Tag Archives: Anthony Trollope

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

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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.

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

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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.

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

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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.

A Classics Challenge

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November's Autumn

I had absolutely no intention of ever doing any more challenges but when I saw this classics one which is being hosted by Katherine Cox at November’s Autumn I decided to join in because it will fit in with my reading for 2012 anyway. It’s more of a bloghop really, with the action going on on the 4th of the month – which should be fun!

So my list of seven classic books to be read in 2012 is:

1. The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

2. The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

3. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

4. Summer by Edith Wharton

5. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

6. The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

7. The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott

I haven’t read any of these books before but they’ve been hanging around the house for years, patiently waiting to be read so this challenge is really going to encourage me to get stuck into them at last. It’ll be interesting to see what the other people involved in the challenge are planning on reading too.

Thanks Katherine, for organising it all.

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope part II

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Well the book is in two parts and because I was blogging so late at night and I was exhausted from decorating, my thoughts on the book are in two parts too because I forgot to mention Lady Laura.

Lady Laura is a young woman and she was wealthy until she paid off her brother’s debts. Her brother, Lord Chiltern is a ne’erdoweel with a reputation for violence and drinking as well as gambling. Like many a young woman before her, and after, life at her family home became so uncomfortable for Laura that she decided to accept an offer of marriage from Robert Kennedy who was an influential and very wealthy Cabinet Minister about twice Laura’s age. As well as his house in London’s Grosvenor Place he had a very large and beautiful estate in Scotland, his homeland.

Unfortunately Lady Laura had married a man she hardly knew. She certainly was completely unaware that her husband was a strict Presbyterian which meant that he was a strict sabbatarian, Sunday was kept as a day of worship only and the only thing that you could do really was go to church and read the bible. Novel reading was very much frowned upon so Laura was bored stiff on Sundays even when she was in London. The house in Scotland was even worse as she couldn’t go out for walks around the estate or anything.

Her husband Mr Kennedy was the sort of man who thought that he owned his wife body and soul and so he expected her to do his bidding at all times, otherwise she wasn’t being a dutiful wife. Well folks, you know what happens if there’s no compromising in a relationship, it’s going to be a disaster – which it was.

I think that Trollope must have been a really enlightened man for the times because he’s so obviously on the side of Laura and dead against Robert Kennedy’s attitude to his wife. I’m just a wee bit sorry for the husband though because I see him as a disappointed man who got married expecting to become a father which is what most wealthy men want, founding a dynasty of their own, but Laura didn’t get pregnant, which is a shame because their relationship would have been entirely different and as a mother Laura would have had far more power over her situation with her husband. He revered his own mother which somehow is never a good sign.

Anyway, I’m probably over thinking the book but what I’m really saying is that Trollope seems to be a good guy, I don’t know anything about his personal life, I must get a biography of him, but at least he knows how decent men should behave, I just hope that he actually was decent. I’d hate to think that he was anything like Charles Dickens who was so horrible to his wife that I can’t read any of his books.

On the subject of Presbyterian Sundays, I’ve had quite a lot of experience of those as a child and they were terrible. There was nothing to do at all as there were no shops open, nothing at all on TV, the radio had Two-Way Family Favourites on it and in the evening when TV was on it was The Black and White Minstrel Show! If the weather was alright you could go for a walk but that was about it. I think gardening would have been acceptable as a Sunday occupation but no DIY.

Things were even worse for people further north. We had friends on the Isle of Skye and they didn’t even have hot food on a Sunday as they were such strict Sabbath keepers that they couldn’t cook any meals. You’ll laugh at this but really it’s true, they didn’t have running water and had to get their water from a well. Every Saturday night they had to fill all their buckets with water for drinking and washing as they weren’t allowed to fill the buckets on Sunday – too bad if they used too much water, they went thirsty! I think some people are still like that up north as there was a bit of a stooshie not so long ago when a ferry operator started up a ferry service on Sundays – it’s another world!

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

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This book is sometimes known by the title The Irish Member. I thought it was about time that I got back to reading the rest of the Palliser series. I had to make a mad dash for the radio off button one night a few weeks ago when I was in the kitchen late on. Whilst I was doing the dishes I suddenly realised that it was a Palliser book which was being serialised on Radio 4 Extra – or whatever they’re calling it this week! You can probably still listen to it on the iPlayer if you don’t want to read the book.

I found Phineas Finn to be a wee bit dry at the beginning and I could understand why some people have a bit of a problem with Trollope. I think that it was because I only had time to read about 20 or 30 pages at a time and for me anyway I find his writing much more enjoyable when I can spend a lot of time reading big chunks of about 80 or 100 pages at one go.

