march onto some nearer approach to equality?
Finn: “I want a fairer world, if that’s what you mean.”
Duke. (Makes sound like “Oh!” lips shake) “No no. I mean that as you are a just and liberal man then you must want all men to be equal.”
Finn sits back, “Mmmm.” (Looks melancholy and earnest and sad. He does not appear to
think men are equal nor are they at all like the Duke)

Duke: “Equality is so great thing, so glorious [tone turns acrid, disgust felt] that you become disgusted by the promise of it in the mouths of blood-thirsty and corrupt men.”
Finn: “Such men have asserted a mock equality so much that the very idea of the thing stinks in my nostrils.”
Duke: (Hamlet-like here) “And yet I fear that though equality is but a dream that may never come … still sometimes one likes to dream” (farther off shot, he walks around desk), “especially as there is no danger that Marching all this [his hand indicates his beautiful study and the landscape outside his window -- in which we know his Duchess and adult children and Mrs Finn are riding] will ever be flown away when I wake up.” (Now bangs on world globe). “Ah, it’s pleasant to play with the idea of a millenium, Finn, that will never come to destroy me. Now, I doubt I should stand the test that’s been attempted in other countries.
Finn: “Yes, you should be thankful the English are not given to violent revolution. They prefer to enjoy what they have in peace and leave others to do likewise” (implication Duke would be a big loser).
Duke: “Will it always be so?”
Finn: “That I cannot say. For the time at least Duke, you are free to enjoy your domaine (pointing outwards to grounds beyond) and to walk in it without fear.”
Duke: : (smiles): “Well, Phineas, let’s walk in it together before the best of the day is gone.”

(Again sound of carriage, and next shot of next scene is of deep clear light steely blue sky with ruins seen.)

And then the scene with the Duchess: somehow this next one feels like the true ending of series; it should have ended here — the happy moment, but as in life the curtain does not come down then. It’s at a later serendipitious older moment the end comes.

Scene 8:

Establishment shot: Out of doors. We see horses emerging from the left hand of the frame and see them clopping, we see ruins. Soft blue sky, light breeze, glorious day. Horses seen from vantage of Duke and Phineas (who we know this from previous scene). Curiously memorable one of the grown children (Silverbridge, Gerald, Lady Mary,, Duchess, Mrs Finn and Lady Mabel) processing out to the grounds of matching on a fine spring day — one’s heart stops at the sense of a precious moment caught from the flux of time (see picture above).

Carriage and three horses go by, and then we see back of Phineas from back, black, top-hat and then two top-hatted men whose black silhouettes are closer to us with carriage moving from distance inbetween. Lovingly done. We watch and this is supposed to make us rejoice

The group slowly comes round the path and tree and down towards the men on the path which realls (though not exactly same) Alice Vavasour and Lady Glen ride ever so many years (episodes) ago, Lady Glen driving then and saying how much she loved this. She waves, and camera shows two men lift hats and wave back. Camera then catches them slowing down, stopping and her high on the seat, beginning to come down.

Duke: “Well, good afternoon, my dear.”
Duchess: “Have you had a nice afternoon, Duke?”
Duke: “Yeah. Very pleasant. Oh, Finn, and I we’ve just been talking uh oh politics.”
Duchess: (As she takes flowers from bouquet which seems there somehow) “Well, what other amusement is possible on such a beautiful afternoon” (this comes from somewhere in PM but I can’t find it)
Duke: “Uh, we’re just going out to enjoy it now” (murmurs inarticulate)

[Another picturesque-lovely still from these later Palliser parts, here the Duchess puts a flower in the lapel of the Duke (Philip Latham) after an exhilarating ride for her and before a pleasant walk for him on a bright day at Matching. A nostalgia for what never was matches to pastoral melancholy of the Matching front room, but bright with the spirit of Duchess as conceived by Raven. We once saw her put a flower in Burgo Fitzgerald's lapel, 1:1]

Then from horses of three young men behind:

Gerald: “Silver, Tregear, race you both through the (?) wood?”
Silver: “Right. Tregear?”
Tregear: “Right.”
Silver: “Mrs Finn (signalling his body to her) shall give us orders.”
Mrs Finn: “As you wish, gentleman” (and camera catches her excited happy face, and she gets up hgh on the carriage): “Back, Mr Tregear. Steady, Silverbridge. Are you ready, gentlemen?”

[We are to remember her past too, and what she gave up at first and then how she gained Phineas who stands to the side of the carriage, with women laughing behind and actresses really do look gay and happy, they enjoy this enactment in these costumes in this site de memoire (history). This again is a true moment of culmination for Phineas and Marie.

Mrs Finn: "Off!"
Lady Mary: "Go! Silverbridge ..."
Other lady's voices shouting (indecipherable who) and we see them gallop off hell for leather

Back to waiting group:

Duke": "Well these boys should take more care. Oh come along, Finn."
Duchess holds on to his arm, elbow, slightlyfrom the back. Finn puts a hand on her shoulder. He walks on, Finn next to Duchess and then camera swings to watch young men riding through another landscape, past that ruin.

Young man on horse (Tregear?): "Come on!" (He is way ahead.) He moves to and through ruined wall with big gap (looks like Tregear).
Then man on white-silver horse, appropriately, we remember this is Silverbridge: "Right! The last one at the Lodgegate's a sissy!"
Gerald (the dunce, the clutz, it was he who started this): "Right! Ouff!" (as he comes through).

Now silver-white horse is rounding a tree, Gerald following and they are on the other side of the river from where we saw them originally and they ride forward, apparently Tregear in the lead.

Scene 9: Matching, front room, in walk Lady Mabel and Mary. There is no such scene in DC; instead Chs 29, pp. 181-82, 184-85, mostly narrated scene of Silverbridge asking Mary to be friends as an old friend of his, and then striking encounter where Silverbridge takes Mary to visit Lady Mabel and they find Tregear there with Miss Cass (! -- the chaperon makes it respectable) and Mary thrusts herself into Tregear's arms, they kiss and then Silverbridge breaks it up. Impossibly Victorian, theatrical melodrama.

Here we see Mary's yearning for her father to approve of Tregear and regret that Treager raced; Lady Mabel's memories of her young years growing up with Silverbridge. Mary understands her father's valuing of "serious" nature in young man (in 1:1 Palliser's most gut level objection to Lady Glen was she was not serious, she was frivolous).

Silverbridge, Tregear and Gerald barge in; Mary protests her father didn't like it, and to Gerald and Silverbridge's rejoinder's, Mabel points to the Duke and Phineas seen in the distance by the ruin walking and "you see how earnestly" talking; Silverbridge looks and remarks how "old for his age" is his father, and Lady Mabel how young is Silverbridge; nevertheless she will walk with him, and they move out. Always these window scenes in the series. A motif brought back again and again as we watch different characters in and through it.

The scene moves to Gerald on the other side of Mary and Tregear; he is thick but gets message and Mary to Tregear (the conservative and replacement for her father): "so you may begin your first lesson . ... in treason ...."

Scene 10: Duke's study, from PM, Vol 4, Chapter 72, pp 619-21 (Penguin) and Chapter 76, pp. 659-660, Chapter 80, pp. 690-91. Bungay brings list of those "who want to resign from your ministry." Painful when Duke asks if Bungay is resigning (no nor Monk nor Finn). Again Duke laments that they won't give them another chance to enact something. To idea he must follow "chance" who may bring him in again, like the Duchess, he says "but never as Prime Minister"), and again "they weren not brought in" to do significant legislation ...

Episode 33: No Going Back.

Scene 11: Tregear approaches Lady Mary sketching by the ruin; sheer lyricism. Some of this adapted from Duke's Children, Chapters 2, p 13 (narrated, Lady Mary tells Mrs Finn), and 29, pp. 184-185 (if not the words, the couple's mood towards one another). The Duke's Children is one of Trollope's more Victorian novels in some of its attitudes and Raven to put this across uses a mood of bright comfort and high idealism. He has only a fragment of Tregear so he is turned into a poignant lover of Mary (which is then contrasted to Lady Mabel Grex's loss of Frank and her unwillingness to betray herself and the boy by marrying him)

Yearning

Feeling so strong it's emotional pain

Scene 12: Duke in his study again, late at night. From Prime Minister, Chapter 72, pp. 619-21; Chapter 78, p. 620; and Chapter 80, p 691 (again reference to Caesar and Pompey, and adds "I am given to fretting ...") also, PM, Ch 66, p. 563 (where Trollope uses free indirect speech as follows: "The old duke [Bungay] had known them both well, but had hardly as yet given the Duchess credit for so true a devotion to her husband. It now seemed to him that, though she had failed to love the man, she had given her entire heart to the Prime Minster.”. In novel Monk is central in scenes or as talked about here; it’s Finn who is in the scenes and Monk and Finn talked about

Establishment shot: Duke in evening clothes, grim expression on his face, sitting on his chair
As they speak, the camera reveals that nearby are Finn and Bungay. Late at night.

Finn: “You must join us, Duke. You must not go altogether. We need you as a statesman and as a friend.”
Duke: “You’re very kind, gentlemen, but Caesar could never command a legion under Pompey.”
Bungay: “It has been done much to the benefit of the country, and with no loss of honor in him who did it.”

Duke gets up slowly: “It will never be done by me.” [plot-design of rest of parts of series will be showing him come to accept a new position in parliament as Duke [upper house] with relief after death of Duchess and his experiences of retirement alone and of his adult children.]
Bungay: “If the fact that you have been first minister should deprive the country of your services in other offices given [?] all the years you have left to you, then I for one shall think the loss irreparable.”
Finn: “And I second that. We cannot spare men ilke you, Duke, for very long.

Camera on Duke facing backwards, seen from shoulders up. He turns.

Duke: “Well, gentlemen, I can’t deny it pleases me to hear you say so. But for m’self I shall never desire to stand at the head of a government again. As you may have observed, I’m given to frettin’. I don’t think that a Prime Minister of a free country should suffer from that infirmity. In fact, for some years to come I would prefer to be altogether out of office. However, I pray that the time time come at last when I may again endeavour to be of some humble service” (This is the last sentence of Trollope’s The Prime Minister, p. 691).

Camera on Bungay looking at Duke gravely.

Duke: “Now if you will forgive (hand to forehead) me, gentlemen (he looks as if he really is about to cry) … (and)

Duchess comes in slowly, all in ivory and white lace. “You are all working very late.”
Duke: “Weighty matters to be decided.”
Duchess: (Worry and anxiety on her aging face, weary look): “But you are finished but that now.”
Bungay: “Yes, my dear, we are finished with that now.”

Camera on her nodding. She walks over to him. She puts her hand on his face, great affection in hers. He looks distressed, slightly paralyzed, not knowing what to do next.

Duchess whispers: “Come. It is time to go to bed.”

He nods.

Scene 13: Duke and Duchess’s bedroom

This is taken from PM, Chs 72, pp. 622-24, and Ch 78, pp. 672-75

Establishment shot: she at her glass, he sitting in his bedroom jacket

Duchess: “What did he say?”
Duke: “I’m sorry, my dear (some noise), what?”
Duchess: “What did the Duke say?”
Duke: “Oh, that our days are numbered.”
Duchess: (she laughs a little). “Oh, I could have told him that long ago. There isn’t a porter at one of the clubs who doesn’t know that. Who is to succeed you?”
Duke: “Oh I shall advise her Majesty to send for Mr Gresham. Oh, she may wish to see Mr Daubeny as well. Not easy to make a ministry at present.”
Duchess: “Why should you not go back?”
Duke: “No. That is not on the cards.”
Duchess: “The why not? Ever so many men have done it after going out. Why not you? Oh, how could they be so ungrateful?”
Duke: “Cora. I’m not going back and there is no point in discussing it further.”
Duchess: “Of course. I understand nothing because I am a woman.”
Duke: “You understand a great deal, but not quite right. At least our troubles are over.

She nods.

Duke: “Oh, I remember, you said the other day, the labor of being a prime minister’s wife [had been] almost too many for you.”
Duchess: “I never said so. As long as you did not give way, no labor’s were too great for me. I’d have slaved morning and night so that we might have succeeded. Oh, I do hate being beat like this. I’d sooner be cut to pieces.”
Duke: “Ah, nobody likes to be beaten, Cora. There is always disappointment at first.”

She nods.

Duke: (Hand on her arm): “You did say you’d be relieved when it came.”
Duchess: “Yes, yes, I know and I meant it. Nevertheless, after drinking brandy so to speak for so long I really think a thin claret would hardly agree with my stomach. Hmmm. (She looks round at him.) Shall you like it for yourself?”
Duke: “I’m a private gentleman, my dear, with more time for his wife and children.”
Duchess: “Well, that is all very well, Duke, but we ain’t quite what you’re used to. You can’t bully us like a cabinet meeting or bring in a bill for reforming us or make us go by decimals. You’ll find us very dull subjects to work on.”
Duke: “Oh, I don’t think so, Cora. Ah, there is Gerald and Silverbridge. They’re going to need guidance and advice.”
Duchess: “Indeed. But you needn’t heap it on them by the cartload.”
Duke: Oh, Mary too, you know she’s got to be settled.”
Duchess: “Now that is woman’s work.”
Duke: “Oh yah. Oh very well.”
Duchess: “Oh well. I can dare to tell the truth about this change, Planty, even if you cannot. Oh yes (intense grief in her face close-up), it will make me unhappy.”

They hug, shake a little (movement image here).

Duke: (he whispers): “I can be honest too, with you at any rate. It will fret me to be without work.”
Duchess: “Yes, yes, I know. I am sorry. I do feel responsible [reference to Lopez debacle].”
Duke: “That is nonsense. It would have happened anyway.”
Duchess: “Well, I shall not be altogether discontented.”
Duke: “What will your contentment be?”
Duchess: “In you. In you (gratified look on her face). Your work was making you ill. Rough people whom your tender nature could not understand worried you. Oooh! I’d have given them worry for worry, but you could not. Wel, [?] you’ll be free of them, and I so I shall be contented (close up).
Duke: “Then I shall be contented too.” His face close up seen from a slant looking gravely and very tenderly at hers.” (PM material now come to an end)

Episode 34: Future plans.

Scene 14: Matching front room, begins with Silverbridge telling Frank he must give “it” [Mary] up. DC, Chapter 14, pp. 87-89, Chapter 31, pp. 191-92. Lines about the Duke: “he’ll say a word or two which you’ll find very hard to bear … My governor’s the quietest man going, but he has got a way of making himself disagreeable when he wishes that I never saw equalled.” Mabel comes in with a distraught expression on her face, Silverbridge says to Tregear to “push along, and Silverbridge proposal scene with Mabel and her rejection ensues. DC, Chapter 19, pp. 120-24.

In book scene is so much less pleasant, and we see more what these young intrinsically hard and selfish people are. It’s played here far more plangently and less bitterly than the scene in Trollope. This is true throughout the adaptation of this last novel. Much more romantic at all points.

They are in the film scene somewhat gay and playful, begin with talk of money which to Silverbridge means nothing for real (“What an accursed thing is money …”) and only when Mabel “lets him off the hook” (an ugly phrase which comes out of a mindset which regards women as trapping men) does the scene really veer into Trollope’s mindset, and even then her prominent reason for saying no, that she does not love him, is brought to the surface in a way it’s not quite in the scene. The proto-feminism of Trollope’s approach which is to emphasize her desperation and bring in Silverbridge’s sense something went on between her and Tregear is dropped; she is more simply not able to come up to her own cynicism.

The mise-en-scene is again the pastoral green ambience of the part, with the window not far off. She does look out window from time to time; she is watching Mary and Frank. She does tell him he can come again and he looks all vulnerable and willing. She says she’s won; he says it’s been a draw. She says he needs to be harder (ironically this will boomerang at her)

Scene 15: First of Duke’s scenes with Silverbridge. He has papers and is talking to Silverbridge.
From DC, Chs 26, pp. 167-69, 27, pp. 172-74 (in book it takes place at Silverbridge’s club and is interrupted by Tifto). In book he is older than Lady Mabel by a week; in film she is older than him by a week. Duke suggests Parliament for a career and the seat at Silverbridge now open; Silverbridge tells of his desire to marry Lady Mabel; Duke remembers Lady Mabel’s alcoholic and gambling father and relative poverty but it does not matter; in the book he goes further: realizes she is the kind of person he would naturally be comfortable with. So wants her for daughter-in-law. First of two scenes, the second longish and important.

Scene 16: Invented scene of Duchess and Duke segued into. Duchess in boudoir, again inhaling some medicine (foreshadowing):

She is not for it. She says Silverbridge is too young for Lady Mabel, and she says he’ll get bored, Duke refers to Lady Mabel’s attractiveness and “she’s very clever” and he doubts the boy will be bored (salacious undercurrent in a gentle jest); to which she replies that she will not “interfere” just give “loving motherly advice” and her face turns and we are in the next scene with
Silverbrige

Scene 17: “Why did you go to your father before me, hmmm?” He justifies himself by”well a lot of things have happened to hurt him, mother” and he wanted to be sure. Is she jealous? She is pleased at this semi-flirtation, but we get this comment from her: she wants “the very vest” for her son, but he looks impatient, tired, rueful but wary too. Then we get the very Trollopian sentiment from her that in marriage, the hors d’oeuvres are the easy part; “she’s not tender enough to make a good joint …” Purpose of scene is to keep her and her and Silverbridge’s relationship in front of us.

Scene 18: At Silverbridge’s club. Dolly brought in in lieu of our narrator who cuts across time and space and provides the kind of irony Dolly does in conversation. Dolly is in DC too — though not as much as here proportionately. From DC, Chapter 7, pp. 45-46 (at least to ideas), Chapter 14, pp. 85-87, Trollope’s point is that party doesn’t matter as much as individual family-and-friend allegiance and Silverbridge doesn’t know that as yet, Ch 16, p. 100. As Dolly says “your governor’s going to be no end cut up about this, Tregear comes in to warn Silverbridge against Tifto and at first Silverbridge resentful, but then sees the truth and then the scene between Tifto and Silverbridge where Silverbridge disdains Tifto to his face in front of the others. Words of that scene closely taken from book (e.g., Ch 14, p. 87: “Now look here Major Tifto, if you’re dissatisfied, you and I can easily separate ourselves”).

The humiliated and therefore angry Tifto

Episode 35: Political Clash.

Scene 19: Duke’s Study. From Duke’s Children, Ch 3, p. 19 (narrator tells us), Chs 7, pp. 44-47, a letter in Ch 14, p. 92. Second linchpin scene for tranposition of this sixth book: Opens with Duke upset that Fothergill has reported Silverbridge needs to have bills for 4000 pounds for training thorough racehorses, to which Silverbridge says that’s all right as he’s giving all that up (!), and then demurs he’s keeping Prime Minister with Tifto; then they get into Silverbridge’s betting as “nothing to speak of,” and then when they turn to Silverbridge’s having gone down once to Silverbridge and going again in a week or two, father starts to admonish he has to gain trust of electorate, he says he has it, and then it comes out Silverbridge tells his father he’s a Tory. Duke’s grave face as he listens to this talk:

His ideology is selfishness and protection of his property and class and we are to see he’s hardly thought this out at all; his expressions are banal and through cliches. He refers his father to what Tregear says. The Duke is appalled partly because it’s a question of heritage (irony here) but also his son shows no depths, no real thought and no understanding of the broader issues or any idea he should go into them. Son realizes how hurt his father is:

But nonetheless, he shrugs it off and deals with it by saying with how he’s not smart and everyone says Tories are the party of the stupid so he belongs there. A complex moment catching real psychology of conflict between two such people.

And then Silverbridge insists “I’m jolly hard put to get there as it is,” away to play cricket; 21 other fellows to consider.

Scene 20: Cricket field. Wholly invented scenes but dialogues and ideas taken from party and water scenes in book. In book, Silverbridge first meets Isobel, DC, Ch 28, pp. 176-79.

We are with audience members watching, and then a familiar person in yellow suit walks on, so we are with Dolly once again. He is there at so many transitions. He walks over to Lady Mabel and Miss Casse in lovely shades of pastoral green; back to pastoral world of opening.

Lady Mabel given disillusioned lines with allusion to Tennyson: “I quite like cricketeers. They look so wholesome all dressed up in white, clothed in white samite,” to which Dolly responds ironically, “Mystical. Wonderful.” Dolly says suddenly of Silverbridge that he’s worried, to which Mabel (not sympathetic we feel) “What has his lordship to worry about? Who has bet?” “Well, there is myself,” “So I had supposed.” Gerald brought in as perhaps coming if he can escape Dons. The “oddity” friend, Tifto, brought in and Mabel makes a catty like remark (suggesting she and the duchess might not have hit it off): “Inherits it from his dear mother I dare say.”

They look over and watch the first meeting of Silverbridge and Isobel (Lynn Frederick), and camera shifts to them, and we are close up and watch and listen.

He says he’s “quite worn out” with worrying over all those who’ve bet on his horse, lightly said but we are to feel he partly means it. She’s glad he “feels” his “responsibilities, even though the matter be so trival” (she laughs). But it’s not. He invites her to Derby too. She will go to see, not to risk her money.

Then we (with Boncassen family, Jerry Stovin and Eileen Erskine as Mr and Mrs) watch Silverbridge play cricket — emphasis on his youth, innocence, beauty. The blue sky, her eagerness from afar; montage-lie shots give us sense of afternoon wearing away.

A final dialogue of Silverbridge and Isabel. In book Tregear was there and Mabel is bitter and ill-natured in comments; here she is alone with Miss Cass and says she’s “been a fool” and has lost him, and Miss Cass says “if he was in earnest,” he will come again. This is from DC, Chapter 20,pp 129-30. In the book we are told Silverbridge “went forth to ask three more times” and was put off (Chapter 31, p. 194) three more times (to make us sympathetic to him, but in series he never asks again, and part ends on the desolate face of Mabel.

