The Three Clerks by Anthony Trollope

31 January 2013 22:49

If you don’t know much about Anthony Trollope you can read about him here. I enjoyed this book which was first published in 1858 and if you fancy reading it too you can download it from Project Gutenberg here. The three clerks in the title are young men trying to get a foothold on the career ladder of the Civil Service, Harry Norman, Alaric Tudor and Charley Tudor. The Tudors are cousins and Harry is their friend and at the weekend they often accompany him on his visits to his aunt’s, Mrs Woodward. She has three young daughters, Gertrude, Linda and Katie and they provide the love interest in The Three Clerks.

The book seems to be very autobiographical with the character of Charley being based on Trollope as a young man in London. Alaric is full of confidence and it isn’t long before his career takes off, but it’s all bluff and bluster really and he is easily led into corruption and bribery. When Undecimus Scott a member of a Scottish aristocratic family (his father is Lord Gaberlunzie) takes interest in Alaric he is flattered and ends up being drawn into Undy Scott’s money making schemes, which are nothing more than dodgy speculation and gambling on being able to make money from buying and selling shares for constructions which don’t even exist – and may never get planning permission. Scott of course never uses his own money for speculating, as I mentioned in a previous post the Scottish word ‘gaberlunzie’ means beggar, if only Alaric had known it, he would have been forewarned.

There’s doomed love, scandal, greed, spectacular falls from grace, civil service re-organisation, plundering of private pension funds and insider dealing. In fact it’s all amazingly up to date, because human beings always have the same weaknesses and faults, no matter which century they’re living in. I’m surprised that this one hasn’t been dramatised for TV, I think it would be very popular.

If you look at the long list of books which Anthony Trollope wrote you can’t help thinking that he must have been so underemployed in his position as Postmaster General, and whatever jobs he had before he reached that dizzy height, that he was spending all of his time scribbling away at his novels. Not that I’m complaining mind you, I’m glad he found something to keep himself busy and the rest of us entertained.

Now my only problem is – which Trollope should I read next!

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Blandings by Wodehouse and the BBC

14 January 2013 23:48

Timothy Spall at Blandings

I bought an omnibus of Blandings books last year and it almost immediately went AWOL and only surfaced when I was getting the house ready for Christmas. By that time the BBC was advertising their Blandings series which started last night, so I didn’t get a chance to read any of the book before viewing it.

I think it was well done though, and even if you just love pigs it was well worth watching just for the lovely big porkers featured in it. Jack even laughed out loud a few times, and that doesn’t happen too often!

Saturday’s Guardian review had an interesting article about Wodehouse and Blandings which you can read here.

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The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope

5 October 2012 00:52

No one, probably, ever felt himself to be more alone in the world than our old friend the Duke of Omnium, when the Duchess died.

Those are the opening words of the book, and I could hardly believe them. I don’t normally ‘give away’ much of the plot or action of any book, for fear that I might spoil it for other potential readers, but lots of people seem to have watched the serialisation of the books so it’ll be no surprise for them.

Whether you love or hate Lady Glencora, and I swung between both, you have to admit that it’s an unusually sudden way to learn of a character’s death. No long dragged out will she, won’t she for him. He couldn’t be more different from Mr Popular Sentiment (Dickens), I actually thought to myself – ‘this reminds me of Psycho’ – because when that film was first released in cinemas the audiences were aghast that Janet Leigh had been done to death so early on in the film, as much as the way of her going.

Anyway, this book is about how the Duke of Omnium copes with his children now that their mother is dead. He has always been quite a remote father to his two sons and one daughter and Glencora kept a lot from him. So when he realises that his late wife had been encouraging a relationship between their daughter and what he regards as a very unsuitable young man, the Duke is not pleased. He plans to marry his daughter off to just about anyone else. The whole situation reminds him of the beginnings of his relationship with Glencora, and he wants a similar outcome for his daughter.

His sons are causing him even more worry through gambling but he manages to cope with that more easily and sees the loss of £70,000 as cheap at the price – if it cures his heir of gambling.

