Anthony Trollope (1815-82)

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Bibliography: Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography, an Analysis of the History and Structure of the Works of Anthony Trollope, and a general survey of the effect of original publishing conditions on a book’s subsequent rarity (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall 1964), 321pp., index.

Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope [Vision Critical Studies] (London: Vision Press 1980), 207pp. CONTENTS: John Cronin, ‘Trollope and the Matter of Ireland’; Joseph Wiesenfarth, ‘Dialectics in Barchester Towers’; Tony Bareham, ‘Patterns of Excellence: ‘Themes and Structure in The Three Clerk’; Walter Allen, ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’; Simon Gatrell, ‘Jealousy, Mastery, Love and Madness: A Reading of He Knew He Was Right’; John Sutherland, ‘Trollope and St Paul’s 1866-70’; John Halperin, ‘The Eustace Diamonds and Politics’; A. O. J. Cockshut, Trollope’s Liberalism’; Robin Gilmour, ‘A Lesser Thackeray?: Trollope and the Victorian Novel’.

N. John Hall & Donald D. Stone, eds., Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37, 3 [‘Anthony Trollope Special Issue’] (Dec. 1982). CONTENTS: ‘Foreword’ [255]; Ruth Ap Roberts, ‘Trollope and the Zeitgeist’ [259]; Michael Riffaterre ‘Trollope’s Metonymies’ [272]; Philip Collins, ‘Business and Bosoms: Some Trollopian ConCerns’ [293]; R. H. Super, ‘Trollope at the Royal Literary Fund’ [316]; Arthur Pollard, ‘Trollope and the Evangelicals’ [329]; James R. Kincaid, ‘Trollope’s Fictional Autobiography’ [340]; J. Hillis Miller, ‘Trollope’s Thackeray’ [350]; Robert Tracy, ‘“The Unnatural Ruin”: Trollope and Nineteenth-Century Irish Fiction’ [358]; Robert M. Polhemus, ‘Being in Love in Phineas Finn/Phineas Redux: Desire, Devotion, Consolation’ [383]; David Pearson, ‘“The Letter Killeth”: Epistolary Purposes and Techniques in Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite’ [396]; Geoffrey Harvey, ‘A Parable of Justice: Drama and Rhetoric in Mr. Scarborough’s Family’ [419]; K. J. Fielding, ‘Trollope and the Saturday Review’ [430]; Patricia Thomas Srebrnik, ‘Trollope, James Virtue, and Saint Paul’s Magazine’ [443]; Edward Seidensticker, ‘Trollope and Murasaki: Impressions of an Orientalist’ [464]; John A. Sutherland, ‘Trollope at Work on The Way We Live Now’ [472]; Contributors [494].

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Commentary

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Maurice Francis Egan, ‘On Irish Novels’, in Catholic University Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1904),: ‘Anthony Trollope’s Irish novels, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, The Kellys and The O’Kellys, followed much later by The Land Leaguers, deserve the criticism of the London Times in 1848 - “Of The Kellys and the O’Kellys we may say what the master said to his footman, when the man complained of the constant supply of legs of mutton on the kitchen table. “Well John, legs of mutton are very substantial food”; and we may say also that John replied, “Substantial, sir - yes, they are substantial but a little coarse.” Trollope one of the first of English novelists, whose Warden and Barchester Towers ought to rank among the classics, had too coarse a touch for the lights and shadows in the April-country of Ireland. His Irish novels, he admits, were never heard of in Ireland, and the editions sold in England were very small; the first two he wrote for pleasure; The Land Leaguers has less interest than the others, - and indeed, no method could be less addapted than the hard-and-fast one of Trollope for representing the Irish of any period. [Cont.]

‘Trollope’s point of view was sympathetic, and, though he could not do what he did for the Anglican parson - that is, give us the best pictures of Protestant clerical life done in English - pictures that have a right to stand beside those Mrs. Oliphant made of the dissenting clergy in The Chronicles of Carlingford - his portrait of Father John and his curate are much truer and kinder than might be expected from a man who had little knowledge of the inner life of priests. He was faithful to Irish life as he saw it. “It was altogether a jolly life I led in Ireland”, he says in his Autobiography. “The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever, the working classes much more intelligent than those of England - economical, and hospitable. We hear much of their spendthrift nature, but extravagance is not the nature of an Irish man, He will count the shillings in a pound much more accurately than an Englishman, and with much more certainty, get twelve pennyworth from each. But the Irish are perverse, irrational and but little bound by the love of truth. I lived for many years among them - not finally leaving the country until 1850, - and I had means of studying their character.” ’ [&c.; Autobiography; see further, under Quotations - as infra].