It is of course the story of Phineas Finn, a handsome young Irishman who stands for parliament really because he was in the right place at the right time. At the time it’s set (1860s) we didn’t have universal suffrage, not even for the men, so each MP was voted in by the small amount of men who were eligible to vote in the area, mainly wealthy property owners.

Phineas does indeed have the luck of the Irish and his parliamentary career comes on in leaps and bounds, mainly because he has the ability to be affable and really listens to people so other men take a liking to him. He gets into the right social circles and hobnobs with influential men and so his political career advances very quickly.

He doesn’t have so much luck where romance is concerned and this is partly due to the fact that he isn’t exactly constant and he tends to be easily distracted by whichever woman he is with at the time.

I’m looking forward to reading The Eustace Diamonds which is the next one in the series.

I remember that when John Major became our Prime Minister, about 20 years ago he said that Trollope was his favourite author and I think he got a lot of help in his career from reading the political books. Like everybody else I’ve puzzled over how a man who was so bad at counting that he was sacked from his job as a bus conductor could have risen to be our Prime Minister. I think he must have modelled himself on Phineas Finn.

Anyway, if you enjoy the classics and a political setting then you should give the Palliser series a go. My copy is an Oxford World’s Classic paperback and it has great notes in the back. Luckily I studied this period when I was at school so I knew a lot about what was going on in Britain at the time but I still learned from the notes. For instance: Did you know that John Stuart Mill the philosopher and economist and son of the Scottish philosopher James Mill, had written an essay called The Subjection of Women in 1869. He was an MP from 1865 and advocated votes for women. Amazingly ahead of the times!

The Duke’s Daughter by Angela Thirkell

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After watching all the horrible things which have been happening in the news from all corners of the world, I was in dire need of some light-hearted reading to take my mind off it all. This book fitted the bill perfectly and although I sometimes had a bit of difficulty keeping all the characters straight in my mind, especially when people who featured in earlier books are mentioned, I still found it really enjoyable.

This book was first published in 1951 and the upper class inhabitants of the county of Barsetshire are still grumbling about Them – by which is meant the Labour government of the day which seemed to be spending all of its time thinking up ways to tax the supposedly wealthier members of the poulation. Death Duties are a big worry to those who have money and the rest of them would no doubt like to have the luxury of having so much money that they had to worry about how much was going to be paid over to the government on their death!

As ever Angela Thirkell has purloined bits from various classic authors, most notably Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen and set it in her own time.

In this one there are quite a few characters being paired up at the end, to everybody’s satisfaction, and some of the more ghastly characters are nicely snubbed. I’m reading these books as I find them so not always in the correct order which is a wee bit annoying but I intend to read them again when I get the full set. No doubt the news won’t be any better then, whenever that may be.

I found this book in an antique centre, very reasonably priced and it’s a first edition, not that I’m ever bothered with that, but it does have the original dust jacket, a bit tatty, but it has comments on the back from luminaries of the time, a couple of them I haven’t heard of but here are a few of the comments.

‘Grace, wit, equanimity and engaging narrative power… if the social historian of the future does not refer to this writer’s novels, he will not know his business.’ – Elizabeth Bowen.

‘Mrs Thirkell possesses to a high degree the gift of making characters spring to life. She is often both witty and shrewd… she has a most observant, and often an attractively wicked, eye.’- C.P. Snow

I’ll just add – Angela Thirkell is well worth reading!

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

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Can You Forgive Her? is the first in The Palliser Series and I thought it was about time that I got around to reading them, especially as the Angela Thirkell books which I’ve been enjoying recently are very loosely based on the series, although a few generations later.

I had seen a comment from another blogger that the book should have been called Can You Stand Her? and I can see what they mean, but in the preface it says that it could have been called Can She Forgive Herself?

Alice Vavasor is a young woman with a very complicated love life and as her mother died within a year of her marriage to Alice’s father it means that Alice has no older female to guide her in these things. Her cousin Kate Vavasor is keen for Alice to become engaged to Kate’s brother George and George is happy to go along with the idea because it means he would get his hands on Alice’s money.

However Alice broke the engagement because of George’s bad behaviour and subsequently became engaged to John Grey a gentleman who has a small country house, called Nethercoates, in Cambridgeshire. Alice finds the area unlovely and fears that she won’t enjoy life amongst people that she doesn’t know and thinks she will miss the bustle of London, even although she rarely goes into society there.