This is the last in the Palliser series and although Trollope is usually really good at tying up the loose ends of characters, he didn’t quite do it here, so I can see why Angela Thirkell decided to write about some of the same families, albeit a few generations ahead. The book didn’t end the way I expected it to because at one point the Duke is described surprisingly, as being a man who is susceptible to feminine frills and petticoats, and I thought that that was a bit of a clue that he would be replacing poor Glencora fast, as so many men seem to do, but I was wrong.

You’ll probably have noticed that I’ve been a bit vague on names here, that’s because I finished reading the book over a week ago and I read it on my Kindle and although I have a copy of the book – I can’t find it – the usual situation for me I’m afraid, I saw it recently! Anyway, I think the children are Silverbridge, the heir to the dukedom, Lady Mary, and was the ‘spare’ son called Gerald?

I did enjoy the book but Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister were my favourites in the series. Yes, they’re much more political, but not in a boring way and they are full of insights into human nature, an education in themselves.

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November’s Autumn September Prompt

27 September 2012 00:12

The September prompt over at November’s Autumn is which piece of music reflects the classic book which you read? I have to admit that I was flummoxed, but just for a wee minute, then it came to me – any music which is played at the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

I read Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Prime Minister recently, all books from Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, mainly set in the the atmosphere of power and arrogance of Westminster but occasionally taking forays into the countryside and to Scotland, exactly as they do every year at the last night of the proms.

Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March – Land of Hope and Glory – is a perfect accompaniment to the Victorian splendour of Westminster and the ‘promenaders’ with their hooters and whizbangs mirror the character of Lady Glencora with her cheek and disrespect for authority.

Rule Britannia of course is a must and the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly certainly enjoyed herself here.

The Sailor’s Hornpipe ia always more than a wee bit of mayhem as the promenaders (the eccentrics bobbing up and down, they have no seats, hence the name) join in as much as possible. I believe there were some nasty comments on You Tube about this behaviour. Maybe you have to be a Brit to appreciate the humour of it all. Anthony Trollope enjoyed poking fun at the establishment, politics and even himself.

I think all of the Palliser books feature Scotland, just as the Proms do as they traditionally end with Auld Land Syne. Years ago a very funny Scottish conductor tried to teach them how to do it properly but he was wasting his breath because they never do. Apart from anything else, like pronunciation being wrong – it’s never ‘Zine’ as some people say, you shouldn’t cross your arms until the second verse; so just at the end.

These pieces of music definitely give you a flavour of Victorian Britain, Empire, humour and downright eccentricity, just as Trollope’s books do.

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The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

21 September 2012 23:34

I enjoyed reading the previous book in the Palliser series so much that I couldn’t wait long to get stuck into this one. It’s all very topical as Trollope was writing about the 1870s Whig (Liberal)-Tory coalition and the problems it caused.

Poor Plantagenet Palliser or the Duke of Omnium as he is now has been given the job of Prime Minister and as the two political factions really hate each other like poison, just as they do now, he isn’t really the right man for the job. Planty is still hankering after decimalisation and reforming the weights and measures system, he doesn’t have the temperament which is needed to keep on the right side of everyone at Westminster. He doesn’t have the gift of being all things to all men (or women) in fact he snubs them inadvertently, and they don’t forget it.

Meanwhile, his wife the duchess aka Lady Glencora has become wildly ambitious, in fact she really thinks that she could run the government better than any of them (don’t we all!). She throws herself into becoming a great political hostess with the intention of making her husband very popular but she tries too hard and ends up being disappointed. Obviously nobody had told her that all political careers end in tears.

Again, Trollope has two very strong women characters, the other one being Emily Wharton. I had always thought that Trollope was very fair minded when it came to women and really ahead of the times regarding women’s freedom of thought and their rights but it didn’t stop him from writing two female characters who are really bad judges of character. Both Glencora and Emily are easily taken in by a handsome face and slick manners. Maybe that was Trollope’s experience of women. Anyway, disaster ensues. I’m fairly sure that my blood pressure took a battering from Ferdinand Lopez’s antics and his wife’s reactions to them!

Although this book was first published in 1876 the themes are all so similar to life at Westminster and in the ‘City’ of today. Ferdinand Lopez is a gambler on the stock exchange and buys and sells commodities which usually don’t even exist. It’s all a con and he uses other people’s money to gamble with. He would fit in well in the financial scene of today.