R. J. Kelly, ‘Anthony Trollope and Ireland’, in The Irish Book Lover, 18, 2 (March & April 1930), 46: ‘Now, in the course of time his last novel was destined to be concerned with Ireland, and with the West, which he knew so well once and it was entitled The Land Leaguers. It, however, fell flat on the English reading public, and as the Irish reading public that could relish such a class of writing is very limited, the book was still more neglected, and it is now comparatively rare. / The scene of the story was laid in Co. Galway, and we find many familiar names of places and people turning up. It appears that a Mr. Jones purchased in 1850 the estates of Ballintubber and Morony in the Landed Estates Court. They belonged to different owners of the old stock, but lay to the right and left of the road which runs down from the little town of Headford to Lough Corrib. “At the time of the purchase there was no quieter spot in all Ireland, one in which the lawful re-quirements of a landlord were more readily performed by a poor and obedient tenantry”. Such is his description. Jones had two sisters, and they left their fortune with him to take care of, and they lost every thing in the land trouble. He had a family. Frank, his eldest boy, a clever lad, and educated at the Queen’s College, Galway , and two girls, and a younger boy, Florian, who became a Catholic. Father Giles, we are told, was parish priest of Headford for forty years. He was one of the old type, but Father Malaki, in the neighbouring parish of Ballintubber, was of a different class, and he had no curate ‘who would interfere with his happiness’. Chapter IV deals with a Mr. Thomas Blake of Cam-lough, “a gentleman living about two miles the other side of Tuam, the first Irishman whom Mr. Jones had become acquainted with, and they became very intimate”. Then we have a Gerald O’Mahony, an Irish-American, who was married and had a daughter, Rachel. He passed over frequently to America, and was a man of strong Republican views. There was a meet of the hounds one day at Ballytoungal, two miles from Clare Galway, on the road to Oranmore, where Sir Nicholas Bod-kin lived. He had a rental of £5,000 and spent every penny of it in the county, where he altogether resided, and died poor as usual with spendthrifts. / We have a splendid description of “Black Daly”, who was Master of the Hounds which ‘used to be called the Galway Blazers, but the name had nearly dropped out of fashion a quarter of a century ago’. [Quotes as infra.] Further, ‘Under the name of Captain York Clayton, Trollope partly describes Clifford Lloyd and his pompous magisterial doings in Galway as Chief Resident Magistrate. Boycotting, murder, the Galway Court House, Ardfry Castle, the trial for the murder of Florian Jones, Cong and its surroundings, and the double murder there, are all mentioned, and then follows a long semi-political dissertation on the “State of Ireland” as Trollope thought it was when, as he says,  “a new and terrible aristocracy was growing up amongst the people - the aristocracy of hidden firearms”. It would be impossible to criticise this work and useless to do so; but it brings before one’s mind under assumed names many once well-known characters in the county of Galway, men whose names alone remain with a certain halo of legend about them, men withal as unlike the present generation, whether peasant or landlord, whether in castle or in cabin; as could be conceived - so unlike that one can hardly believe that a half a century, barely fifty years, have come and gone and wrought such changes. But the men of that period of the old land-lordism of the early Victorian age, these men with their ways and faults and good qualities are gone, and not one remains today who can be compared with them or considered a fit survivor, and whose action or methods of thinking and living could recall the dead past never to be re-enacted.’ [End.]

Shane Leslie: Leslie called the eponymous hero of Phineas Finn ‘the real man for Galway’ in his preface to that novel. (Phineas Finn, OUP edn. 1949; quoted in John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988), as infra.

Doris R. Asmundsson, ‘Trollope’s First Novel: A Re-Examination ‘, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.83-91; quotes Trollope’s revelation in An Autobiography that it was a desire for money which motivated him to write novels: ‘“If honest men did not squabble for money, in this wicked world of ours, the dishonest men would get it all; and I do not see that the cause of virtue would be much improved.” (p.83.)

Mary Campbell, review of John N. Hall, ed., Trollope (OUP 1992), 597[448]pp.: considers it a ‘very satisfactory book’ [Books Ireland May 1992]; quotes Dublin Review of 1872, ‘This Englishman, keenly observant ... absolutely sincere and unprejudiced, writes a story as true to the saddest and heaviest truths of Irish life, as racy of the soil, as rich with the peculiar humour, the moral features, the social oddities, the subtle individuality of the far west of Ireland as George Eliot’s novels are true to the truths of English life.’ [see supra]; At the age of 26, Trollope applied for transfer to Ireland under threat of dismissal from the Post Office Service. He later wrote, ‘From the day I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me. Since that time who as had a happier life than mine?’ Trollope lived in Banagher, had read the ‘landlord’ novels of Maria Edgeworth, the peasant novels of Carleton, Banim, and Griffin, and ... created [in The MacDermotts of Ballycloran] a book with a genuine tragic sense of people trapped &c. The MacDermotts are Catholic landlords but as poor as their own tenants caught in a web of debt and decay that will eventually destroy them. The Kellys and the O’Kellys starts as a historical novel with the trial of Daniel O’Connell, but Trollope soon drops to the factual level and lets a double love story take over ... Late, in the full flood of his major works, he produced Castle Richmond, a novel of the Famine times. ... He returned to Ireland in fiction again in An Eye for An Eye, a stark and haunting tale of seduction set against the wild scenery of Clare, and The Landleaguers, his last novel, unfinished at his death. Afterwards posted in Clonmel, Mallow, and later sent back to Belfast, where he completed The Warden, and thence to Donnybrook where he wrote Barchester Towers, all these based on his experience of south west England where he was sent to reorganise the postal service.