It has to be said that John Grey could be described as being a decent but boring man and Alice believes that, in modern parlance he’s not that into her. But she’s entirely wrong about that, it’s just that John Grey is a very buttoned-up sort of chap who isn’t very good at showing his feelings.

Inevitably Alice changes her mind yet again and cousin George comes back on the scene, aided and abetted by his sister Kate.

Anyway, that’s the gist of the story but it’s a very long book in two parts, each of over 400 pages in length. So there’s a lot more to it and at times it veers off to Yarmouth where Aunt Morrow, who is a very merry, rich widow and, despite her husband being dead only four months, is setting her cap at various men. She’s a really unlikeable character. Presumably she is in the book to add some humour but I felt it did get in the way of the story and in fact in the introduction which I always read last it did suggest that readers should skip those bits entirely.

But the most interesting character is Lady Glencora and I can see that her husband Plantagenet Palliser is going to be driven to distraction by her and a good thing too.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

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This book was first published in 1867.

At first I thought that The Claverings was going to be very similar to The Belton Estate which was the last book by Trollope which I read but it ended up being quite different. I did enjoy it although it took me longer to read than I had expected but that was really just down to me being a bit too busy.

Joan Kyler and I have been doing what I think is called a buddyread together and we plan to exchange our thoughts on the book, anybody else who has read it please feel free to add your comments.

I do think that Trollope was a master of observation, even today all of his characters are very recognisable in society. I suppose human nature never really changes from one generation to the next.

As Joan has already mentioned – the men in this book are all fairly unlikeable really. The best that can be said for most of the male Claverings is that they are a completely lazy and feckless bunch and if they hadn’t been born into comfortable circumstances there wouldn’t have been much hope for them being able to make their way in the world, and Sir Hugh is an absolute swine of a husband.

The book begins with the beautiful Julia Brabazon jilting Harry Clavering because although she loves him she can’t see him ever having much money and she wants wealth and a position in society, consequently she marries a rich young lord instead and her troubles begin.

I’ll leave it there to see if Joan wants to add her observations.

South Bridge, Edinburgh, and Books

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It’s been ages since I had a mooch around a bookshop because there wasn’t any point in doing it due to the fact that I’m not supposed to be buying books until I whittle away at my unread book piles. But today, despite the horrible rain we just felt the need to get out of the house for a while and as I have loads of books that I really want to track down I thought – Edinburgh, Perth or St Andrews?

There’s flooding around the Perth area so we thought it best to give that a miss and as the weather forecast said that the rain was going to clear up in the afternoon around the Edinburgh area – we plumped for capital punishment!

The forecast was wrong and it rained all day plus it was very windy so we were buffeted going over the Forth Road Bridge – not nice. We decided to go to the South Bridge area for a change instead of our usual Stockbridge haunts. It wasn’t very successful, we must have been in about 7 book shops and charity shops and my haul was:

Behold, Here’s Poison – Georgette Heyer.
Duplicate Death – Georgette Heyer.
The Empty House – Rosamunde Pilcher.
Can You Forgive Her? – Anthony Trollope.

and my husband bought :
Ordinary Thunderstorms – William Boyd.

I’d been looking for Can You Forgive Her? because I wanted to read The Palliser series, and I thought that I’d better buy the Heyers in case I don’t see them again for ages. I really like Heyer’s detective novels because they’re very witty too, quite an unusual combination I think, and I’m on a Rosamunde Pilcher kick at the moment, this one is very short at only 182 pages, very unusual for her.

I was looking for books by Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Janet Sandison, E.M. Delafield, Jane Duncan – all very retro but I haven’t read them before and much to my amazement they are being read now, I have to see what I’ve been missing!

Now that I’ve tried the shops and been unsuccessful I can order some on-line with an unblemished conscience because I always like to give my custom to small bookshops when I can. Plus it’s nice to have a poke around lots of books but none of the Edinburgh shops are anything like as good or crazy as Voltaire and Rousseau in Glasgow. It looks like you couldn’t possibly find anything you want amongst the piles, but I always do. Must get back there again soon.

After parking the car we had to walk past this hairdresser’s to get to the bookshops today. This place intrigues me because it’s such a throw-back to the 50s. It looks like nothing has ever been changed since then and I’ve never seen it open. What sort of hairdresser is closed on a Saturday afternoon? I know that you always think of Edinburgh for history and Glasgow for style, but I think they’ve taken this a bit far here. Who would use a place like this?

For all I know it might be a fantastic resource for the ladies of Edinburgh of a certain type. Stout tweed skirts, Fair-Isle jumpers and Lisle stockings. Not forgetting the blue rinses.

Anyone for a shampoo and set?!