Fish, Champagne, Excuses, and Threats: Letters in Trollope’s Novels
What happens when the narrator hands the pen to a character?
It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies,—who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two,—that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself…. She was hardly nineteen when her father died and she was taken home by that dreadful old termagant, her aunt, Lady Linlithgow. Lizzie would have sooner gone to any other friend or relative, had there been any other friend or relative to take her possessed of a house in town….1
This is how Anthony Trollope opens The Eustace Diamonds. He uses a third-person narrator, but that narrator is floating among different points of view in a way that advances the story and produces a comic effect.2
The opening distinction between “friends” and “enemies” sets the narrator up, not so much as omniscient, but as situated within a community and aware of both the friends and the enemies. It also tells us much about Lizzie: it’s not that many young women who have “numerous and active” enemies. Since the narrator does not seem to be criticizing the enemies, we have gained useful information about someone who, perhaps, deserves the enmity directed at her. It also gives us a whiff of Lizzie’s feeling that she is assailed by enemies. The statement that Lizzie “had done very well with herself” implies that ambition and social climbing are at work. The efficiency of this opening sentence in conveying multiple levels of meaning is marvelous.
When the narrator refers to “that dreadful old termagant,” we have veered into Lizzie’s point of view and her dislike of her aunt. (Later, we learn that Lizzie refers to her aunt as the “vulturess.”) But since the aunt has taken her in and supported her after the death of her father, the narrator is implicitly criticizing Lizzie’s selfishness and lack of gratitude by exposing it to view.
With the observation that Lizzie would have preferred almost any other home, the writing adopts a dual perspective. The fact of Lizzie’s preference is indisputable, and thus a matter for omniscient narration. But when the narrator adds that Lizzie would have gone elsewhere “had there been any other friend or relative to take her possessed of a house in town,” the narrator adopts Lizzie’s perspective (wanting a house in town) while ironically exposing Lizzie’s calculating nature in insisting on a London home. She has relatives in the countryside who would gladly have taken her in, but in town, she can fish for a wealthy husband.
John Singer Sargent, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (1892), detail. Lizzie is described as beautiful and innocent-looking - but also as a jewel-loving magpie. I’m sure that to sit for Sargent, Lizzie would have worn more than the spectacular pendant Lady Agnew is wearing. The resemblance is pretty good, though: like Lady Agnew, Lizzie has hair that is nearly black and is an acknowledged beauty.
The subtlety of Trollope’s third-person narration marks The Eustace Diamonds as a classic Victorian novel; a narrator that zooms in and out of the thoughts of the characters is a hallmark of Victorian fiction.3 But Trollope, a longtime civil servant working for the General Post Office, extended his narrator’s reach by interpolating letters into his stories. This post can cover only a minute sampling of the letters that appear in Trollope’s novels, because he used them so extensively. In fact, one critic set up a typology of 23 different kinds of letters used as narrative devices in Trollope’s novels.4 But it is worth looking at a few of them to reflect on what Trollope gains when he briefly silences his narrator in favor of the voice of a character.
From Irony to Exposure
Several of Trollope’s novels include letters in which a man breaks off a marriage engagement. Such letters were fraught for the writers, because a jilted bride-to-be could bring a lawsuit for breach of promise of marriage (and this continued to be true in England until 1971!). Thus, these letters were always written with care.
In the first example below, taken from Mr. Scarborough’s Family, a middle-aged country squire, Mr. Prosper, has decided to marry. He has come to this resolution for the most foolish of reasons: he is disgusted with his nephew (who is also the heir to his entailed estate) and hopes to thwart the nephew’s inheritance by having a son of his own, or, failing that, by encumbering the estate with a generous widow’s jointure. The woman he chooses, Matilda Thoroughbung, is also middle-aged and has a significant fortune of her own, which makes her an attractive prospect.