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Robert Lee Wolff, ed., Garland Reprints with preface & Introduction: MacDermots published by Frances Trollope’s publisher Travers on the assumption that it was hers, the MS being signed “A. Trollope” and communicated through her. Trollope wrote to the London Times defending Lord John Russell’s policies in repealing Corn Law, supplying Indian Corn to the Irish victims, and establishing work, with strict measures; 7 articles appeared 25 Aug 1849; 30 mar, 6 April, 11 May, 1 June, 8 June, 15 June, 1850; Autobiography implies they appeared in 1848-49, but in fact their later appearance explains in part their relative toughness, after the repression of the 1848 rising; tone of letters tougher than one would expect from author of MACDERMOTS OF BALLYCLORAN, 3 vols. (1848), Thady is unable to negotiate to regain the integrity of the estate for sub-tenants who are milking it nor persuade his father to the correct legal measures; Feemy is pretty, frivolous, and idle; seduced by Ussher, police sub-inspector; Ussher’s religion and office an insult to the Macdermot pride in Thady; Thady is involved with Fenians, and is induced to plot his death, at the crisis killing him by accident not design with a bludgeon blow to the head; [ends with an ‘atrocity’, Wolff]; Thady gives himself up and is tried; Thady hanged in Carrick on Shannon, attended at the gallows by Fr John, who looks after the old man, Larry MacDermot, ‘confirmed idiot ... formally declared’. CASTLE RICHMOND (1860), includes death of mother and children by starvation in a cabin, on which the aristocratic hero stumbles; Trollope shows distaste for Evangelical Protestants bribing Catholics to convert with food [soupers]; theme is rivalry of widow and her daughter for the young hero, Owen Fitzgerald, who, however, prefers the son, and finally goes off the continent with him [Wolff raises question of unconscious homosexuality]; includes chapter on Famine [see QUOT infra]. EYE FOR AN EYE; Kate O’Hara, well-educated, living with widowed mother atop the Cliffs of Moher, assisted to meet society by caring priest, Fr Marty’ meets weak, handsome young officer Frederic [sic] Neville; becomes pregnant; Neville inherits earldom becoming Lord Scroope and is persuaded reluctantly to break off the affair; Fr. Marty’s conversations with the incensed mother, and his attempt to persuade Scroope to marry her; his prevarications; Mrs O’Hara pushes him from the Cliffs of Moher, ‘under the rocks ... I thrust him down with my hands and with my feet’’; her sentencing and death[?]; the daughter with her child, ruined. PHINEAS FINN (St Paul’s Magazine, Oct 1867-May 1869; 2 vols. May 1869); New ed., gen ed. Michael Sadleir (OUP ed., 1949), with Preface by Sir Shane Leslie, though Phineas Finn is based on a political adventurer called John Sadleir, he was not convincing as an Irishman ... comes within an ace of being the legendary ‘man from Galway’; fails due to amorous and political scruples [two aristocratic women call in love with him, incl. Duchess of Omnium]; supports Tenant Rights and resigns under-secretaryship; MP for Loughshane, not Galway [Leslie adds exclamation mark on his own account]; Phineas taught the British public about Parliament; Irish background grows faint inspite of occasional ‘bedad’ from Larry Fitzgibbon and Mary Flood Jones; In his Autobiography, Trollope confessed to a blunder in taking his hero from Ireland owing to his visit to that country which he had really known when it was ‘distressful’ [v-vi]. Phineas Redux (ser. in Graphic, 18 July 1873-10 Jan 1874; 2 vols. 1873); OUP ed., Michael Sadleir, with preface by RW Chapman; Trollope left Phineas at the end of Phineas Finn marrying an Irish girl he kissed behind the door, and finding a job in Cork. MALACHI COVE (Tabb House 1974), 145pp., stories by Trollope in Tabb Hse. series of rep. gatherings; ‘Malachi Cove’ [c.1868] set in Cornwall; “Fr. Giles of Ballymoy”, Irish story, pp.22-41. THE LANDLEAGUERS (1883); Jones, landlord, benefitted by Encumbered Estates Act of 1849; first generation landlord, maintains tillage by salt-water sluices keeping out sea in Galway estate; the story centres on the terrible psychological pressure exerted on the mind of the landlord’s 12 years old son, torn by conflict between his love for his father and an oath of secrecy he has been forced to take to the insurgents not to reveal what he knows of their plan to sabotage the fields by flooding; the boy is exposed to the dilemma because he was become a Catholic, an action which his father deplores but makes no effort to undo; tension reaches extraordinary pitch; Trollope introduces the last of his Irish Catholic priests, Fr Brosnan, virtually a co-conspirator his (Wolff, ed., 1979, p.xxv).

Karen Faulkner, ‘Anthony Trollope’s Apprenticeship’, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol.38 No. 2 (Sept. 1983), pp.161-88: Unlike Edgeworth, he cannot chronicle misery and yet remain outside it, comforted by a romantic view of the basic goodness of the peasant mind and heart; and, unlike Carleton, he cannot lose himself in enthusiastic identification with the people he is describing. His experience and his honesty force him to acknowledge that human nature as degraded as that he describes in The MacDermots can only produce further degradation and misery. … It was necessary for him to seek to be “as true to life” as possible, which or him meant that he must try to understand his characters from within and [place] them in a world as like his own as possible. [162]. Quotes Thomas Flanagan to the effect that the Irish novelists ‘say Irish experience as being essentially tragic, the one view which the English readers were not prepared to accept’, preferring comic novels of Lever whose ‘dashing dragoons and impoverished fox hunters held genial sway over a mob of feckless rustics’. [Flanagan, 1959, p.39; here 163]; Further, The Macdermots is the story of the disintegration of an old family of the Irish Catholic gentry. As Catholics, they have been subject to more than one hundred years of discriminatory laws, only recently repealed, which have destroyed the family fortune and kept them ignorant, while fostering in them the qualities of impracticality, bravado, and romanticism that Trollope sees as typically Irish. Their tenants cannot pay their rents, and young Thady Macdermot, who manages the estate while his father drifts slowly into imbecility, cannot bring himself to evict them and replace them with paying tenants, even if such were to be found. His sister Feemy (Euphemia), a handsome and spirited but totally uneducated girl, is in love with a Protestant police captain who seduces her by promises of marriage. Thady accidentally kills his sister’s lover, thinking the man is forcing Feemy into his carriage - actually she is going willingly but faints when she realises that her brother is watching. Thady is ultimately hanged, after Feemy, who turns out to be pregnant, dies in the courtroom before she can testify in her brother’s behalf. Filling out the three-volume novel are detailed presentations of the miseries of the residents of Ballycloran. The atmosphere is one of nearly unmitigated poverty and harshness. Even the humor, which is abundant in the early part of the novel, arises out of the bareness of the poor people’s lives. For instance, a homely and not especially young or clever woman is married after having attracted two suitors by her brother’s offer of a dowry consisting of two small pigs and a pair of bedsheets, along with “a thrifle of change.” The livestock occasions much good-natured joking at the wedding, which is held at the local tavern because of its sufficiency of drinking glasses and its conveniently central location. On the morning of the wedding the bride comes to Feemy to borrow silverware and a servant girl to help in the preparations and then double as bridesmaid. Feemy sympathises in silent amusement with her worries about marriage, for Mary is not especially eager to marry, she confesses, but is doing so for the sake of her family. When Feemy points out that her only family is a brother, Mary explains that she means the family she will undoubtedly have in due time if she marries. Feemy loans her the silverware, of which there is but little, and the girl [… &c.]. Trollope: The MacDermots is … worth reading by any one who wishes to understand what Irish life was before the potato disease, the famine, and he Encumbered Estates Bill.’ (Autobiography, ed., Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, OUP 1950; rep. 1980, p.71.); The humour is absolutely goodnatured but it depends on the discrepancy between the characters being described and the audience Trollope is writing for. [66]. Note in same issue: Robert Tracy, rev., Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl, 3 vols; O’Donnel: A National Tale, 3 vols; Florence Macarthy: An Irish tale 4 vols; The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys, 4 vols; Dramatic Scenes from Real Life, 2 vols. Sel and intro. Robert Lee Wollf., pp.235-38.