If you know anything about Victorian politics it’s easy to pick out Mr Gresham as being Gladstone and Daubeney is Disraeli. Topics such as suffrage and political reform are being discussed but as someone said recently, they discuss things in Westminster for 100 -150 years before anything actually happens, as proven by the decimalisation of the currency!

And here we are 150 or so years later in a Liberal-Tory coalition, they still hate each other like poison but it’s supposed to be for the good of the country but in reality they just want to hang on to power. We are back to being ruled by a bunch of old Etonians, just as they were in Trollope’s day, and they think that we (the people) are a bunch of oiks and plebs!

I have to say that it’s much better reading about Trollope’s Westminster rather than the politics of today. I’m going straight on to reading the last one in the series, The Duke’s Children.
I’m obviously not the only person to be reminded of the Victorian Whig/Tory coalition.

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Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

9 September 2012 00:21

I’m steadily working my way through Trollope’s Pallisers, this being the fourth book in the series, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it all. In fact I’m having to make myself take a rest in between them and read something completely different (and less of a chunkster) otherwise it would be ages before I was ‘living’ outside 19th century Britain.

As you will realise from the title, Phineas Finn makes a comeback to Westminster via the constituency of Tankerville where he is eventually proclaimed as their MP after the vote was scrutinised and his opponent was found to have been bribing voters.

Although he doesn’t like the look of the place or its inhabitants he’s glad to be able to be part of the life of Westminster again, despite the fact that he is having to live off his savings as of course in those times MPs weren’t paid a wage, politics was really a rich man’s pastime. Phineas is hoping to gain a ministerial post as ministers were paid, but things don’t go well for him and he has such a quick temper and he takes offence so easily that it’s inevitable that he falls foul of enemies who are out to get him.

Well, that’s about as much as I’m going to say about the storyline, except to say that it did take a completely unexpected turn – for me anyway. I haven’t seen the Pallisers on TV so it’s all new to me.

In this book and the previous one there has been a lot written about Plantagenet Palliser, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying to get decimalisation of the currency through the House of Commons. This was a huge surprise to me when I first read it because decimalisation didn’t take place in the UK until 1971, when I was in primary 7. We were all given dummy sets of the new coins in plastic so that we would be used to them when they were minted. You can see what the old coins looked like here.

I was quite amazed to discover through Trollope that decimalisation was mooted as far back as Victorian times. I had a bit of a search and discovered it being spoken of in Hansard on 12th,June 1855. So it took over 100 years from then for the system to be changed to what is definitely a simpler way of calculating things but I must admit that I’m one of the generation who still thinks of prices in ‘real’ money, so I still find myself saying occasionally something like: Flip! That cauliflower is 30 bob in real money! In other words 30 shillings – or £1.50 in decimal coinage.

Planty Palliser or the Duke as I must now call him was exasperated as he didn’t know what to do about the farthings as five farthings wouldn’t fit into an old penny. That was no problem in 1971 because farthings had been abolished by then as being too worthless to bother about. A certain person sitting not too far from me now can remember being charged tuppence three farthings for something, it must have been sweeties surely. I bet shop workers were glad to be rid of them, it’s such a lot to have to say – for so little.

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The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

29 August 2012 14:59

First published in 1872, The Eustace Diamonds is the third book in Trollope’s Palliser series and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I read it on my Kindle although I have a paperback copy of it and at 770 pages it’s the usual Anthony Trollope chunkster.

Lizzie Greystock is the only child of Admiral Greystock who died penniless and in debt, and as Lizzie’s mother is already dead it means that Lizzie needs to marry money to make her way in the world. She’s not going to earn an honest living as a governess, as many women in her position have done before.

Lizzie learned a lot from her father and has the same spendthrift ways, nevertheless she manages to hook a wealthy husband who is already seriously ill, Sir Florian Eustace dies within a year, probably hastened by Lizzie’s behaviour as he soon realises that she’s an avaricious minx. He leaves her an estate in Scotland for her lifetime and plenty of money. Well, it would be enough money for most people but as Lizzie has always lived way beyond her means she can’t change her ways and still finds herself in debt and having to frequent the pawnbroker’s office.