Perhaps sensing that Mr. Prosper’s proposal is more a matter of business than love, Miss Thoroughbung accepts him, but then opens negotiations with him on the spot about the various requirements she will have as his wife. These extend to bringing her paid companion with her into Mr. Prosper’s house, as well as her maid; keeping a pony carriage; and having a certain quantum of fish and champagne. Then, “throwing her arms round his neck, [she] kissed him most affectionately. After that there was no retreating for Mr. Prosper,—no immediate mode of retreat, at all events. He could only back out of the room ….”5
Mr. Prosper is appalled. In plotting to dispossess his heir and gain a considerable fortune into the bargain, he has neglected to consider that if he marries, he will have to live with this woman, who is far harder-nosed and, in his view, less genteel than he is. In thinking this through, he composes the following cringeworthy letter in which he attempts to find a “mode of retreat” from the engagement he has just formed. Note the interjections from the narrator.
“MY DEAR MISS THOROUGHBUNG,—In the views which we both promulgated this morning I fear that there was some essential misunderstanding as to the mode of life which had occurred to both of us. You, as was so natural at your age, and with your charms, have not been slow to anticipate a coming period of uncheckered delights. Your allusion to a pony-carriage, and other incidental allusions,” – he did not think it well to mention more particularly the fish and the champagne, – “have made clear the sort of future life which you have pictured to yourself. Heaven forbid that I should take upon myself to find fault with anything so pleasant and so innocent! But my prospects of life are different, and in seeking the honor of an alliance with you I was looking for a quiet companion in my declining years, and it might be also to a mother to a possible future son. When you honored me with an unmistakable sign of your affection, on my going, I was just about to explain all this. You must excuse me if my mouth was then stopped by the mutual ardor of our feeling. I was about to say—” But [the narrator adds,] he had found it difficult to explain what he had been about to say ….6
Here, instead of wrapping Mr. Prosper in a blanket of third-person narration, Trollope exposes Mr. Prosper’s mortification. It is almost as if Trollope forces him to stand in front of the crowd of readers and confess his foolishness.7
Mr. Prosper tries to turn his second thoughts into a meditation on difference of age and expectation. His references to “your age, and [] your charms,” the “uncheckered delights,” and pastimes that are “so pleasant and so innocent” does make him sound as if he is aged and infirm, while she is a mere child. But in fact, they are essentially the same age, and so his complaints are nonsensical.
The specific objections Mr. Prosper raises are so absurd – why would anyone find a pony carriage objectionable? – that they make it very clear that he just wants out. Even he recognizes the absurdity of making a fuss about fish and champagne, which is why, as the narrator interjects, he does not mention them.
He plays the old man with his plea for a “quiet companion in my declining years” and then undermines this immediately with the implicit sexual undertone of “a mother to a possible future son.”
He tries to distance himself from Miss Thoroughbung’s enthusiastic embrace by the formality of the “unmistakable sign of your” – not his – “affection,” but he undermines himself again by referring to the “mutual ardor of our feeling.”
The ridiculous formality of his tone as he raises the “uncheckered delights,” the “quiet companion,” and the “mutual ardor” lays Mr. Prosper’s absurdity bare for us, without narratorial intervention.
This last point is the most essential difference between third person narration and the use of letters in Trollope’s novels: the third person narrator typically presents a character’s internal thoughts, but in a way that subtly reveals a narratorial judgment. The loss of the narrator means that the reader judges the character’s outward self-presentation, not his internal thinking.
Clara Peeters, Still Life with fish, a candle, artichokes, crab and prawns (1611). When Mr. Prosper comes to propose to Miss Thoroughbung, she and her paid companion talk about the “despatched crabs” they had had for supper. Mr. Prosper ruminates, “Did they have despatched crabs for supper every night? … It was certainly a strong reason against his marriage.“ And of course, Miss Thoroughbung insists on having her fish. | Note that the painter of this still-life was a woman - a rarity in the 17th century. She included a tiny self-portrait in the reflection of the lid of the jug at the right of the painting, which is just barely discernible in the Prado’s reproduction (viewable here).