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Owen Dudley Edwards, ‘Anthony Trollope, Irish Writer’, in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 38 No. 1 (June. 1983), pp.1-42: ‘Every one of them [English novelists] saw Ireland as outsiders. Trollope did not. His view of Ireland from first to last was that of a participant: Ireland made him.’ [1]; quote Michael Sadleir, ‘Ireland produced the man; but it was left to England to inspire the novelist … Ireland, having by friendliness, sport, and open air saved Trollope from himself, came near by her insane absorption in her own wrongs and thwarted hopes to choke the very genius that she had vitalised’ (Trollope: A Commentary, Constable 1927, p.136; Edwards, p.1); bibl, Trollope, ‘The O’Conors of Castle Conor, County Mayo’, in Harper’s, May 1860; “Father Giles of Ballymoy”, in Argosy (May 1866); collected in Herbert van Thal, ed. [Trollope,] The Spotted Dog and Other Stories (Pan 1950); Refers to the Land Leaguers, and says ‘the anger is that of George Moore in Parnell and His Island (1887) and Edith Somerville in Naboth’s Vineyard (1891) [3]; further discusses the ‘love that went into the celebration of the institution’ of fox-hunting. [4]; For longer extract on Trollope and Irish identity, see under Edwards [supra];

Owen Dudley Edwards (‘Anthony Trollope, Irish Writer’, 1983) - cont. Of Phineas Finn, Trollope later wrote: ‘to take him from Ireland … There was nothing to be gained by the peculiarity, and there was an added difficulty in obtaining sympathy and affection for a politician belonging to a nationality whose politics are not respected in England. But in spite of this Phineas succeeded. (An Autobiography, ed. Sadleir & Page, 1883, p.318.) [5] - and note that Edwards later comments: ‘Phineas’s Irishness, for all of Trollope’s remark in the Autobiography that it was unnecessary, seems to me to be essential to the whole business. He is pre-eminently the beautiful savage, straight from the frontier. And Trollope, who had read and pondered his James Fennimore Cooper … recognises that in Ireland he had the exaggerations and the verities of the frontier.’ [21; cont.]

Owen Dudley Edwards (‘Anthony Trollope, Irish Writer’, 1983) - cont.: ‘Sadleir further calls the first two novels ‘pamphlet[s] in fictional guise’ (p.139; here p.7), which Edwards deems to be a misunderstanding; Gladstone infuriated supporters of the [US] Union in the American Civil War by suggesting that it looked as though Jefferson Davis would create a nation; Edwards writes in conclusion that Trollope ‘went to the frontier [and] learned his literary trade on the frontier. He discovered that frontier-made goods were not good selling material … He began to build his literary achievement in forms acceptable to England and apparently [the] English. But the tools and perceptions were Irish in the initial instance, and much of the workmanship after his return to England was still based on the rough designs he had initially executed on Irish soil, with Irish themes, about Irish characters, and with Irish insights. He had even made his small but impressive contribution to the creation in the Anglo-Irish frontier form of speech. Ultimately, he won sufficient strength to bring in a frontier figure as a means by which his own observations from outside could be sharpened even more [in Phineas Finn.] [41] The paradox remains that he observed England and described it, but while in part his description was true, in part it was an imposition on England of Irish experiences and people, in part a deployment of qualities common to both islands. [42]. Note in same issue, Walter Kendrick review of John Halperin, ed., Trollope Centenary Essays (St Martin’s Press 1982), xv, 191pp., considered ‘lack-lustre’]. Contribs. Incl. Janet Egleson Dunleavy, Robert Tracy, Juliet McMaster, Robert M. Polhemus, Arthur Pollard [flatfooted treatment of ‘Trollope’s idea of the Gentleman’]. Only Andrew Wright and R. H. Super are ‘worth saving, while John N. Hall on Trollope the Person is of special interest.’ (pp.109-11).

Peter Gray, ‘Ideology and the Famine’, in Cáthal Portéir, ed., The Great Irish Famine [Thomas Davis Lectures Series], RTÉ/Mercier, 1995, pp.86-103: quotes phrases from Trollope’s Six Letters on the Famine: ‘to encourage industry, to do battle with sloth and despair; to awake a manly feeling of inward confidence and reliance on the justice of Heaven’. (Trollope, The Irish Famine: Six Letters to the Editor of the Examiner, ed. L. O’Tingay, London 1989, p.29; Gray, p.103.)

Margaret Kelleher, ‘Irish Famine in Literature’, in Cáthal Portéir, ed., The Great Irish Famine [Thomas Davis Lectures Series], RTÉ/Mercier, 1995, p.234f: notes that details of the famine in Castle Richmond (1860; rep. OUP 1989) serve the function of casting the dislikable hero Herbert in the character of a man of charity through his famine work; further, ‘these episodes allow the author to discourse on political economy and the dangers of “promiscuous charity”, especially in the light of the apathy of the poor, and are intended to illustrate the operations of a power which was to Trollope ‘prompt, wise and beneficent’ [i.e., the famine]; remarks that the characterisation of famine victims in the novel employs gender terms which recur throughout famine representations […]. (p.235.)

Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English; 1830-1890 [...]’, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Kelleher & Philip O’Leary (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. 1 [Chap. 11]: ‘The publication of [Sidney Godolphin] Osborne’s letters in The Times [later issued as Gleanings in the West of Ireland (1850)] prompted the young Anthony Trollope, then living in Ireland where he worked as a surveyor for the postal service, to write a series of letters to the Examiner, a liberal English newspaper, on the subject of ‘Ireland, her undoubted grievances, her modern history, her recent sufferings, and her present actual state’. Ten years later, just prior to his final departure from Ireland where he had lived intermittently during the 1850s, Trollope completed Castle Richmond, his third of five novels set in Ireland. As in The Black Prophet, for much of Trollope’s novel the subject of famine is conveyed through a conventional love story: in Castle Richmond, the involvement of the novel’s hero, Herbert Fitzgerald, in the distribution of famine relief emerges as a useful narrative strategy to differentiate him from his rakish cousin Owen Fitzgerald, rival both to the heroine’s affection and to the interest of readers. On the other hand, Herbert’s encounters with the starving poor, in the course of which he champions laissez-faire policies against what is termed ‘promiscuous charity’, prove more difficult for the narrative to assimilate, as are the detailed and disturbing examinations of victims’ quasi-naked bodies included in these scenes. An authorial voice intervenes to identify the destruction of the potato firmly as the work of God, echoing providentialist views of the blight which were current in the 1840s and after. At the novel’s end, a narrative of Malthusian-like progress is proclaimed in stark biblical terms: / “But if one did in truth write a tale of the famine [...] the same author going on with his series would give in his last set, - Ireland in her prosperity.” (Richmond Castle, OUP World Classics Edn. 1989, p.489; given more fully under Quotations, infra.]’ (Kelleher & O’Leary, op. cit., 2006, p.467.)