Lady Mabel has lost him

For information on Sudeley Castle, see comments.

Next: some commentary on this part and then onto 12:25

Ellen

5.02 For the first time in fifteen years, David Dimbleby didn’t do Question Time last night after being rendered unconscious by a bullock. This, surely, is an excuse. It sounds like a made up fact, like Moira Stewart only eats Wine Gums; Chris Tarrant actually clockwork.

It turns out that quite a lot of writers have had getting up early routines over the years. The Terry Pratchett line that (in a roundabout way) gave this blog its name probably needs modifying: “No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it,” along with a whole pretentious slew of underslept figures from the literary world.

But There Before Light’s real spiritual grandfather is Anthony Trollope, who “woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service.”

The postal service: I hope he got the job thanks to the early rising, and the close understanding of the needs and drives, hopes and fears of postmen that it gave him.

6.41: On another subject in which I have an interest, Pakistan has passed a bill regulating organ donation and outlawing the sale of organs. Good for them. Pakistan’s situation gives the lie to my current bete noir, who seems to think impoverished Americans have the right to traffic their own organs in spite of research that finds: “Paid donation, regulated or commercial, leads to coercion and exploitation of the poor and benefits the rich. This situation has forestalled deceased donor program and hence other solid-organ transplants.”

End of rant.

6.59: A morning more of questions than solutions, in fact more of questions which turned out not to have the slightest relevance. Still as the great Bruce Lee realised, “A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.” Forward then to the weekend, and sleep. To quote the equally-great Dan Quayle, “It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.“

Born in 1928 in Manchester, England, Johnson is an English Roman Catholic journalist, historian, speechwriter, and author. He was educated at the Jesuit independent school Stonyhurst College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He has more than more than 40 books in print that include:

Heroes(2007)
Creators (2006)
George Washington: The Founding Father (2005)
Intellectuals (2003)
Napoleon (2002)
The Renaissance: A Short History (2002)

I have just re-read Creators in which Johnson examines 17 exemplars of what he characterizes as “creative courage”: Chaucer, Dürer, Shakespeare, Bach, Turner and Hokusai, Austen, Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc, Hugo, Twain, Tiffany, Eliot, Balenciaga and Dior, and in then Picasso and Disney. The range of his interests correctly suggests the scope and depth of his erudition. Here are two brief excerpts:

Creative courage “is of many different kinds. What are we to think of the quiet, withdrawn, silent, uncomplaining courage of Emily Dickinson? She continued to write her poetry, and eventually amassed a significant oeuvre, with little or no encouragement, no guidance, and no public response, for only six short poems were published in her lifetime and these against her will. She worked essentially in isolation and solitude, a brave woman confronting the fears and agonies of creation without (or hindrance either, as perhaps she would have said).” Johnson also briefly discusses Mozart, Dickens, Caravaggio, Beethoven, Marie Cassatt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Robert Louis Stevenson, David Hume, Trollope, V.S. Pritchett, and J.B. Priestly…all of whom encountered and overcame “daunting challenges.”

“The popularity of the creative arts, and the influence they exert, will depend ultimately in their quality and allure, on the delight and excitement they generate, and on demotic choices. Picasso set his faith against nature, and burrowed within himself. Disney worked with nature, stylizing it, anthropomorphizing it, and surrealizing it, but ultimately reinforcing it. That is why his ideas form so many powerful palimpsests in the visual vocabulary of the world in the early twenty-first century, and will continue to shine through, while the ideas of Picasso, powerful thought they were for much of the twentieth century, will gradually fade and seem outmoded, as representational art returns in favor. In the end nature is the strongest force of all.”

I highly recommend Creators as well as Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds in which he examines the lives and achievements of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi.

On the renamed Trollope 19thC Studies list (see right for link) we have embarked on a year long project of reading the complete Short Stories. We have read some 13 stories so far and the main – and very obvious – conclusions I would draw are…

1. That the quality of the stories varies wildly; some are little gems, others are poor in a way which nothing  in any novel I have read prepared me for (of course my knowledge of the novels is limited!)
2. A repeated theme is that of Englishmen (and women) behaving badly abroad – and the vast majority of the stories to date are set overseas.
3. Trollope makes fascinating use of first-person narration. I wrote of this on-list…..”"The variations in ‘I’. The clump of 4 stories I have just read – John Bull, Palestine, Talboys and Oxney all feature a first-person narrator but the position and stance and interpretation of this ‘I’ is very dissimilar. In Oxney we have the I of the novels – the author, Trollope himself, projecting his persona as balanced, wry, dispassionate, outside the action. Of course this I is in no way a participant in the events; he is merely the all-seeing recorder. In the other three Tales however the I is to a greater or lesser degree a participant in
   the action. In the case of John Bull and Palestine a vital one. In both cases here we have a man telling a story of his past – in the case of John Bull at some considerable distance, in the case of Palestine at least some distance. How far are these autobiographical? Well in the case of John Bull very considerably so as it is based on an incident in which Trollope was involved. He is therefore laughing at himself (which for me is the best aspect of a story I did not
   particularly enjoy). In Palestine the question of auto-biography becomes much more moot and important and there has been some considerable
   discussion of this already. What I would say is that the two I’s (of John Bull and Palestine) are very different; of course they could be aspects of one persona. But whereas in John Bull we have an ‘I’ laughing at his foolish youth, in Palestine the tensions are mostly unresolved. I do not draw any conclusions to any of this merely point out how fascinating Trollope’s use of first-person narration is.”

The one story which I had read previously – The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Colne- is unquestionably one of the gems; certainly the favourite of those I have read so far. To what degree this is connected to the fact that it is set in the world of many of Trollope’s novels (the English countryside), and deals with Trollopian themes and so has all the comfort of the familiar it is hard to say. It would be unfair to say that this is a Trollope novel in miniature as it functions perfectly as a short story, but there is nonetheless a certain truth to the remark.

For my immediate purposes here however I am interested to see that when I first read the story I concentrated on the city/country dualism to be found there. As I have recently been discussing this dualism in a very different context (see http://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/september-miscellany/ ) I though that I would reproduce an edited version of my thoughts here…..

>>>>Of course there are all sorts of ironies and dualities at play in the story……………One duality is of course the urban/rural. Stressed by the idyllic nature of the location as pictured right at the start of story. There is something of the Garden of Eden here and Broughton is the snake. But this is far to simple for Trollope. However beautiful the landscape this is a very limited, static society. Trollope may in this story ultimately come down on the side of the rural but the dualism is never simple.

The irony is very apparent in the comparison of Mr Woolsworthy with Scott’s Antiquary(Jonathon Oldbuck). Presumably Trollope’s readers would have been intimately acquainted with Scott and have known that the glorious, larger-than-life, highly comic and energetic Mr Oldbuck – a gentle self-mocking by Scott – is miles away from the patently dull Mr Woolsworthy (worthy but dull indeed ::)). Mr Oldbuck would have seen through a Captain Broughton in five minutes.

If in comparing Rhoda and Patience we are looking chiefly at differences, in comparing Broughton and Everard [1] it is the similarities which are most evident.
They are both calculating men to whom, whatever they may say, the social game is of great importance. And perhaps in Trollope and Gissing’s attitude to them we may see something of the authors own position? Let us be clear that Broughton is an insufferable jerk. And be clear that Trollope thinks so too….

>>I by no means say that he was not a brute.<<

This strikes me as characteristic. One of those deadly asides which you can almost skip by without assimilating its import (I imagine there is probably a lengthy study on the use of the double negative in Trollope somewhere… how different is “I confidently avow he was a brute”?)

>>What would his sister say, she who had married the Honourable Augustus Gumbleton, gold-stick-in-waiting to Her Majesty’s Privy Council?<<

The description of a “gold-stick-in- waiting’ almost causes us to pass by the deadliness of a man who would mind about the judgement of a sister who had married such a man.

But most deadly of all..

>>when, after her little jokes, she did confess her love, had she not been a little too free for feminine excellence? A man likes to be told that he is loved, but he hardly wishes that the girl he is to marry should fling herself at his head! <<

This it appears to me is the heart of the story. Trollope it often seems to me is deeply romantic. Romantic no doubt in a thoroughly masculinist way. But romantic none-the-less. A man who does not appreciate the girl he loves falling into his arms is in some ways always a ‘brute’. Certainly so if his opposition to this is a concern for money and social position. It is in this light that I read the ending …..

Patience..

>>But with a large heart she loves many, and, with no romance, she works hard to lighten the burdens of those she loves.<<

This it seems to me is wholly commendatory. Trollope’s gender politics are certainly revealed in the fact that there is an air of melancholy about this – that by not marrying Patience has somehow missed out – but I am quite sure that we are not meant to question or condemn her decision.

But…

>>As for Captain Broughton, all the world know that he did marry that great heiress with whom his name was once before connected, and that he is now a
useful member of Parliament, working on committees three or four days a week with a zeal that is indefatigable. Sometimes, not often, as he thinks of
Patience Woolsworthy, a gratified smile comes across his face. <<

To me this is is a reassertion of his brutishness and also that ultimate siding with the rural in that rural/urban dualism. Broughton’s ‘indefatigable zeal’ is meant to read ironically (I think of the absurd committee in The Three Clerks) where Patience’s ‘hard work’ is meant to be read as genuinely effective. The rural is real, the urban false. This of course is not necessarily always true of Trollope but it seems to function strongly so in this story. What is of particular interest is that
the rural is strongly feminine.<<<<

It is the last observation which especially interests me in the light of what I had been writing about Big City/Small Town movies last month. While I talked about the way in which the bridging figures in these movies were generally female, I think it is also true that in terms of gender identification the City tends to the masculine (we rarely see any female characters other than the bridging character herself), where the Small Town tends to the female. As I remarked it is in Trollope that we probably find the last full flowering of city/country dualism in English fiction and it is interesting to see that the gender identification probably works in the same way there as in late 20thC Hollywood movies.

Notes

1. The comparison here is with characters in Gissing’s The Odd Women which we had been reading on-list immediately before reading this story.

“”There is no mercy, nor friendship anywhere” — Ferdinand Lopez (an abbreviated version of a line from Trollope’s The Prime Minister

Duchess (Susan Hampshire) rushes into Marie Finn’s (Barbara Murray) arms

On their last evening Lopez (Stuart Wilson) kneels before Emily (Sheila Rusking), puts his head on her lap, seeking comfort

Dear Friends,

Perhaps because this part has some of the most striking hard and cynical moments in the whole series, the director intuitively compensated by having more opening scenes for each part begin with one character reaching out to hug or be hugged by another or touch one another (Duke to Bungay, Duchess to Silverbridge, above Duchess to Marie, even more discreetly Lopez to Sextus Parker) than I remember in any other part. We also have a man humble himself before a woman physically: an effort is made to make Lopez a more sympathetic character at the same time as he is more wildly jeeringly desperate.

I continue with my blog reviews of the 1974 BBC Pallisers mini-series. We are up to 11:23, a dramatization of the climax of The Prime Minister (Volume III): Phineas’s speech exposing Ferdinand Lopez, Lopez’s suicide; we see the last in this series of Emily Lopez, Mr Wharton (Brewster Mason) and Sextus Parker (David Ryall), and the story of Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) is minimally threaded in yet again.

As with Part 11:22, the dramatization of the marriage of Lopez and Emily is the overwhelming dominate thread, only here the marriage is now in a state of utter disrepair, and (fascinatingly) Raven has made Emily turn, and it’s just about erotically, to her father, and (as Sedgwick suggested is common to most of our male hegemonic literature, but even more so in male homosexual books), it comes down to a struggle between the father and Lopez for Emily.

This is presented stark in a way it’s not in Trollope as Raven weaves scenes back and forth between Lopez and the father-in-law, Lopez and Emily, Emily and the father-in-law, punctuated by two to Happerton Mills (the man made to have the job at Guatemala on offer) and at the opening of the part between Lopez and Sexty, in the middle (where it’s Sexty who is made to concoct the plan to blackmail the father-in-law — in the book Lopez needs no counselling or urging on this) and at the close.

Nearly our last sight of Emily; she has chosen the safe older man

The other thread, much diminished is that between the Duke and Duchess over Lopez’s making public the Duchess’s shennigans, the Duke’s refusal to let his wife be openly humiliated in public, her pleadings he do so, Bungay’s advice (to no avail), all culminating in Donal McCann’s magnificent performance of Phineas’s speech in Parliament. This is one of the high points of the 26 part series, for here is a culmination of Phineas’s career and why in the series he is seen to succeed (as a useful orator).

Phineas in command of hecklers, admired by his colleagues, uses some of Trollope’s powerful language:

he is one of who . . . is only anxious to inflict an unmanly wound in order that he may be gratified by seeing the pain which he inflicts (PM, Vol 3, Ch 57, ‘94 Oxford, p 495)

He has just finished saying “It is not part of my script to gratify the emorbid and indecent curiosity” of the opposing members; he asks one of them to come forward. Not one man rises. Then he changes his terms to “cruel and perverse.” Again there is heckling and he wonders about this desire to “gratify an appetite for inflicting cowardly wounds” and “a spectacle of pain.” I think the filmmakers mean us to recognize ourselves and world here, for when Phineas (a split second after our still) goes on to say “I need not pause to stigmatize the meanness of Mr Lopez’s application (great ploy, pausing while you deny pausing), the braying erupts on the other side of the room as they enjoy their scapegoating and sense that this is not them, oh never them, they would make no such applications, would they?

The other high — or low – point is a frantic powerful quarrel between Lopez and Emily over sex where he mocks her sexual appetite for him.

The best moments are not Glencora’s powerful request to the Duke to let her take the blame (as after all he will not and she is protected and glad to be so), but rather little ones like the closing scene Sexty Parker comes to Abel Wharton and shows himself capable of fleecing Abel Wharton for far more than Lopez ever did. Lopez (in a series of brief scenes) had told Sexy first that Wharton was coming to pay the bill and he had lied and said it was 6,000 pounds when it was 2,000 and they would split the extra four, and then that the deal was off as his job had been cancelled, and then that he was “going away.” Parker flatters Wharton with talk of how Lopez respected him and Wharton falls for it, a scene which has the effect of suggesting Lopez’s fall was not because he was a “bad man” but not a sufficiently “able” or astute liar. After all he did believe the Duchess would support him, was shocked when she left the morning the election began.

Nonetheless, because the scene between the Duchess and Duke carries the main thread across the series of their developing relationship and is subtle and powerful too, I transcribe it here.

The Part opens with Bungay come to comfort the Duke about the failing coalition and having to listen to the Duke read aloud the latest excoriating epistle from The People’s Banner, the Duchess cutting her hair (with a maid standing right by her ready to obey her every commant) urging Mrs Finn not to follow her husband to sea, when Bungay comes in to tell the Duchess her husband is in emotional straits. Duke and Duchess preceded by Duke and Bungay and Duchess and Marie, with Bungay coming in to get her.

Episode 26, Muckraking, Scene 2: Duke’s study at Matching

1 Establishment shot: Duke writing at desk, with man standing near by (parallels Duchess cutting her hair with maid standing nearby). We hear door open, we see Duchess hurrying through the door (an episode about coming through doors)

Duchess: “Oh!”
Duke signals man to go.
Duchess: “I’ve just heard. I have just heard for the first time that there was a row about the money that you paid to Mr Lopez”
Duke: (putting down writing implement) “Who told you?”
Duchess: “The other Duke. Of course he was quite right. I had to know. I . . . I . . . knew something was troubling you, but why had you not told me?” (comes over to desk, leans towards him, tones of real affection and appeal)

Unusually earnest moment

Duke: “My dear I didn’t want you to be troubled.”
Duchess: “Why not? I should not be troubled and no more should you be. Tuh! What can such a man as Slide do to you? You’re too big to feel the sting of a reptile such as that.”
Duke: “I don’t care to have my character impugned, not by such men as Slide and Lopez.”
Duchess: (assenting noise). “What matter if you are in the right . . . I read somewhere the other day that great ships always have little worms attached to them, but that the great ships swim on and know nothing of the little worms.”
Duke “And the worms conquer at the last.”
Duchess: “Oh they should not conquer me. Now. What is this that they say about the money. That you should not have paid it.”
Duke (nods): “I begin to think they’re right.
Duchess: “In any case it was my fault. You paid the money because of what I had done and I assure you, Plantagenet, I promised Mr Lopez nothing. All we need to do is make that fact public.”
We see him contemplating her.
Duchess: “When this is done, you will be cleared and Mr Lopez will be shown up for what he is.”
Duke: “My dear, you too will be shown up.”
Duchess (calm upon her face): “Yes, yes as a interfering hussy and I shall not mind one bit.”
Duke (shaking voice): “I shall mind for ya.”
Duchess (alarm in her face now): “You must throw me to the whale, Plantagenet, if not I shall write to the newspaper myself. Please just please please let somebody say that the duchess did so and so, and must be blamed for the whole affair. Well, it was very wicked, no doubt, but they can’t kill me nor yet dismiss me and I certainly shan’t resign” (she smiles).
Duke (smiles back, eye contact): “I should resign, m’dear.”
Duchess: “Ah, Plantagenet, if all the ministers in England resigned as soon as their wives did foolish things, the governement would stop tomorrow (comes forward). You must let the blame lie where the blame belongs: squarely on yours stupid wife.”
Ducke: “No, my dear. You’d be talked about and a man’s wife should be talked about by no one.”
Duchess: “Oh that is just highfaluting, Plantagenet.”
Duke: “Yes, well m’dear you must allow me to judge for myself in these matters, and I will judge . . . ah I will never say I did not do it, it was my wife who did.”
Duchess: “Why not? Adams said so because Adam chose to tell the truth.”
Duke: “Humm. He’s been despised ever snice. Oh not for eating the apple but for blaming the woman. Glencora (rueful shaking of head), I will not do it.”
Duchess stands silent. She looks right at him “Hmmn” (She nods her head quickly. She turns and walks past him on her way and gets to door.)
Duke (softer voice): “Cora! (She is walking out of the door) Will you kiss me?”
She turns round puzzled. She smiles, alert now, walks over and kisses him.
Ducke (low tone, holding her hand, his head down) “Oh no, dear. You must not think that I am angry with you because this thing vexes me. I dream always that we may live as other people live.”

Glad she will not resign

Duchess: “Whoo (sharp smile wry on her face) “we’d be very silly to resort to that.”

************

When you go over a part in this series slowly, you discover how important it is what scene preceded what; and how keeping in mind the juxtaposition gives them much more meaning.

So, for example, this set which includes the one where Lopez taunts Emily with her sexual desire for him: he has just accepted money from Wharton to leave her behind and is torturing her because he despises himself. Lest we really think well of Whaton that is followed by his visit to Happerton where they discuss how selling guns is a wonderful thing to do abroad (in countries like South America say) for the two sides want endlessly to fight and you get to supply everyone:

Episode 27: Lopez schemes.

Scene 5: Emily and Lopez’s flat. He has just come from threatening Mr Wharton with taking Emily to Guatemala (“They do say that sea air is good for expectant mothers …”)

Establishment shot: Emily and he in the middle of talking, the dialogue takes off from what we have heard in the previous and Loepz intense, so super elegant in dress (like a vampire). She stands to the back looking weary.

Emily: “You mean that I must whether I wish to or not.”
Lopez: “Certainly, you must. I mean good God where is a woman’s place, do you not wish to come?”
Emily: “I wish to be wherever you are. You are the father of my child. It is my duty to be with you.”
Lopez. “Right. Very well.”
Emily (she turns round, and looks at him with appeal in her eyes and sits): “But I do not wish to leave my father.”
Lopez (exhales smoke and looks at her through it): “He’s done little enough for us.”
Emily “He is my father and I love him. If I go to this place that you speak of, I might never see him again.”
Lopez (his hand on his forehead): “Emily, my dearest, the alternatives are very clear. Either we must leave England for Guatemala or we must have 20,000 pounds. Now perhaps you can make your father understand this. You see, Emily, at the moment we have one invaluable weapon with which to fight for our survival (ponits) your unborn child.”
Emily; “My child. A weapon.”
Lopez: “You see, it would be intolerable to your father that you in your present condition should be taken away from him to a foreign country, from which you might never return. Now it is your task ot make your father understand that this indeed will happen, that you and your child will indeed be taken from him, unless we get the money that we need (urgent strident voice). Now once you have dinned that into him, he is bound to surrender.”
Emily (her eyebrows go up) “So not only is my child a weapon, but my father is an enemy, who must be made to surrender.”
Lopez (shakes his head, all earnestness): “Once you have done so then we may all be friends again.”‘

How appalled she is by this man

Emily: “Friends!? how can I look him in the face, my father who has always loved me, as I love him.”
Lopez: “I hope you’re not forgetting the love that is due to me. You owe more to your huband than you do to your father.’
Emily So I would have thought once. But a husband who can ask such a thing of his wife.”
Lopez (raising his voice) “I have no choice, and if you love me, you will do as I say!” (He sits very close to her) “I mean, do you love me, Emily?”
She turns her head slightly.
Lopez: “By God, you will say that you do, answer me!”
Emily: “Ferdinand, let me get this straight (he puts hands on her shoulder): “You as my husband are asking me to go to my father and ask for 20,000 pounds as absolute condition for our remaining in this country.”
Lopez; “Yes, 20,000 pounds, remember.”
Emily (she shakes a little, and then moves to get up): “Very well. I will go to him and see what can be done.” She winces.
Loepz (coming closer again): “That’s my girl. that’s my good girl.”
She turns her head. She moves away, genuinely sickened, then looks at him with quiet alienation. He looks down at her.