There Is Nothing So Manly As Breaking It Off
Another amusing letter backing out of an engagement appears in He Knew He Was Right. The writer is a clergyman, Thomas Gibson, who has had difficulty in choosing between two sisters for a wife. The narrator describes the sisters’ years-long competition to ensnare him with a cruel simile: “As two pigs may be seen at the same trough, each striving to take the delicacies of the banquet from the other, and yet enjoying always the warmth of the same dunghill in amicable contiguity, so had these young ladies lived in sisterly friendship, while each was striving to take a husband from the other.”8 When Mr. Gibson at last chooses one of them, Camilla, he soon finds that she is much too bossy for his taste and much too extravagant for his purse. And so he writes her the following letter:
I sit down, Camilla, with a sad heart and a reluctant hand … to communicate to you a fatal truth. But truth should be made to prevail, and there is nothing in man so cowardly, so detrimental, and so unmanly as its concealment. I have looked into myself, and have inquired of myself, and have assured myself, that were I to become your husband, I should not make you happy. It would be of no use for me now to dilate on the reasons which have convinced me;—but I am convinced, and I consider it my duty to inform you so at once…. I would not wish to say a word animadverting on yourself. If there must be blame in this matter, I am willing to take it all on my own shoulders. But things have been done of late, and words have been spoken, and habits have displayed themselves, which would not, I am sure, conduce to our mutual comfort in this world, or to our assistance to each other in our struggles to reach the happiness of the world to come. … Yours, with feelings of the truest friendship, THOMAS GIBSON.9
This is so hypocritical that the mildly ironic tone of Trollope’s narrator could not quite convey the depth of its insincerity. But Trollope uses the narrator to probe Mr. Gibson’s thoughts after he finishes the letter – and by doing so, adds irony to the awkwardness of the letter itself.
The narrator invites the reader’s scorn by observing that, while Mr. Gibson had found the letter “very difficult” to write, “he was rather proud of it than otherwise when it was completed…. [H]e thought that he had done all this rather well.”
The narrator exposes Mr. Gibson’s insincerity in observing that he had thought it necessary to “accuse himself a little in order that he might excuse himself much.”
Mr. Gibson calls much credit to himself by claiming, in triadic phrasing, that “nothing in man [is] so cowardly, so detrimental, and so unmanly as [] concealment” – and so, he suggests, he is being ever so brave, beneficent, and manly as he jilts his prospective bride.
In saying, again in a triadic turn of phrase, that he has “looked into myself, and have inquired of myself, and have assured myself, that were I to become your husband, I should not make you happy,” he imposes on his fiancée precisely the opposite of what she thinks would make her happy. And despite the looking, the inquiry, and the assurances, he provides no reason at all why he “should not make you happy.”
The falsity of his statements is reinforced by the fact that he is unwilling to articulate any reason for his claim that he could not make her happy; he simply says that it would “be of no use for me now to dilate on the reasons.”
In the references to “things [that] have been done,” “words [that] have been spoken, and habits [that] have displayed themselves” – another triad – Mr. Gibson is trying to lay the blame on his fiancée without being so accusatory as to make himself look bad. And so he adds to the disingenuousness of his explanation by a clerical appeal to heaven: that these things would not “conduce to our mutual comfort in this world” or assist in their “struggles to reach the happiness of the world to come.”
The three triads make it seem as if the gentleman doth protest too much, no?
The closing salutation, a reference to “feelings of truest friendship,” seems like a particularly tone-deaf way for an intended husband to back out of his engagement.
W. H. Sweet, Exeter Cathedral Interior Architectural Study, early 20th century. Mr. Gibson is a minor canon who participates in chanting the services at Exeter Cathedral, the interior of which is shown here.