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R. F. Foster, ‘Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland’, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Penguin 2001), on Trollope in Ireland: ‘He started writing novels there; his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran, is Irish; and so was his last, forty years and millions of words later. This was the unfinished Landleaguers. Ireland say him in as a novelist; and saw him out. / ‘"When I meet an Irishman abroad I always recognise in him more of a kinsman than I do an Englishman.” “From the day on which I set foot in Ireland all ... evils went away from me. Since that time who has had a happier life than mine?” (Autobiog., 1883; 1964 Edn., p.68) He was looking for a family who would make him feel at ease, since his relationship with his own “kinsmen’ was at best uneasy. And he was anxious to reassure himself that his life had been happy, that he was fortunate and blessed, and that this blessing had coincided with his arrival in a country where he [129] was unknown and could make a new start. (In fact, a classic frontier.) Ireland in the early 1840s was not a foreign country; it was, in fact, legislatively part of the United Kingdom. But it was undeniably exotic. Irish weather, Irish landscape, the Irish use of English, Irish social modes were all different. Trollope would have added (shockingly to us) that so was Irish dirt, on which he has many disquisitions. Irish working people and menials were cleverer, sharper and funnier. Irish girls were prettier and more approachable. Irish hunting was unparalleled. / All this is the re-creation of a Golden Age, lit with the sunny optimism of energetic youth. [...; cont.]

R. F. Foster, ‘Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland’, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Penguin 2001), on Trollope in Ireland: ‘Trollope’s own insecure family background and marginalised social status are too obvious to need stating. Ireland is perhaps, above all, the great lost domain of Trollope’s mental landscape. Here he had found both emotional security and social status, becoming a Freemason, a member of an elite, an acknowledged gentleman. His status in Ireland has been well described by Andrew Sanders as at once “intimate and privileged”.(Anthony Trollope, 1998, p.10.) But he lost Ireland, not once but twice. The first time was when he finally returned to England in 1859, and became famous and successful. The second loss came as Irish politics radicalised from the late 18 7os and the social role of the Irish land-owning classes was called into question, with the rise of separatist nationalism and the advent of the land war. Above all, this meant the end of deference politics in Ireland - which had constructed the background of the Ireland Trollope knew and loved.’ (pp.129-30.) [Cont.]

R. F. Foster (‘Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland’, 2001) - cont.: ‘For Trollope’s own purposes of self-esteem, and to carry through the powerful myth of himself which he sustained in his art and life, Ireland had to be a success. It had to be a frontier that he could conquer; it had to produce heroes and heroines; it had to be a happy place. For Trollope, Ireland, in fact, was to fulfil the function of the kind of happy childhood which he felt he had deserved (much as Oxford was to do for [Evelyn] Waugh). This is the key to understanding both the sympathy of his perception and the determined obtuseness in areas where the reality diverged from his ideal. And the most spectacular illustration of this concerns the devastation which afflicted Ireland at exactly the period of Trollope’s sojourn there: the Great Famine of the mid 1840s.’ p.132). Foster goes on to discuss Trollope’s ‘deliberate denial of what rural life in much of Ireland had actually become by the time he was writing it’ in The MacDermots (p.133); his letters to the Examiner in 1850, defending Trevelyan, here called ‘shocking’ in view of his endorsement of the laissez-faire approach; and finally his version of the Famine in Castle Richmond. Here Foster takes issue with Mary Hamer’s introduction to the World Classics edn. [see Notes, infra] of the novel in claiming that a plot about rivals in love and a bigamous marriage is [‘]incompatible with the effect of giving give a portrait of Famine-wracked Ireland’ (Foster, p.135), and argues instead that the novel’s ‘providential paradigm’ of the Fitzgeralds and the Desmonds offers a moral for the country as a whole. (Idem.)  [Cont.]

R. F. Foster (‘Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland’, 2001) - cont.: ‘Trollope had written Ireland into his panoramic vision of Victorian English life, but in his last year, and his last novel, he saw Irish nationalism beginning to write Ireland out of the Union. This would prove such a successful operation that the Irish dimension of Trollope’s English identity has tended to recede: forgotten along with the British identity of the Victorian Irish middle class, Catholic as well as Protestant, who produced generations of Phineas Finns. But the vehemence of The Landleaguers, and also its uncharacteristically ungenerous vision, is a stark reminder of how much the possession of Ireland meant to its author, in his art and his life. It is the reaction of someone who feels that something is being taken from him: something which he discovered and possessed in his youth, something which became part of his achieved personality (that achieved personality celebrated in the Autobiography), something which he treasured and loved and celebrated. It is, yet again, the fear of the many heroes in his books (including his Irish books) who are threatened with the loss of their habitation. [. I]n his writings about Ireland, and the way Ireland refracted itself through his fiction, there is a passionate cross-flow of contradictions. One of his most pronounced personal characteristics was, perhaps, his inconsistency: contemporaries who encountered him often expressed surprise that the man they met - with his loudness, [146] embarrassingness, ‘bluster, apparent insensitivity - could write the marvellous books they read. Perhaps in the end, it was Trollope the man who pronounced on Ireland; but at the same time Ireland did more than is often recognised to produce Trollope the writer, and this is reflected in the shade as well as the light. ‘ [p.146; end.]

R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History (1993) - quotes Trollope: ‘From the day on which I set foot in Ireland all ... evils went away from me. Since that time who has had a happier life than mine?’ - and: ‘When I meet an Irishman abroad I always recognise in him more of a kinsman than I do in an Englishman.’ Foster writes of Trollope’s The Kellys and the O’Kellys that ‘it is an unwinking, accurate and thoughtful obervation of Irish conditions just after the Famine [...] but it is also a celebration of the complexities of Irish social relations, at once off-hand and sophisticated’. Further remarks that ‘Victoria Glendenning has pointed out that he learned his English mode of address and behaviour in Ireland’; finally, ‘his opposition to Home Rule was violent and his unfinished last novel The Landleaguers (1883) is a crude treatise against Irish rural savagery worthy of Froude or Kingsley; in his late autobiography he tried to disown the necessary qualities of Phineas Finn.’ [q.p.; see extracts - as attached.]