Emily and father then having a loving scene which ends with her on knees held in his embrace. He will help her rid herself of this incubus. Then Episode 28: Homecoming: New episode and Silverbridge and mother scene where he tells her he cannot be a liberal; one of those hugging and kissing moments:

The title and contrast casts irony on Lopez and Emily’s homecomings nowadays. Then back to Lopez and father-in-law, and Lopez signs a promise to leave Emily for good, and it’s after that he gets ugly.

Episode 28: Homecoming: Ironic reference to Lopez and Emily at home as well

Scene 10: Lopez and Emily’s apartment

Establishment shot: Lopez in dark vestibule, all shades around him

Emily (not seen, but anxious voice heard): “Ferdinand (we now see her stepping upt towards him)
Ferdinand walks in slowly.
Emily: “What happened with my father today?”
Lopez (walks ahead of her): “‘Tis all to be made straight, Emily.”
Emily (closes door): “How made straight? (she walks over to him from behind carefully) “is he paying you all that money?
Lopez: “No, not exactly. But all will be well more or less, but it is rather in the melting pot for the moment.”
Emily: “I don’t understand you. Before you went to see my father, you were so clear and positive about your terms. How do you mean in the melting pot?”
Lopez (shouts): “Please do not ask me to explain it!”
Emily: “But I do ask. I must know what will happ. Be plain with me.”
Lopez (high-pitched half-scream): “All right of one thing I shall be plain: Your father is a mean and vindictive old screw, Emily, who drives a bargain as hard as a flint and with all that he is a sanctimonious as a quaker and as sly as a gypsy and you know what? I wish that the old brute were dead and at the devil.” (sits down).
Emily (intense feeling of hatred): “How dare you? Wish him dead to you so you could get your greasy hands on his money so as you got them on on me.”
Lopez: “Oh, and how you itched for them.”
Emily (disgusted): “You coward to say it. (she turns round) You coward to insult my father behind his back. YOu hate him because he was right about you frmo the start. He aid you were a foreigner, an alien, a creature of prey, and he was right. You deceived me. You seduced me and all for money. Yes you seduced me.”
Lopez (laughs sneeringly): “Oh never before we were married, my dear.”
She gulps.
Lopez (imitating a whining tone) “And how how you love it when I did begin. I mean you you whimper and squealed for more and more . . . (he gets up and goes over to her and overbears her with a sense of his body)
Emily (pushes him away): “Coward. Reptile. You spit upon my father and you’ll dance on his grave if you cold, bu tnow that he has in some way saved you, all you do is wiggle and spit your puny venom like some worm trying to imitate a snake.”
He puts his head on her cheek.
Emily: “Don’t you dare touch me.”
Lopez moves back half-supercilious. He takes his hand lightly off.
Lopez: “Time was when you doted on me, Emily. And you would still if things had gone right. How typical.”
She is standing by the door, leaning against it, gasping, crying as if she has been hit.

Snarling sexual taunting

Lopez (continues): “of a woman to blame the troubles of her own heat (she makes an anguished sound) has caused on the poor serpent in the grass.”
So he is Satan who overspent for her (in that scene of them planing and his fatuity of buying what he could not afford and her lapping it up, and the father so sceptical behind). She groans and cries and slaps him.

Scene in Happteron’s office where Wharton ascertains job real, and they are selling guns for wars which never run out comes next. This is completely invented by Raven and speaks home to what happened in Latin and South America due to macho male culture and the fascist capitalist spy and military organizations of the US (perhaps with a little help from the UK too).

This is a darkly funny joke. Raven has specified Trollope’s version (just a manager) so that Lopez is to sell metal for guns. Happerton Mills says such jobs cannot go out of style: these South American countries are ever destroying one another and their company grows rich by selling guns to all. This does present the usual condemnation of those who grow rich over colonialist wars by selling guns in another light. Instead of the gun-runners being blamed as making the war possible, those who buy the guns are made the instigators or those who are carrying on because they want to. How Raven loathed war and militarism and all its effects on society and male behavior is seen in one of his reviews.

Episode 28: Homecoming, Scene 10: Happerton’s office

Establishment shot: two men on either side of a desk, one is Mr Wharton.

Happerton: “It is I assure you Mr Wharton a very great opening for Lopez and as his friend I am very pleased that he’s taking it up.”
Wharton: “The concern is genuine, Mr Happerton?”
Happerton: “As genuine as concerns in Guatemala can be.”
Wharton (a close up on his face) nods (sceptical or cynical look)
Happerton: “That is to say, Mr Wharton, there must always be some element of risk.”
Wharton: “What risk?”
Happerton: “Metal Piping Limited, sir, will deal with guns, small cannon for the most part, the guns themselves in their kind are genuine, but there is always a risk that the supply of wars may dry up.”
Wharton (smiles): “Not in South America, I think,”
Happerton: “A shrewd point, Mr Wharton.”
Wharton: “Thank you, Mr Happerton. Here is another: If you are satisfied as to Lopez’s competence, why do you insist that he invest 5000 pounds?”
Happerton: “We can do with the extra capital, and if he has money invested in the thing, he will manage it that much better.”
Wharton: ” A manager, he positively will be, provided the money be invested?”
Happerton: “Manager he will be and leave for Guatemal by the next packet.” (A look in his face shows he knows what Wharton wants; the far-distant absence forever of Lopez.)
Wharton: “Thank you, Mr Happerton.”

In the next scene Lopez goes to Sexty’s office, and finds Sexty drunk; Lopez is bringing the news of 6000 pounds; they will split the extra 4000 before he goes to Guatemala. So he is remaining faithful to his partner, no?

The third briefer thread allows for picturesque scenes at Matching; we return to the familiar boudoir the old Duke made for a young Lady Glencora; to the window before which we have watched so many characters sit, read, look out, respond to someone. The scene between Happerton and Wharton is juxtaposed to three of these, very short.

We have already seen Silverbridge come home from Venice, very warm and loving between him and Duchess, and a lovely picturesque moment of young love between Silverbridge and Lady Mabel Grex, made so alluringly beautiful in that familiar window seat at Matching by idyllic colors (greens and blues) and sunlight. It like several opening moments of the different scenes where the characters stretch out hands to one another (Duke to Bungay, Duchess to Duke, Lopez in the end to Sextus, the Duchess to Marie, to her son) is meant as a strong emotional contrast to the ravaging disloyalties and (presented as) perversity of all else we are seeing.

Mary (Kate Nichols) and Lady Mabel Grex (Anna Carteret)

The Duchess is again not sympathetic here, or a Philistine who does not want Lady Mabel and her son to go walking (nor Mary to inveigle for this) as she wants him to be able to go after “higher” (richer, more powerfully connected) women.

To briefly sum up what follows: Marie comes home to hug the Duchess (see above) and says Phineas is even now speaking for Duke in Parliament; then great climactic moment of Phineas’s speech, then Lopez ostracized out of club (very ugly and spoken by Dolly Longestaffe [Donald Pickering] who is no angel himself; and then Happerton tells Lopez he’s not wanted in front of his father-in-law.

The last episode (30) shows Lopez visiting Sexty having made up his mind to do away with himself, all gallantry and elegance (though also like a vampire). His last scene with Emily (instead of her love for Arthur, it’s her pregnancy complacency we see and also a resurgence of affection for Lopez which comes from earlier in the book and in the still which opens this blog above), his face at the wnidow, the hard rain leading into the train station, and the close up of his hard still enigmatic face. Then the Inspector’s visit to tell her and her father, her faint (and offstage miscarriage); then the Duchess and Bungay trying to tell the Duke Lopez’s death not his fault; I fear this scene is the glossing over to normalization many viewers would cling to with the Duchess’s words telling the Duke it’s a disease to think on these things the aximon they’ll remember. I think of Hamlet. For the attentive viewer, we remember Lady Glen in her dealings with Lopez is seen to have done wrong. She is all repentence but it’s more for someone who regrets suffering now. They dressed her extravagantly and sexily (even wearing a push-up bra, the only time in the series) when dealing with Lopez. She used him to feed her vanity. Trollope too criticizes her strongly, a reality not enough emphasized when people discuss the book.

The last scene of father and daughter (father won, the kiss as she goes obediently to bed) and father and Sextus, an ironical ending where Sexty’s flattering lies working more efficiently than Lopez’s aggressive proud drive.

The part at the end does try for some sympathy for Lopez: he looks weaker, weary, and in the film (unlike the book), it is Parker who comes up with the idea of blackmailing Wharton through Emily, Parker who enunciates the principle, and Lopez just obeys (though with great panache and pride); Lopez in close ups looks pained.

The suicide is not done the kind of brilliant justice to it is in the book. As depressions in Trollope are glossed over, so this nadir of the males in the series. Ferdinand has been the most defeated; he started with least. And Raven has Palliser pronounce some sorrowful words for him that to end as tatters and burnt scattered flesh and bones at such a place is a sobering destiny. The last scenes of Lopez appearing mad move so swiftly and in the dark, all I could get was his face in front of the window through the rain the night before:

So I couldn’t get that final still of his darkened eyes, but I remember them and think most viewers would, though only by watching carefully do you realize through much of the series Wilson played Lopez as someone who rarely made eye contact with anyone.

Next up: 12:24

Ellen

For previous blogs: 1:1 – 8:17, 9:18-10:20, 10:21 (Companionship and refuge, Duke and Duchess in Conflict), 11:22

The Duchess, Silverbridge, Tregear and Lady Mary in a gondola, seen from a distance

Dear Friends,

I’ve written about Pallisers 9:18 – 10:21 (including the Lady Rosina de Courcy) of the 1974 BBC Pallisers on this blog thus far. (For 1:1 – 8:17 see previous blog.) I’ve another one to add tonight: 11:22.

The power of 11:22 come from the dramatization of the inward destruction of the marriage of Ferdinand Lopez and Emily Wharton. The overarching theme drawn from Trollope’s The Prime Minister so as to encompass the Lopez/Wharton story with the personal party politics of the book and previous Palliser episodes is the power of money and the need Ferdinand Lopez has of money.

Part 22, has six scenes of Emily and Lopez! All piled together suddenly. It moves from 21, the honeymoon, a scene of an apparently loving couple which ends on a a sudden troubled note when Ferdinand admits he’s strapped for cash; then after another brief scene where we watch father send check, we have a second scene from this honeymoon, Emily still in nightgown and she more troubled yet not overt beyond saying Ferdinand misreading letter. Then there are two I have here transcribed.

The basis for both Lopez and Emily scenes is literally tiny dialogue (The Prime Minister, Vol 2, Chapter 35, pp. 301-2 in Oxford Classics paperback) when Lopez comes home from Silverbridge, but more generally it comes the narrator’s commentary on them and implication of awakening to living with hollow and increasingly desperate and unrealistic man, particularly on Emily’s part turned into high drama.

Episode 22: Travellers

Scene 8 between Lopez and Sprout where Lopez very strained and cannot accept that he will be treated like everyone else who is nobody in this world

Scene 9: Lopez and Emily’s apartment in London

1. Establishment shot: Lopez glimpsed in the corridor, framed tightly, overcoat and hat, quickly moves to room and we see Emily looking at him, her face now flat and weary, not happy

Lopez: “You had my telegram?”
Emily: “Oh, Ferdinand, it did make me so wretched.”
Lopez: “And a wretched business it was too. yet I could hardly believe it. Everybody sudenly seemed to turn from me. Everybody there deserted me.”
Emily: “You did not give up.”
Lopez comes up to kiss her lightly. “No, the more fool I. The duchess originally intimated that I [Emily now taking his coat off] I would be returned unopposed, in which case the cost would have been amost nothing. Now the expense of a contested election win or lose is at least 1000. pounds.
Emily: “Oh, Ferdinand, have you paid it?”
Lopez: “Not yet. No doubt the bill will come in before long. “That at least I can depend upon.”
He sits there in a fever of intensities. She stands there with a sombre troubled look; somehow holding his coat while she stares at him captures her own desperate case too.

Emily (Sheila Ruskin) standing there, sombre

Lopez: “I mean the duchess must have known what would happen. [He sighs.] By Jove, Emily she left the castle the day I reachd Silverbridge. A shot visit to London, they said. You know men and women ahve become so dishonest that nobody is safe anywhere.”
Emily: “It is hard.”
Lopez smiles: “It is cruelly hard, Emily. [Voice now slithering.] I don’t suppose there was ever a time in my life when the loss of 1000 pounds would have been as much as this now.”

She looks at him and is seeing him for the first time as a man without money or resources, a liar. A hard look in her eyes.

Lopez: “The question is what will your father do for us (his eyes shift away).

Episode 23: Financial Bind, Scene 10: The next scene is where he goes to Mr Wharton and complains and says it was Emily who wanted this place and her father gives him the money rather than listen to this. Adam and Eve metaphor comes up later when Duke and Duchess discuss Ferdinand’s letter asking for money (see below) and the Duke says he will not be like Adam and blame Eve; Duchess says but it was my fault; in Emily’s case it isn’t except for having married him. Wharton says he does not object to Lopez telling him of Lopez’s business, but does not see how he can serve Lopez. Lopez feels unable to continue.

Scene 11: Back in Lopez and Emily’s flat, another day for she is in another outfit, also austere

1 Establishment shot: Lopez with angry face turns as if from his father-in-law to wife (scene moves swiftly from previous)

Lopez (angry face, have look, demanding talking to someone else should serve him, and who is there but Emily the wife): “I had wished to tell him everything there and then, but his manner was too discouraging. I may yet have to ask you to do it.”
Emily (looks puzzled now, for a second, then appalled): “It would come better from you. I think (she sits down and he looks sullen.)
Lopez: “But as he has come up to the mark (? — in) this, it would be sensible Ithink to let the reins lie loose on his neck for a while.”
Now her face set (dismay controlled). She looks round at him:

Emily: “Is that how you think of him?”
Lopez (angry face): “Upon my soul, I do not know what to think. I’ve been so abused and cheated over this election, that I can hardly see straight. There is one thing I have begun to see … the duchess encouraged me to go in for Silverbridge under false pretenses. Now if anyone owes me compensation, it is she.
Emily” “But paper has just paid the costs.”
Lopez: “I’ve no doubt the bill will be more in the end. They always are (close up to angry spoiled face) besides it’s not only the money. There has been treachery here, Emily. (Ugly look in his eyes, really creepy face) and for me there has been humiliation.”

Pained yet creepy expression (Stuart Wilson)

Scene 12: Duke and Duchess over letter and again it feels continous for Lopez’s letter done as voice-over by Stuart Wilson. This one a brilliant rendition of PM, Volume 3, Chatper 42, pp. 364-70. This one between the Duke and Duchess is among the many strong scene so far in the series between the Duke and Duchess. He just lights into her: her disobedience, interference, stupidity (a good natured woman who is foolish), all of it look what has resulted.

Duchess (Susan Hampshire) as startled at his shame as Emily is at Lopez’s lack of it

He must pay Ferdinand he says because he owes it to him. In other words the Duchess was just nothing really and it was his responsibility. (Women are not responsible). He admits he cannot stop reading the newspapers; the public life has gotten under his skin and into his veins. He talks of how much she means to him and how it hurts him to see her discussed in the way she will be and that he cannot get himself to present the truth of what happened (that she picked up, encouraged, and promised Lopez).

He (Philip Latham as Duke) cannot make it public

The two come close to one another, sit close, bow, hug, look into one another’s eyes, and we see a distance between them as people were they cannot understand one another. The Duchess says she is stupid or dumb (some such words) but operates as best as she can see it in the world and at least she has a thick skin. So the Duke says he will himself pay the money and have a letter printed admitting mistakes were made. He hopes that not too much will be made of this to make him look corrupt, as if he was doing what he said he abhorred: picking a candidate and then paying him off.

It is true we have seen as bad people in the series as Lopez, but Lopez is the first male to behave so vilely and meanly in front of us with not an iota of redemption in the way of generosity of spirit anywhere at all.

The real modern insight in both situations here is how in marriage one can end up with someone with whom there is a complete lack of understanding. When you are young, you may be amazed to see this: at the other person’s so very different inner self and how they impinge and pressure you with these thoughts, feelings, demands that jar intensely.

We then get a deeply troubled bitter scene between Emily and Lopez (the fifth between them in the episode) following hard upon Parker’s visit demanding payment for the guana and asking Lopez to get the money from his father-in-law. And finally after an idyllic gondola scene of the Duchess, Silverbridge, Frank Tregear and a now happy Mary (for her mother has been won over and is attracted by and likes Tregear and invites him to Matching), talking of the peace of home, we come ironically to a home where there is no peace.

We see Emily in nearly black, dark brown telling of pregnancy to be confronted with demands she get money. Emily’s face is very hard as she looks in the mirror. She will not go to her father now. Ferdinand does and finally tells the old man what is his business. The old man listens and we see this is rotten stock market gambling and by the end he throws Ferdinand out literally, saying only he will not let his daughter and grandchild starve and will give Ferdinand bread. Marvelous bitterness of the man playing Wharton as he talks about the expensive honeymoon and flats Ferdinand has bought.

This too I think is meant to reach the 20th century audience, now those who resent those who have and supposedly don’t pay for it.

The part end on the terrible scene with father-in-law where Lopez behaves is a cur, and at last shows up at Mr Slide’s to betray the Duke for a measley 130 pounds, and is told that is 100 more than the traditional price.

In this part Raven has done justice to how a marriage can be founded on delusions and smash very quickly. This is but one part of Trollope’s novel but it is a centrally rivetting one and one that would speak home to people today just as much as in the 1870s. For women then there was no divorce, and it was very hard to support yourself, for a woman of the gentry not trained to do so, a trauma she probably couldn’t cope with.

This theme is threaded through the Duke and Duchess’s scenes both alone, in contrast to Phineas and Marie, and with their son and heir, Silverbridge. The following scene comes right after the opening three of Ferdinand and Emily on their honeymoon with the sandwiched in one of her father writing out the 3000 pound check. it is the culmination of the high conflict we saw in the previous episode and the Duke’s having lost the strength.

Here we see finally the Duke cannot stand the networking and entertaining any longer and demands it be put an end to. The Duchess does not feel about her work the way the Duke does, but she is tired, weary, and has had a couple of bad moments with the Duke over Ferdinand Lopez, or her own politicking with her limited power.

Episode 21: Honeymoon

Scene 4: Sitting room at Gatherum castle; where Duchess works, they have coffee, intimates meet.

Basis: Prime Minister, Vol 3, Ch 42, pp. 356-58 (very different, not dramatized and Duchess half sarcastic, and playing for time to invite people, and then sticking precisely to those allowed to irritate him. Here we have a human drama of wide dimensions suggested in Trollope’s telling, not scenes themselves)

1. Establishment shot: Duke in dressing jacket looking out window, Duchess hard at work in nightgown, hat, and robe; we hear laughter from below, perhaps outside.

She carries on writing. She labors some more, as we watch her write on. He picks up and throws down letters. She’s writing invitations probably and correspondence having to do with guests gone and guests to come.

Duke: “Cora?”
Duchess: “Hmmm?”
Duke: “I’ve got something to say.”
Duchess: “Mmmmm. Please say it, Plantagenet.”
Duke: “Very well. It’s time to put an end to all this.”
Duchess turns round; “All what?”
Duke: “All this (reaches out for letters) entertainment (he throws down letters and puts sarcasm into word, irony).
Duchess takes off glasses. “Plantagenet! you approved the idea at the start.”
Ducke: “Yes, the idea perhaps but the reality’s gone far enough (he stand up, looks grim). While I’m burdeneed with this present office I can’t continue to receive guests in the house.”
Duchess: “These are all people whom you need.”
Duke: “I don’t need them here. With most of them I get along much better in their absence. Well, do you remember that sickening affair, Sir Orlando Drought, all that could have been avoided if he had not been allowed to approach too near to become too familiar …”
Duchess: “Important men, little men for that matter, like to be able to approach their prime minister.”
Duke (gritted teeth, intense tones and face): “They’re making my life impossible.”
She looks appalled at realizing his psychological state.
Duke sits. “It’s got to cease.”
Duchess: “I see. So it’s a case of repel borders. (She puts out candle flame with a wet finger.) Darkness all round.
Duke: “Well (noise). Well, I know (really a noise) you cannot possibly turn out those peopel who are staying in here now, but I beg you no further invitations.”
She looks hurt, her hands folded.
Duchess gets up and walks over. “Phineas Finn, Plantagenet. He is due over from Ireland in a day or two and I was just about to invite him. His wife is here.”
Duke: “Finn may come and go as he leases. He’s an old friend, but don’t encourage any of these others to linger except um Lady Rosina. She stays for as long as we do.”
Duchess: “Do now it shall be Darcy and Joan and Aunt Rosina. What a galaxy of fashion and wit.”
Duke: “Well, that is the way I shall like it.”
She sits down wry.
Duke: “and as for these others, I’ll have no more of it.”
Duchess: “The Duke of St Bungay, Plantagenet, says that these assembleies are of great assistance to your ministry.”
Duke: “And so they were at the beginning, but now it’s degrading me.”
Close up of her face as it hardens in hurt and then anger. “Degrading (teeth show) you.”
Duke (close up) There are those, who say I’m bribing men with hospitality.”
Duchess: “Oh, Planty, you’re so thin-skinned that any counsel offered you take as a form of criticism. You must ignore them.”
Duke. “I try to, Cora. It is very hard you know to ignore journalists who write about you daily. Quintus Slide in the People’s Banner, well, he has a poisonous pen.”
Duchess: “Hunh. One day he’ll prick himself too death with it.”
Duke: “He must prick me to death first. Well, Cora will ya do as I’m asking (clenches fist, in real need) about ceasing all this here at Gatherum.”