The Letter as Weapon
Lest you think that Trollope uses letters only to allow his most cringeworthy characters to parade their foolishness, I’ll end with a final letter of a very different sort from He Knew He Was Right. It is not a jilting letter, but one written by a husband, Louis Trevelyan, to Emily Trevelyan, the wife from whom he is separated. Trevelyan writes it against a legal backdrop of extreme inequality of power between separated spouses. The cause of the separation is a disagreement about Emily’s communications with Colonel Osborne, a friend of her father’s. And the letter is a good illustration of the use of correspondence to advance a narrative and expose the personality of the character who has written it:
Dear Emily,
I have learned, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you have corresponded with Colonel Osborne … and also that you have seen him …. This has been done in direct opposition to my expressed wishes …. I am quite at a loss to understand how you can reconcile to yourself so flagrant a disobedience of my instructions, and so perverse a disregard to the opinion of the world at large.
I warn you that I keep a watch on you…. You cannot see Colonel Osborne, or write to him, without my knowing it. I pledge you my word that in either case,—that is, if you correspond with him or see him,—I will at once take our boy away from you….
If you obey my commands on this head I will leave our boy with you nine months out of every year till he shall be six years old…. And I will allow you £800 per year for your own maintenance ….
Should there be any further communication between you and Colonel Osborne, not only will I take your child away from you, but I will also limit the allowance to be made to you to a bare sustenance….
Yours affectionately, LOUIS TREVELYAN.10
I won’t discuss this letter given the length of this post. But I will note that here, as in the Gibson letter, Trollope has his character employ a singularly discordant closing salutation. Does that letter seem “affectionate”? The novel in which this letter appears also includes letters with the following memorable closing salutations: “Yours in deep indignation” [from one of Emily’s relatives to Emily’s husband] and “Your affectionate and offended husband” [from Louis Trevelyan to Emily].
Appendix on the novels below, plus a question for all of you!
Appendix about the novels, all by Anthony Trollope, from which these letters are taken
The Eustace Diamonds (1872). This tightly plotted novel centers on Lizzie Eustace, the character I discussed at the beginning of this essay. She is a romantic, but also a compulsive liar. The plot centers on her legal battle with her late husband’s family over certain heirloom jewels that she wants to keep for herself, and the theft of those jewels. It also features her matrimonial adventures as she tries to choose her next husband.
Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883). This is Trollope’s last complete novel, published posthumously. The principal plot centers around an old man’s efforts to thwart the effect of the entail on his estate. It features a young hothead, a woman determined to shape her own destiny despite the contrary wishes of her elders, and Trollope’s most devious villain. The silly Mr. Prosper is a sideshow. I have written a short teaser on this book here that will convey more information.
He Knew He Was Right (1869). This novel centers on the deterioration of the marriage between Louis and Emily Trevelyan against the backdrop of laws that deprived women of almost all rights when they were separated from their husbands. In addition to this fairly dark principal plot, there are some charming romantic subplots. I wrote a teaser on this book here.
All of these are great, entertaining reads. Those who would like to get more Trollope - join The Trollope Society USA here!
Questions for Those Who Read to the Bitter End (or at least to the end before the footnotes):
What topics would you like to see addressed in this Substack? Was this post too nerdy? Please make your suggestions in the comments!
Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds (1872), ch. 1.
See generally, James Wood, How Fiction Works (10th anniversary ed. 2018).
J. Hillis Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction (1968), ch. 1 (pp. 1-25).
David Pearson, “‘The Letter Killeth’: Epistolary Purposes and Techniques,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37: 396-418 (1982), p. 401.
Anthony Trollope, Mr. Scarborough’s Family (1883), ch. 26.
Id., ch. 27.
Mr. Prosper doesn’t send the letter – Miss Thoroughbung sees it in his house. She tells him that it is a “very stupid letter” and has a wonderful time making sport of him for backing out.
Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (1869), ch. 44.
Id., ch. 74.
Id., ch. 27.
A wonderful essay, Claire. I agree--somehow the letters that Trollope's characters write convey an enormous amount about both the characters themselves and conventions of the day. They are filled with life and bear much attention.
It's an interesting study in the history of the novel - why do the ironical narrators suddenly emerge as the heroes of Victorian fiction? There's such a marked distinction between 18th and 19th century novel-writing.