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Offaly History Page (on Trollope ‘s Irish novels:) ‘In his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), deals with the tragedy that overwhelms a reduced Catholic gentry family. / In The Kellys and the Kellys (1848), departing from a powerful account of Daniel O’Connell’s state trial in Dublin, 1844, he sets an upper-class love-story in Dunmore, Co. Galway, among the landed families of ascendancy Ireland, depicting with remarkable precision the social gradations of contemporary Irish society. Neither of these novels was successful, and he did not take up an Irish subject again until his permanent return to England. Castle Richmond (1860), the next, concerns a rivalry between a widow and her daughter over Owen Fitzgerald, an Irish aristocrat who (innocently enough) goes off finally the son and brother. Set in Cork during the Famine, it illustrates that catastrophe with searing details, while assigning the cause to the ignorance and rapacity of the Irish middle class. Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1874), though the title-character is Irish and supposedly modelled on John Sadleir, focus on political life at Westminster. / An Eye for an Eye (1879), set at the Cliffs of Moher, is another tale of seduction, in which the mother of the injured girl revenges herself upon the young officer who, on becoming an earl, has jilted her. The Landleaguers (1883) was the last of nearly fifty novels. Written on a visit to Ireland when he was already very ill, and published uncompleted, it deals with the persecution of an English family who buy an estate in Co. Galway. As an independent and non-sectarian observer, Trollope showed considerable insight into the thoughts and feelings of the Catholic majority, particularly with regard to the influence for good of priests such as Fr. McGrath in The Macdermots and Fr. Marty in An Eye for an Eye.’ [Online - 29 June, 2006.]

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Quotations
Autobiography (1883): ‘It was altogether a very jolly life that I led in Ireland. I was always moving about, and soon found myself in to be pecuniary circumstances which were opulent in comparison with those of my past life. The Irish people did not murder me, nor did they even break my head. I soon found them to be good-humoured, clever, [the] working classes very much more intelligent than those of England - economical and hospitable. We hear much of their spendthrift nature, but extravagance is not the nature of an Irish man, He will count the shillings in a pound much more accurately than an Englishman, and with much more certainty, get twelve pennyworth from each. But the Irish are perverse, irrational and but little bound by the love of truth. I lived for many years among them - not finally leaving the country until 1850, - and I had means of studying their character.” (An Autobiography, 1883; quoted [in part] in Maurice Francis Egan, ‘On Irish Novels’, in Catholic University Bulletin, 10, 3, 1904, p.331 [as supra].)

Further, ‘[The Irish are not spendthrift] but they are perverse, irrational, and but little bound by the love of truth.’ (Frank O’Connor, Book of Ireland, 1979). ‘If honest men did not squabble for money, in this wicked world of ours, the dishonest men would get it all; and I do not see that the cause of virtue would be much improved.’ (cited p.83 in Doris R. Asmundsson, ‘Trollope’s First Novel: A Re-examination’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.83-91).

Castle Richmond (1860), ‘The Famine Years’ [Chap. XXII]: ‘The fault has been [not Papism and Sedition but] the lowness of education and consequent want of principle among the middle classes; and this fault had been found as strongly marked among the Protestants as it had been among the Roman Catholics. Young men had been brought up to do nothing. Property was regarded as having no duties attached to it. Men became rapacious, and determined to extract the uttermost farthing out of the land within their power, let the consequences to the people of the land be what they may. / We used to hear much of absentees. It was not the absence of the absentees that did the damage but the presence of those they left behind them on the soil. The scourge of Ireland was the existence of a class who looked to be gentlemen living on their property ..’ (q.pp.).

Castle Richmond (1860): ‘But if one did in truth write a tale of the famine, after that it would behove the author to write a tale of the pestilence; and then another, a tale of the exodus. These three wonderful events, following each other, were the blessings coming from Omniscience and Omnipotence by which the black clouds were driven away from the Irish firmament ... And then the same author going on with his series would give in his last set, - Ireland in her prosperity.’ (OUP World Classics Edn. 1989, p.489.; quoted in Margaret Kelleher, ‘Prose Writing and Drama in English; 1830-1890 [...]’, in Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. Kelleher & O’Leary (Cambridge UP 2006), Vol. 1 [Chap. 11], p.467; as in Commentary, supra.)

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The Land-Leaguers (1883): ‘Who Black Daly was or whence he had come many men, even in Co. Galway, did not know. It was not that he had no property, but that property was so small as to make it impossible that the owner should be master of the county hounds. But in truth Black Daly lived at Daly’s Bridge, in the neighbourhood of Castle Blakeney, when he was supposed to be at home. And the house in which he lived he had undoubtedly inherited from his father. But he was not often there, and kept his kennels at Ahascragh, five miles away from Daly’s Bridge. Much was not therefore known of Mr. Daly in his own house. But in the field no man was better known or more popular if thorough obedience is an element of popularity. The old gentry of the county could not tell why Mr. Daly had been put into his present position five and twenty years ago, but the manner of his election was often talked about . He had no money and very few acres of his own on which to preserve foxes. He never borrowed a shilling from any man, and he certainly paid his way. But if he told a young man that he ought to buy a horse the young man certainly bought it. And if he told the young man that he must pay a certain price, the young man generally paid it. But if the young man were not ready with his money by the day fixed, that young man generally had a bad time of it. Young men have been known to be driven not only out of County Galway, but out of Ireland itself, by the tone of Mr. Daly’s voice and by the blackness of his frown [.]’. (n.p.; Quoted in R. J. Kelly, in The Irish Book Lover, 1930 [as supra.]