She looks at him with genuine puzzled pity. “Yes if you order it. (she laughs a little), but it is hard to be told after all my work that it has degraded you.”
Duke: “So it has and you too. All these false smiles and false words.”
Duchess: “I have told you that if you wish to remain as Prime Minister, someone must smile at your supporters, if not you then me.”
He looks pained.
She rises a little and turns face away, real aching strain etched on bones of her face.
Ducjess: “It has been for you that I’ve done it. That people mght know how really gracious you are and good.”
Duke looks down sad and grave.
Duchess gets up: “Is that unbecoming a wife?”
Walks over to desk with letters, puts them down.
Duchess: “Still I own, Plantagenet, I shall be glad to doff my mask. It was beginning to feel … (she covers her face with her hand as she gathers papers) (whispers) degrading ..shaking hands with all those cads and caddesses has nearly worn my poor hands away” (rubs it — a reverse of lady Macbeth as a gesture).

He gets up, puts paper in his hands down, goes over to her. He touches her lightly and she turns round and is in his arms (just like a Trollope novel!), being hugged tight. They rock slightly. [This is an ending of a number of the parts in this series, including those which climax a substory in a book.]
Duchess pulls away and looks up to her (near close-up again): “You .. you must not thnk Plantagenet that I am not clever enough to realize how ridiculous I am.”

This is a very different portrait of the Duchess than the chapter I invite you to compare it with. By contrast, Trollope is not in deep sympathy with her, or inclined to show her as continuing very hard. The question is, which is humanly more likely? I like Raven’s duchess much better but I fear Trollope’s is closer to typical human nature.

As I say, it follows hard upon the “honeymoon” of the Lopezes where we see Emily also in a nightgown and Lopez similarly hugging her (itself arched around the father sending the 3000 pounds), but how hollow is the difference. It is followed by a deeply congenial conversation between Phineas and Marie in the park at Gatherum where Marie says it is not bad they are often apart, for love is so easily staled.

We see Phineas and Marie Finn walking in the meadow, possibly at Gatherum. It looks like the landscape around the castle. The scene between the Duke and Duchess included the Duchess’s assertion they must have Phineas as he is coming home from Ireland, and the Duke’s response, yes, of course, we will have friends.

It’s a lingering interlude where the two discuss their happy marriage (in effect). He says how much he has missed her, and she counters she has missed him, but sometimes or a certain amount of apartness is good for a marriage. There is a beautiful scene caught by the camera of the two of them looking into one another’s faces with softened love; they kiss in the meadow too.

Then they discuss what has been happening between the Duke and Duchess, the Duchess’s bad judgement in taking up Lopez, and how the Duke seems not to be able to shake it off.

It’s a choral scene. Unlike Trollope this couple is made to stand for an ideal. Trollope (I think) has no ideal loving married couple; he is himself too disillusioned for this; he will present marriage as a satisfactory arrangement for life (networking, children) such as we see in the Grants, tender love say here or there (between the Quiverfuls say or the couple in La Vendee where the man thinks he is dying), but a couple who stands for a full group of norms (anti-ambition in Marie, moderated in Phineas and to do good), no.

They are a scrim against which we see Ferndinand and Emily as well.

According to a man who has written a book on soap operas as well as the continuing high status series, the happy interlude so often found in women’s films occurs periodically in these series. We can see others in the Pallisers in the form of all the returns to the garden at Gatherum where there were large garden parties, each one signaling we were moving onto another novel. Here we see a different usage.

There was a fourth couple (more really, minor characters in the Wharton family comprise yet more): Mr and Mrs Sexty Parker. Sexty (David Ryall) is in the series, but not Mrs Parker. She is a real loss: with her we return to a character like Mrs Bunce, a working class woman and we see how her domestic common sense marriage works, and how the loss of money devastates it.

Another contrast to the rest of this Part and the one previous is the implicit indifference to ambition and showing of power over others in Marie, and the idea you must allow yourself to be soiled, and become rotten, if you go in for it too much, if you have to fight for it when you are not born to it. Maybe this is as subversive as one can get today (I mean 2009) — and more so today than ever as we now live in an era where ruthless breaking of bonds is just fine (whether at work or at home). This is of course brought home in the scene where the Duke and Duchess agonized together over Lopez’s letter (see above) in Episode 24.

The series also marks (as I remarked yesterday on my query on greying hair in women in the Victorian perido) that are characters are reaching middle aged, the new generation making its appearance. It’s autumn says Donal McCann so beautifully (he has a wonderful speaking voice).

And there is a third thread is the Silverbridge one: he is in Venice, meets with Lady Mabel Grex and Miss Cassewary. It has already been established that Silverbridge is feckless, naive, and the sense of this scene is he is courting Lady Mabel who is much more mature or knowing than he. Pleasantly for once the “old maid” in the scene is presented as a congenial pleasant woman. And it has been made deeply clear from the time of Silverbridge’s baby hood until now how bonded are he and his mother.

Duchess speaks to Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) on the terrace; both collude to hide whatever they’ve got to say of intimate life from the Duke; lighting is used to make us feel they stand near sparkling waters

IN this part we meet Gerald come to Gatherum and see him too greeted lovingly by the Duchess, and her plans to visit Silverbridge (to get away from Gatherum too) with him, Lady Mary and the Duke. So the parents come to visit Silverbridge, and so too Frank Tregear, and the duchess (off-stage) learns to like Tregear by the gondola ride.

Duchess and Tregear (Jeremy Irons)

The gay subtextual use of Venice is brought in during the visit of the Duke and Duchess to Venice. The story of the family who had to give up their flat and went bankrupt because they chose “oriental” ways uses language Trollope and other 19th century writers used as euphemisms for homosexuality. (Margaret Markwick’s as yet unpublished book uses this phrase to detect homosexual themes in Trollope.) We see paintings of nude figures in the apartment and their gender is not clear.

Interestingly Ferdinand Lopez contrasts to Tregear in this part. Tregear in Trollope is ambitious, can be ruthless, and an upstart, not all that unlike George Vavasour in some ways, only he is controlled and prudent and can and does love Lady Mary Palliser once he is thrown off by Lady Mabel Grex. Tregear in Raven is a much more pastoral figure: he is contemplative, he is adult and mature and sees much more clearly than Silverbridge (as Charles Rider does Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited): really Irons and Andrews are playing the same typed pair in both films, just with different names. During Episode 22 Tregear goes for a long tour in middle Europe; he makes no attempt to secure Lady Mary; he may be a nobody and outsider, but he has in him the feel of a poet and certainly is serious and ethical (parallel to the Duke).

Now the Duchess is attracted to Tregear (she is ambivalent about power and status finally) and we see has fostered his relationship with Lady Mary Palliser but again it seems her understanding or attraction to Tregear is his handsomeness, that her daughter is physically attracted. He is unambitious and what he loves best is home, Cornwall. Lady Mary loves him for that (in a gondola scene).

Next up: 11:24

Ellen

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97)

Dear Friends,

For a few weeks now I’ve been sustained by two books, sometimes reading them at night, sometimes in the car as I sit next to Jim while he drives. One, Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws, I’ve written about on Reveries under the Sign of Austen as having to do with the 18th century (she even quotes Austen on jigsaw puzzles centrally).
The other, Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe, Junior, a final Chronicle of Carlingford (1876) I’ll write about here as the first of a (I hope) few postings on Oliphant as a great Victorian author.

Tonight I mean to recommend Phoebe Junior, the last of her Carlingford novels, a series of cyclical books written partly in imitatio of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, and then set the novels against the background of her other remarkable books.

Cover illustration for Virago edition of Phoebe Junior: Victor Corcos (1859-1933), In a Garden

The novel swirls around the lives of several groups of characters connected through their religion, family, and place. They may be grouped by age, class status, and whether they are dissenters or church of England (establishment). The major figure is the young woman Phoebe Beecham (junior); her mother was Phoebe Tozer. Phoebe “junior” is a young woman brought up to be genteel since her mother got out of Carlingford and married a rising clergyman, rising in dissenter circles. Phoebe Junior is highly intelligent, discreet, and ambitious, at once kind and worldly, strong, capable of highly unconventional behavior. She is the alter ago for Oliphant herself.

The story begins when Phoebe’s grandmother Tozer falls very ill in Carlingford. Despite Phobe Senior’s strong reluctance to return her daughter to her lower class origins as the grandchild of storekeepers, rather than allow a sister-in-law and brother to get close to this grandmother and thus inherit needed money, Phoebe senior sends her Phoebe Junior back to Carlingford. Phoebe Junior is to nurse said Grandmother and live with said Grandfather — and keep other grasping relatives at a distance. By living with these shopkeepers (gasp!), Phoebe is coming down in the world and may not be visited by upper class people; she may end up isolated, and have no where to wear all the lovely clothes her mother can now provide for her.

We discover Phoebe Junior is a strong-minded young woman and can withstand having to go live with older people totally out of sympathy with her. She has strong self-esteem, but the theme here is one that appeals much to me: Oliphant makes it explicit: Says Mrs Sam Hurst (one of the older women characters in Carlingford itself): “That is all you know girls” [to the Mays], you don’t know the plague of relations, and how people have got to humble themselves to keep money in the family, or keep up appearances, espeically people that have risen in the world” (Virago ed, p 98).

Oliphant shows the elder Tozers to be irritating, continually nagging or bothering Phoebe to dress in ways she knows are inferior, never once convinced or moved out of their narrow thoughts. How she endures this I don’t know except that the social life elsewhere supposedly higher is not much fun either.

I would not call this satire, but rather hard depiction of realities and I’m not sure that one does have to humble oneself. Phoebe need not have gone. Her mother said so. They might have lost the money and could have done without it. Phoebe goes as a challenge; after all, like Lucilla (Miss Majoribanks, another of the Carlingford novels which I read half-way through) Phoebe hasn’t got much to do.

A second set of young women are the Mays: Ursula and Janey, and the interest (fascination) there is while they are members of the Church of England, by culture they are not very genteel, or no more genteel than the dissenters. In fact (though Ursula and Janey are unaware of it), they are on the edge of economic disaster. Ursula is very ordinary in understanding, even a bit dull, but most of the time well-meaning enough. She is not idealized either, not a bad sort, but imperceptive and egoistic. Ursula is decent to her younger sister, Janey, not out and thus cut off from any pleasure. Austen’s Elizabeth’s comment on the practice of not allowing young women who are the second in age to be “out” is germane here. It does not encourage sisterly feeling, but we see Janey and Ursula rise above jealousy. Oliphant is still making the same point about the unfairness of this.

In an opening sequence, at an assembly Ursula (all in white) and Phoebe (in black) to to a party set up and paid for by the wealthy dissenting older couple, the Copperheads. Phoebe and Ursula end up vying for the attention of Clarence Copperhead who is tall, heavy, and much duller than the other central young heroines and heroes of the novel, but, as is true in the world, sensitive enough about his own ego and pride, out to get what advantages, power, money, enjoyment he can out of life. Clarence perceives that Phoebe would make him the best wife. He is being sent by his father, Mr Copperhead for improvements in education to Ursula and Janey’s father, a Church of England Minister, Mr May.

Oliphant’s characterization of May and development of his character is the most powerful in the book. Cultivated, intelligent when it comes to books, an establishment gentleman, May doesn’t make enough money to support his genteel upper class lifestyle, and continually overspends. So he has been getting on for years by maneuvring someone beneath him, dependent on him, to sign his bills, and who is it but the wealthy grocer Tozer and another tradesman who needs his business and contacts, Cotsdean. May is actually nasty, narrow, and sordid in his human appetites, and only plausible in company (he pretends to respect and like Phoebe and fools her about this). Mrs Sam Hurst would be willing to marry this horror of a man. So would many another woman in the novel.

What Mr May has done is forge Tozer’s signature to a bill Cotsdead took for him to the bank. Like in Austen’s fiction, he is no ogre, and someone utterly in tune with the rest of social life (Phoebe doesn’t suspect anything of what his real mind and characters are). His crime recalls what Trollope’s Josiah Crawley is accused of but did not do.

Mr May has driven his son, Reginald, to take a position which is very like that of Trollope’s Mr Harding. Reginald will be a warden of six old man with a (smaller) sinecure. Reginald, handsome, perceptive, cultivated like his father, is the first of our young heroes. We see how difficult it is for a young gentleman to place in a way Trollope doesn’t quite bring home because Trollope usually doesn’t take us into this level of desperation and jockeying for position most of the time. (We do see it in The Three Clerks.) Reginald falls in love with Phoebe — a man of the church, in love with a female dissenter. But their educational level is the same, though Reginald is not as bright as

Horace Northcote, our second hero. Northcote is a brilliant honest dissenting young man, working for radical causes (the Liberation society) and has attacked Reginald for taking one of these sinecures, but his real target is the established church itself. He is better off financially than Reginald, but when we go for a walk with them to a beautiful church on the warden’s grounds we are made to see or feel the advantage Reginald has in sense of security and meaning to be placed in a world of centuries old art and tradition. Even if Reginald’s way of spending his days is among the ignorant individual poor, while Northcote seems to do higher political things, Northcote’s life is diminished by his not having connection to this tradition.

Now Northcote feels for Ursula; he sees her father, Mr May, bullying and harassing and embarrassing her by complaining about the meals he insists she concoct up for his resident pupil, Clarence Copperhead. Northcote feels such sympathy for Ursula. He is so attracted to her sweetness, he thinks he is in love with her, and begins to court her to her surprize, fear, and delight. Ursula does not love him equally in return because she is not capable of this, but she is alive to the power of the man’s mind and handsomeness, and possibility of a happy life with him.

Class issues are very painful in this novel, and they intersect with gender ones.

Cover illustration for Penguin edition of Miss Marjoribanks: James Tissot (1836-1902), The Rivals

The Copperheads are where we begin the story, with the assembly party they throw for other dissenters and which establishment people will come. Mr Copperhead, a bully of a man who has made huge sums, coarse, show-offy, vulgar, and determined to make everyone admire him for his money which in fact most do. He buys art to show the price he paid for it. He sends his son Clarence to be educated by May, and the son is taken in because May is desperate for the fee and possibilities of further money through the connection.

Mrs Copperhead’s wife is miserable with him: she is sensitive, perceptive and lives an isolated life with no outlet for a real friend. Her best moments are with her son, Clarence who dull as he is, does love her. She is kind and buys things for the May girls, but it’s shown that she gets a good deal out of buying said stuff. No one does anything just like this out of the goodness of their hearts even if they have more than another. Mr Copperhead was very irritated by Clarence dancing with Ursula and Phoebe all evening as neither have the high rank or big money he wants for his son.

A final set of characters fills out the triangulations Oliphant works with. The Dorsets, upper class establishment people who don’t have quite enough money to live wealthily but just manage. Mr Dorset does not forge or embezzle; he prefers to live within his straitened means and we see how this hurts his pride and yet how his pride makes him look down on the Copperheads, Mays (who are lower in rank) and certainly all the dissenters.

There are two young women in the Dorset family: Anne and Sophy Dorset. They live in London, are well educated and perceptive, sophisticated in outlook. With their parents, they are willing to be patronized by the Copperheads (go to their parties, accept their invitations); Mr Copperhead of course despises them, and they dismiss him in their hearts. Anne, who is not going to marry, is the best or nicest person in the story thus far, 30 years old. We see her devoting her hours to a niece and nephew sent from India and her brother’s children, partly because she needs to be needed. She has the best values of anyone in the story and is probably the most exploited in a daily hourly way. Sophy her younger sister (say around 28) was jilted when a young man she loved discovered her father, Mr Dorset had not cultivated his connections and has minimal means. She has not gotten over this. Anne is very kind to Ursula when Ursula comes to visit, and Ursula is aware of this, grateful and sticks up for Anne when anyone denigrates her. It’s at such moments we see Ursula at her best.

Oliphant is strongly anti-romantic (she made fun of Jane Eyre) and her heroine, Phoebe, chooses to marry for money and ambition rather than love. In so doing she helps save Mr May to whom she is grateful for having her in his house where she meets and is courted by both Clarence Copperhead and Reginald May. There too she makes friends with Ursula, Janey and Northcote.

Oliphant puts a hard truthful view of social life before us. It’s what I am loving this novel for this time round. What I objected to in Miss Majoribanks (and it made me unable to finish it) was the value put on it by Lucilla who we are to find dislikable — even if satirized Oliphant wouldn’t write a book about it if she didn’t value it at some level and sympathize with Lucilla’s aspirations to petty tyrannnies and power. (It’s an Emma novel.)

What I like in Phoebe Junior is there is a much larger perspective, with at at the same time I think actually more alienation as Oliphant really shows us how some people have better things in them that make them suffer so and also the larger social monsters responsible (Mr May, Mr Copperhead).

In this Carlingford series Oliphant had the idea of doing for the level below the gentry and church of England what Trollope did for them in Barsetshire. We rarely have shopkeepers’ as major characters, much less their daughters. We do not see dissenters in this way at all — there is no harsh satire on their religion, and they seem to like pleasure as much as the next person (something Trollope will not allow). But like say Anna Barbauld and Elizabeth Gaskell, she shows how social circumstances and a lack of respect drives the dissenters to change their attitude to their religion and emulate upper class ways of worship and attitudes.

Cover illustration for Virago edition of Salem Chapel: John Callcott Horsley (1817-1903), Madame se chauffe

So three young women: Phoebe Beecham, Ursula May and (probably) Sophy Dorset, all delineated psychologically so as to suggest how they cope and how they have gotten to the point where they have probably fates. I at first thought Clarence Copperhead would go for Sophy though he seems to care more for his mother and food than anything else; and predicted the bully vulgar Mr Copperhead may stop it if Sophy doesn’t refuse, or the father may be charmed by the high status, hard to say as money is what he values. If Sophy does marry him, it will not be for love but to have a husband with money and means for her and her sister In fact Copperhead goes for and wins Phoebe, rather easily due to his money and status). Three young men: Reginald May, Horace Northcote, Clarence Copperhread, carefully delineated so as to project psychological, social, economic, humane themes. As men they are plugged or can be directly in to the society; the women must plug into the men. Fascinating older people: Mr May, Mr Copperhead, Mrs Beecham (Phoebe’s mother), Mrs Copperhead (poor woman), the elderly dull lower class vulgar Tozers (grandparents). And the single woman, Anne Dorset reminding me of Trollope’s Priscilla Stanbury (the wonderfully intelligent spinster of strong integrity in He Knew He Was Right) only much sweeter and not going to end up in a miserable cottage since her father has status and enough to keep her.

I love Oliphant’s truthfulness. No one in the novel is imagined as altruistic really beyond what is in their interests; momentarily they can be kind, and they can be sexually attracted or admire someone for something they want, but not beyond that.

And the psychological portraiture is candid: Copperhead is the son of a fantastically rich man, and not a total fool, but no sensitive insightful gentleman; his looks are commonplace, even dull from the outside (this is very Trollopian — I remember John Ball in Miss Mackenzie).

There are some strongly feminist passages in the book too. Take Phoebe’s sarcasm to the young man’s complacent assumption of their superiority:

‘To be sure,’ said Phoebe, ‘we are not so clever as you are, and can’t do so many things. We know no Latin or Greek to keep our minds instructed; we acknowledge our infirmity; and we couldn’t play football to save our lives. Football is what you do in this season, when you don’t hunt, and before the ice is bearing? We are poor creatures; we can’t parcel out our lives, according as it is time for football or cricket. You must not be so severe upon girls for being so inferior to you.’

But as stronger impulse is showing the coldness, selfishness, pragmaticism, value of status, money, and prestige in all human nature. Here’s what Phoebe thinks when she decides to marry Copperhead:

Phoebe had nothing to appeal to Heaven about, or to seek counsel from Nature upon, as sentimental people might do. She took counsel with herself, the person most interested. What was the thing she ought to do? Clarence Copperhead was going to propose to her. She did not even take the trouble of saying to herself that he loved her; it was Reginald who did that, a totally different person, but yet the other was more urgent. What was Phoebe to do? She did not dislike Clarence Copperhead, and it was no horror to her to think of marrying him. She had felt for years that this might be on the cards, and there were a great many things in it which demanded consideration. He was not very wise, nor a man to be enthusiastic about, but he would be a career to Phoebe. She did not think of it humbly like this, but with a big capital Career. Yes; she could put him into parliament, and keep him there. She could thrust him forward (she believed) to the front of affairs. He would be as good as a profession, a position, a great work to Phoebe. He meant wealth (which she dismissed in its superficial aspect as something meaningless and vulgar, but accepted in its higher aspect as an almost necessary condition of influence), and he meant all the possibilities of future power. Who can say that she was not as romantic as any girl of twenty could be? only her romance took an unusual form. It was her head that was full of throbbings and pulses, not her heart.

Instead of dreaming of prince charming (no matter how poor you see), Phoebe dreams of marrying a man who will give her a place, prestige, and work in the world as a society and politicizing wife — in the way Lady Glencora Palliser tries to be in The Prime Minister. Oliphant knows this kind of aspiration is not one conventionally acceptable. The above tone is not sardonic, but rather earnest. Merryn Williams, one of Oliphant’s biographers, says many readers would find Phoebe’s lack of idealism and romance unpleasant — and choice of husband.

And Oliphant does not slide over the boredom of choosing to live with a stupid man:

He was stupid – but he was a man, and Phoebe felt proud of him, for the moment at least” and “He was a blockhead, but he was a man…

It’s even suggested that, although Clarence is a fool, Phoebe finds him quite physically attractive – he is said to be large and “not without good looks”, and there are descriptions of him putting his arms around her waist and lifting her up in the air.

I hope I have conveyed what is the peculiar strength and value of Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior.