She has in her possession a diamond necklace valued at £10,000 and although it has been handed down in the Eustace family for generations Lizzie chooses to regard the Eustace Diamonds as her own property, rather than something which should be kept for future generations, particularly her baby son Florian Eustace. Legal battles ensue. Lizzie is one of those peope who just can’t tell the truth, and quickly comes to believe in her own lies. It’s fair to say that if Lizzie were in a panto we’d all be hissing at her but she’s so ghastly she actually manages to get decent people on her side. I think nowadays she’d be described as being ‘a piece of work’.

In tandem with that storyline is the fortunes of Lucy Morris, in a similar situation to Lizzie, she opts to become a governess and earns her own way in the world and is the exact opposite sort of character to Lizzie. She’s honest and true and wins the heart of Frank Greystock, a good man although he has inherited the same spendthrift Greystock genes as Lizzie, he is really in need of a rich wife who can help him on in his political career. Frank is Lizzie’s cousin and he becomes embroiled in the whole murky Eustace affair.

Well, that’s as much as I’m going to say about the storyline, if you haven’t read the Palliser series you might like to start from the beginning with Can You Forgive Her? which you can download for free from Project Gutenberg.

On a personal note I was absolutely amazed when the action in the book shifted to Ayrshire in Scotland, and to what I’m sure was Culzean Castle although in the book it’s called Portray Castle. We recently visited Culzean, you can see my post here and if you know it I’m sure you’ll agree that this passage from the book describes the place perfectly, it begins:

‘The castle stood on a bluff of land, with a fine prospect of the Firth of Clyde, and with a distant view of the isle of Arran.’

It’s a long description but it all fits with Culzean so I’m sure Trollope must have been there at some point. This and the fact that two of the characters ended up getting married in the episcopal church in Ayr, which happens to be the church which my brother-in-law was curate of way back in the 1970s, meant that I was recognising places as well as characters, because Trollope was so good at writing about people, their thoughts and experiences.

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The Classics Club

22 March 2012 00:21

I read about The Classics Club on Anbolyn’s Gudrun’s Tights and decided to join in too. You can read about it here.

I’ve listed 55 books which I intend to read within the next five years although in truth I hope it won’t take me so long. These are all books which have been in my house for years, waiting for their moment in the sun but I just haven’t got around to them. Apart from the Freeman Wills Crofts books near the end, I’ll be able to borrow those ones from my library and those are the ones I’m looking forward to reading most because I so enjoyed The 12.30 from Croydon and I love reading vintage crime. I’m going to read The Scarlet Letter first because it’s one of the ones which I think I should have read absolutely yonks ago.

When I get to the end of the 55 I’m going to reward myself with – a pat on the back and more books!

1. Deerslayer by J. Fenimore Cooper
2. Uther and Igraine by Warwick Deeping
3. Heroes by Thomas Carlyle
4. The Lady of the Camelias by Alexandre Dumas
5. Swan Song by John Galsworthy
6. End of the Chapter by John Galsworthy
7. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
8. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
9. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
10. The Talisman by Walter Scott
11. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
12. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
13. Nana by Emile Zola
14. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
15. The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope
16. The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope
17. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
18. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett
19. Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
20. The Naulahka by Rudyard Kipling and W. Balestier
21. O Pioneer! by Willa Cather
22. Moby Dick by Hermann Melville
23. The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby
24. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
25. An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym
26. The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett
27. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
28. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
29. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
30. Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
31. Witch Wood by John Buchan
32. The Courts of the Morning by John Buchan
33. The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan
34. Love by Elizabeth von Arnim
35. The Corn King and the Spring Queen ny Naomi Mitchison
36. Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys
37. A Favourite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford
38. Poor Caroline by Winifred Holtby
39. The World my Wilderness by Rose Macaulay
40. Salem Chapel by Mrs Oliphant
41. The Republic by Pliny
42. The Harsh Voice by Rebecca West
43. Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
44. Not So Quiet by Hellen Zenna Smith
45. The Tenth Man by Graham Greene
46. The Third Man by Graham Greene
47. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
48. Felix Holt the Radical by George Eliot
49. The Box Office Murders by Freeman Wills Crofts
50. Inspector French’s Greatest Case by Freeman Wills Crofts
51. Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts
52. Man Overboard by Freeman Wills Crofts
53. Mystery on Southampton Water by Freeman Wills Crofts
54. The Hog’s Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts
55. Selected Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