The Landleaguers (1883), Mr. Jones’s reaction to the murder of his son Florian: ‘We can hardly analyse the father’s mind as he went. Not a tear came to his relief. Nor during this half hour can he hardly have been said to sorrow./ An intensity of wrath filled his breast. He had spent his time for many a long year in doing all in his power for those around him, and now they had brought him to this. They had robbed him of his boy’s heart. They had taught his boy to be one of them, and to be untrue to his own people. And now, because he had yielded to better teachings, they had murdered him. They had taught his boy to be a coward; for even in his bereavement he remembered poor Florian’s failing. The accursed Papist people were all cowards down to their backbones. So he said of them in his rage. There was not one of them who could look any peril in the face as did Yorke Clayton or his son Frank. But they were terribly powerful in their wretched want of manliness. They could murder, and were protected in their bloodthirstiness one by another. He did not doubt but that those two girls wailing on the road knew well enough who was the murderer, but no one would tell in this accursed, unhallowed, godless country. The honour and honesty of one man did not, in these days, prompt another to abstain from vice. The only heroism left in the country was the heroism of mystery, of secret bloodshed and of.hidden attacks.’ (pp.256-57; quoted in R. F. Foster, ‘Stopping the Hunt: Trollope and the Memory of Ireland’, in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, London: Penguin 2001, 2002, pp.140-41.) Also, Quotes Edith, Florian’s sister: ‘He has got it into his head that the Catholics are a downtrodden people, and therefore he will be one of them.’ (Landleaguers, ed. Mary Hamer, OUP 1993, p.101; Foster, op. cit. 2001, p.145.)

The Landleaguers (1883) - on Gerald O’Mahony, the Irish-American agitator: ‘When he began his book he hated rent from his very soul. The difficulty he saw was this: what should you do with the property when you took it away from the landlords? He quite saw his way to taking it away; if only a new order would come from heaven for the creation of a special set of farmers who should be wedded to their land by some celestial matrimony, and should clearly be in possession of it without the perpetration of any injustice. He did not quite see his way to this by his own lights, and therefore he went to the British Museum. When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum. In this way Mr O’Mahony purposed to spend his autumn instead of speaking at the Rotunda, because it suited him to live in London rather than in Dublin.’ (Landleaguers, ed. Mary Hamer, OUP 1993, p.270; Foster, op. cit., 2001, p.143.)

The Landleaguers (1883) - on Boycotting: ‘It must be acknowledged that throughout the south and west of Ireland the quickness and perfection with which this science was understood and practised was very much to the credit of the intelligence of the people. We can understand that boycotting should be studied in Yorkshire, and practised - after an experience of many years. Laying on one side for the moment all ideas as to the honesty and expediency of the measure, we think that Yorkshire might in half a century learn how to boycott its neighbours. A Yorkshire man might boycott a Lancashire man, or Lincoln might boycott Nottingham. It would require much teaching; - many books would have to be written, and an infinite amount of heavy slow imperfect practice would follow. But County Mayo and County Galway rose to the requirements of the art almost in a night! Gradually we Englishmen learned to know in a dull glimmering way what they were about; but at the first whisper of the word all Ireland knew how to ruin itself. This was done readily by people of the poorer class, - without any gifts of education, and certainly the immoderate practice of the science displays great national intelligence.’ (Landleaguers, ed. Mary Hamer, OUP 1993, p.161-62; Foster, op. cit. 2001, p.145.)

Banished evils: ‘From the day I set my foot in Ireland all these evils went away from me. Since that time who as had a happier life than mine?’ … I think that I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have long been aware of a certain weakness in my own character, which I may call a craving for love. I have ever had a wish to be liked by those around me - a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified. In my schooldays no small part of my misery came from the envy with which I regarded the popularity of popular boys. They seemed to me to live in a special paradise.’ (Quoted in Derek Hawes, ‘Is he Worshipful Brother?’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 Oct. 1999, p.16; author notes that Masonic regalia belonging to Trollope is in the possession of Geordie Greig, ed. of Tatler.)

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References

Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), give biog.: lived in Ireland, 1841-59, at Banagher and Clonmel; finished his first two novels, The MacDermotts (1844) and The Kellys and the O’Kellys (1848), both failures with the public; claims to have known the people, but an anti-nationalist; article on his novels in Dublin Review Vol 71 (1872), p.393 [as infra, ‘... writes a story as true to the saddest and heaviest truths of Irish life, as racy of the soil, as rich with the peculiar humour, the moral features, the social oddities, the subtle individuality of the far west of Ireland as George Eliot’s novels are true to the truths of English life’]. IF lists The MacDermotts of Ballycloran (1844; Lane, 1907) [Co Leitrim, broken-down Catholic families, Miss MacDermott engaged to sub-inspector of police who attempts to elope with her; sub-inspector killed in affray with her brother; young MacDermott tried and hanged; background of Irish rural life, comic and quaint; lifelike portrait of grand old Fr. John M’Grath; illicit stills, lower orders coarse; author considered it his best plot; praised by G. O. Trevelyan; called ‘one of the most melancholy books ever written’]; The Kellys and the O’Kellys (Chapman & Hall 1848; 7th ed. 1867; new ed. Hall 1907) [Dunmore, Co. Galway, time of O’Connell trial, 1844; upperclass lovestory; clever portraits, Martin Kelly, Widow Kelly, hero Frank O’Kelly, Lord Ballintine; hard-riding harddrinking landlord class; fresh, humorous, and genuine human interest]; Castle Richmond (1860; 5th ed. [Harper, Ward & Lock] 1867); [Co Cork in Famine, dealt with fully; two families, Owen Fitzgerald, noble character [hero; finely drawn]; Phineas Finn, the Irish Member (Bell 1866) [no notice]; Phineas Redux (Bell 1874) [study of political personalities set in London, little concerned with Ireland]; The Land Leaguers, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus 1883) [Protestant family buy property and settle in Galway; unfinished; trials of people who are boycotted; sympathetic to people, shows faults and misunderstandings on both sides; plot involves enmity of peasant towards landlord whom he tries to injure in every way; landlord’s son, the only witness, murdered for telling what he knows; harsh criticism of Catholic priests; written in Ireland].