Albert Goodwin (1845-1932), The Old Mill, near Winchester

I have written about Oliphant on the World Wide Web before: she wrote one of the best critical essays on Austen in the 19th century: her review of Austen’s nephew’s memoir, while unkindly mocking him, presented Austen for the first time as the satirical acid feminine presence D. W. Harding recognized her to be. She is also a writer of masterpieces in the ghost story kind, e.g., The Beleaguered Cityy= and “The Library Window”.

On Women Writers through the Ages, we read her great novel set in England, Hester (1883) where I wrote weekly about it. The heroine here is an older business woman and the hero her nephew. On my own I went onto her remarkable Scots novels, The Ladies Lindores (1883) and Kirsteen (1890). Her Autobiography as published by her niece (Mrs Harry Coghill), together with her letters to the Blackwell’s is one of the most powerful life-writings of the 19th century. She does not wear her heart on her sleeve, but as you read her candid account of her hard-working literary-art life you see how original a being she was. I wrote essays on these works too, so compelled did I feel to work out their meaning and urge others to read them too.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Lydia on the Terrace Crocheting

In general, there is a distinction between the presence Oliphant puts before us in her English, Scots and the ghost story-gothic novellas and short fiction. The irony in the English books (and that means the Carlingford) is distinctly pragmatic and concerned intensely with class and money — only Hester makes gender and romance as central and it’s the most powerful I think of all I’ve read thus far in Oliphant’s English mode.

In her Scots novels, she’s ironic and realistic or anti-romantic about different things. She places the books in Scots tradition (and herself is writing to critique and replace what she conceives of as Scott’s romancing and sentimentality about the lower classes in Scotland). She presents more landscape, more delving into culture and, more about women trying to achieve independence. There is dramatization of dangerous sexualities and murderous or atavistic violent impulses because she conceives they have more play in the less populated areas of the UK.

The ghost and gothics are not ironic in these ways at all. She lets loose and we are in a realm of the uncanny and she soars into poetry that is frightening and metaphysical. You might say they have dramatic irony as a structure.

Finally, her Autobiography is pure open poignancy, candour about her inner life, creative faculty, difficult career as a woman, and tragic loss of her husband, sons, nephew. Her literary criticism about her era and the 18th century is as insightful as you will find; she is an independent thinking deep feeling woman who survived by working long and hard (she wrote 126 novels). The end of her life was tragic in that those she loved all predeceased her, and the last line of her autobiography shows her breaking off, writing “I can no more.”

Illustration for Oliphant’s haunted and haunting “The Library Window”

Ellen

Witley Court is a country house in Worcestershire which was largely gutted by fire in 1937. Although the house is still a ruin, English Heritage, who acquired the property in the 1980’s, have been working to restore the historically important gardens. In addition Great Witley Church, which is attached to the house, fortunately escaped the fire; it is a quite extraordinary creation to find in rural Worcestershire and well worth repeated visits.

I have probably discussed this before but  it is worth re-iterating what a comparatively excellent organisation English Heritage is; my comparison point is primarily against the National Trust, but also against the majority of houses which remain in private ownership. It is because of this that EH is about the only organisation we are now members of, despite the fact that we certainly do not pay enough visits to their properties to make our membership financially worth-while. This superiority lies partly in the physical provisions – of decent toilet facilities, good signing, disabled access and so on, but more importantly in the fact that they work hard on the provision of a proper historical context with reasonable perspective, rather than gushing adulation of the minor aristocracy. This is evidenced at Witley in the fine guidebook. In the 17th and 18th centuries Witley was the property of the Foley family whose wealth originated with Richard Foley of Dudley, who was a very early iron industrialist – he stole the design of a nail making machine in Sweden by ‘pretending to be half-witted’. His son augmented the family fortune by supplying cannon and ballistics in the English Revolution. So the family fortunes derived from industrial espionage and arms manufacture (plus ca change). As so often happened in the 18thC the Foleys gradually moved out of industry into land, and while mid-18thC Foleys were responsible for the Church, later ones were a set of wastrels and gamblers, in particular Thomas Foley VI who was dubbed ‘Lord Balloon’ after a disastrous balloon accident in the gardens of his London house. The contemporary Royal Register noted that he ‘by a most rapid course of debauchery, extravagance and gambling, involved himself in a state of distress from the misery and disgrace of which he can never be extricated’ (this is the kind of social reality which tends not to find its way into National Trust, let alone private, guidebooks). Although his successor restored the fortunes of the Foleys by marrying an heiress and then employed John Nash to do some work on Witley, his son (Foley VIII) was forced to sell Witley in 1833 for £900,000 (about £48 million! today).

The purchaser possessed wealth which made the Foleys look like paupers; they were the Ward family, Earls of Dudley (co-incidentally the first Foley’s iron-works had also been based in Dudley). The guidebook goes into some detail on the basis of their tremendous wealth. In the first place they owned many industrial concerns – collieries, iron-works, chemical factories and a railway construction business – mostly in South Staffordshire and the Black Country. Secondly they owned, by 1883, 25,000 acres in England and Wales. And third they owned plantations in Jamaica which had of course been made profitable originally by slave labour (at the time of abolition there were 270 slaves on the principal plantation alone). At the height of the families prosperity in the 1880’s the family owned properties (residences) in London (2), Cheshire, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Boulougne, Nice, Rome, Vienna and Jamaica – in addition of course to Witley itself. Their annual income was £123,000 (about £7 million today) a sum exceeded by only 6 other noblemen in the country. It is worth cataloguing this opulence just to remind ourselves of the extraordinary wealth and power of some Victorian families. This was wealth on a Palliser scale although the family were by no means an ancient one. Part of this wealth went into the complete remodelling of Witley on the Italianate style made popular by Victoria – Nash’s neoclassical exterior was destroyed (an act of Victorian cultural vandalism which thanks to the fire no longer seems apparent). Elaborate gardens were designed by leading garden-designer W A Nesfield. Life at Witley was ‘correspondingly opulent and reached a zenith in the 1890’s when the prince of Wales (Edward VII to be) was a regular attender, in particular at the shooting parties where immense slaughter would take place. The guidebook quotes a Mrs Berkeley who was also a guest ‘One side of the gay life I loathed, the game question. The battues, the wholesale slaughter of tame birds driven into a corner, the crowd of keepers, the destroyed crops, the ravaged pastureland, and what all these things meant to the farmers on the estate’. There was of course a massive staff of servants. But all this lavish expenditure combined with falling industrial profits meant that this lifestyle could not be maintained. By 1913 the estate was mortgaged and pictures sold. Finally in 1920 Witley was sold to another industrialist, Sir Herbert Smith, a carpet manufacturer who had done well out of WW1. He was known as Piggy on account of his corpulence, but only lived in the south-west corner of the house, which is possibly why no lives were lost in the 1937 fire (the guidebook has some reminiscences by a Mrs Lorna Harrold who lived on the Witleyestate; she remarked ‘After Lady Dudley died Sir Herbert Smith bought the Court. He used to have a big Rolls Royce and he would go through the village every day in his top hat. He had a lot of money but he wasn’t a gentleman’. Poor Piggy! This kind of statement and attitude is one which one sometimes assumes to be almost fictional – whether in Trollopian definitions of gentlemen, or in the exact social distinctions of some Golden Age mystery writers; it is good – or at least informative – to be reminded that such absurd attitudes and extraordinary English class awareness did, in fact, exist).

In terms of what now remains at Witley the most obvious testament to Victorian opulence and taste is the great Perseus and Andromeda fountain which has now been restored to full working order; part of the reason for our visit was to see it in action…..

It is certainly a testament to extravagance and opulence and wealth, which looks fine in the setting for which it was designed (it is something of relief that Bing Crosby’splan to purchase it for a golf course in Palm Springs came to nothing, elitist though such comment may be – in a way it would be appropriate there I suppose) whatever questions there may be about its ultimate artistic merit. As a whole Witley Court certainly provides visual pleasures but they are of a pastoral kind; the house itself is now a sic transit gloria mundi kind of experience….

Another reason for our visit to Witley on that specific weekend was that it was hosting an ‘event’ on the theme of the Suffragette movement – this turned out to be a short (half-hour) playlet relating the experiences of an upper-class Suffragette and a maid-servant during the early part of the movement. A third male actor played various roles as required. There were a number of songs from the period and the basic history was well covered. Again it was not a major artistic achievement by any means but it was very good to see English Heritage trying to expand the ‘Living History’ movement beyond its usual ‘boys with toys’ (battle re-enactments) displays. Too often the impression given by the Living History events is that History consists of warfare – which is of course true for some periods of English (or any other nation’s) history but excludes far more than it includes. This was an imaginative attempt to widen the focus and in a progressive direction to boot.

In comparison to the foregoing Great Witleychurch is an undoubted artistic wonder. The exterior, which is pleasant but unprepossessing gives one absolutely no idea what awaits inside and it is the unexpectedness which first takes the breath away. Those familiar with English Church visiting and the vista of grey stone are likely to be astonished when they see the interior…..

It was created in the mid-18thC by James Gibbs who incorporated the magnificent ceiling panels by Antonio Bellucio and ten windows by the London glass -painter Joshua Price. The elaborate vaulting on the ceiling is actually in papier mache (then a recent innovation) rather than plaster.

Bellucci's Central Ceiling Panel - The Ascension

Both panels and glass are magnificent. But the strange thing about Great Witley Church is that all this baroque beauty and extravagance does not in fact feel very religious. I am not sure whether this is a result of my English Protestant upbringing which provides some sub-conscious link between architectural plainness and religion (a connection maintained by much Church visiting). I know that both Roman Catholic and High Church Anglican Churches (of the kind which may be found at Walsingham in Norfolk for instance) make me very uncomfortable – The Stations of the Cross etc. but it is not because I feel they are religious – rather that I am subliminally programmed by my sub-conscious to find them heretical, and indeed ideologically and theologically (absurd though it may be for an atheist to claim the latter) objectionable. And actually were I to be religious I have no doubt that I would be very Low church indeed! The churches in which I have felt most uncomfortable in terms of their impressing their religiosity on me have been small, very Protestant field chapels in Shropshire and Galloway; a very old and bare crypt in Yorkshire. In Great Witley however I can just stand and admire the whole Baroque artistry and the glory of the panels and windows.

Adoration of the Golden Calf

Perhaps though my reaction is connected to some feeling that Great  Witley Church is really a testament to human skill and creativity and has little to do with the divine. It is a very 18thC creation – light and air and proportion, but also colour and imagination. Whatever the case it is definitely for me a 5 star Church (as opposed to Jenkins who gives it 4 – but then there is nothing whatever of the Gothic in Witley!).

A view from the Long Mynd to the Stiperstones

The End!

The cork-soled boots, now heavy with subtext

Dear Friends,

As I wrote a couple of years ago now (really) while often I wish Raven had not chosen to de-emphasize the individual sub- or primary story of a Palliser novel, and emphasized the Palliser one (the only book where he cannot manage this is The Eustace Diamonds), in this part and the one previous I am glad the Palliser story is made pre-eminent with the Lopez/Emily/Wharton story, now shorn of many of its characters and made subordinate, with material brought in from The Duke’s Children: the ejection of Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) from Oxford, as a young man, his arrival at the castle with Tregear (Jeremy Irons), his close relationship with his mother and his difference in character from his father, and the first rumor of the romance of Tregear and Lady Mary (Kate Nicholls).

I’m glad because the Palliser story now about two mature aging adults in an often tense conflicts with one another as they go through life is a living story for me: their conflicts are ours and their accommodations too (although couched in the Victorian idiom of the novel).

I have three more of my favorite scenes from this part (we’ve already had the Duke’s two walks with Lady Rosina [Sheila Keith]) to share here on the Net. Two are not invented, but rather elaborated somewhat differently: those where the Duke (Philip Latham) first tells the Duchess (Susan Hampshire) that he will respect the recent law and newly elaborated custom of relatively free elections in an area, and asks her to do likewise; and then, having discovered she has been trying to influence the election, erupts in a bitter rage (partly the result of all he has endured from her politicking and his experience of office) to demand that she stop.

One is wholly invented: I also like the scene where she visits Mr Sprout (Mr Sprout) in order to influence him; now instead of this we have the narrator telling us she had a quiet word with Mr Spurgeon (we are told this more than once). The scene is done in the spirit of the book to the extent even a long-time reader of Trollope like myself looks in the book to see if there is a scene to correspond. There is not.

Episode 19: Open Seat.

The Duchess has encouraged Lopez (Stuart Wilson) to go for the seat. At the same time, she has told Silverbridge to tell Tregear to leave as (like Wharton) she does not want her daughter sluiced by a man of a lower rank.

Marie Finn (Barbara Murray) exhibits more decent feeling than the Duchess; surprized at this at first blush

Silverbridge has just complied in the previous scene.

It is another night in the castle.

Scene 21: Night drawing room for the Duke and Duchess to retire to, a kind of blue sitting room

Source: PM, Vol 2, Ch 27, pp. 238-40, Ch 32, p. 278; Duke refers to a scene which in the novel occurs between him and Major Pountney, PM, Vol 2, Ch 27, pp. 236-237. The scene with Sir Orlando concerns just his suggestion for an increase in armament (iron sheaths) supposedly in order to have something to do Vol 1, Ch 20, pp 173-75.

1. Establishment shot: Plantagenet in evening jacket, standing reading papers; Duchess leaning down pouring coffee.

Evening coffee

Duchess: “I saw you playing chess with Mr Lopez this evening.”
Duke: “Mmmmm….”
Duchess: “How did you find him?”
Duke: (Unintelligible to me) ” ,,, quite intelligent to talk to. I can’t think why you invited him down here for a second time.”
Duchess: “Well, he’s a pleasant fellow and I am sure he’s a rising man.”
Duke: “Yes, well we’ll see about that.”
Duchess: “And see … there soon I hope [Parliament?] … uh … Planty ….”
Duke: “Yes.”
Duchess: “Is Mr Grey still going off to his mission to Peoria?”
Duke: “Yes, Yeah.”
Duchess: “And he’ll give up his seat at Silverbridge?”
Duke: “Yes, almost certainly.”
Duchess: “Then let Mr Lopez have it.”
Duke (surprized): “Mr Lopez?”
Duchess: “Yes, he’s a clever man and new blood and could be of use to you.”
Duke: Noise which questions this assertion.
Duchess: “Well, you ministers keep shuffling the same old cards until they’re so dirty you could hardly see the pips on them.”
Duke: “Why, I am one of the dirty old pack me’self.”
Duchess: “No (a coddling affectionate tone). Nonsense. I didn’t include you with the dirty old pack.”
Duke: “Nope. It is not for me to retrn a member at Silverbridge.”
Duchess: “Not, no openly these days. I know that but uh the quiet suggestion in the right place?”
Duke: “My dear Glencora, I’ve already been approached on this you know by Sir Orlando Drought.”
Camera on her, dark shadows around her, stands still.
Duke: “with a similar request for his nephew.”
Duchess: (turns around, a little worried look on her face): “You turned him down, of course.” (we see she is only worried for her candidate and didn’t believe the Duke’s assertions about not influening the election at all)
Duke: “Yes, I did (firm).”
Duchess: “Oh, but not too roughly I hope, the man is valuable to you.”
Duke: “My dear, the man’s a wretch. Now I honor the law I hope in the letter and in the spirit. Oh, I just made it plain to him that his request was indecent and presumptuous.”
Duchess laughs lightly. Looks down.
Duchess: “Well, perhaps it was, coming from him. Coming from your wife, Planty (an appeal in her eyes and tone).”
Duke: “No, my dear, that is for nobody. Not even for my wife will I interfere in this election at Silverbridge.”
Duchess: “If the candidate be worthy?”
Duke: “Pschaw. I know very little about the worth of Mr Lopez.”
Duchess: “I will guarantee it.”
Duke: “Ah ahk. (Noises). I will not interfere in this election. Now that is not on his behalf, or any man’s.”
Close up of her guarded face, an unpleasant look on it.

The Duchess with a hard, guarded face

Duke: “Nor will you.”
She ironically bows with cup in her hand.
Duchess: “As your grace commands.”
Duke: “Well then, now, my dear, I am serious about this. I am very serious indeed.”
Duchess: “Well (huffy sound) I suppose that I may speak a word or two.”
Duke: “In Silverbridge not one word. No where else for that matter.”
He goes back to his papers; she faces the door; she goes out the door.

Intervening scene of her still encouraging Lopez in the aviary/greenhouse.

The aviary/greenhouse, a pastoral place, becomes a place of corrupt assignations for place, petty power, money. The duchess a bird in a cage flapping against her bars?

Episode 20: Lopez’s money woes as he wrests money for his honeymoon and apartment from Sextus Parker. Then a scene of his fatuous showing off in front of Emily. We are supposed to see his false values and his failure to understand that he has not impressed his father-in-law favorably by this gross spending and insouciant gestures. Then the bells signalling the wedding and Emily now married and bedded too. And so we turn back to the Duchess.

Scene 26: Just outside and then inside Mr Sprout’s shoe shop.

Leitmotif: cork-soled boots, white ones on display as Duchess comes in

Establishment shot: Outdoor window which says “Superior Footwear” and “B. Sprout.” We hear her shoes walking, in front of her a footman holds open the door.

Camera switches and we are inside the shop. We see white boots on one level and above them black ones. Sprout comes out to meet her; he is expecting her and talks in awed tones.

Sprout: “Your grace!” (He handles watch; again we see how he has been waiting for her.)
Duchess (with basket in hand): “Mr Sprout. Uh. The duke has advise me to come to you for some of you cork-soled boots. It seems that his great aunt Lady Rosina de Courcy has found them very serviceable (intent look in her eyes).”
Sprout: “Eh! Her ladiship is a most valued client (Duchess looking at display) and has always sworn by my cork shoes.”
Duchess: “Yes, she declares she owes her very survival to them. Although heaven knows she’s survived long enough.”
Sprout looks uncertain how to reply to that, dubious, not clear what this is about. He walks over to stand.
Sprout: “If I may take some measurements, your grace.”
Duchess: “Oh, yes, please do. I shall be needing half a dozen pairs against the coming winter.”
Sprout looks astonished (and pleased).
Sprout: “Your grace!” (hurries over to get measuring stuff from behind the stand on the other side of room. He takes a white cardboard looking object with some ribbons hanging from it. He moves worn stool over to where she is seated and places it beneath her foot afer she takes off her boot.
Duchess (now flirting): “Woo! Mr Sprout!” (giggles, hands down near her lower leg). “I suppose you’re very busy, Mr Sprout, considering candidates for the bi-election. I know that you and Mr Spurgeon always see to everything important in Silverbridge.”
Sprout: (as he does his task, now has a measuring tape in hand) “It is a weighty affair, your grace. This is the first time in many years that Silverbridge has had to find a new member.”
Duchess: “Mmmm. The duke of course has no views in this matter.”

Duchess and Mr Sprout

Sprout. “So we have understood.”
Duchess: “And neither of course have I (light laugh) and yet Mr Sprout …”
Sprout look up briefly and then down, listening.
Sprout: “And yet, your grace … “
Duchess: “Although I have no views as to the election, I have been favorably impressed by a certain Mr Ferdinand Lopez who may just conceivably persent himself here in some weeks time. Wehn he returns from his wedding tour.”
Sprout: “Mr Lopez (tying her shoes back), your grace.”
Duchess giggles: “He has from time to time been a guest at the castle. You understand?” (very light voice now).
Sprout (getting up) “I entirely understand, your grace.” (Writing down something on pad). “Cork-soles just like Lady Rosina’s. Uh. When did your grace wish for delivery?”
Duchess walking out: “Oh, any time that is convenient. Oh … Mr Sprout …” (door opens, fell tingles, as man hold it for her).
Sprout: “Your grace?”
Duchess: “Since Lady Rosina speaks so well of your work, I think I’ll take a whole dozen pairs after all.”
Sprout (eyebrows raised high). He looks keen and knowing as she walks out. He shakes his head.

She is humming lightly.

Scene 27: Again the sitting room for Duke and Duchess and family at Gatherum (recognized by frilly blue skirted lamp, like a little crinoline).

Much is taken from Prime Minister, II, Chapter 32, p 274-278.

Establishment shot: to the front of the room before the fireplace, on a large well made basket, two black boots, one laid on its side, showing the rubber soles.

Mastershot: as she comes in she is humming the same tune, but she has a different dress and hat on.

A little later in scene, she removes elegant hat

Enough time has gone by for the man to make 12 pairs of cork-soled boots. A short maid taking mincing steps behind her as she comes in.

The Duke opens the door suddenly and sharply.

Duke: “Cora!”
Duchess: “Yes” (looking in the mirror at herself). Mastershot shows us the configuration of the room, where they are in relation to one another, the maid. She is still humming.
He closes the door. Irritated dark look in his face.
Duke: “Why is it hard to kill an established evil?”
Duchess: “What evil have you failed to kill, Duke?”
He is standing looking at cork soled boots, picks one up, looks at soles. (We are to recall that when lady Rosina talked about cork soled boots she meant nothing else, no subtext; the Duchess is endlesss subtext.)
Duke: “The people in Silverbridge (the maid comes over to where he is and he begins to help her pick up the basket by handing it to her), they’re still saying I want to return a candidate for ‘em.”
Duchess: “Oh! (looks hesitant and smiles placatingly). So that’s the evil. It seems to me to be an admirable (maid quietly walks out the door, new mastershot of room from another angle) institution which for some reason you wish to murder.”
Duke (soft voice): “Well, I must do what I think is right. I’m sorry I don’t carry ou with me in this matter, Cora.” (He turns round to face her). “But I think you’ll agree on this (piercing look at her, she looks down though not facing him, but us) that when I say a thing should be done, then it should be done.”
She sighs and with a wry exprssion on her face she puts on gloves.
He looks grim.
Duchess: “Any more suicidal thing than throwing away that borough was never done in all history.
Who will thank you? How will it help you? It is like King Lear throwing off his clothes in the storm
because his daughters threw him out.”
Duke (deep voice) “Glencora. Cora.” (Bridling and he walks to the wide door and closes both sides of one facing us. He means to endure a scene.)
She sits, now gloveless and begins to take off her hat.
Duke turns round. “Now I have chosen that I shall know nothing about this election in Silverbridge because I think that that is right.”
Duchess. “Yes, uncle Lear.”
Duke: “And I’ve chosen that you should know nothing about it. (Walks behind her and sits to her side, but nearby), and yet they’re saying at Silverbridge that you are canvassing for Mr Lopez.”
Glencora (turns round, close up, concerned face). “Who says that?”
Duke: “I don’t think that it matters who said it so long as it is untrue. Now I trust that it is untrue.”
Duchess (look perturbed and worried). (Gulps.) “Of course I haven’t been canvassing for Mr Lopez.”
Camera on his dark face listening.