I’m not really superstitious but I feel that as this challenge is such a prolonged one I really have to say that I intend finishing these books – and I’m borrowing a phrase from my late Mum here – If I’m Spared – and I’m saying it on behalf of everyone else taking part too because I just feel that these things shouldn’t be taken for granted. It’s bad luck. Do I sound a bit mental? Don’t answer that!

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The Odd Women by George Gissing

23 February 2012 22:36

This book was written in 1892 and was published the following year. The Odd Women in the title are those half a million or so ‘superfluous’ females who are never going to find a husband because of the imbalance of the sexes at the time.

Monica Madden was one of them, along with her two older sisters, and they had struggled to earn a living since the early death of their parents. Monica is wearing herself away at a place of business, a sort of shop/warehouse, where she has to spend many hours on her feet, in an unhealthy atmosphere.

Miss Barfoot and Miss Nunn are two unmarried ladies who are dedicating their lives to the betterment of young women, hoping to educate them with office skills and the ability to support themselves in independent lives, with no need to rely on men to look after them. Monica takes the opportunity to leave her workplace in the hope of finding something better after she has had some training, but her heart isn’t really in it and she ends up marrying a man more than twice her age whom she hardly knows at all. Basically Monica married her stalker, Edmund Widdowson, who had become infatuated with the young girl and it wasn’t long before Monica was being suffocated by his possessive and jealous behaviour. It can only end in tears!

Free union is spoken of by other characters, in other words living together as a married couple but without the legal formalities. That subject was about 80 odd years ahead of the times in my neck of the woods anyway – where anyone contemplating that was ‘living in sin’ and would be ‘the talk of the steamie’ right up until about the 1980s!

I had read differing reviews of this book – some people really enjoying it and others finding it a bit meh. I have to say that I was on the side of those who were underwhelmed by it until about half way through, when for me anyway it began to pick up and I did end up by enjoying it. It isn’t a book which I would ever want to revisit though.

George Gissing evidently had a low opinion of women but he seems to have married women that he barely knew, his first wife was a prostitute so the relationship was unlikely to be all hearts and roses – she took to the bottle. The characters who get married in the book do so to escape from unsatisfactory situations but only end up with another set of problems. Frying pan to fire.

As I was born in the 1950s – just – I found the subject matter quite surprising because things didn’t seem to have moved on that far when I was growing up. There was still the belief that if a woman wasn’t married by the time she was 21 then she was ‘on the shelf’ and doomed to a miserable life, always living with her parents – a perpetual child until the parents grew old and then the unmarried daughter became their carer.

Mothers, including my own, actually said that there was no point in bothering about (putting effort into) daughters because they would only end up pushing a pram anyway. We could have been doing with some ambitious women as role models back then but the phrase ‘career women’ was spoken like a dirty word then. How times have changed.

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Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe abridged!

31 January 2012 23:09

I’ve just managed to plough my way through my very first book by Sir Walter Scott, I had tried before and failed miserably and I hardly ever give up on books – it was The Talisman which felled me. So I was interested to hear a Scottish academic speaking on the radio yesterday as he had recently abridged Scott’s Ivanhoe, you can read about it here. Apparently he has cut it down to 80,000 words so that it’s more manageable for the modern reader.

I don’t know if it’s a good idea really as I don’t think I would feel that I had actually read a book by Sir Walter Scott if it has been gutted. I read The Pirate and I chose that one because I thought it would be a hard subject to make boring. I have to admit though that there were times when it was like wading through thick porridge with not a morsel of sugar or syrup to sustain me along the way.

I read it for the November’s Autumn classic challenge so I’ll be reviewing it on the 4th of February, but I will say that I felt a real sense of achievment when I got to the last page with no skipping or dodging of the slow bits. However I am truly thankful that I didn’t have to read Scott when I was at school!

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