Ernest Baker , History of The Novel, Vol. 8 (1936); Trollope’s haphazard schooling, Westminster; Frances Trollope, his mother, of amazing industry, some sort of hit with everything she wrote; popularity and abuse; idolised by her children; Trollope relates in Autobiography how he and friends brooding over ruins of country house somewhere in Co. Lietrim, the melancholic visage of the old building seized his imagination and he ‘fabricated’ the story of the MacDermots; read and re-read Irish novelists, Carleton et al., and knew Lever personally; the tale of the Macdermots overelaborated; plot takes the author himself in hand; hardly any earnest of future creativeness; too much instruction, information (Trollope wrote in Thackeray, ‘the object of the novel is to instruct us in morals while it amuses’.) The Kellys and O’Kelly’s, cheerful, with thoroughbred scoundrel in Barry Lynch. Long after, Trollope returned to Irish subjects, with Castle Richmond (1860), dealing with the famine years 1846-47 which he witnessed on the spot, and again in Land Leaguers [sic] (1883), left unfinished and published after his death; but both these novels display next or nothing of the genuine Trollope; early novels failures. Baker follows with his main discussion, beginning, ‘The Novels that Count’.

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Harlow: Longmans 1988): falling seriously ill with asthma, he underwent a character change, and - in his own account - left ‘26 years of suffering, disgrace and inward remorse’ behind him, and took a demanding post as a surveyer’s clerk in the Central District of Ireland [Post Office]... did well ... and spent 17 years in the country ... developed his lifelong love of hunting in Ireland. ... began The Macdermots in 1843 ... m. in June 1844 Rose Heseltine whom he met there. The Macdermots of Ballycloran was published ingnominiously by Newby in 1847 and earned nothing. Equally unsuccessful was a second Irish novel, The Kellys and the O’Kellys (Colburn 1848). ... the Irish story Castle Richmond (1860) refused by Smith of Cornhill Magazine and issued by Chapman and Hall. Sutherland lists separately The Kellys and the O’Kellys, or Landlords and Tenants (1848) and writes of Frank O’Kelly as the first of his horsey, reckless heroes, Lord Kilcullen, and others. The Macdermots of Ballycloran (Newby 1847) was published at Trollope’s mother’s instance and treats of the decline of an Anglo-Irish family in Co. Leitrim after the famine, in particular the evacuation of Ballycloran House by the Macdermots when Larry goes mad following the hanging of his son Thady for the murder of the police officer Ussher the seducer of his sister Feemy who dies bearing his bastard. An abyssmal failure with the public. Also lists Phineas Finn, the Irish Member (1862) - with comments as given under Shane Leslie in Commentary [supra].

Eric Stevens (1992), Anthony Trollope, Malachi’s Cove and other stories and essays, ed with intro. by Richard Mullen (Tabb House 1985) [1st ed.] xxi+145pp [stories centred on role of 19th c. women], Eric Stevens Cat 168 1992 £6; also N. John Hall, ed., The Letters of Anthony Trollope 1835-1882, 2 vols. (Stanford UP 1983) [1st ed.], 1082pp., £65; Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character (Faber 1988) [1st ed.] 397pp. £8. [study of protagonists]

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Notes
The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847): Trollope Soc./Folio Edn. described in COPAC as the story of the unscrupulous Ferdinand Lopez, who succeeds in being selected as a parliamentary candidate for the Palliser pocket borough. A blackmail scandal involving Lady Glencora involves the Prime Minister in making a payment to Lopez, an affair which then appears in the gutter press [online; accessed 07.06.2010].

Castle Richmond (1861; reiss. 1873): Set in Ireland during the famine years of 1845-47; concentrates on the lives of the labouring Irish poor, both before and during the famine, as the Fitzgeralds fight to survive a threat to possession of their family home. [online; accessed 07.06.2010].

An Eye for an Eye (1879): Written in 1870 but held back until 1879, this is arguably the most melodramatic story that Trollope wrote in his long career and certainly his frankest and most daring treatment of pre-marital sex. It is a romantic and tragic tale set in the west of Ireland. Fred Neville, a young officer in the Hussars, falls heir to an earldom. But before taking up his responsibilities, he resolves to enjoy a year of adventure in Ireland where his regiment is posted. Among the romantic surroundings of the sheer cliffs of Moher on the rugged Atlantic coast, Fred meets and falls in love with an Irish girl of great beauty and mysterious background. His family opposes the match absolutely. Fred seduces his wild Irish girl, and the scene is set for a tragic outcome that far exceeds the adventures Fred had in mind. (COPAC note to World Classics Edn. [OUP]; online; accessed 10.06.2010.)

The Landleaguers (1884): Trollope’s last novel, is set in Ireland during the Land War of the early 1880s. It is both a documentary record, closely following events in Westminster and the Irish countryside, and a meditative fantasy. A landlord’s son is murdered by rural terrorists, a crime that replays the real-life assassination of Lord Frederic Cavendish in Dublin in 1882, and the novel traces the violent disruption of civil life as tenants, organized on the Land League, plot to force their landlords to give them a better deal. But part of Trollope’s imaginative response to the crisis takes the form of an intriguingly uncharacteristic subplot, in which a young American woman travels to London and tries to make a name for herself on the operatic stage, while her father becomes a landleaguing Member of Parliament. In the introduction to this edition, Mary Hamer provides a historically based reading of the subplot and relates it to Trollope’s own personal stake in the crisis between Britain and Ireland. (COPAC note to OUP World Classics 1993 Edn.; online; accessed 10.06.2010).

The Land-Leaguers (1884): Set in Ireland. When Philip Jones incites the enmity of Pat Carroll, a tenant, Carroll retaliates by flooding one of Jones’s fields. His actions are witnessed by Florian Jones, Philip’s son. Florian, a recent Catholic convert, has sworn an oath not to reveal the perpetrators of the deed. (COPAC note to Penguin 1993 Edn.; online; accessed 10.06.2010).

Henry Colburn: Colburn, Trollope’s publisher, wrote to him: ‘It is evident that readers do not like novels on Irish subjects as well as on others.’ (Autobiography, 1883, p.78.)

R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland ( 1988), quotes Trollope’s comments on the social geography of an Irish village, ‘Dunmore’ in The Kellys and the O’Kellys (p.337).

Namesake: An Andrew Trollope wrote in 1581: ‘at night the Mr, Mrs, or dame, men servants, women servants, gesse [guests], strangers, and all, lye in one lytle rometh not so good or hansume as many a hoggescote in England’. (See Gottfried, ed. Spenser’s Prose Works, Vol. 10, 1949, Commentary on View, p.366.)

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