Duke listening, darkened face

Duchess: “But I did just happen to mention to Mr Sprout the cork-sole man that I rather apporove of Mr Lopez in a general social way.”
Duke (low voice): ” Well, Mr Sprout is a very prominent citizen in Silverbridge. Well, I particularly asked you not to speak on this matter to anyone at all.”
Duchess: “But I only said that I thought .. think that he … “
Duke (interrupts fiercely) “What business had you to say anything” (loud, emphatic, the feel of him hitting something without doing it)
She looks up at him. “Well, I suppse I may have my sympathies as well as another. You’ve become so autocratic (she gets up and walks over to the door, looks like she is about to open it) I shall have to go in for women’s rights.”
Duke (other side of the room). “Cora. Cora. Don’t separate yourself from me. Don’t disjoin yourself from me in all these troubles” (crying sound in his voice).
Duchess (high pitched and turns round) “What am I to do when you consistently scold me. ‘What right had you to say anything?’ No woman likes that sort of thing, and I do not know of any who like it less than Glencora (comes over to sofa and curtsies) Duchess of Omnium.”
He stands, shaking his head. “My dear” (soft voice) “you know how anxious I am to share everything with you in politics but at the last there must be one voice and that must be the ruling voice.”
Duchess: “and that is to be yours. Of course.”
Duke: “In matters such as this it must be.”
Duchess; “But do not you see that is why I lilke to do a little business on my own behind your back. It is human nature and you have got to put up withit. I wish you had a better wife, but as you haven’t you had better make the best of your bargain and not expect too much of it.”
Close up on him: “I still expect it certainly but not without trying to amend it.”
She looks down (close up on her).
Duke (Cont’d): “Now I will not have it said that the castle is trying to influence the borough (very bitter and low voice)and from this time on, I command (very loud and clearly enunciated word) your utter obedience in this.”
Camera goes back and forth between their faces.
She nods a slight assent and we hear the anamnesic music come in.

End of Part 21. The moment where he says, Cora, Cora, don’t separate yourself from me, don’t disjoin yourself very moving. It also hits at precisely where men cannot understand feminism.

A few concluding notes on this part: If you count as a scene action which occurs in the same general place, this episode has the longest scene of the whole series: a long series of encounters and conversations that occur at Gatherum at what we are to suppose is an ongoing and even nightly typical grandiose party with the Duchess as presiding genius and the Duke the reluctant observer (lurking Dolly says it in the wings, using a word that reminds me of people on lists who never speak or write). If on the other hand, you count as a scene each time a new character enters or a character who is central to a dialogue leaves, this is a extraordinary display of virtuoso patterning of scenes. I agree with the director who said each time a new character enters a scene, it’s new because the new presence alters the atmosphere.

Choral moment: Marie Finn and Barrington Erle (Moray Watson)

The context for the above three scenes are choral conversations where we see Dolly and Barrington Erle, the Duke of St Bungay (Roger Livesey) and Monk (Bryan Pringle, made very old by tiny glasses and mustaches) and other politician figures, including now once again Marie Finn (as Madame Max she functioned this way when she first appeared), speaking lines in the novel the narrator speaks which meditate and usually assert the Duke is wrong for not approving of his wife’s conduct, that the Duchess is performing an important function in keeping politicans happy, and even the Duke himself: when the Duke asks St Bungay if he really thinks politics works through such parties, St Bungay says why yes, for what drives most men is vanity.

The question this film asks (it is a different one from Trollope’s in his book) is how much corruption is necessary. The parallel or contrasting story of Lopez shows us a snake, a moral horror who has so corrupted himself he is become something deeply pernicious to anyone’s leading a life with meaning. The Duke will not sully his heart at all, even to the extent the world regards as trivial: when Duchess says of Silverbridge to the Duke, that it behooves the Duke not to allow others to see how much he disapproves of his son’s conduct, that it’s a peccadillo to most people, one which doesn’t matter (as nothing that counts to pragmatists rides on Silverbridge getting a degree), he replies that to him it is deeply shameful that his son does not respect learning and will not have any.

And the substory provides the dark notes of corruption. Again in Trollope the emphasis is on Lopez as outsider; here his outside status is what drives him and enables him paradoxically to make his way in. Not in itself the emphasis (as in Trollope)

Lopez (played with great acumen by Stuart Wilson) is pitch itself, the man who has no principles whatsoever and thus can be counted on to do anything.

Lopez as wild man; in this part two Stuart rarely makes eye contact with others

If seen in the context of our world today, Lopez would be okay hiring torturers as all part of his day on the way to some luxuriant party where he borrowed money to wear fancy clothes.

In the long scenes with Sexty Parker (David Ryall), one at the beginning of the episode where Lopez returns the bill he had gotten Sexty to sign and is very contented and pleasant because he thinks he’s about to marry money (Emily [Sheila Ruskin]) and get a seat in Parliament (through the Duchess), he is kind to Sexty and all magnanimity, but in the second to last scene of this episode he is in an intense state of high charge since even though he now has permission to marry Emily, his father-in-law, Abel Wharton (very able, Brewster Mason) has not given him a dime and has not brought the subject of money up (Lopez becomes intensely biting and fraught when Sexty says well, you bring it up) and he is now having to spend great sums to look rich (buy an expensive honeyman, rent a palatial apartment) and also possibly to be elected (as after all the Duchess has become enigmatic and insinuates that she cannot do anything explicit fo him as the Duke himself refuses to favor anyone).

In the talk of this substory, Abel Wharton’s insists that he disapproves of Lopez because 1) he can find out nothing about him, and 2) is also an alien to them all (a foreigner) is disapproved of. He is a “man dropped out of the moon” (Raven’s wording):

Lopez is Jewish, but it’s rather the people know nothing of him. We can see in the scenes between Parker and Lopez despite Lopez’s reiteration he also loves Emily, what he longs for intensely is her money.

So he’s half-hysterical in temperament, and when he cannot get money from Wharton and desperately need s it, he shouts and menaces Sexty to get him to sign a bill for 2000 pounds. He turns into a kind of slitherly sliding animal, ready to pounce. Just before he saved Wharton’s foolish son, Everett (Gareth Forwood) in the park (a scene which parallels how Phineas saved Kennedy and also despite Kennedy’s dislike and distrust of him got Kennedy to accept him) and got the father’s permission to marry Emily, Everett had wanted to get into parliament for he (naively, the whole of the Palliser series shows) thinks he can do real good and will be simply so honorable by being there, but episode suggests otherwise. The parallel in
this episode is inadequate sons and naive women (no feminism here):

Comic absurd image; they are looking up at father

In this episode Susan Hampshire plays the Duchess differently than she has before. Suddenly she is hard, often taking on a tart pert and flirting tone that is more than slightly distasteful because it’s projected as cold and calculating, and for the first time the film-makers have dressed her very sexily. She wears a lot of diamonds and her outfits are over-the-top in glitter and furbelows and flounces and feathers. She has one of the kinds of bras used frequently in costume drama today which push a woman’s breasts high up and make them prominent like two squashed hills (to me looking like they are now ready for their mammogram). The talk (as I’ve said) is all in her favor by the choral characters: her flirting with the banally immoral and stupid Sir Orlando is justified by Marie too.

But if the talk of the episode justifies her, not the way she is made to act, and what happens. She is out of her depths. She has mistakenly chosen Lopez for her candidate attracted by this snake who glides up to her garments (yes Eve with the serpent comes to mind) because she does share in her mind and heart some of his characteristics. The episode also shows that she also lacks the cunning to pick a candidate who has at least a minimum of truth-telling and social responsibility which will enable him say to support himself (Lopez is lying from the get-go as he hasn’t a dime) and the implication goes way back to 9:19 where Lopez is brought up, and as Madame Max as Barbara Murray suggests to Susan Hampshire as the Duchess to stay away. And Lopez in over his head because he is spending madly when he should not. He does not recognize that he makes a fool of himself in front of his father-in-law when he boasts of huge apartment which he will drop in a moment and of fancy honeymoon. That’s suicidal in its way. So Duchess is absurd for supporting Lopez; he is leaping well beyond his capacity with his wedding tour, apartment, buying and selling and now wanting to be elected, foolhardy in the extreme.

Silverbridge ashamed of himself as he begins to tell his friend he must leave and quickly

Here again the parallel shows the Duchess in an amoral light: towards the end of the episode she mentions to Silverbridge she has noticed Tregear and Lady Mary attracted to one another. She therefore wants Tregear out, and she suddenly says she needs the room.

The Duchess only cares what the world thinks and tells husband he must pretend not to care about Silverbridge’s ejection. I felt for the duke. And Raven’s Tregear again is not at all Trollope’s character who is enigmatically ambitious, a man on the make, harder with less ideals than Phineas Finn, the earlier type in the series. In the novel it is the Duke who throws someone out: Major Pountney and he looks bad. This episode substitutes two scenes with Sir Orlando (asking for armaments to have something to do and asking for election place for nephew) but cannot be thrown out even if Lady Rosina and Duke know he is a “wretch.”

This reminds me of General Tilney’s behavior in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. She wants him out and now. “How dare he” and “what presumption” says the Duchess. This to a young man who has left his education to keep Silverbridge company; he takes it pretty well from Silverbridge (he doesn’t care that much for Lady Mary as well will find out).

74Pallisers1021Youmustleave.jpg

In the next episode Tregear (Jeremy Irons) is an unambitious poet-travelling type who has a soul and heart and has been rejected by Lady Mabel; there is a gliding over the homosexual material here. Slowly material from The Duke’s Children woven in.

How much they get into 55 minutes! And I have omitted how aged a number of them suddenly are. They have been getting older, but here they seem to put on another 10 years from last time.

On to 10:22.

Thumbnail outline of The Pallisers, with links to all the summaries

Ellen

Do you ever feel that you are trying to do two jobs? I’m struggling to complete my novel because I want to spend eight hours a day on it and I’m only finding half an hour here and there. I need a pep talk from a pro. Since I’ve just finished a jolly enjoyable novel by Anthony Trollope, I thought I’d spirit myself back in time and ask him how he managed to write it.

I caught up with him in the whist room at the Garrick club. “Frittering your time away playing cards, Anthony?” I asked him. “Shouldn’t you be writing your next best seller?”

“I completed my day’s literary work before I dressed for breakfast,” he replied cheerily.

“What, you get time for breakfast? Some of us have to work, you know.”

“Ha ha ha!” He realised I was joking and tolerated my impertinence with great good humour. “During the day I do the work of a surveyor of the General Post Office, and so do it as to give the authorities of the department no slightest pretext for fault-finding.”

“What? So you really squeeze your novel writing in before breakfast? It must take forever to finish anything that way.”

“Young man,” ( he was scarcely six years older than me I think, but never mind), “I feel confident that in amount no other writer contributed so much during the last twelve years to English literature. Over and above my novels, I have written political, critical, social, and sporting articles for periodicals without number.”

“Oh, but come on, Anthony. Journalism. That’s hack-work. What about something that will stand the test of time: a novel of quality?”

The literary lion leant back in his chair with a complacent sigh. “My morning routine allows me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel a day, and if kept up through ten months, will produce three novels of three volumes each in the year; which must at any rate be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man.”

“Hmm. That’s quite impressive, I have to admit. So what exactly is your morning routine?”

“It’s my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 a.m.; and it’s also my practice to allow myself no mercy.”

“5:30! I’d need a strong cup of coffee to get my brain into gear at that unholy hour.”

“I have an old groom, whose business it is to call me, and to whom I pay £5 a year extra for the duty. I also allow him no mercy. Fortunately for him, he has never once been late with the coffee which it is his duty to bring me.”

“So that’s your secret, is it? I dare say if I could afford servants, I could be a successful novelist too.”

“I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had.”

“But I suppose these days there are machines that can deliver a steaming cup of coffee at the crack of dawn. I’ll google it when I get back to the office.”

Mr. Trollope shook his whiskers at me in a distracted fashion as if he were impatient to get back to the whist table. Ignoring my last utterance, he opined, “All those I think who have lived as literary men, working daily as literary labourers, will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

“Quite, quite,” I said. “If I had three hours in the day to sit and daydream … I can see that it actually might be quite pleasant to rise early, nibble on your pen and stare at the walls for a bit before breakfast.”

“You misunderstand me, Sir,” he said gruffly. He was beginning to show more and more impatience. “The literary tyro should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours, — so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas.”

“That coffee must really do its work well,” I said.

“It has become my custom,” he said proudly, “to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words are forthcoming as regularly as my watch goes.”

“Oh! What, so you write 1,000 words an hour for three solid hours?”

“My three hours are not devoted entirely to writing. I always begin my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which takes me half an hour, and which consists chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases. I would strongly recommend this practice to all tyros in writing.”

“You mean writers should actually read what they’ve written? Oh, I’ve tried that. I don’t like it at all!”

“That their work should be read after it has been written is a matter of course, — that it should be read twice — “

“Twice!”

“Twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be a matter of course. But by reading what he has last written, just before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming to be unlike himself.”

“What about this ghastly modern habit of rewriting everything?”

But before he could answer this perfectly reasonable question, Mr. Trollope was pulled from his chair by a couple of cronies and forced to make up a fourth hand at the whist table, after which, I’m sorry to report that I couldn’t get another syllable from him of any significance.

[All the utterances from Trollope, with some slight alterations, can be found in his Autobiography. No doubt he was inspired to write those passages after this stimulating interview.]

Prunella Scales and Timothy West

Anthony Trollope is one of my favourite novelists but I have to admit that I don’t always finish his novels. While I’m reading them I really enjoy them but some of them are quite long. Somehow it doesn’t matter that I don’t finish them because it’s usually obvious what’s going to happen. He also tends to repeat things quite a bit so the chances are that, in bailing out early, you’re not missing as much as you might think. In fact that’s one of the things I like about Trollope; he never assumes you can remember who everyone is or what their goals in life are. He likes to remind you often. They always have a goal. That’s another good thing. You can learn from these characters. They have a goal and they set about achieving it. We should all do that really, shouldn’t we? That would stop us from moaning in our blogs about how useless we are. Frank Gresham’s plan, for example, is to marry money. Not that he wants to, but everyone tells him he must. Frank must marry money otherwise he will be ruined. The woman he falls in love with, Mary Thorne, doesn’t have any. She loves Frank truly and deeply so her goal is to avoid marrying him at all costs.

Dr Thorne is Mary’s uncle. He knows something that Frank and Mary don’t know but which could make a vital difference to their lives. His goal is not to disclose it, because that could create false hope. But he’s a kind man and he also wants Mary to be happy; making sure she can be is another of his goals.

I actually made it to the end of Dr. Thorne and I was very pleased with myself. Everything turned out nicely and I had no reason to complain — about Frank or Mary or Dr. Thorne or my own fickleness.

I must confess, though, that I didn’t actually read the novel. I had it read to me by Timothy West. He did a great job, as he always does, and he even made me laugh out loud a few times. I don’t mean LOL, I mean really laugh out loud.

I have sort of met Timothy West. We were at the cinema together and he had a little drink in the pub next door with his wife, Prunella Scales. All right, I didn’t really meet him, but only because I kept my distance out of respect. I could have met him. Anyway, he is a brilliant actor and Trollope is a brilliant novelist. What a combination they make!

Duke (Philip Latham) and Lady Rosina (Sheila Keith) walk into the wood around Gatherum

Dear Readers,

On Trollope-l this weekend we got into quite a conversation about the merits of film adaptation versus the eponymous books they are based upon. There was a strong tendency to value books over films (as you might expect), but this was countered by arguments films may be as artful and meaningful as verbal texts. An evaluative criteria of faithfulness was countered by someone who said he much preferred the invention and use of the past these films bring to bear on modern situations. I tried to adjudicate between the several positions staked out.

I took the still iconoclastic view that while one might say there is a loss from book to film, there is also much gain. The kind of insight and information offered is simply different. That many people don’t pay attention to what they are seeing, and movies remain a disrespected commodity (it’s to the studios’ advantage that they do, for that keeps a mass audience coming) is part of why many still do not study a movie. I’ve found some apparently faithful adaptations to be masterpieces and some free adaptations to be poor. It just depends on who did what. No adaptation is really faithful is where we have to start; in fact the desire to be faithful is only part of the motivation and mostly in cases where the novel is a cult object. Just as often the adapter wants to revel in and change the material, pull out what’s relevant and make a new statement out of the favored material.

I suggested that each era (like literature) also has its schemata, and as when you sit down to read a 19th century novel you automatically historicize, so this must be done with films. Films of the 1970s have different aesthetics than films today. The 70s films seem more boring or dull, but then they have long brilliantly acted scenes which have mostly gone from films today. Films today have 8 second scenes and favor montages and epitomizing moments over long developed scenes.

Well, a propos of this conversation, I found myself getting the greatest kick and much comfort, amusement and even strength from Raven’s depiction of Lady Rosina de Courcy (as played by Sheila Keith) in his Pallisers 10:21 (see previous blog on Pallisers).

This character does come from Trollope’s The Prime Minister: as in Trollope’s PM, Lady Rosina is an intense relief to the Duke (Philip Latham): unlike just about all the new people and most of the old in his govenment that the Duchess (Susan Hampshire) is filling Gatherum Castle with, Lady Rosina is not a sycophant; she is not ever trying to use whatever conversation she has with someone to forward her interests (money, jobs, prestige, whatever can be gotten). When Trollope’s Lady Rosina discusses the value, strength, and reasonable price of cork sole shoes from Mr Spouts (a shoe dealer in Silverbridge, a town in Barchester where Gatherum is to be found), she discusses them for their own sake. The Duke loathes what the Duchess is making out of Gatherum, and we are supposed half to agree with him: the Duchess knows this is the way to keep politics going, and Trollope wants us to see how corrupt human ways are and expose personal politicking as central to an ongoing review of how politics works in the corridors of power. This another phase of Trollope’s examination of politics: in Phineas Finn, Trollope went into issues and what happens when someone votes their conscience, in Phineas Redux, the issues more generally of how parties work and if they are an evil or a good. Can You Forgive Her? shows us the problems of a career for a man with no money; in The Prime Minister we have Ferdinand Lopez, a man without connections and (partly as a consequence) without any conscience.

The thing is although many readers remember Lady Rosina, if you really look carefully in Trollope’s novel, you find there is but one, only one scene of the Duke walking with Lady Rosina, and only one dialogue about cork sole shoes: PM, Vol I, Ch 27, in the 1994 Penguin edition by David Skilton, pp. 233-35. Trollope uses this brilliant flared moment for amusement and contrast, and we remember it, and he then makes her the subject of debates and passing remarks in quarrels and discussions between the Duke and Duchess in which the Duchess’s point of view is shown to be that of an admired politician in the book, the Duke’s Nestor, the Duke of St Bungay.. Not all these are dramatized; our narrator tells us of them, using occasional bits of dialogue and free indirect speech. Lady Rosina character also provides a link to Mr Sprout who the Duchess (disobeying the Duke’s orders) goes to to politick on behalf of “her” candidate, Ferdinand Lopez.

In other words, Trollope is not interested in any real way in Lady Rosina for herself nor in the feel of the scenes between her and the Duke. Its only what she stands for generally. We are not to admire her especially as she is as narrow as the others and she is there to show us aspects of the Duke’s turning away. She is narrow, an egoist, not a woman of any kind of wide or thorough knowledge, but she is for real.

Raven has altered the character enough to use her differently and he has presented her at length in the part where she appears. In Raven we have two full scenes, one lengthy, pulled out of the one dramatized scene in Trollope and from the different dialogues between the Duke and Duchess and the narrator’s comments on Lady Rosina and the Duke and Duchess’s attitudes towards her. The Duchess is exasperated by the Duke’s presence and herself bored silly by the woman. This way of changing a text is common in adaptations. The adaptor is interested in a particular character or theme in ways the original writer was not and again and again goes to the same scene or set of scenes and develops them, usually further and in a slightly different direction. Andrew Davies does this all the time (he does it in the 2008 Sense and Sensibility).

Now I find these scenes just delightful. Raven’s Lady Rosina is the Duke’s aunt and the Duke remembers how much he enjoyed Christmas when she was there, and how she liked walking with her when he was an adolescent boy. In Trollope she remains a distant relation/friend, some sort of cousin and he didn’t know her when he was young; in fact she’s a “remnant” and character he makes recur from his Dr Thorne (the third of the Barsetshire novels), where she was presented more as a snob and narrow than anything else. Raven’s Lady Rosina is aware of what’s happening in the castle and not just as a snob or upper class woman “in the old grand manner” as Raven’s Dolly Longestaffe has it (he is imported from Trollope’s late dark satire, The Way we Live Now, as asatirical Addison-like observer — modelled on the character in the American Hollywood film, All About Eve), but as a genuinely humane woman who knows the politicians around her are a desperately ambitious lot and is aware the Duke ought to be spending time with them; as a lonely woman she is grateful to him and heartened by his attention. Unlike Trollope’s Lady Rosina, Raven’s character talks about this.

Here is their first scene together. I enjoy her and these scenes so, I’ve transcribed them.

***

10:21; Episode 16: Entertaining

Two scenes. The first one invented and based based on what we have as to content and feel: Raven uses some of the narrator’s descriptions. It’s there to introduce Lady Rosina. The second scene he adapts The Prime Minister, II, Chapters 21, pp. 180-81 (Lady Glen complains to Duke about Lady Rosina as his choice and he defends himself); Chapter 27, pp. 233-35 (the cork sole dialogue).

Scene 3 (of the part): Tents out in the vast lawn of Gatherum castle; buzzing of voices heard

Establishment shot: the master tent and people seen at a distance in clumps from it

Camera comes closer and we see Duchess emerging on someone’s arm, Marie behnid her, Dolly crosses over between them and the camera

Erle’s shoulder now next to Dolly as they watch (and we with them)

Man: “Your grace … pulll … bow to the extent of your arrow …”

We see the Duchess pull on the bow in her arrow

Man: “and release”

She does it.

Dolly: “I think all these bows and arrows are damned silly.”

She looks at him and shoots, and we watch and it’s a near bull’s eye!

Making a bull’s eye, triumphant

Surprized sounds of awe; applause and the cry: “Excellent!”

Duchess: “I’m out (unintelligible) again. Gatherum archery fount open to all comers.

Dolly: “Great shot, Duchess.”

Duchess: “Thank you, Dolly.”

Erle humming and laughter

Dolly: “A fluke of cousre. Just her luck. Otherwise she’s doing it all very well.”

Erle: “And she has had the good sense to ask some people who ain’t polticians, huh? Like you for one.”

Dolly: “Oh I’m here that I can proclaim her success around London.”

Erle: “You’re also here because she likes a mixture, hmmm.”

Dolly: “By jove, she’s got it.”

We see fat and comic characters walking along.

Dolly: “There is Boffin the grocer. He looks ill. I suppose she’s hoping he will give some of his greasy sovereigns from the till to the party funds.”

Erle: “Oh (taking a piece of a sandwich from tray servant has brought them) thank you.”

Dolly: “At the other end of the scale, there’s Lady Rosina (looking ahead … )

Erle: “Lady Rosina?”

We see them walking at a slight distance.

Dolly: “Lady Rosina de Courcy.”

Erle: “Oh yeah?”

Dolly: “She’s Planty Pall’s aunt. She’s as poor as a beanstalk but grand in the old manner. The Boffins and the rest are going to like rubbing shoulders with her.”

Erle: “Ah, but is she doing to like rubbing shoulders with them?”

Dolly: “She’s only here for the forage, poor old girl (we hear applause in the background). She wants to get her head in a bucket and hope nobody will talk to her.”

Scene 4: Further along in the lawn where it’s beginning to get woods around and less grassy and controlled, more natural

Establishment shot: back to Duke and Lady Rosina, in a medium length shot

Dialogue (opening Raven gives as dialogue what narrator reports Lady Glen thought before she accosts Plantagenet in Ch 21), free indirect speech)

Lady R: “I must say Plantagenet you are very considerate. It isn’t every Prime Minister who would spend his time squiring his old aunt.”

Most people would not walk with their old aunt

Duke: “Hmmm. There is no one whose company I’d rather have.”

Lady R: “But uh all your colleagues [camera catches Erle and Dolly passing by] all these statesmen you have here …”

Duke: “I don’t see any statesmen. They’re politicians.”

Lady R: “Even politicians must be more imporatnt to you than aunts.”

Duke: “Um, they are far less aimable. Do you remember those walks we used to go on when I was a boy? It was the best part of the holidays. When you came and took …. [I can't catch it] careful …

[Camera sees swamp like puddle and their feet]

Duke: “The contractors must have missed this place. You don’t want to get your feet wet.”

Lady R: “Don’t you worry, Plantagenet [camera now on her picking up her dress and showing cork soles under elegant old lady's boots] Sprout’s cork sholes. [She walks through.]

Duke nods. “Sprout’s cork soles, uh?”

Lady R makes an assenting noise. “Mr Sprout, the bootmaker in Silverbridge specializes in cork sole boots. Very reasonable charges. I cannot afford fancy prices you know, and they’ll bring you high and dry through almost anything.”

Lady R: “Through any mess which contractors may make if not through the kind which is made by politicians.”

Plantagenet turns around to smile at her.

***

Raven’s character encourages the Duke in his behavior; thanks the Duke for his kindness and attention and seems glad however that he has chosen to walk with her. On their second walk and second scene she tells him with her strong shoes she’s game for 5 miles a day every day with him. They really smile at one another as no one has in this part but the Duchess and her son, Silverbridge, thus far.

Here is the second tracking shot scene of the Duke and Lady Rosina:

***

This follows hard upon one where the Duke is accosted by Sir Orlando Drought (Basil Dignam), the head of the coalition in the house, and Drought urges the Duke to “do” something, which is specifically spend money on arms.

Mastershot mise-en-scene of this first encounter. First we see the Duchess as hostess with everyone around her, all doing characteristic things (Dolly leans over piano, flattering, teasing), Orlando and Lopez (seen from the back) at a card table.

When Orlando follows the Duke out to the nearby aviary/green house and and insists on presenting his ideas, we are to see this is ridiculous and the Duke has a hard time being patient. The words come from a scene in Trollope (The Prime Minister, I, Ch 20, pp 168-69, 173-75 in the 1994 Penguin Prime Minister edited by David Skilton) which is transposed to the indoors; interestingly the issue of wasting money on armament would have been relevant to a 1970s audience.

Then by contrast we have the Duke and Lady Rosina again walking together on the green lawn and into the wood. Again Raven milks The Prime Minister, II, Chapters 21, pp. 180-81; Chapter 27, pp. 233-35

Episode 17, Future Politic:

Scene 10/11 of the part:

Establishment shot: Lady Rosina and the duke walking together across the lawn

Lady Rosina: “You look rather worn today, Plantagenet. I fear lest you fnid my company tiring.”

Duke: “Far from it, Aunt Rosina. Your company is my only solace just now. (He points back to the castle.) Castle! crammed with people. Half of them strangers to me. It is as much as I can do to be polite to’em. In fact um, (he falls silent and has a full look on his face as a man having many thoughts that make him so absorbed he forgets where he is; her face looks full too, but she is alert and in control, not so troubled) no, to one at least I am afraid I was I was barely.polite. The other night I deliberately snubbed (nods his head) Sir Orlando Drought.

Lady Rosina: “The odious man with the scarlet face. I can hardly blame you for that Plantagenet.”

Duke: “He happens to be important in my government.”

Lady Rosina: “and look as if he knows it.”

Duke: “ooooh yes.”

Camera tracks them off the screen and we see empty grass; then we pick them up walking in another path.

Duke: “Everywhere I go he torments me. For all I know he’s lurking near us now ready to jump out.”

We are seeing them through branches, the way we see repeatedly the Duchess and others politicking (she with Lopez, Erle with Orlando, Duke with Orlando) through the bars of the bird cage in the aviary-green house of Gatherum. When Lopez talks with Everett at the Beargarten, we see them through the smoke of Lopez’s thin cigar.

Duke: “Behind every bush. Seize on me with one of his foolish and impertinent suggestions.”

Lady Rosina: “You are paying the price of being a great man.”

Duke: “I sometimes wish I were a little one.”

Lady Rosina: “You will never be that.”

She is genuinely listening to him.

He hesitates, looks at her and then up, and then walks on. Again we see them walk off screen, and now we see empty spot and camera picks them up again in a wider meadow.

Duke: “I wish they’d all go away.”

They come upon young people in pairs first walking and then half-running towads them, they giggle; they are flirting. They pass the middle aged duke and elderly lady. Duke lends an arm to help Lady Rosina get out of their way. Now the camera picks them up in a part of the forest; steady quiet walking, and now they are by an oneiric lake.

Duke: “All of them Aunt Rosina except you. I don’t think you know what comfort these walks of our are to me.

Lady Rosina: “How very kind of you to say so, Plantagenet. Well, so long as I have Sprouts cork soles to walk on, you may depend on me for a good five mies a day (a gleam seen in her eye). She smiles at him and he back.

He looks gratified, and the next scene is Lopez with Sexty Parker plotting to make money in an underhanded gambling way on the stock market; Lopez need Sexty’s money to gamble with, so again there is an ironic contrast. Again Raven has invented a scene out of mostly narrated material from PM, II, Chapters 43, 46, pp. 377-78 (narrated), 395-96 (Lopez’s letter to his father-in-law purporting to explain his business).

The camera takes us for long walks in a beautiful lawn garden and forest, and we have a number of twisting tracking shots, one of which ends with Lady Rosina and the Duke by an oneiric lake and (I think) can remind us of the Duke in 1:1 when young walking with Griselda Lady Grantley (also changed much from the book), another early attempt at escape. That scene was lovely and spring-like and he was young. Here, like all the other actors, Latham is made up to look aging.

***

This scene in its context appeals to me mightily and I suppose Raven meant it to. Raven and the film-makers of the 1974 films are addressing a person in the 1970s and still today who loathes politics from a different angle than the 19th century person. They are taking from Trollope what is meaningful to us today and develping it. We want a different sort of refuge than Trollope envisaged, one which we can assume has a certain level of comfort and education, and this Lady Rosina is a figure from an egalitarian vision of the world. (In Trollope we have rather depictions of tradespeople and working class characters in elections who are incapable of thought, are sycophants by instinct, are supposedly contented with the system as it is; this is quite a contrast to Disraeli who presents them as hiding their real angers and resentments, quite as capable of thought and understanding and knowledge too as upper and middle class characters; ditto in George Meredith.)

Adaptations are meant to do just what Raven is doing, whatever kind they are (faithful, commentary or free). As Milne (he of Winnie-the-Pooh) said (who wrote an interesting play out of Austen’s P&P) the author of the new work develops what is there for the contemporary audience and makes it doubly meaningful: in terms of what was, and what is. The light shed works both ways. The adaptor uses a new media as best he can. So Raven does here.

Ellen

tomorrow we put on a puppet show for the library. i’ve been sitting in the kitchen making a bright orange puffer fish with my Mumsie and cutting out little white teeth. i love theatricals. and musicals. and dramas. and puppet shows. they are lovely beyond everything.

i once was a princess with a sparkly wand.

another time i was James Henry Trotter.

tomorrow i get to be Percy the fish.

i adore being other people (or things and what-not).

tomorrow is my birthday. {my golden birthday}. i got a very special present from a very wonderful teacher tonight. it made me very happy of course.

i think i might wear a dress tomorrow.

but tonight i’ll wear my pajamas. and smile. because The Warden, by Anthony Trollope is sitting on my bed. right next to Tristan and Iseult. what more could i ask for? (maybe a pair of rain boots….and a typewriter…..p.l.e.a.s.e.)

i’ve had something Miss Tandy said a bit ago stuck in my head for a while now. i thought it was sweet. if you know the answer.

**************

“Why would you want to lean down to kiss a girl for the rest of your life?”

**************

i know the answer.

-Bella

“We must go out there” (and face the world, a young and older woman’s entrance into the world, last still from 10:20)

Dear Friends,

Though it’s been a number of months (again) since I last posted about the 1974 BBC Pallisers series, I am still working my way slowing through all the Parts. I’ve decided I can’t both try to write a book on the Austen films and keep up thorough analyses of the Palliser series in blog-essay format. What I’m doing now is carrying on reading the Palliser novels whole and then carefully taking down the screenplays of each hour episode, comparing the texts of the screenplays and actual dramas to what I find in the novels: the series continues to be a commentary type. I will eventually (perhaps if I manage a couple of chapters on the Austen films) write a couple of more concise (less detailed) blogs on Parts 18-29 (Volumes 9-12).

I left off at 8:17. In a nutshell, 8:18 and 8:19 bring us to the end of Phineas Redux, with some striking changes: for example, a ghost scene where it is made explicit that Phineas (Donal McCann) did long to do away with Bonteen (Peter Sallis), so that the inferences from the novel are altered to something far more disillusioned at the same time as far less ethically demanding.

I would call these two episodes “Phineas’s ordeal” and they correspond in Victorian melodramatic detective terms to Meredith’s “Beauchamp’s Ordeal.”

This melodrama provides the strongest elements in 9:18 and 9:19. I take our first transcript from such a scene.

The thing to keep your eye on is how changed it is. It is derived from Phineas Redux, II, Ch 56, pp. 13-46, but with considerable changes and much original dialogue. The Original takes place in Meager household, includes Amelia the daughter, reveals the life of the lodging house directly.
Here the key is the relationship between the women which builds in the comfort of Madame Max’s house, and it through this built-trust that Mrs Meager reveals the unexpected important fact that there was another grey coat in the vicinity, one Mr Emilius could have worn. An irony is the women are more effective outside the established logical allowances of probabilty. The acting of barba Murray and Sheila Fay as the two women takes us beyond Trollope’s text where there is no such intimation and also the screenplay:

The women’s shared sympathy is strong. The best moments are in Fay’s face, for example the peculiarly tense look from actress’s face comes when she is telling of coat, of pawning, of her fears of police, and particularly her tones when describing Mr Meagre as a filthy sot. Much she has had to endure.

The allusions to political novels in 9:18 and 9:19 anticipates Raven’s development of Trollope’s later political novel, The Prime Minister. No longer will we look at issues but at the workings of personal politics in the upper class and how coteries function, an important theme in Trollope’s own The American Senator, also alluded to in 8:17-18. Material bringing in the growing up of the Pallisers’ children is interwoven in conversation. Also Lady Glen’s tearing a letter from Burgo (from 1:1), the Duke’s memories of how his wife did not love him and wanted to flee shortly after they married.

The two linked parts end on a return to the Arcadian gardens, in the series an emphatic signal to us we are turning again to a new novel. We see the wedding of Phineas and Madame Max and get a funny scene between Dolly (Donald Pickering) and the Duchess (Susan Hampshire) where he informs her what such picture albums left on tables for others to see are for.

The Prime Minster itself is begun more in earnest with the political talk of Barrington Erle (Moray Watson) and Dolly at the wedding and then in the final touching nightime scene between the now Duke (Plantagenet, Philip Latham) and Duchess (Lady Glen, Susan Hampshire) who have grown to love tenderly, value, esteem one another despite great differences in attitudes. They talk of what they will do outside the political world, thus telling us they care intensely about it and will rejoin.

Which is what they do in 10:20. In 10:20 the Lopez story is begun, denuded of many characters (as was Frank Greystock’s story in the Eustace Diamonds parts) and is to be fitted into the political and sexual vision of this part. There are strong hints (never elaborated), again through allusion (to Swinburne) that part of the mystery of Lopez is he’s homosexual. The Lopez story vies for space with the entrance of Lady Mary (Kate Nicholss), Silverbridge (Anthony Andrews) and Frank Tregear (Jeremy Irons) into the films, Silverbridge having been thrown out of Oxford (for painting a master’s house red), Lady Mary a close loving daughter with her mother, and the two young men (hinted) a strong loving friendship (they go to Venice in a later part, living there together).

The strongest scenes in the part are those which dramatize the relationship between the Duchess and Duke, and I give a transcript of the last one in the part. I chose this one because if you compare its ultimate major source (Prime Minister, Vol 1, Chapter 19), you will discover that surprizingly little is actually taken from the original scene, key phrases and sentences, some memorable hot words (“vulgarity”), and much is invented. The scene feels as if it were Trollope and anticipates the ending of PM where indeed we find that the Duke has learned to like power and does not want to give it up. I can imagine people hunting for the full scene in the book, and finding themselves a little startled to see how much original development there is here.

The acting of Latham and Hamsphire is at this point superb. He often makes wordless sounds and his body language replaces words; he has become the older Duke over the year.

I do not think Hampshire usually that powerful an actress; the type she plays is one who is guarded and makes a point of living on the surface in front of others, but in this rare moment in the series, she drops her mask and we see her intensely grated upon as she hears the word “vulgarity” from the Duke as a description of all her hard work fixing up the grounds, turning the castle into a super-hotel, being a hostess who is all smiles. In the still I have included her lips and the right side of her face just begins to move into a hard sneer of deep offense and irritation.

Much of scene between Duke and Duchess not in the book but it could have been and feels so right; he writes what Trollope could have and makes us think it’s there. It’s almost there Much is invented.

“He hates it,” the Duchess observing the Duke wandering about the gardens of Gatherum Castle

In the audio-commentary by Emma Thompson to the 1995 Miramax Sense and Sensibility film (directed by Ang Lee), she remarks that the Atlas scene between Elinor (Emma Thompson), Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) and Margaret (Emilie Francois) has seemed to some viewers who know the novel to be so like Austen that they ask where in the novel does it occur. For my part I find it too sweet for Austen, but there are other scenes (between Elinor and Marianne, Kate Winslett, for Lucy Steele and Mrs Jennings (Elizabeth Spriggs) where you think the scene is close to Austen’s own and when you go back find much has been changed or invented. Thompson says she is most delighted when people ask her to tell them where in Austen’s book this dialogue or scene occurred when there is no such line or quite this scene. She feels she has performed the ultimate function of recreating Austen for us.

So perhaps Raven, only he has changed the inferences of the whole hour by new additions, scenes which are quite different, important eliminations and allusions. But I must save the discussion of this for when I come to the end of writing out all the screenplays and after I have written two chapters of my much longed-for (meaning me, meaning I do long to do it) “The Austen Movies.”

Comic moment of what Duchess might be seeing: Duke told it’s not for him and the workman to ask questions about what’s being done to the grounds

Ellen

]]> http://josephgrinton.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/the-greatest-master-of-fiction/ Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:43:01 +0000 Joseph http://josephgrinton.wordpress.com/2009/06/10/the-greatest-master-of-fiction/

There was “tube strike chaos” according to the newspapers today, which meant it was a very quiet day in the office as most people were “working from home.” I also had a quieter than usual journey to work. I travel on the Docklands Light Railway, which is never considered part of the tube network. It’s very confusing for tourists. When they ask for the nearest tube I say, “Do you mean the DLR?”

No, they never mean the DLR, but they’re quite grateful all the same when they discover it can take them where they want to go.

In fact I had quite a pleasant journey to work and back. I am reading The History of Henry Esmond by William Thackeray. I had to order it from a second hand book dealer because it’s out of print, which is surprising in view of the fact that Thackeray, Trollope and a few others considered it his best novel. Trollope even went further.

I myself regard Esmond as the greatest novel in the English language, basing that judgment upon the excellence of its language, on the clear individuality of the characters, on the truth of its delineations in regard to the time selected, and on its great pathos. There are also in it a few scenes so told that even Scott has never equalled the telling.  Let any one who doubts this read the passage in which Lady Castlewood induces the Duke of Hamilton to think that his nuptials with Beatrix will be honoured if Colonel Esmond will give away the bride. When he went from us he left behind living novelists with great names; but I think that they who best understood the matter felt that the greatest master of fiction of this age had gone.

[From Trollope's Autobiography]

I haven’t yet reached the scene Trollope mentions even though I’ve been reading the book for two months but it’s true that the pathos is there. I think Thackeray put a lot of himself into Esmond. It has the authentic resonance of lived emotion and, once you get past the obscure Jacobite intrigues and turgid circumlocutions, the human drama draws you in and the events dwell in your mind. I put it aside some weeks ago at page 207 because I had too many other pressing concerns, but I’m glad I resumed it in an idle moment, because now, at page 320, it is really enriching my journeys.

George Eliot found the central relationship of the book “uncomfortable.” It is a bit strange. Henry Esmond is an illegitimate orphan who is cheated out of his rightful inheritance by his foster father, Francis, Viscount Castlewood. Henry learns of the deception but continues to love and revere his foster parents (Francis in memory only after he dies in a duel). Henry joins the army and fights in Marlborough’s campaigns in Europe in order to impress his cousin, Beatrix, who is the daughter of his foster mother, Lady Castlewood. He is in love with Beatrix but, although Lady Castlewood approves the match and watches over Henry’s courtship with tender concern, Beatrix is too coquettish and capricious to appreciate him. So she marries the dashing Duke of Hamilton and Henry marries Lady Castlewood. Extraordinary! But, although he is courting Beatrix, Henry’s relationship throughout is really with his foster mother. It is in his encounters with her that you really feel the the full dignity of Henry’s sensitive and generous nature.

I wonder to what extent these relationships are invested with Thackeray’s own intense feelings following the end of his doomed, unconsummated love affair with the married Mrs. Brookfield, if such an affair can ever be said to have an end. I think perhaps all Esmond’s feelings come from Thackeray himself.

Thackeray was being deliberately old-fashioned and clever, writing in the style of Queen Anne’s time. Lanying has reminded me that it’s my duty to be modern and clever in order to give her the kind of novel she craves. I’ll try not to do as Trollope urges then and copy Thackeray’s style. Instead I’ll just try to remember the touching simplicity with which Thackeray has conveyed the authentic human emotions resonating at the heart of this novel. Strange as the relationships are, there is never a false note here. The greatest master of fiction knew above all the importance of emotional truth.

]]> http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/filmography-of-adaptations-of-anthony-trollopes-novels/ Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:50:34 +0000 ellenandjim http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/filmography-of-adaptations-of-anthony-trollopes-novels/

Anthony Trollope by Samuel Laurence, 1864

Dear Friends,

It’s time I started posting once again about the 1974 BBC 26 part film adaptation of Trollope’s six Palliser or Parliamentary novels, written by Simon Raven. The last time I posted I wrote an essay on Anthony Trollope as a political novelist and how the Palliser films are only partly presented as about parliamentary politics.

Tonight to start us (or myself) off again, I thought I’d put a filmography of adaptations of Trollope’s novels. In reading general books on film adaptations this week I came across errors about how many, when and what has been adapted. It seemed to me the author guessed Trollope should have some, but didn’t go to the trouble of researching the question any.

I have, using mostly IMDB, corrected and produced a truer list than I’ve seen anywhere else. Another source has been Robert Giddings’s The Classic Serial on Televison and Radio; and I’ve kept information from stray comments here and there on essays on early BBC adaptations.

It is repeatedly said the first film adaptation on BBC (and TV) in a mini-series form of a novel was Trollope’s The Warden. This is not quite true; quite apart from adaptations of popular and other high status older novels, there were earlier ones of Austen’s novels. Starting with radio adaptations (important in themselves and as influencing the early TV adaptations), in 1938 (that early), a “serial reading of Trollope’s Barchester Towers was broadcast on the London regional programme in the summer of 1938″ (p. 9). Trollope’s novels have not dominated the mini-series terrain, but they have always been part of it, and a couple of times major productions have been mounted (with much expense and solid actors and writers).

From Pallisers, 10:20, The Duchess (Susan Hampshire) and Mrs Marie Finn (aka Madame Max Goesler, Barbara Murray) talking of the Duchess’s ambitions as the wife of the Prime Minister

In 1943, in the same year as an early landmark production of Dickens on radio, David Copperfield with Ralph Richardson as Micawber, Trollope’s Barchester Towers was again adapted for radio, this time by H. Oldfield Box, and in ten parts (p. 12). In 1945 it was Dr Thorne, which became a radio mini-series. There have been more recent radio adaptations too, and broadcasts of the older ones.

Here is a list of the TV adaptations as far as my knowledge goes. There has been no movie made for theatres as yet.

1. 1951 BBC, The Warden. It is described as the very first BBC serial of a novel; it was done in 6 episode parts. Other adaptations of high status novels had been done before (1938, 55 minute P&P, 1948 105 minute Emma, Kerr and Papill, 1950 one hour American Philco Theatre, live S&S); the screenplay for this first Warden was by Cedric Willis, Kerr, 14)
2. 1958 BBC The Eustace Diamonds (I know nothing more)
3. 1959 BBC The Last Chronicle of Barset (ditto)
4. 1960 BBC The Small House at Allington (ditto)
5. 1969 a first BBC2 The Way We Live Now (5 episodes of 45 minutes) screenplay Simon Raven, directed James Cellan Jones, and actors include Colin Blakely, Rachel Gurney, Angharad Rees (as Marie Melmotte, made a central character as she was in the later series)
6. 1974 a BBC The Pallisers, (26 50 minute episodes or 22 episodes) directed by Hugh David, Ronald Wilson, screenplays, Simon Raven, actors include Susan Hampshire, Philip Latham &c;
7. 1974 Penrith, Malachi’s Cove, directed and written by Henry Herbert, starring Donald Pleasaunce, Malachi, and Veronica Quilligan, Malachi’s daughter, Mally. Single 90 minute episode from the short story of that name. This was shown in movie theaters in Britain in 1977 under the title The Seaweed Children.
8. 1982 a BBC Barchester Chronicles (7 episodes of 55 minutes), directed by David Giles, screenplay Alan Pater, actors include Donald and Angela Pleasance, Nigel Hawthorne, Geraldine McEwan, Janet Maw, Alan Rickman &c
9. 2001 BBC The Way We Live Now (300 minutes) directed by David Yates, Andrew Davies, actors include David Suchet, Shirley Henderson, Matthew Macfayden, Mirando Otto, Paloma Baeza, Cheryl Campbell.
10. 2004 1 hour, BBC documentary, The Two Loves of Anthony Trollope, directed by Richard Downes, no attribution for a writer, with Stephen Frye as narrator.
11. 2004 BBC He Knew He Was Right 4 parts (240 minutes) directed Tom Vaughn, screenplay Andrew Davies, actors Oliver Dimsdale, Laura Fraser, Bill Nighy, Anna Massey &c

It might have stuck in Trollope’s craw to see ED adapted so early on, but it would not have surprized him. In his Autobiography he wrote how it beat out his finer political novel, The Prime Minister, and a brilliant moving original novel, Nina Balatka, about cultural and psychological conflicts at a deep level in two individuals, one a Jewish outsider, the other a Christian girl, who considers suicide. She almost throws herself into the Charles River:

Recent photo of Charles River, Prague

But he would not have been surprised to see the novel most often adapted thus far is Barchester Towers. He said of it it was the one book by him by the time he wrote his Autobiography which people felt called upon to read.

There are far fewer of these movies for Trollope than for Austen and a few other Victorian novelists (Dickens, Gaskell, Elliot, Hardy). It might be that the number of readers of his novels is not as high as John Letts used to believe (see his preface to my book, Trollope on the Net).

I have recently had an experience which may be the result of a lack of academic interest in Trollope for himself. I volunteered to an editor of a respected academic periodical on Victorian Studies to review : The Politics of Gender in Anthony Trollope’s Novels: New Readings for the Twenty-First Century, edd. Margaret Markwick, Deborah Denenholz Morse, and Regina Gagnier (Ashgate, 2009, 978-7546-6389-8, $99.96 listed price).

I proposed to write about what this volume hopes for: a change in Trollope studies. It was striking at the conference how different the subjects and tone taken towards Trollope from the last conference (admittedly 25 years ago) and also how different from what is often found in the Trollope society (though not always). What I’d been noticing in the latest Victorian Studies,
is how Trollope’s famous novels today (different from those favored say 25 years ago) embody attitudes or agendas that belong to the author’s book or agenda of the book as a whole, but how he is not assessed in his own right. I was bothered by that, and over the past couple of years going to the MLA I have listened to a number of papers on him, but always as embodying this or that attitude, apart from himself. He is not the focus nor Trollope studies as such. The only recent book I have and know of is Mark W Turner’s Trollope and the Magazines (who was invited to give a key lecture at the conference but didn’t show); there are newer books with chapters on Trollope (where he is used to prove another agenda about the age or political-sociological insight of the author) This new collection brings him forward as a force to deal with in his own right engaging in subjects of interest today. I do know from having been at the conference that there was as much interest in him from a post-colonialist perspective as a gender one. I can see this reflected in the titles advertised in the Ashgate brochure.

I offered to concentrate on this new book, describing what was a dearth of central studies, bringing in papers or chapters on Trollope in other books or papers I’ve heard at conferences. I’m a member of NAVSA. This was the first conference in 25 years, yet (as everyone says) so many people still read him and in any conference he’ll be a central figure quoted in lots of papers. My own interest in him has also changed, and now I’m studying his novels in the light of film adaptations of them.

I have not heard back: I suspect this is from the same reason I was not invited to contribute to this volume. I am an adjunct. I gave a paper Trollope’s Comfort Romances for Men in the conference which was on gender studies and much praised, and which was put on the Victorian website. I could easily have develped a paper out of this for the volume. If my frankness about male heterosexuality or my stance on Trollope was not liked, no one said and I would have been willing to tweak or tone down as others do.

Well if my idea has been taken and given to someone else with more prestige, or it was not thought good enough, or there is still this stubborn lack of interest in Trollope for himself so such a longish essay would not be wanted, I have at least been able to talk about this problem and my proposal, here, now, in this blog.

As this already long enough and has enough content for one blog, I’ll save a list of the few articles that have been written on film adaptations of Trollope for a future blog. Sarah Cardwell (who has published the excellent and indispensable Andrew Davies and Film Adaptations Revisited has given a paper which I gather is not that well known and I will summarize it (as she was kind enough to send me a copy).

If anyone knows of another radio, TV, or film adaptation, please to let me know and I’ll add it to the above. If there is any error in the above list, ditto.

Ellen

P.S. If anyone who reads this knows the difference between tags and categories I would be most grateful if you would tell me. I see that I can switch all my categories to tags; for an experiment I simply added a tag that already existed as a category. I could see no change on my site. Also sometimes getting into the editing page, I have to sign my password in again. I keep typing “remember me,” but some days this doesn’t work. Can anyone tell me how to set up this blog so that I don’t have to type in my password each time I want to approve a comment or edit my page.

E.M.

]]> http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/rescue-retrieval/ Tue, 19 May 2009 13:42:46 +0000 ellenandjim http://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/rescue-retrieval/

Dear Friends,

Yesterday Jim and I managed to rescue and retrieve all those blogs from “Ellen and Jim have a blog, too,” which were about the topics I will be exploring on this blog. We have put them in several places: on my website front page, and in the Austen, Trollope, and Clarissa regions. The URLs for the first three are in two places:

Austen

Also found at: An Austen Miscellany

Trollope

Also found at Anthony Trollope: British Novelist (1815-1882)

Richardson’s Clarissa

Also found at:

Clarissa website: Reading Richardson’s novel in real time; a study of Nokes and Barron’s 1991 BBC mini-series

The last three are may be accessed from the front page only:

Women’s art (poetry, memoirs, novels, plays, films, pictures)

Academic conferences

Travel Writing

I’ve also opened a second blog, “A Diary of Doings and Thoughts” on livejournal where I had an account and a couple of friends who like to discuss costume drama.

Ellen

]]> http://overratedlist.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/robin-new-york-ny-age-55/ Wed, 06 May 2009 16:24:55 +0000 OverratedList http://overratedlist.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/robin-new-york-ny-age-55/

1. The Great Outdoors

2. Anthony Trollope

3. Ergonomic desk chairs

4. Breakfast in bed

(Robin / New York, NY / Age 55)

]]> http://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/the-tenway-junction/ Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:31:32 +0000 nick2209 http://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/the-tenway-junction/

 I have just finished The Prime Minister, the fifth of Trollope’s six Palliser novels or sequence (I have been struggling to catch up with the Trollope-l reading schedule and am now within a few weeks of doing so!). Without going into any lengthy analysis of this great book I did want to just add a short comment on the magnificent chapter, entitled as above, in which Ferdinand Lopez, the book’s villain, commits suicide. Tenway Junction was in fact, the notes to the edition I read inform me, Willesden Junction, opened in 1866 (The Prime Minister was published in 1876) at the junction of several local lines and the two main lines from Euston to the North. 

      Trollope’s prose here, which can be, enjoyably, verbose is here stripped right back; his account is one in which acutely observed detail steadily mounts. The chapter is the very opposite of melodrama (whatever that may be). Ferdinand Lopez takes a bus, then the underground to Euston. He visits the station cafe, flirts with the waitress and has a mutton chop. He then takes a first-class return for Tenway Junction. Trollope describes the immense confusion which reigns there as a mass of passengers change trains.  Lopez walks back and forth along a platform but even amidst the throng a vigilant railway ‘pundit’ grows suspicious and questions him. Lopez asserts that he is waiting for a train from Liverpool with a friend on it. He eventually eludes his shadow and as the morning express from Euston approaches at ‘a thousand miles an hour’ Lopez ‘With quick, but still gentle and apparently unhurried steps,..walked down before the flying engine – and in a moment had been knocked into bloody atoms’. The rhythms of the entire chapter are exemplified in this final passage, the quiet prosaic nature of the description shattered by that last final phrase have an immense power. They are also of course extremely bleak. This is one of the great accounts of suicide which draws much of its strength by avoiding any interiority at all. Convincing interiority is almost impossible when writing such accounts for the banal and obvious reason that the successful suicide carries no tales (I can speak as an unsuccessful one but clearly would not be writing today had I succeeded!). Trollope has described Lopez’s thought processes which led him tothis point earlier on, but of the day and event itself he takes the utterly correct decision to stand back and observe in a minute and almost dispassionate manner.

    To anyone who believes or asserts that Trollope is a comfortable, easy writer the three words The Tenway Junction should alone function as a total rebuttal. Of course those who have seriously read him will know these assertions to be untrue. But this is a short distillation of just how bleak, and  powerfully bleak, he can be. It is worth adding as a final note that the ‘bloody atoms’ are also a reference back to Epicurean theory which earlier in the book has been adduced as an explanation of the way in which complete idiots rise to the top in political life.

]]> http://gmtminus5.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/the-way-we-live-now/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:37:54 +0000 gmtminus5 http://gmtminus5.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/the-way-we-live-now/

I don’t know much about the background of Bernard Madoff, but I think if he’d spent even a little time studying literature he might have realized he should stay out of investing. We get very clear warnings about trusting men whose last names begin with “M” with our money. Around 1855, Charles Dickens gives us the inscrutable Mr. Merdle in Little Dorrit (if you can’t manage the book, the BBC has a nice miniseries). Everything Mr. Merdle touches turns to gold, until it doesn’t because he’s running a ponzi scheme, and everyone is ruined and he kills himself (spoiler). A couple decades later, Trollope satirizes the 1870s with another swindler, Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (again, there’s a miniseries). The late 1800s must have been a bad time to be a financier in London, but it’s not much better now. Merdle, Melmotte, Madoff…we should have seen it coming (we meaning all those people who gave him all their money instead of following the most basic rule of investing: diversify).

]]> http://annebabson.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/true-trollopes-opinionated-american-women-as-trouble-makers-in-victorian-literature/ Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:45:45 +0000 annebabson http://annebabson.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/true-trollopes-opinionated-american-women-as-trouble-makers-in-victorian-literature/

“…In San Francisco Mrs. Hurtle was regarded as a mystery. Some people did not quite believe that there ever had been a Mr. Hurtle. Others said that there certainly had been a Mr. Hurtle, and that to the best of their belief he still existed. The fact, however, best known of her was, that she had shot a man through the head somewhere in Oregon. She had not been tried for it, as the world of Oregon had considered that the circumstances justified the deed. Everybody knew that she was very clever and very beautiful — but everybody also thought that she was very dangerous.” — Excerpt from The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

From the Library of Congress photo archives -- undated

In school I was plagued by Victorian heroines — quasi-tubercular virgins who were buffeted by one outrage followed by another — this was what it meant to go to English class and do the assigned reading.  Only men were heroic and swash-buckling.  I  signed up voluntarily for all of Jane Austen’s heroines, who, while plucky, were virtuous, extremely bound by convention, and ironically from a woman author who never married, abandoned the reader at the marriage altar, as if marriage meant an end to all unsettled business in a woman’s life.  I regarded these novels, as much as I loved Ms. Austen, as offering little insight to a modern woman seeking a sequel to her own part one.  I read a lot of other stuff instead — ALL of French literature, the ancients of Greece and Mesopotamia, modern Americans, the Elizabethans and the Restoration Theater, but nineteenth century England, with a few exceptions — Oscar Wilde’s outrageous humor and the delicious silliness of Gilbert and Sullivan Operettas — bored me to no end.

Then I recently discovered the Trollope family with all its buttoned-up but still baroque dysfunctions.

I knew how the word “trollope” came to mean a woman of ill repute — a Mrs. Fanny Trollope had visited the United States in 1830 and had returned to Europe to write a book about us, Domestic Manners of the Americans, here in which she complained about absolutely everything we did and said to no end.  She actually went so far as to say that the foundational idea of our society (however imperfectly expressed it was in 1830) — “all men are created equal” was a total crock and that it was high time that we uncouth hillbillies learned who our betters really were — the British, of course.  I had read in a history book in tenth grade a short excerpt from this book, which has been out of print since a decade or two before the Civil War, and thought it was bitingly funny — she described with all the fluster of an English snoot the disgust she felt about men spitting tobacco and women asking her impolite questions without proper introduction.  It was delicious the way that a bitchy character on 90210 is delicious, and  I always wanted to read what she said.  However, at the time, that would have required about the same amount of inter-library loan international diplomacy as getting my hands on an original Guttenberg Bible to check the font size.  Yet, I never forgot, especially, since when I was called names by angry men, they often chose the T-word to insult me — very unusually for someone of my generation.  “Trollope” evokes a kind of whale-bone-corseted sluttiness, an old-world tea-party-low-cut sluttiness with sharp-Alice-Roosevelt- Longworth “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me,”-worthy wit, not just average twentieth century sluttiness. I always saw this as a mark of distinction,  as I have  learned to treasure the insults of my enemies almost in the same manner in which I treasure the compliments of my friends.  Both indicate the amount of success I have had in accomplishing my purposes in this life.

Now, thanks to the paperless world of electronic libraries, I was able to acquire a copy of that above-mentioned bitchy masterpiece in the public domain, and let me tell you, it was worth the price of my Amazon Kindle to read it — I howled out loud with laughter.  I say, no wonder we hated her.  I also understand why she thought we were such a pack of future Jerry Springer guests with no sense at all.  She made a better living as a writer than most men of her day because she possessed a high-minded version of Simon Cowell’s articulate rudeness.  We tune in to him, and she was a best-seller.

Only because she was the mother of Anthoy Trollope, the very British novelist of Victorian B-List or C-List fame, I decided to venture into his novels and his biography to find out what I could.

Ladies and trollopes, what a surprise!

He is in fact up to the very things I did not ever care for in Victorian Lit — he uplifts the institutions of the Anglican Church and Victorian marriage, the family unit as it was popularly understood in his day, and he is as classist as Kipling and, at times,  as maudlin as Dickens.  However — and this is a big however — he messes with all the institutions he lionizes, and he uses American characters to do it, and many of the women are total trollopes.  In a Trollope novel, everybody is trying to find a mate or a fortune, but romance and capitalism are the  same thing, even where people are sincere.  Even in his Barchester novels, the church is where the money changers go to perform their alchemy.  It’s not that he doesn’t have his Christ-like parsons and his virtuous virgins –  he does.  However, there are these other people in his works who are so disestablishmentarian as to make the others look like loveable boobs who have missed the zeitgeist of their times.  My thinking as to why I was forced kicking and screaming in high school to read so much Dickens and none of Trollope is that he tells it so much like it is, particularly about young people and sex, that somebody at the PTA must have banned the good stuff.

For those of you who have never read Trollope, imagine the drawing rooms of The Importance of Being Ernest at tea but infiltrated by Annie Oakley.  That’s like the presence of  Mrs. Hurtle in The Way We Live Now, an American woman who admits to a number of people who will talk, and she knows it, that she has had sex without being married to one of the heroes of the book, tries to and nearly succeeds at chasing away the fiancee of this hero, and she does so while threatening to shoot him like she did another man in Oregon who wronged her.  She actually says in a book written in the  1870s something that would not really be imagined until the feminism of the 1970s that she does not need a man to defend her honor — she brought her six-shooter  to England with her and she still shoots straight in a duel.  And she says this while looking like a Gibson Girl in a bustle and a bun.

I love her. I love her shoes.  And I love her some more.

I also love Arabella Trefoil in The American Senator, an aristocrat without an inheritance who is supposed to marry money, like almost any Jane Austen character.  The difference between Arabella and any of Jane Austen’s heroines is that Arabella is all about the cash.  She has no other thoughts of even friendship with men until late in the book, and she resents her situation — she asks, very reasonably, why she should not be angry at the fact that women have no other way in her society of getting money.  She talks romance but thinks like a Wall Street MBA closer.  At the end of the book, she finds herself married to an  ambassador, who warns her that it won’t be all parties and frivolity any more — she will have work to do as an ambassador’s wife.  She tells him, “I have found the pleasures very hard.”  It looked like a royal ball, but it was a day at the office for her — and she admits it.

The two women I mention are not revolutionaries — they muddle their way through circumstances over which they have impaired control — impaired because they are women in the Victorian Age.  Still, they are  refreshing to see.  So are the openly dysfunctional portraits Trollope gives of Victorian families without “Poor Oliver Twist” hand-wringing, just the picture as he imagined it — unsentimental, even anti-sentimental.

Anthony Trollope wasn’t a feminist.  He opposed women’s suffrage.  He seems to have had a difficult relationship with his trollope mother.  He married a very proper, very dutiful, and very dull English woman.  He loved her dutifully, commenting that it was good for a man to have his dinner on time the way he liked  it.  He seems to have had no back talk from her.  However, in his forties,  Anthony Trollope meets and falls in love with a feminist suffrage militant woman from New York.  She was wild.  She was free.  She was smart and frank.  Nothing much scared her, not their age difference, not his marital status, and not even his copious, scary white beard.  I admit I would  not commit adultery with any man, but even a single Anthony Trollope would meet one of my Lady Bic Razors before his lips met mine.  However, trollope epithet notwithstanding, I am a New York feminist of another era.  Perhaps she really dug the whole Santa Claus vibe.  What’s clear is that he decided, probably thanks to her (and freudianly, his mother), that women who thought for themselves and who weren’t afraid to fight to be free were just much hotter than those good girls that everybody was supposed to like back then but didn’t actually like any less or any more than they like them now.

I love it that Trollope, after his mother hung us all out to dry, used American truth-tellers as a device in multiple works to convey his true thoughts.  I admit I am disappointed, much the way I am disappointed  that Jefferson had slaves, that Trollope loved opinionated women, he just didn’t want to emancipate them, not even in his books.

Brilliantly, Trollope does not punish the trollopes in his books — they make out okay, and we don’t hate them when we close the cover shut.

I have forgiven the dead white men I was forced to read in English class a bit because I now know that they were in better and more iconoclastic company than I heretofore knew.    I am grateful for the bitchy voice of a foremother and her undue influence on her underappreciated son. I am still looking for a novelist who writes about second acts for women, sequels post-alter, post-divorce, post- sagging, post- wrinkles.  I intend to write whatever I need that I do not find pret-a-porter.  Doubtless Mrs. Fanny Trollope would hate my homespun and call it uncouth, but that’s okay — she has given me her name, and I value her criticism as well as any other’s.

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